“Who better than a cop knows how the system is fixed? Galloway, my supervisor, has five years less experience than I do, but he’s a sergeant and I’m still a trooper because my grandfather was bilingual and his wasn’t.”
“I thought you stayed a trooper for cover,” says Tyler.
“Are you kidding?” says Perez.
“You’re doing alright,” says Alex.
“Thanks to Kali,” he says giving the sign and reverently bowing his head.
“See Michael,” says Trent. “We’re all born-again because of you.”
He shrugs.
The city lights are far behind them when their road curves and bends between pine-wooden hills. Occasionally Michael sees the lake off to his right, black and still. Lights twinkle on the distant shore.
“The dinosaur movies are always wrong, you know,” says Tyler. “The T-Rex was rare. Predators are rare. For a system to work there has to be like 98 prey animals for every 1 or 2 predators. Practically 99%.”
“Now we’re in kindergarten?” says Howard.
“That’s why Tigers are few,” he says.
“Plenty of knock-offs,” says Alex. “Plenty of folks doing what we’re doing.”
“Not what we’re doing,” says Tyler. “Not this.”
“They also serve Kali,” says Howard. “They just don’t know it and Kali doesn’t care. She doesn’t need the tigers. She can do very well without us. Don’t forget that. Kali kills her children.”
“She is time,” says Michael. “She kills everything. Don’t take it personally.”
“My mother said that when we die, if we were a loyal Faithful Tiger, we would be rewarded in the afterlife.”
“Our victims too,” says Alex. “Kali welcomes them.”
Michael laughs. “Sounds like religious cross-contamination. Isn’t it about karma and rebirth? Reincarnation? Not harps and angels?”
“There are demons and shades,” says Perez. “I’ve seen those.”
“While on jaggery?” says Howard.
“Yes.”
Howard scoffs. “So you saw things on an hallucinogenic and that’s proof?”
“How can you have so little faith?” asks Kristina. “Even after Michael shows up?”
“I’ve seen demons,” says Michael.
“Of course you have,” says Howard.
“And a black halo around people I later found out were, uhm, you guys.”
Howard shrugs looking out the window.
Tyler slows the car and turns off the highway. They follow a rutted and rocky dirt road down a modest incline which quickly takes them out of sight from the main road. Thirty yards on and they come to a steel gate set between two sturdy poles illuminated in the headlights. The gate is latched with a heavy chain and massive padlock. Alex climbs out, opens it to let them through. He locks it behind them.
A quarter mile down the road, they pull to the grassy shoulder behind a row of cars and get out.
“So much for carpooling,” says Tyler.
Kristina passes out flashlights and they set off. Howard and Perez keep their positions behind Michael as they walk along the road and then down a path Michael doesn’t see until he is on it.
The smell of wood fire reaches them at the same time as the sound of people congregating; low conversations, laughter, and even music in the blue starlit smoke. Michael hears a guitar and the thrums of drums.
The path opens up to a modest clearing. It is unremarkable from the other clearings the path traveled across to get to this one, but Michael knows instinctively that this is Holy Ground—a cemetery like Crystal Springs.
Dozens of people are milling around, talking, laughing, and drinking coffee. They’re dressed warmly against the high mountain cold. Picnic blankets are laid out around the fire in the center. It’s not a big fire, just enough to heat a coffee pot or two and provide light and a central focus.
Michael stops before leaving the cover of the trees. He is held in limbo between two places, like the doorway in Altura, death before him, escape behind. The others wait for him to move.
“What is it?” asks Tyler.
“If I go onto this ground,” he says. “I’ll die.”
“Everyone dies,” says Howard giving him a push.
“Is She talking to you?” says Kristina wide-eyed. “What do you see?”
“I’m going to die here,” he says. “Before dawn.”
“Interesting,” says Howard pushing him again.
Perez grabs Howard’s arm. “Let the man make the decision,” he says.
“Michael,” says Howard. “If you don’t go down there, we’ll have to kill you. We’ll do it here and now. All of us.”
