The Vetala

by Phillip Ernest

  Avinash was knocked off his feet and borne backwards the length of the bus and out the gaping front window, where both brothers slammed against the rock and fell out of sight. In the next instant the bus kicked backwards and flew off the ground, then landed with a shuddering crash only a few feet away from Nada, revealing Amruteshvar and Avinash standing face to face in combat stance.

  Avinash leapt on his brother like a tiger, and the two tumbled onto the ground, struggling with each other. Avinash got a grip on his brother’s throat and wrestled him onto his back. As he sat on Amruteshvar’s chest, pinning his shoulders to the ground, Avinash’s face was so transformed by a grin of hate that he ceased to resemble himself. His mouth grew enormous, every tooth became a spearlike fang. Nada was shaken by sympathetic horror as she saw him dart his head forward like a snake striking; with his now vast maw he engulfed Amruteshvar’s whole face in a ring of teeth and ripped it away, leaving a featureless mass of bloody flesh. Amruteshvar’s body went limp.

  Nada screamed, “Amruteshvar! Oh my god! Oh my god!”

  Still hunched over his brother, Avinash snapped his head round and looked at Nada. Crimson chunks and threads dripped from his fangs. Amruteshvar’s death, and the certain imminence of her own, inspired Nada with the defiance of despair. She felt her features settle into a look of cool determination as she hugged the metal box to her chest with both arms, ready to go down fighting with all her strength.

  Turning back to his brother, Avinash plunged huge bladelike claws into his abdomen, and drew them back steaming with gore. Then he leapt to his feet, turned to face Nada, and with a single bound crossed the twenty feet of space that separated them, landing immediately in front of her.

  With his huge demonic face an inch away from hers, he released a searing scream that blew Nada off her feet. She was thrown backwards, dropping the box, and tumbled breathlessly to the ground some distance away.

  Avinash seized the box with dripping claws, and roared in agony as his and his brother’s flesh sizzled and smoked on contact with the metal. He quickly lifted the box and hurled it through the bus’s smashed rear window, then leapt to its front door and scrambled up the steps and into the driver’s seat. The engine groaned to life and the bus lurched backwards, heading straight for Nada, who only just managed to reorient herself and roll out of the way the instant before the wheels would have crushed her.

  Shuddering and crashing, bouncing crazily up and down, the bus continued to hurtle backwards up the rocky slope and towards the road, now lined with a huge throng of vehicles and gawking people who began to scatter as it neared.

  Without pausing to reflect on the miracle of her survival, again focused on the day’s original mission,

  Nada scrambled to her feet and ran towards the bus as it thundered onto the road, smashing vehicles and crushing people under its rear wheels. As it pounded to a stop she reached its rear door, and grabbing the handbar, yanked herself onto the bottom step just before the bus leapt forward, ploughing into everything in its path and taking off down Malati Road.

  Clutching the back of the last seat with both hands, Nada managed to slowly climb the steps of the rear entrance as the bus swayed wildly back and forth, weaving through traffic. Embracing the last pole in the aisle, fighting to stay on her feet, she looked forward and saw Avinash in the driver’s seat and the box on the floor of the aisle two or three rows behind him. A dead man slumped in one seat on the left with his head hanging out of the smashed window, the glass mangling the flesh of his neck. Farther ahead on the other side, a woman lay on her back, pinned in place by her sari, which had caught on the seat’s back; vacant eyes staring, her head lolled into the aisle at a sickeningly unnatural angle, jerking up and down as the bus crashed along the road. With effort, Nada mastered the turmoil of guilt and pity that threatened to cloud her mind, and steeled herself for her task.

  Grasping the backs of the seats on both sides, straddling the aisle, she slowly made her way forward, almost thrown off her feet at every step. Looking up, she saw Avinash’s red eyes glaring at her in the rear-view mirror. The bus twisted to the left with a deafening screech of tires. The force of the turn ripped the man’s corpse from the window and hurled it like a doll against the opposite seats. Nada clenched her eyes shut with the effort of holding on.

