“Mom, please,” he said quietly. “What do I do?”
“Speak the words,” his mother said. “Summon him.”
The circle erupted with chanting. Ridley joined them. He felt the name Belial on his lips without understanding the rest, and could only watch as the hooded man set the infant back between its mother’s legs, still smeared in blood and birth fluids. Again voices called out to Belial.
Ridley couldn’t breathe. The room darkened, as if the whole world had dimmed. The film crew were truly only shadows now, shadows and gleaming eyes. Time had frozen between one heartbeat and the next. He felt a loss that cut to the bone, grief pouring into him. Another dagger swept down, this one in the grip of the hooded man, and sliced across the infant’s chest, just above his heart, only deep enough to draw blood.
The burn of that cut sliced across Ridley’s own chest. He could feel the wicked bite of the blade and the trickle of blood down his skin, though no blade had touched him.
He screamed and lunged for the baby, but an enormous man struck him in the temple and hurled him against the stone base of the altar. A booted foot crunched down on his throat, pinning him to the floor. Inside George Sumner’s mask, Ridley began to suffocate.
He still clutched Sumner’s dagger, but as he raised his hand, another cultist dropped upon him, a blond woman whose mask seemed partly askew. He glimpsed the corner of her smile under the mask as she trapped his arm against the floor with her knees.
Her dagger was the first to cut him. She lifted it with both hands and rammed it through the meat of his shoulder, cleaving muscle. Blood sprayed and he screamed with the voices of two men, decades apart. Another blade bit into his thigh. The third plunged into his abdomen, the fourth into his side, the fifth into his right arm, scraping bone as it jammed between ulna and radius. After that, Ridley could no longer scream. Numbness flooded into his veins to replace the blood that spilled out. The blade that thrust into the side of his face, shattering teeth, might have been the tenth or eleventh. He felt that one, though he was no longer capable of screaming. He could weep, though, and he did.
When they were finished, there had been twelve wounds. Twelve daggers. Twelve murderers in their Belial masks on the set of Chapel of Darkness, every moment preserved on celluloid.
His mother, Athena, slipped off the altar. Had the afterbirth come? He wasn’t sure, but she was there beside him nevertheless, kneeling with the infant Timothy in her arms, still smeared with their shared fluids. The baby suckled at her breast in quiet contentment as Ridley’s blood pooled on the stone floor. The officiant raised her arms and began a prayer to gods of pain and cruelty.
Athena bent to whisper in his ear. “He is close. So near to us now. But only you can complete the ritual. Only you can bring him into our midst.”
One hand cradling the babe, she reached the other to touch his arm. She took his right wrist and lifted it, and his fingers began to open but she clasped hers around them, making sure he kept his grip on the dagger. The last dagger. The thirteenth.
As the baby nursed quietly, she helped him bring the dagger to his own throat and she kissed his temple.
“This part must be yours,” she said.
Ridley would have laughed if he could have. Lunacy. It was lunacy. He would never…
But in the shadows overhead, something breathed. The shadows themselves had form and awareness and they waited impatiently, urgent with desire. The chanting rose into a sensual crescendo and it seemed to caress him. This body knew what it had to do.
He drew the blade across his throat and a wave of blissful relief swept over him. It lasted only a moment before a chill seized him, icy needles of pain. Ridley inhaled sharply and his eyes went wide. The shadows roiled and coalesced around him, enveloping him, and as he sipped his last breath, he drew the shadows into George Sumner’s lungs.
As his life ebbed, he heard the baby crying, and the voice was his own.
* * *
Massarsky felt the room go cold. He always had the air-conditioning up too high, but this was something else. A glaze of frost settled on Ridley’s skin. At one point the man had been talking behind the mask, a quiet chant in some language Massarsky could not make out. He’d even reached up to untie the mask, but something had stopped him. Ridley had dropped his hands to his sides again and hadn’t moved since. Massarsky had moved, though, backing first a few steps and then a good eight or nine feet away. He hadn’t lied about the three people he had allowed to try on the mask before. All of them had seen something when they’d put the mask on, something that had given them hideous dreams, but none had reacted the way Ridley had.
