Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

Suddenly, incense filled the air and stung the eyes. We passed a ramshackle green building which from the sounds of bells and atonal singing rising from an inner courtyard gave the impression of being a temple. Outside the green temple, an old woman and her granddaughter scooped heaps of cow dung from a large basket and kneaded them into hamburger-sized fuel patties for the evening fire. The temple wall was coated for thirty feet with rows of round and drying chunks of finger-patterned dung. Across the mud path of a street, several men were working on a bamboo frame of a hut no larger than a big backpacking tent. The men stopped their good-natured shouting and watched silently as we passed. If I had retained any doubt that my two guides were Kapalikas, it was dispelled by the wake of silence we left in our passing.

"Is it much farther?" It was beginning to rain again, and I'd left our umbrella back at the hotel. My white slacks were muddy halfway to my knees. My tan Wallabees would never be the same again. I stopped. "I said, Is it much farther?"

The heavy man in khaki turned and shook his head. He stabbed a finger at a wall of gray industrial buildings visible just beyond the sea of shacks. We had to climb a muddy hillside for the last hundred yards and I went down on my knees twice. The top of the hill was guarded by a high mesh fence with overhanging barbed wire. I looked through and saw rusted oil barrels and empty railroad sidings between the buildings.

"Now what?" I turned to admire the view of the chawl . The tin roofs were held down by countless rocks, black on gray. Here and there open flames were visible in dark doorways. Far off in the direction from which we had come, tenements stretched out of sight into the heavy drizzle. Smoke rose from a hundred sources and blended into the gray-brown sky.

"Come." The thin, hatched-faced man had peeled back a section of fence.

I hesitated. My heart was pounding from more than the climb up the hill. I was filled with that exhilarating, stomach-clenching lightness that one feels approaching the end of a high diving board.

I nodded and stepped through the fence.

The factory area was silent . I realized how I had grown used to the constant sounds of conversation, of movement . . . of people in this crowded city. Now, as we moved from one dim alley to the next, the silence grew as thick as the moist air. I could not believe that this factory complex was still active. Small brick buildings were almost overgrown with weeds and vines. Far up a wall, a window that had once held a hundred glass squares could now show only ten or twelve intact. The rest were jagged black holes through which small birds occasionally flitted. Everywhere were the empty oil drums — once a bright red, yellow, blue, but now scabrous with rust.

We turned into an even narrower alley, a cul-de-sac . I stopped abruptly. My hand went to the lower right pocket of my safari shirt and to the heavy, palm-sized rock I had picked up on the hillside. Incredibly, I felt no fear now that I was here, only a strong curiosity as to what the two men would do next. I glanced over my shoulder to make sure my back was clear, mentally traced a retreat through the maze of alleys, and turned back to the two Kapalikas. Watch the heavy one , a part of me warned.

"There." The one in khaki pointed up a narrow outside wooden stairway. The door at the top was a little higher than a normal second floor would be. Ivy matted the brick wall. There were no windows.

I did not move. My hand closed around the stone. The two men waited a long moment, glanced at each other, and turned on their heels to walk back the way we had come. I stepped to the side with my back against a wall and let them go. I could tell that they did not expect me to follow. Their footsteps on gravel were audible for a short while, and then there was only the sound of my own heavy breathing.

I glanced up at the steep stairway. The high walls and narrow strip of sky made me a little dizzy. Suddenly a flock of pigeons exploded from some dark cavity under the rooftop and wheeled away, wings flapping like rifle shots, circling into the heavy sky. It seemed very dark for 3:30 in the afternoon.

I walked back to the junction of alleys and looked both directions. Nothing was visible for at least a hundred paces. The rock in my hand felt cool and properly heavy, a caveman's utensil. Red clay still clung to its smooth surface. I raised the stone to my cheek and looked again at the door thirty feet up the overgrown wall. There was a pane of glass in the door but it had been painted over long ago.

I closed my eyes a second and let my breathing slow. Then I dropped the stone into my shirt pocket and climbed the rotting staircase to meet whatever waited there.

The room was very small and very dark. A tiny oil lamp, open flame sputtering above a pool of rancid ghee , sat in the center of a square wooden table but the little light it produced was swallowed by the tattered black curtains which hung on every side. The chamber was less a room than a black-shrouded crypt. Two chairs waited at the table. On the splintered table's surface lay a book, its title not quite legible in the sick light. I did not have to read the cover to know what book it was. It was Winter Spirits , the collection of my poetry.

The door had opened on a corridor so narrow and so black that I almost had smiled, remembering the fun house at old Riverview Park. My shoulders brushed the flaking plaster on either side. The air was thick with the smell of wood rot and mold, bringing memories of times as a child when I'd crawled under our latticed front porch to play in the moist soil and darkness there. I would not have entered the narrow hall had not the faint glow of the oil lamp been visible.

The black gauze curtain hanging just inside the room struck my face as I entered. It swept aside easily enough, crumbling at my touch like a spider's abandoned web.

If the copy of my book was meant to intrigue me, it did. If it was meant to put me at my ease, it failed.

I remained standing four feet from the table. The rock was in my hand again, but it seemed a pitiful thing, a child's response. I again remembered the fun house at Riverview Park, and this time grinned despite myself. If anything leaped out of the curtained darkness at me, it would damn well get a face full of granite.

"Hey!" The black curtains absorbed my shout as effectively as they did the light. The open flame danced at the movement of air. "Hey! Ollie Oxen in Free! Game's over! Come on in!" Part of me was close to giggling at the absurdity of the situation. Part of me wanted to scream.

"All right, let's get this show on the road," I said and stepped forward, pulled the chair out, and sat at the table. I laid the rock on my book like a clumsy paperweight. Then I folded my hands and sat as still and upright as a schoolchild on the first day of school. Several moments passed. No sound intruded. It was so hot that sweat dripped from my chin and made small circles in the dust on the table. I waited.

Then the flame bent to an unfelt movement of air.

Someone was coming through the black curtains.

A tall form brushed back the netting, paused while still in shadow, and then shuffled hesitantly into the light.

I saw the eyes first — the moist, intelligent eyes tempered by time and too great a knowledge of human suffering. There was no doubt. They were the eyes of a poet. I was looking at M. Das. He stepped closer, and I gripped the edge of the table in a convulsive movement.