  Within moments, she opened them again, alarmed: the bus was now moving uphill on a trafficless road, and she realized that this was the narrow side-road to the top of Vetal Tekadi.

  Of course: Avinash couldn’t bear to touch the manuscript himself, so he was going to drive the bus off the cliff at the end of the road, and the fireball that would consume it at the foot of the hill would destroy both the book and its protector—or only its protector, but her death would neutralize whatever potential danger the book posed to him, perhaps forever.

  As the bus careened up the hill, step by slow step Nada neared the box at the head of the aisle, cringing as she passed the dead woman with her flopping head and vacant eyes.

  Now she could see Avinash’s whole face in the rearview mirror, his eyes that watched her difficult progress with burning hate; the face was again recognizably his, though the blood caked about the fanged, gnashing mouth recorded the hideous change that had transformed it in the moment when he had destroyed his brother.

  Amruteshvar! Gone! And it was her fault!

  Now it was between Nada and the monster, she alone had this one last chance to destroy the vetala and free the man. A final lurching step, and her foot touched the box; letting go of the seats on both sides, she pounced on it, gripping it with both hands, crouching over it with maternal protectiveness.

  Avinash was now just ahead of her to her right, almost within reach. Snarling like an animal, he turned again and again to glare at her over his shoulder, and began to grasp at her with his left hand. She ducked her head and dragged the heavy box back a bit, then fumbled in her pocket for the key, which she had chained to her belt for the anticipated short rickshaw journey back to Yadnya.

  After several wide misses, she succeeded in inserting it into the keyhole and unlocking the box, then seized the red bundle inside. Even in this nightmare, when the only way to save her life was to use the manuscript as a weapon, it was only with great difficulty that she managed to overcome her philologist’s instinct to keep it protected.

  Bracing herself on her knees, holding it in front of her with both hands, she lunged forward and thrust it against Avinash’s wounded and exposed left shoulder. He screamed inhumanly as his flesh sizzled and smoked at the touch of the red cloth.

  Nada leaned against him with all her weight. He turned. Their faces were inches apart. In his red eyes she saw hate, desperation, pleading, fear, the struggle between the original man and an alien evil that had deeply corrupted but still not completely vanquished him.

  A tremendous pity filled her, pity and resolution, and she leaned into him even harder. He screamed again and again as the red cloth burned into his lacerated flesh with a sizzling sound, sending up a foul smoke.

  Suddenly, Nada could no longer see the road through the front window, only a panorama of the suburbs and surrounding countryside far below. At a point where the road turned sharply upwards and to the left, the bus had shot straight off the cliff, and now seemed to Nada to be suspended in space and time. The city’s vastness filled the window from horizon to horizon.

  Avinash was still facing her. The evil had gone out of his face, leaving only fear and desperation, now mingled with recognition and gratitude. Even his eyes had turned from red to brown.

  This was the man himself, the real Avinash, whoever he had been before being invaded and corrupted by the monster he now was. They stood frozen, face to face, Nada pressing the book into his shoulder, as the bus imperceptibly began its descent to the ground far below. With the sluggish slowness of dream, the horizon crept upwards towards the top of the window and slipped out of sight.

&n
bsp; They were tipping forward and falling. The window now looked down on a grid of streets and houses that faded out where the rocks and trees of the hillside began. Alarm began to nag at the edge of her attention. Still pressing the book against Avinash’s shoulder, she detached her gaze from his and turned it towards the rising menace of the ground while he continued to stare at her with an expression that had become serene and loving. She felt her guts wrenched by the conflicting claims of gravity and the velocity of their fall. Her eyes and mouth slowly widened into a scream.

  She felt a new element move into the scene of imminent impact framed by the window, a huge dark form that swooped from just above the bus’s roof, then rose and disappeared into the bus itself, where she felt it hovering behind her head, a somehow benevolent presence.