“Jesus,” he muttered. He could see his own breath. With a shiver, he crossed his arms, trying to keep warm.
Frost had formed on the mask now, and somehow it no longer really looked like a mask. Instead, Ridley appeared to have a caul over his face, a thin membrane with blue veins just below the surface, veins whose patterns matched the symbols that had been drawn there before.
Ridley turned to look at him, the movement so abrupt that Massarsky let out a tiny squeak of fear. Behind that mask, that caul, Ridley’s eyes glittered with flecks like embers, as if they reflected some celestial hell.
“The circle is complete,” a woman’s voice said, making Massarsky squeak once more.
He exhaled, watching his breath mist in front of him. Massarsky did not turn around. He did not know how she had gotten into the room, though he had known she would come. She had promised, after all, that she would be there.
“You brought payment?” he asked.
Athena Ridley, aged and riddled with cancer, had a rough, rasping laugh. “You are bold,” she said. “I’ve always liked that in a man. And yes, of course. I’ve left the money on your pillow, the way men like you have always done for whores.”
She walked to her son. Or whatever now lived behind that mask, inside those glittering eyes.
“Come, my love,” the dying woman whispered, taking the silent thing by its hand. “At last, we may begin.”
When they’d left, Massarsky locked the door behind them.
Then he wept.
And then he counted his money.
FOLIE À DEUX, OR THE TICKING HOURGLASS
Usman T. Malik
I WANTED TO MAKE a hundred mothers cry.
In Shahdara was his villa. A pretty, spacious thing with an artificial pond set in the enormous basement and a gym filled with benches, barbells, and training equipment bought at Loha Bazaar. He was such a good neighbor, indulgent, generous, and the street was filled with urchins and runaways. They were received there, anyone who needed food and succor. He welcomed them with open arms. Fish swam in his pond, bright orange and blue green turned misty-magical by the play of light and shadows in the basement. After the older boys had worked out and a masseur oiled and rubbed and pressed open their knots, he and his boys, young and old, walked downstairs to watch the fish with wide-eyed wonder. Together they dropped feed into the pond and sang children’s songs. They especially loved singing “Machlee ka bacha Pani mai se nikla”:
The fish’s son jumped out of the water
Father caught it. Mother cooked it.
We all ate it. Had so muuuch fuuunnn.
So muuuch fuuuun.
In Shahdara was his video game arcade. A nine-year-old boy in a colorless shalwar kameez slammed the token slot, fished around in his pocket, cursed, looked around. He caught sight of a one-hundred-rupee note curled on the floor like a Gold Leaf wrapper, Jinnah’s unforgiving face peering at the ceiling. Eyes lit up, the boy ambled across the shop.
I swear to God, the boy would say later, I never stole the money. It was just there.
In Shahdara next to the video game arcade was a room dusty and windowless. Thieves were sent there for disciplining. The room was mostly quiet. Occasionally a moaning sound might cut
through the machine gun, beeping, and laser sounds of the arcade.
In Shahdara adjacent to his villa was a concrete godown. It had huge double doors and rust on the padlock. Sometimes a chemical smell spilled out from beneath the doors, eye-watering and acrid.
I could have killed more, could have killed five hundred, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to break my vow. One hundred was the promise.
The sentence would be commensurate to the crimes, said the local magistrate. He would be taken to Iqbal Park; in the shadow of the majestic Minar-e-Pakistan, before a blue lake, he would be hanged to death. His body would be chopped into one hundred pieces, dissolved in acid in front of the parents, and cast into the Ravi River.
The sentence was immediately challenged by the provincial government, condemned by human rights organizations, and denounced by a local sharia court, but each passing day brings it closer to fruition.
And we will film it all. The butchering of a butcher.
* * *
You have an hour, they say. I am amazed Amina managed even that.
He sits straight in his chair, his dirty salt-and-pepper hair parted to the right. He is smaller than on TV. “You two,” he says. He looks so ordinary.
