Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Tabinda scythed the haze with an outstretched arm. They approached a towering structure. The Buddhist stupa. Noor put her hand out and scraped a fingernail across the wall. How cold and brooding and alien it felt with mist clinging to it. She remembered her dream — shiny white phalanges groping the building — and her stomach turned. She pinched her shalwar and rubbed the brick dust off.

“I liked your little history lesson,” Tabinda said. “But it has more meaning than the Israelites gave it.”

“What?”

“It describes existence accurately. The two goats are life and death, both horrendous conditions. Gods are vindictive, after all. Would you like to hear a similar story? It’s from the Mahabharata.”

Noor hesitated. Cautiously she said, “Sure.”

“In the beginning were three cities that orbited the earth. They weren’t happy places.”

In the distance vibration rose, faint as insect static. Noor cocked her head. It was coming from beyond the citadel deep in the night.

“What’s that?”

“The cities fought each other with iron thunderbolts smelted in a hundred thousand suns. Until one invented a unique weapon.”

Tabinda stopped. Before them was a twisted iron door flanked by massive brick colonnades. Rust blanketed it from top to bottom, except for the emblem of the Dancing Girl, hand on her hip, stamped in the middle. Parts of the figure were eroded by age but even through tendrils of fog the dancer’s eyes, now open and swollen with madness, were visible. A brass padlock dangled from a moon-shaped hasp. The door was ajar.

“The weapon was wielded with the force of the universe behind it and it annihilated the rival cities. The cost of preparing it was grave, though. The inhabitants of the triumphant city had to use the blood of entire nations on Earth.”

Tabinda pushed the door and it screeched inward, trailing the vapor pall draped over it. She stepped back, letting Noor peer in. “After you.”

Inside was blackness thick as blood. The noise in the sky was louder now. Whack whack whack! It sounded like a piece of meat stuck in the blades of an electric fan.

“Hold on. What is that?” Noor said uneasily. Her breath steamed and dissolved in the mist.

The professor stood enshrouded in white, her uneven face still as a deep dark pool. “It’s the army chopper come looking for us,” she said. “Don’t worry. They can’t land in this fog.”

Noor tried to back out, but Tabinda was quick. A two-handed fist slammed Noor’s shoulder blade. Agony shot through her spine, buckling her, sending her flying through the doorway. The black rushed at her. She flailed her arms, trying to grab a handhold but tripped and smashed headlong into something solid. The world exploded into fractals: gray and black and grainy. A buzzing in her ears, something circling her brain, enfolding it like a reptile’s maw — and Noor disintegrated.

Someone scraped up her pieces and put her together. She was slithering down steps as cold and unforgiving as faith’s hold. Liquid heat simmered in her eyes. Her knees bumped and banged. One shoe jammed in a crack at the edge of the staircase; someone yanked her foot out and continued dragging her.

She was placed on a hard surface. Mist and incense smoke roiled in a vortex around her. Her eyes watered from the fumes. Through the haze she glimpsed figures revolving slowly. Half a dozen, maybe more. They drummed long spear-like objects on their sneakers and boots. She licked her lips. Her tongue was a festering ulcer, her head a beehive of bewilderment.

Pain squeezed her shoulders when Noor raised her head. She moaned. She was lying on her stomach on a narrow ledge inside the citadel, a long rectangular room with a brick ledge running from end to end three feet above the dry communal pool. The great bathhouse. It took her a minute to realize that her wrists were throbbing. They were bound with rope. So were her ankles.

“For a long time I wondered why the inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro were so particular about the drainage system,” said Tabinda. She was standing in the middle of the pool before a brick-lined circular opening about six feet wide. Mist wreathed the hole and Noor couldn’t see inside it. Tabinda wore a fan-shaped metallic headdress with its edges dipped to create circular indentations at both ends. Flames flickered in small clay lamps placed inside these hollows. Her face was red with heat and perspiration, the half-paralysis so bad it seemed she was scalded on one side.

“Every house had its own drain connected to a network of brick channels in the streets. The channels ran clever courses and ended here in the bathhouse. I couldn’t understand why they’d want to dump sewage here. It didn’t make sense.”

Tabinda was surrounded by a procession of seven figures: cadets wearing glittering bangles on their arms and circling diya lamps in the dense air. Smoke plumed in rapid spirals, thickening their features, sending sooty entrails across faces shining like glass. Tabrez and Raheem were among them. Tabrez’s freckles glistened.

“It wasn’t until Fossel and I unearthed the intricate network of brick-lined conduits below the citadel that we understood the purpose of this extensive system.”

The seven boys began to gyrate their way across the pool. Their eyes were glassy. The lamps flared and guttered. They disappeared in the murk. Noor’s heart beat so fast she could feel her limbs jerk with every pulsation. Terror had driven the pain away.

“To this day the Indus script remains indecipherable to others, but Fossel said he had translated it. The meanings of the symbols came to him in a dream, he said.” A grotesque half-smile cracked the right side of her face. “Inscriptions he found on some seals describe the residents’ belief in a supreme father. They called this deity the Terrible Emperor of the Night. Said that he ruled the meat-city in the sky with a lightning arm and a thunder fist, and that he had a hungry mouth on earth. Ancients in other cultures knew of this mouth. In their poems they called it the ō s dhwosos .”

She was mad. The woman was mad. Noor’s blood was ice in her vessels. She strained at the ropes binding her limbs, but it was useless; she was tightly trussed. She arched her back and looked at her captors. Abar had materialized beside the professor. In his hand was a long piece of black glass the size of a child’s femur; similar, Noor realized, to what she had glimpsed in the street. Devil glass. Abar’s blank gaze was riveted on her. He ran a finger across the jagged edge of the weapon and it came away black with blood.

Abar wiped his finger on his school sweater. There was no cut.

“This wasn’t a bathhouse, you see. This was an ablution pool,” Tabinda said gently, as if explaining to a child, “filled with the city’s libation.”

It took Noor a moment to understand what that meant. When she did, her flesh went cold.

“Once a year the omphalos would tauten and the door to His house swing open. At some point in their history, during years of drought and starvation perhaps, the residents turned to their children. Always the oldest offspring lain carefully by the blood gutters. It wasn’t until enemy races conquered Mohenjo-Daro that the practice finally came to an end,” Tabinda said. She rubbed her throat absently. “The following year, however, in one night the entire city along with its new rulers was destroyed.”

The cadets reappeared, dragging a sizable bundle across the dry pool. It left a glistening black trail fading into the mist. A hand dropped from the bundle. Noor began to tremble, her breath hitching.

The fingertips were white, the nails perfectly manicured.

“How could we have known when we began the dig?” said Tabinda. Behind her Abar stood passing the glass knife from one hand to the other. It sparkled in the gloom. “I wanted to flee when the dreams started, but Fossel wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to study the darkness, as he put it. The tablets and seals indicated the secret room was real. And he said he would find it.”