Trent nods. “Come Jayden,” he says. “This is your party. You don’t want to be late.”
The others in the clearing notice them and the talking falls off. Michael swallows but his mouth is dry. He succeeds only in reminding himself of his injured windpipe. He rubs it tenderly with his fingers.
“That’s the spirit,” says Trent leading him toward the fire.
Michael leaves the cover and follows Trent to the feast.
“Jayden,” says Alex. “That’s a new one.”
“It means God has heard,” Trent tells him.
Michael guesses there are about thirty people. He recognizes a few from the questioning in the hotel suite, but most are new faces. Most are young, strong and fit. Some he can see are brother and sister, father and son, mother and daughter. There are no children.
He’s met with friendly reassuring smiles that put his teeth on edge and sends his heart racing. He knows these are not friends. These are not family. They do not have his best interest at heart. These are deceivers. These are killers. These are the children of Kali. There is a unity among the group, a loyalty and devotion to a purpose and to the family, but he is not now part of that family. He was once and he may be again, but now he is a potential liability, possible approver, and deeply in danger.
Jessica stands up from a blanket where she was mixing ingredients into a porcelain bowl stolen from the hotel buffet. She still looks young to Michael, childlike but confident, as she had in the casino, her hands full of stolen poker chips, her face full of life.
“Fletcher, this is Michael, the one I told you about” she says.
A tall skinny man with tussled red hair and big ears stands up and offers him the sign.
“Heya Jeb,” says Fletcher.
“Hello Joe.”
“Everything okay?” says Tyler. “You guys get settled?”
“Yeah, we’re doing real good,” Fletcher says, his accent a twang. “Thanks for taking us in. Shit-storm in Dixie.”
“Crack house burned up?” says Howard.
“Meth lab explosion,” he says. “Gutted my streak.”
“Fletcher can handle a boat,” says Jessica to Tyler.
“Any size,” he brags. “From a canoe up to barge. I’m your man.”
“Sorry about your people Fletcher,” says Michael. “Did you lose any family?”
“My stupid sister,” he says. “She never had enough sense.”
“And the twins,” says Michael surprising Fletcher.
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “That was bad.”
“Trent?” says Jessica. “Do you have something for me?”
“Yes.” He gives her an aluminum foil ball the size of a large fist.
“Go tell them to start the music,” Jessica says.
“Yes, ma’am.” Fletcher trots away.
From a Tupperware container drawn out of a red Colman cooler on the blanket beside her, Jessica shakes jaggery—raw Indian brown sugar, into a frying pan. She puts it over a small bed of coals she’s pulled out of the main fire, and stirs it with a plastic spatula. The smell is like lightning in Michael’s brain. She dips her fingers in a bowl of water and spritzes it over the sugar. The pan sizzles softly and the music begins.
“Open that for me,” she says to Michael gesturing to a bag on the bla
nket.
Inside Michael finds a new pepper grinder still in its shrink-wrapped cardboard packaging. The price tag announces it was marked down and on sale.
He tears it open and hands it to Jessica laughing quietly under his breath.
“What’s so amusing?”
“It’s a lot of things,” he says. “On one hand I’m scared shitless. I can’t believe I haven’t just keeled over I’m so terrified right now.”
“What else?” she says dropping herbs into the grinder; pepper, cardamom, lemon, asafetida, and herbs he has no name for but remembers nonetheless.
“You’re making the jaggery,” he says, beginning to bounce to the music. “Holy sacrament and you’re doing it with plastic spoons, Tupperware and foil.”
“Should I be using blessed instruments and holy water? Should I be in a robe and have a funny hat on?”
“No,” he laughs. “That’s just it. It’s wonderful.”
“Here,” she says, “Stir this. Don’t let it scorch.”
He pulls away. “No,” he says, “I couldn’t… I shouldn’t—”
“You don’t want to?”
“You know it’s not that.”
“Come Michael. Rejoin us.”