  Now staring at whatever was behind Nada, Avinash’s face had moved through surprise to rage. The ground accelerated to meet them with an almost audible tremendousness. By now it was clear where the impact would occur. They were on a level with the top floors of two apartment towers, moving towards a spot on the street between them, close to where it ended in rocks and vegetation at the foot of the hill. She could see the upper branches of a great tree stretching like grasping fingers into the bus’s glassless front window. Beneath the tree were parked two cars. They would come down on the front of one and the rear of the other. Nada felt herself enfolded in a warm darkness that drew her, still clutching the manuscript, gently back from Avinash and into itself. The last thing she saw was Avinash’s face, again a red-eyed mask of pure demonic fury and hate, at the moment when the window frame met the two cars with a distant drawn-out roar of twisting metal and bursting glass.

  By now everything seemed distant to Nada as she felt herself moving upwards in the embrace of a protecting darkness. An enormous jolt of thunder and heat touched her gently from afar as she was drawn into fearless sleep. She began to dream of all that had just happened—getting the manuscript at the Institute, the rickshaw ride,

  the crash, the bus ride—saw it all through a lens of calm, happy wonder which stripped even Avinash of his menace, and made him one of them, a fellow-sufferer, a brother—even, conceivably, a friend and lover, in another life.

  She began to see them all in that other life, too, in flashes interspersed among the scenes of the chase: Nada (but she looked like someone else) walking close to Avinash in the forest. Nada and Avinash sitting on the ground in front of an old-fashioned village house eating a meal with Amruteshvar, all of them dressed in the quietly splendid garments of long ago. Avinash and Amruteshvar facing each other, frowning and angry. Nada and Avinash sitting side by side on a rock in the forest, him reaching out and touching her chin as she looked down and aside, smiling with embarrassment and hidden love.

  Then the past was gone, and she again saw the street at the foot of Vetal Tekadi, now scattered with flaming debris around the remains of the bus and the two cars. The upper half of Avinash’s body protruded from under the blasted hulk of the bus’s front portion, his guts spilling onto the ground around him. Lying on his back, he looked up at her and the vague, massive presence which hovered around her, and which she knew to be Amruteshvar.

  He struggled onto his side, and his guts were sucked back into the bloody mess of flesh and clothing that had been his abdomen, which was now magically knitting itself together again. The bus groaned and shifted slightly as he dragged himself from under it, trailing crushed legs which were also rapidly recomposing themselves as the gore that covered them receded and evaporated. He pulled himself onto his arms and knees, paused to collect his strength, then staggered unsteadily to his feet.

  Standing amidst the flames, he turned his gaze up to Nada and Amruteshvar. His face was mild, brown-eyed, completely human. “Pāhi tām,” he said in Sanskrit. Take care of her.

  Then they were rising, leaving Avinash looking up at them, and beyond him, the huge throng of people who had gathered in the street around the burning bus, and who seemed to see the bus alone. The sky had rapidly grown dark with rainclouds, and Nada felt another nearer darkness spread about them like wings as they flew ever higher above the city, over Vetal Tekadi, over the Institute on the other side, and down towards Usha Road. Then the dream faded and she slipped into oblivion, exhausted.

  7

  The Reading Session

  Nada awoke in her room in Yadnya, with the sun of evening bathing the wall. She was wearing the same clothes, and could feel the sweat and dirt of the day on her skin. As she turned onto her side, she felt that she ached everywhere, and that she was still weak, even after—what, maybe seven hours of sleep?

  She remembered the day’s events as far as the flight, a dreamlike memory that was difficult to distinguish from the dreams she had had since then. As she tried to sort out vision and reality, she felt a growing dread of the likely real-world consequences of what had happened.

  She had been at the centre of a spectacular disaster, witnessed by hundreds of people, in which many people had been killed. What awaited her when she got up and went downstairs? Would the police be there? If not, they must certainly be on her trail. Hundreds of people had seen her and Amruteshvar getting into the bus after it had crashed off Malati Road; they had seen them involved in the violence that left the passengers and many bystanders dead. Their role in those events, their opposition to Avinash, may not have been clear.