Amina stares into his eyes. She wears a pretty mauve head scarf that is knotted around her chin and flutters a bit when she speaks, “Aap jantay hain hum kyoon aye hain?”
“I know why you’re here.”
“Khalid sahib will help us with the taping and, later, filming,” Amina says, nodding at me. I click the tape recorder on. “Can you identify yourself for the record?” He does. Amina goes on, “This is an extraordinary sentence. It is possible they might not move forward with it.”
“You know what they say isn’t true, but this isn’t a sham, either. Art never is. Did they tell you I went to NCA—yes, the college—and almost graduated before I opened the game arcade?” He looks at her, tugs at the collar of his sweater. He has a soft chin, and the thick turtleneck holds it aloft like an egg. “Doesn’t matter what they say. Doesn’t matter what they do but I’m glad everyone will watch and hear my story.” He lowers his head and his square plastic glasses slide down his piggish nose. He could pass as a schoolteacher. A child could look into those soft hazel eyes, find them friendly and comforting.
“No one has ever cared. For too long the world has stayed silently complicit. No more. It should know what it did to me, what it plans to do to me.”
The electric fan of the police station whirs above us. The room smells like sweat and cigarettes. Amina sits still.
“What it does all the time to my orphans, my runaways.”
“And what has the world done to you or those orphans?” Amina says.
He laughs. “Have you ever read the papers? How many children disappear off the streets of Lahore daily? How many cops and waderas and judges are involved in those trafficking rings? Me, I have been saving them for years. Taking them off the streets. Homing them.”
“A wonderful homing that included rape and murder, sure.” Amina raises an arm, brushes a stray hair away from her eyes. She was an acne-prone teen now left with pockmarks. I’ve seen her touch them sometimes, but not today.
I say, “They want your blood.”
He licks the left corner of his lips, then the right, quick darts. I saw him do that in the first interview. There is even a grainy paparazzi shot: his dark snaillike tongue worrying the pencil-line mustache, his mocking gaze fixed sidelong at the crowd of onlookers and policemen—a macabre snapshot picked up by hundreds of media outlets and shot around the world in a matter of hours. “They are garbage and they want garbage things. This video, though, after it’s done—”
“Do you have any family?” Amina doesn’t use his name, won’t. “It will be tough on them.”
“Just my boys.”
“Your boys?”
“My beautiful boys.”
“Your father?”
“Passed away two years ago.”
“There is a chance,” Amina says, “we could put a halt to the filming. A court order—”
“No.”
“So be it. Theek hai. We’ll make sure we’re ready.”
He shows yellow teeth. “I’m sure you will.”
Amina is staring at his teeth. She has hidden her hands away from him under the table. Her left, closer to me, is a fist. What does she see? An image of those teeth gently biting down on a brown nipple. A filthy godown in Shahdara, bare yellow bulbs dangling from the wood-slatted ceiling, smell of dust and wheat chaff; and between the dozens of wheat sacks, arms and legs moving languorously.
Acid-Walla they call him, I think, and squeeze my eyes shut briefly.
“We will be in touch with the Inspector sahib.” Amina is standing. She moved so softly it is unnerving. “Tell me something.”
He waits with all the patience in the world.
“Why give yourself up? Why send the letter?”
He pushes his glasses up his nose and squints at her. “What’s your name again?”
She tenses.
“Amina Swati, Daily Jang,” he reads from her ID card. His tongue sweeps out and in. “As God is my witness, Amina dear, we will become frands. One day you will know what that means. Then you will understand the true nature of the frandship I gave my boys.” He says the word in English, stretching it out like wet taffy, sweetmeat put away for later consumption. “But if you can get me the hourglass, I’ll tell you more.”
“What?”
He leans across the table. “My mother’s ticking hourglass. Find out what they did with it and everything you want to know—yours.”
There is a look in her eyes; Amina turns and walks out. I follow her and we cross the courtyard under the warm late-afternoon sun to the main gate of Kot Lakhpat Jail. A group of prisoners are playing badminton. They eye us as we pass but say nothing.
