Dan Simmons - Song of Kali

Singh translated the other's brief sentence. "No, Mr. Luczak. This was the way he came in two hours ago."

I reacted then. "Jesus! Why would anyone kill and then skin a human being?"

Singh shook his head. "He was not deceased when he was first seen. He was on Sudder Street. Screaming. Running, according to witnesses. He fell. Sometime later the screaming stopped. Eventually someone sent for a police wagon."

I took two involuntary steps back. I could hear my mother's voice echoing from the third-floor landing on Pulaski Street. Robert Luczak, you come in here this minute before I skin you alive . It was possible.

"Do you know him?" Singh asked impatiently. He gestured for more light. The corpse's head was thrown back, frozen in final agony by the grip of early rigor mortis .

"No," I said through gritted teeth. "Wait." I forced myself to step into the tight circle of light. The face was untouched except for the distorted features. Recognition hit me like a fist.

"You do know him," said Singh.

"Yes." I had said his name. Dear God, I had said his name when talking to Das .

"It is Mr. Krishna?"

"No," I said and turned away from the bright table. I had said his name . "It's the glasses that are missing. He wears glasses. His name is Jayaprakesh Muktanandaji."

Amrita and I slept until nine A.M. We did not dream. The roar of rain through the open window obliterated dreams. Sometime around dawn, the electricity and air conditioning must have come on, but we were not aware of it.

At 11:00 Singh sent a car to bring us to police headquarters. Any phone call to the hotel would be transferred to us there. The police center was another dark and cavernous room in another dark and labyrinthine building. Great mounds of file folders and yellowing documents obscured the desks and almost hid the faceless men hunched over typewriters that looked to have been used in Queen Victoria's day. Amrita and I spent several hours going through huge books of photographs. After hundreds of women's faces, I began to wonder if I would recognize Kamakhya Bahrati if I saw her. Yes, I would .

There was only one discovery. After scrutinizing a dark and faded photograph of a heavy man in prison gray, I tentatively identified him as the Kapalika in khaki who had broken my finger.

"But you are not sure?" asked Singh.

"No. He was older, heavier, longer hair."

Singh grunted and gave the photograph and instructions to someone. He never told me what the man's name was or why he had once been jailed. The sound of brittle plastic breaking .

By early afternoon we returned to the hotel and were amazed to find that there had been over a hundred calls to the police-line number we had given in the newspaper ads. None of the calls had yielded hard information. The few that reported seeing the child here or there were being followed up, but the sergeant was pessimistic. Most of the calls were from men or women willing to sell us an infant for the price of the reward.

I slammed the door and we lay on the bed together and waited.

The late hours of that Wednesday are largely lost to me. I remember images clearly, but they seem unrelated to one another. Some I cannot separate from the dreams that have haunted me since those days.

Sometime around eight P.M. I got up, kissed Amrita goodbye as she dozed, and left the hotel. The solution to everything had become quite clear to me suddenly. I would go out into Calcutta, find the Kapalikas, tell them that I was sorry, that I would do whatever they wanted, and then they would give our baby back. It was simple.

Failing that, I would find the goddess Kali and kill the bitch.

I remember walking for many blocks, but at some point I was riding in a cab, watching faces on the sidewalk, sure that the next one would be Kamakhya. Or Krishna. Or Das.

Then the cab was parked under a banyan tree, waiting, waiting while I climbed a sharp iron gate and loped, half crouching, up a flower-lined drive. The house was dark. I rattled shutters. I pounded on doors. "Chatterjee!" I screamed. The house was dark.

At another time I was walking on the river's edge. The Howrah Bridge loomed above me in that last twilight before true darkness. Paved streets gave way to muddy lanes and dark slums. Children danced around me. I threw them all of my change. I remember looking back once and no longer seeing the mob of children but several men following me. Their mouths moved, but I heard nothing. They made a half-circle and began approaching me cautiously, arms half raised.

"Kapalikas?" I said hopefully. I think I said it. "Are you Kapalikas? Kali? Kapalikas?"

They hesitated and glanced at one another for courage. I looked at their rags and their lean-hungry bodies — muscles wound tight with anticipation — and I knew they were not Kapalikas. Or thugees . Or goondas . Only poor, hungry men ready to kill for a foreigner's money.

"All right!" I cried then. I was grinning. I could not stop grinning, although I felt that something sharp was cutting a hole in me while I grinned. The past few days, the night, Victoria — everything was contracting into a tight knot of pure joy at this.

"All right!" I shouted. "Come on. Come on. Please." My arms opened wide. I would have embraced them. I would have hugged them close in a sweaty, locker-room embrace while I joyously ripped their taut throats out with my teeth.

I think I would have. I do not know. The men looked at one another, backed away, and disappeared in the shadowed lanes. I almost cried when they had gone.

I don't know whether it was before or after my encounter with the men that I was in a small, storefront temple. There was a clumsy statue of a kneeling black cow with a red and white necklace. Old men squatted and spat into the smoky dimness and stared in horror at me. An ancient scarecrow repeatedly pointed at my feet and gabbled at me. I think he wanted me to remove my shoes.

"Fuck that," I said in a reasonable tone. "That doesn't matter. Just tell them that they win, okay? Tell them that I'll do whatever they want. All right? I promise. I really promise. I swear to God. Scout's honor." I think I began crying then. At least I watched through a prism of tears as an old man with most of his front teeth missing grinned vacuously at me, patting me on the shoulder as he rocked back and forth on his skinny haunches.

There was a great wasteland of shacks and old tires lying in the rain, and I waded through the mud for miles toward the tall chimneys and open flames that cast a red hue over everything and which receded from me no matter how I struggled to close the distance. I believe that this was a real place. I do not know. It has been the landscape of my dreams for so long now.

It was in the first false light of dawn that I found the little girl. She was lying in the street — in the mud path that passed for a street there. She was no more than five. Her long black hair was tangled, and she was curled under a thin tan quilt still wet from the night's showers. Something in her unself-conscious commitment to sleep drew me to her. I dropped to one knee on the muddy path. People and bicycles were already beginning to move, swerving to avoid us in the narrow lane.

The girl's eyes were closed tightly, as though in concentration, and her mouth was slightly open. Her small fist was curled against her cheek. Soon she would have to wake, tend the fire, serve the men, care for the younger chidren, and face the end of a childhood she had barely known. Soon she would become the property of a man other than her father, and on that day she would receive the traditional Hindu blessing — "May you have eight sons." But for now she had only to sleep, her fist curled, her brown cheek against the soil, her eyes closed tightly against the morning light.