  And clownishly inept as the police were, how difficult could it be for them to find her? She had been a frequent and striking sight in this neighbourhood for a quarter of a century. Even many who had never talked with her must have at least heard about her, know where she worked and lived.

  And apart from the loss of so many innocent lives, and the appalling question of her role in it, this event was a disaster for her personally. What would it mean for her position in India? Would she be tried and jailed? Expelled? Secretly blacklisted and barred from the country? These were fates of which she had always lived in fear, and she had been so grateful, after losing Zoran, that that most devastating experience of her life had not been compounded by exile from their hearts’ adopted homeland, which would certainly have tipped her into suicidal despair.

  Then, her own parents and Zoran’s had flown from Croatia to help her deal with the police, devastated and drained as she was, and in the background she had had influential support in India and Europe. The police had not been inclined to cause difficulties. Nothing in her bizarre story had corresponded to anything real. Even the villages, roads, temples, and countryside she had described did not exist, and Zoran’s body had been found on the side of the highway with a massive head wound.

  It was obvious to the police what had happened: clearly this foreign girl had been driven temporarily mad by the trauma of seeing her boyfriend struck and killed by a passing vehicle, and besides, they had probably both been stoned for weeks. So there had been no further

  investigation, Nada, her parents, and Zoran’s parents had gone back to Croatia with his body, and she had had no difficulty at the Indian embassy in Zagreb or the Mumbai airport when she returned to India a few months later.

  She doubted she would be so lucky this time. She slipped her feet over the bedside and sat up slowly and painfully, noticing how dirty her clothes were. At that moment there was a knock on the door, and she braced herself for whatever she would have to face next. But the voice that followed was Kamala’s.

  “Nada, are you awake? Amruteshvar thinks you’ve just woken up.”

  Amruteshvar. Yes. He was alive. She had seen him die, horribly, and then... he had been alive again, and had saved her. This had been real. She clung to this certainty with a solid, exhilarating sense of relief and safety.

  “Yes, he’s right,” Nada replied. “Just a minute.”

  She shook her head and stood up slowly, then went and opened the door.

  “How are you feeling?” said Kamala. “Would you like some tea?”

&nb
sp; “That would be beautiful, yes,” said Nada. “Is it just Amruteshvar downstairs? Is... everything all right?”

  “It’s just him, yes,” replied Kamala. “He told me what happened—not everything, he said, but enough. You both came in the back door around one, just before there was a tremendous thunderstorm, pre-monsoon. You were asleep on your feet. We brought you straight up and put you to bed in your clothes.”

  As they moved towards the stairs, Nada paused to look in at the door of the study, and saw what she was looking for: the manuscript sat on the desk wrapped in its apparently unscathed red cloth. She went over and picked it up to look at it more closely. There was no sign of its recent adventures—being thrown into the bus by Avinash, being pressed against his bloody shoulder. She put it back down and touched the rosary, then turned and went downstairs with Kamala.

  Amruteshvar was sitting on one of the chairs in the hall, and looked up when she came in alone.

  “I guess you’re feeling a little bad, but not too bad,” he said.

  “Quite right. You know everything, don’t you,” replied Nada, smiling slightly, her voice touched with irritation, despite the near-joy she had felt on seeing him again, which a confusion of shame and guilt had caused her to repress. “Do you know what the upshot of today’s adventure is going to be? The police station is just fifty feet down the road. It may take them a while to figure it out, but I’m sure they’ll find their way here eventually.”

  “In fact they won’t,” said Amruteshvar. “The city thinks the bus driver went mad after hitting his head in the crash, then took off on his own. You’ll read that in the paper tomorrow. The people who saw us... didn’t see us. Normally, when it’s just a few people, this kind of problem isn’t hard to take care of, but I have to admit that with the hundreds who saw us this time, it wasn’t so easy. But I managed.”