I glance at Amina. Her face is white as the walls of his cell. “Monster,” she says. “Crazy, filthy son of a whore. He should be raped by a dozen men and dumped in the gutter.” She won’t look at me when she says those words. “They played right into his hands. He wanted this.”
“Wanted what?”
“For his final act to be as public as possible.”
“Why do you think?”
“Because he’s nuts and all psychopathic nuts want the world to know them. Acknowledge them. Validate their miserable, worthless existence.”
It is eleven a.m. on Friday, October 12. The sentence, we’ve been told, will be carried out in exactly a month.
* * *
I first heard about House Number-100 from our family tutor Sir Akram the Terrifier, who gave private tuition to us all. He rode his bicycle from one cousin’s home to another, oiled hair curled and glistening beneath his dusky wool cap, and special-knocked on our doors. We hated that cap. We hated his bicycle. He used to have a motorbike, but after receiving a particularly nasty beating, Khan Bhai took a cricket bat to it, smashed it into a misshapen hunk. Threw the hunk in the empty parking lot behind our joint-family home. (A school now stands in that lot.) Gul Uncle had to pay Sir Akram for a new bike and my cousin was grounded for months.
Khan Bhai still grins when he talks about that. “It was a glorious day,” he says. “A win for us kids.” In hindsight he respects our tutor, brings Sir Akram’s kids presents—real conscientious is my cousin—but back then he was pissed. “Told Sir not to touch my face but he didn’t listen, did he?”
House Number-100 near Kabootar Poora. Sir Akram tutored the children who lived there: two boys bright and courteous who worshipped their teacher, he said. So hospitable that he never had to punish them. Cardamom tea and buttered toast served each time he went to their house. Their grandmother was a visitant—a pahunchi-hui-khatoon. Everyone knew she commanded jinn; they fell in with her, silent and vaporous. A body of a man glimpsed
prostrate on a prayer mat, vanished in the flick of the eye, then back in that meem shape, his hair limp and heavy like tarred straw, arms outstretched before the deity.
Sir Akram insisted the deity was God.
Her grandchildren, he said, were told to tread lightly at dusk, to be careful, respectful. Respect goes a long way (especially toward one’s teachers). Dusk belongs to the jinn, and the house unfolds at night.
I last met Khan Bhai a few years ago after a road altercation left him bed-bound for a week. His leg was broken in four different places; he had fractured three fingers. “Happens,” he said. I admired his restraint, his indifference. His unsmiling wife brought us tea and left the room. We sat and sipped. Life really had grounded him well.
“Do you remember the Parhai-Ka-Neelam-Ghar Sir Akram used to hold?” Khan Bhai said.
“Yes!” I cried. “I haven’t thought of it in years.”
“Education Jeopardy.” He slapped his thigh, laughing. “My God. Those sweets. Remember how he’d give out sweets to the winners? Or if you could pronounce all the prayers correctly?”
I smiled. “I remember. You used to win all the time.”
“You did, too. At least for a while.” Khan Bhai coughed up a bit of tea. “Later, I think, you got behind a bit, no? Got belted a few times.”
“Yes, me and Salman, both. Remember when he was beaten with that stick, the one with rusted nails in it? God, we thought he wouldn’t stop bleeding. Would die of tetanus or something.”
He looked at me, frowning. “Who? I thought it was you.” He dipped a cake rusk in his tea. “I do remember that day. Kind of. It still find it amazing that, even though they knew, our parents never said anything besides, ‘Sir jee, please be careful next time.’ What the fuck, right?” It was eerie, a bit discomfiting, seeing Khan Bhai mimic Sal’s mother. He was good at that, always had been. Mimicking, pretending, surviving. “To top it off, if you complained too much, your parents would beat you up as well. I mean, so where does one go? It’s such a trap.” He tapped a bandaged finger on his tea saucer. “You know, it’s funny: I don’t remember half of that time. I’m sure I’m not the only one who wants that shit behind me. You hang out recently with any other cousin?”
Final Cuts Page 27