He kneels down beside her and takes the pan and spatula. He stirs the jaggery, wetting it and heating it into a syrup as he remembers his mother doing. Jessica grinds the spices into another stolen buffet bowl and smells it.
“You know in the old days it was forbidden to kill a woman?” she says. “A taboo, since they were a symbol of Kali. You also weren’t allowed to steal unless you killed and buried the guy you stole from. Oh and women couldn’t be tigers.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the rules change. Kali and the tigers have evolved.”
“You’re making jaggery and arguing against tradition?” he says.
She laughs. “I guess I am. But some traditions are good. This is a good one. Others need to be updated.”
“She’s going to argue for guns next,” says Tyler, surprising Michael who didn’t know he was standing so close behind him.
“No, I’m not. Blood should not be spilled.”
Jessica adjusts the spices, runs them though the grinder again, and then after another smell test, sprinkles them into the pan.
“More water,” she says.
Michael adds some.
Drums beat an ancient rhythm and a guitar adds texture. A round dance begins to circle the fire, dancers stepping and twirling, holding hands then letting go, a chaotic unchoreographed ballet of improvisation and ecstasy.
“Here,” says Jessica. She’s holding open the aluminum foil bundle Trent had given her. Inside are two triangular, moist brown lumps.
Michael draws a breath.
“Take them,” she says. “Give me the pan. Do you know what to do? You must squeeze them into the sugar.”
“Not my kill,” Michael says, his voice breaking. Somewhere in the back of his mind he’s screaming.
“Yes it was,” she says. “It’s right for you to do it.”
He looks up then, behind him and around. Tyler is watching him intently. Trent and Ericka and Barb have appeared. Three men, strong and intent, hover nearby like the death they are. They each bob and weave to the infectious beat of the drums, but their eyes are on Michael like claws in his hide.
The screaming in his head rises as he draws another breath and puts down the skillet. He takes the offered organs into his hands and feels their weight. They are cold and moist and the heaviest things he’s ever lifted. They smell of blood and something else; something old and wonderful. They smell of God.
He cannot hear the music for the screaming in his head. Jessica says something to him. It looks encouraging, but he can understand none of it. He is deaf in the screaming.
She holds the pan under his shaking hands. He senses movement behind him, the flash of a yellow rumal. He takes a breath, one of his last he is sure, and squeezes the glands over the cooking sugar. Steam rises between his fists and into his face. He exhales and breathes again. The odor is fire in his mind. The screaming fades and his hands stop shaking. He feels a grin spread over his cheeks which are wet with his tears.
Trent takes the crushed adrenal glands from Michael’s hands and drops them into a hole beside the blanket. It is a small hole, but deep. He kicks dirt on top of it with his foot and then wipes his hands with a baby-wipe Ericka hands him from her purse.
“Here Michael,” she says, offering him a wipe. “It’s sticky.”
Jessica has the jaggery off the fire. She is beginning to form small balls from the cooling syrup. The song she sings while she makes them is familiar and haunting, but not in a language he understands.
“Come dance with me,” says Ericka to Michael. “It’s time to dance.”
“Yes, dance Michael,” Jessica says. “Dance.”
He lets Ericka draw him into the circle. There are many dancers, but not everyone is in the circle. Some have taken up posts at the edge of the clearing as guards watching the woods beyond the clearing and him within it.
The music is loud and primal. Incessant. It invades Michael’s mind and he gives into it like darkness. He whirls and steps with the others. Joyful and careless, alive in the music and that is enough. He does not know how long he dances, it might be minutes, it might be hours but all at once the dancers stop and the music fades away.
Jessica lifts the bowl of sugar above her head and does a silly pirouette for effect.
They find places on the blankets. They pull their coats over their sweaty bodies and prepare for the sacrament.
“Wait on my blanket, Michael,” says Jessica.
She walks the bowl around the circle handing it out like party favors. Some take it with ceremony, raising the candy to the dark sky above, others just pop it straight in their mouth laughing with anticipation.
