Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

"'No!' cried the officer. He shook the lathi club at Sanjay's fumbling hand. 'Begone! Immediately!' And so saying, he turned his back on us and walked quickly to the center of the intersection. There he began waving his arms and blowing his whistle at the screaming mass of tangled traffic which had blocked three streets in the short time he had been absent from his tire.

"Sanjay wrenched the truck into gear, drove around the snarled pack of vehicles by driving across the grass of Plaza Park, and turned against oncoming traffic onto Strand Road South.

"We parked as close as we could to the warehouse. The street was very dark, but there was a lantern in the back of the truck. Sanjay had to light it so we could untangle our offerings from the cords of my corpse's shroud. By my watch, a gift from Sanjay, it was ten minutes before twelve. My watch often ran slow.

"I could see by the sudden leap of light from the lantern that Sanjay had carried what had once been an old man from the cremation grounds. The corpse had no teeth, only a wisp of hair, and cataracts on both eyes. It was tangled in a spiderweb of ropes from my corpse's covering.

"'Damn!' muttered Sanjay. 'It's like a stinking parachute. No, there's a fucking net tangled in with the tarp.' Sanjay finally had to use his teeth to bite through the cord.

"'Quickly,' he said to me. Take that cloth off yours. They will not want it covered.'

'"But I don't think . . ."

"' Do it, dammit,' snapped Sanjay in a full rage. His eyes seemed to leap out of his red face. The lantern spat and hissed. 'Shit, shit, shit!' he exploded. 'I should have used vow as I first planned. It would have been so damned simple. Shit!' Sanjay angrily lifted his corpse under the arms and started dragging it free of the severed ropes.

"I stood there, transfixed, numb. Even when I slowly began untying the final knots and tugging away the last cords, I was not aware of what my hands were doing. I tell you what, Jayaprakesh. You are a victim of social injustice. Your plight touches me. I will lower the rent from two hundred rupees a month to five rupees. If you need a loan for the first two or three months, I will be happy to advance it .

"Tears ran down my cheeks and fell to the shroud. From far away I heard Sanjay's cry to hurry, but my hands moved slowly and methodically to untie the last of the tangled lines. I remembered my tears of gratitude when Sanjay took me in as a roommate, my surprise and gratitude at his including me in his Kapalika initiation.

" I should have used you as I first planned .

"I wiped brusquely at my eyes, angrily pulled the shroud away, and threw it into the far corner of the van.

"'Ayeeeaa!' The scream was torn out of me. I leaped backwards and slammed into the wall of the van, almost pitching forward onto the thing revealed before me. The lantern tipped over and rolled along the metal floor. I screamed again.

"'What?' Sanjay had run back to the van. Now he stopped and clutched at the door. 'Arhhh . . ."

"The thing I had carried like a bride from the cremation grounds may once have been human. No longer. No trace remained. The body was swollen twice the size of a man — more a giant, putrid starfish than a man. The face had no shape, only a white mass with wrinkled holes and swollen slits where the eyes, mouth, and nose might once have been. The thing was a sick simulacrum of a human form, crudely molded of suppurating fungus and dead, distorted meat.

"It was white — all white — the white of the bellies of dead carp washed up from the Hooghly. The skin had the texture of bleached, rotted rubber, like something peeled and shaped from the underside of a poisonous toadstool. The corpse was bloated taut; inflated from the awful internal pressure of expanding gases and organs swollen to the bursting point and beyond. Fractured splinters of ribs and bones were visible here and there in the puffy mass like sticks embedded in a rising dough.

"'Ahh,' gasped Sanjay. 'A drowning victim.'

"As if to confirm Sanjay's statement, there came a whiff of foul river mud, and a sluglike thing appeared in one of the black eyeholes. Glistening feelers tasted the night air and then withdrew from the light. I sensed the movement of many other things in the swollen mass.

"I pressed back against the side of the van and slid my way to the rear door. I would have pushed past Sanjay and run into the welcoming night, but he blocked me, pushed me back into the narrow chamber with the thing.

"'Pick it up,' Sanjay said.

"I stared at him. The fallen lantern threw wild shadows between us. I could only stare.

"'Pick it up, Jayaprakesh. We have less than two minutes until the ceremony begins. Pick it up.'

"I would have jumped Sanjay then. I would have happily choked him until the last gasps of life rattled out of his lying throat. Then I saw the gun. It had appeared in his fist like the lotus flower suddenly popping into the palm of a clever traveling magician. It was a small pistol. It hardly looked large enough to be real. But it was. I had no doubt of that. And the black circle of the barrel was aimed right between my eyes.

"'Pick it up.'

"Nothing on earth could have made me pick up the thing on the floor behind me. Nothing except the absolute certain knowledge that I would be dead in three seconds if I did not comply. Dead . Like the thing in the van. Lying with it . On it. With it .

"I knelt, set the lantern upright before it sputtered out or set fire to the shroud, and put my arms under the shape. It seemed to welcome my grasp. One arm moved against my side like the furtive touch of a timid lover. My fingers sank deep into the white. The flesh felt cool and rubbery, and I was sure that my fingers would break through at any second. Soft things shifted and stirred inside it as I backed out of the van and took a step. The thing sagged against me, and for a second I felt the terrible certainty that the corpse would deliquesce and flow down over me like moist river clay.

"I raised my face to the night sky and stumbled forward. Behind me, Sanjay shouldered his own cold burden and followed me into the Temple of the Kapalikas.

We sang the sacred words from the Satapatha Brahmana .

"'And the order of sacrifice shall be this . . . first man, then horse, bull, ram, and goat . . . Man is foremost of the animals and most pleasing to the gods. . . ."

"We knelt in the darkness before the jagrata Kali. They had dressed us in plain white dhotis . Our feet were bare. Our foreheads were marked. We seven initiates knelt in a semicircle closest to the goddess. Then there was an arc of candles and the outer circle of Kapalikas. In front of us lay the bodies we had brought as offerings. On the belly of each corpse a Kapalika priest had placed a small white skull. The skulls were human, too small to be from adults. The empty sockets watched us with the same intensity as the goddess's hungry eyes.

"The head of our eighth initiate still hung from the hand of Kali, but now the young face was chalk-white and the lips had pulled back into a rictus grin. The corpse, however, was gone from its place at the base of the idol and the goddess's bangled foot was raised over empty air.