Aru Shah and the End of Time

by Roshani Chokshi

  A burst of heat and light threw her and Mini onto their backs. Aru blinked and looked up to see a wall of flames towering above them, blocking the cave entrance. The wave hit the threshold of the entrance…and stopped. Aru heard sizzling and steaming. But the poison had disappeared! The magical flames had formed some kind of fence, and must’ve cooked up all the liquid.

  Mini walked to her side, out of breath, but her face shining. “See? Enough heat, and time, will turn a liquid into a gas.”

  “That was incredible,” said Aru. “How’d you think of that?”

  Mini just beamed.

  Aru couldn’t help recalling what Lord Hanuman had said before they’d left the Court of the Sky. About how sometimes you needed someone to remind you of how powerful you were—then you would surprise even yourself.

  All the flames in the room had burned out. Mini tiptoed carefully toward the center of the cave. Where the cauldron had been, there was a scorch mark on the ground. A tiny bit of the poison had found shelter from the fire in a new place: the statue of Shiva who had once crouched openmouthed behind it. Now his throat glowed bright blue.

  Also on the ground stood a small turquoise goblet. Aru wondered whether that was the shoelike thing that had been floating in the cauldron. A silver liquid filled the cup. Mini picked it up gingerly.

  “The third key,” she said. “A sip of old age.”

  Aru reached for it, grimacing. She tried to dump out the liquid, but it didn’t budge. Magic was often a stickler for rules. Rude.

  “It should be your turn,” Aru said. “But let me guess: I have to sip this because you saved our butts back there?”

  “Yup,” said Mini.

  Aru gagged just looking at it. “What if it’s poison? It came from a poisonous cauldron, after all….”

  Mini shrugged. “Then maybe I could save you with one of Spring’s petit fours.”

  Aru was still doubtful. “What if I swallow the key?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend doing that. When I was three, I ate my mom’s engagement ring, and they gave me a bunch of bananas, and they had to—”

  “NEVER MIND! I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.”

  “Drink up or I’ll finish the story!”

  “You are evil.”

  Mini crossed her arms over her chest. “I believe in fairness.”

  Aru took the tiniest of sips, the kind she occasionally took from her mom’s Sunday glass of wine just to see why people fussed over the stuff. She always ending up spitting out the foul-tasting liquid. But old age didn’t taste…bad. It reminded Aru of her birthday last year. Her mom had taken them to a fancy Italian restaurant. Aru had eaten so much that she’d fallen asleep in the car. Her mom had picked her up (Aru remembered because she kept pretending to be asleep) and carried her to bed. The sip of old age was like that—a happy kind of fullness.

  A weight pressed down on her tongue. Startled, she spat it out and found a small white key. It was made of bone. NOPE.

  “AHHHH!” screamed Aru. She started to scrape her tongue. Then she realized she hadn’t washed her hands since Brahmasura became a pile of ashes. Aru spat on the ground.

  “The third key!” said Mini excitedly. “Cool! It’s a bone! I wonder if it was like a phalanx, or maybe a—”

  Aru glared at her, and Mini quickly changed the subject.

  “We did it!” said Mini. “We’ve got all three keys to get inside the Kingdom of Death.”

  Despite being thoroughly grossed out, Aru smiled. They’d really done it. And what made it even better was that Mini wasn’t standing quite so timidly anymore. With the glow of the poison in Shiva’s mouth behind her, it almost looked like she had a halo.

  “Ready?” asked Aru.

  Mini nodded.

  Aru’s palms had started to sweat. Her hair felt pulled too tight. Part of her was wondering whether she should make a last-minute bathroom run, because there was no telling whether the Underworld had public restrooms. But maybe that was just nerves.

  The girls laid down the three keys in a row: the sprig of youth, the coin from the bite of Adulthood (now shiny again), and the bone key.

  Aru wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen next. But that didn’t matter, because the keys knew what to do. At once, they melted and ran together, forming a puddle of light. Aru held her breath as the puddle rose, growing higher and higher until it was about the height of the seven-headed horse that had carried her across the Ocean of Milk.

  In the darkness of the cave, a door took shape.

  The door to the Kingdom of Death.