Michael is among the last to taste the jaggery and the waiting for Jessica to complete the circuit around the fire is the longest five minutes of his life.
She kneels down beside him and plucks the second to last candy from the bowl. Michael opens his mouth and she places it tenderly on his tongue, then takes the last one herself.
Michael closes his mouth and sucks on the poisonous sugar and that is the end of Michael Oswald.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It is a sweetness unlike any other. Spiced and thick. Ancient and alive. Tart, organic and everlasting. The kiss of a God. Kali.
He lets it dissolve in his mouth slowly, savoring every drop. It is this he has craved most of his life. He thinks he moans out loud, but can’t be sure. He ignores his other senses and puts his entire soul into tasting the Holy Jaggery. Abandoned in the flavor, alive in the sugar, he forgets that this it is a transitory thing, short lived and fatal, like life. He relishes the moment, the few precious minutes of pleasure, turned ecstasy, turned madness, that the jaggery will bring him. The taste is more than a dance of flavors in his mouth. It is more than the sum of its parts; sweet and sour, tart and smooth. It is ambrosia—literally the food of the gods. It is a chariot to Kali. He has had jaggery before, stolen and sweet, the way She meant it to be. The magickal myriad of flavors rolling over his tongue are but precursor to what he knows awaits him. The knowledge of what is coming is itself another flavor, an underlying potency to the simple treasure in his mouth.
When the final syrup drips down his swollen throat he lies back onto the blanket beside Jessica. She pulls his arm over her shoulder in a classic spoon for warmth and comfort. The night is chilly and they will grow cold from the coming long inactivity. She draws a blanket over them and Michael catches sight of Tyler keeping watch nearby.
“See you on the other side,” he says with a wink.
During the dance, he’d felt easy and accepted. He’s held hands with strangers, been bear-hugged and kissed by people who only this morning were going to kill him. His preparation of the sacrament had let him in, the music made everyon
e friends, the eating of the jaggery would make him family again. They were deceivers, but he felt the welcome was sincere.
He has a brief moment of contentment curled up with Jessica. It is but a single peaceful moment before the coming journey.
It rises slowly like a river tide. A slow glacial piston climbing first in his dance-tired muscles, soothing them with warm kisses and spreading out and in and up through his body like a heating wire in his veins. He feels it particularly in the base of his skull. His jaw clenches, and he feels the fire pool in his neck. Then like a thousand dancing demons, the fire leaps into his brain and ravages his senses.
His body shudders with fever. He thinks to throw off the blanket; he’s burning up, but his muscles won’t obey him. His last waking sensation, the last impulse he draws from the material world before he crosses over, is the knowledge that he has an erection.
Then he is out of his body.
The heat follows him on. He is fire. He is the flame that burns the dead on the cremation ground; born at dawn to consume a body by dusk. He is that fire. That Holy Flame. That is he.
He loves the ashes he leaves behind. In raptured awe, he wonders at their turn on the wheel; nothing, to be made something again—in time. In Kali. All pass through Kali, nothing survives Her. All is born to be consumed, to be born again in cycles great and small until Kali is no more.
She is terrible and relentless. It takes all of creation to hold her in check. Otherwise, She would dance with Her flames and consume the world not knowing when to stop, not wishing to, until the entire universe is gone once and forever, the balance un-restorable, time at an end.
She shows him the universe as a wheel, the three forces turning it forever; creation, sustenance, destruction; Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. Kali, black, four-armed and bloodthirsty, is consort to Shiva, Lord of Destruction, but more terrible than He. Where Lord Shiva is wise and controlled, Kali is passion and fire. Bloodlust. She is death unstoppable, within Her is the power to end all creation.
Mother Kali smiles for him and kisses him with ashen breath and blood-sticky lips. She holds him like a baby in her arms caressing him with steel and wire, claw and fang.
“You are greater than them all,” Michael says, and She laughs for joy and surprise. And the world shakes, and the universe shudders.
What Immortal Hand Page 28