  The Door and the Dogs

  The door to the Kingdom of Death was wrought of bone and leaf and light.

  Mini raised her hand to touch it. Then she shook her head. “I thought I’d feel…differently,” she said.

  “About what?” asked Aru.

  “About the door and where it was going.”

  “It’s going to the Kingdom of Death. That’s all.”

  “Yes, but this is the door to my—” Mini stopped and stuttered. “I mean, I guess he really isn’t my…my…”

  “Dad?”

  Mini flinched. “Yeah. That. But I don’t know him. And he doesn’t know me. I mean, I guess it doesn’t matter. Boo and my parents said he’s my soul dad, not my home dad, but I guess I hoped he’d do something other than give me a mirror, you know?”

  No. She didn’t know. Aru knew it was a little mean, but she didn’t feel that bad for Mini. Aru was in the same boat, and she didn’t have a home dad to comfort her. Yeah, Indra might have made her soul, but where was her real father? He could still be out there…somewhere. And whoever he was, he hadn’t wanted her.

  She pushed down that surge of envy. It wasn’t Mini’s fault.

  “What’re you going to do if you meet the Dharma Raja?”

  “I’ll just thank him for letting me exist, I guess? I dunno. It’s weird.” Mini took a deep breath. “Okay, I’m ready now.”

  Aru reached for the doorknob, but it shocked her hand. She pulled back, stung. “I think you should do it.”

  “Me? Why?”

  “Because you’re the Daughter of Death. It’s like going into your house.”

  “What if it shocks me, too?”

  Aru shrugged. “Maybe say your name first?”

  Mini looked doubtful, but she squared her shoulders. “My name is Yamini Kapoor-Mercado-Lopez, and this is…” She turned to Aru and hissed, “I don’t know your last name!”

  Aru was tempted to say that her name was Bond. James Bond.

  “Aru Shah.”

  “No middle name?”

  She shrugged again. “If I have one, no one ever told me what it was.”

  Mini nodded, apparently satisfied, then continued talking to the door. “Aru Shah. We are entering the Kingdom of Death because we have been sent on a quest to awaken the celestial weapons so that, uh, so that Time doesn’t end and also to find out how to stop this really awful demon by looking for answers in the Pool of the…Last?”

  “Pool of the Past,” whispered Aru.

  “Pool of the Past!” finished Mini. “Please and thank you.”

  The door didn’t budge. Then again, Mini hadn’t pushed it.

  “Why aren’t you even trying to open it?” demanded Aru.

  “It’s not polite to force things.”

  With that, the door gave way with a sigh and a groan.

  From the side, the door to the Kingdom of Death was as slim as a closed laptop. And yet, the moment Mini stepped inside, she disappeared. It was as if she had stepped into a slice in the air.

  After a few seconds, Mini poked her head out. “Are you coming or not?”

  Aru’s stomach turned. She couldn’t remember any stories about the Halls of the Dead. But just the idea of them was enough to scare her. She kept imagining faceless ghosts behind the door. Fires that never went out. A sky devoid of stars.

  And then she imagined her mom’s face frozen in horror, her hair falling around her. She remembered Boo
lying limp in the Sleeper’s hand. Those images made her move.

  “It’s an adventure?” she said, trying to rally herself.

  Aru’s hand drifted to the pants pocket where she kept the Ping-Pong ball. It was warm and reassuring. “It’s fine. This is fine. Everything is fine,” she muttered to herself.

  She placed her foot across the threshold.

  A frigid wind picked up the hairs on the nape of her neck. On the breeze, she could hear the final words of people who had died: No, not yet! And Please make sure someone remembers to feed Snowball. And I hope someone clears my Internet browser.

  But mostly, Aru heard love.

  Tell my family I love them.

  Tell my wife I love her.

  Tell my children I love them.

  Tell Snowball I love her.

  Aru felt a sharp twist in her heart. Had she told her mother she loved her before she left the museum with Boo?

  There was no going back now. The moment she stepped into the Kingdom of Death, the door disappeared. She was left in a tunnel so black she couldn’t tell what she was walking on. Was it darkness itself? There were no walls, no sky or sea, no beginning or end. Just blackness.

  “My mom used to tell me that death is like a parking lot,” whispered Mini. She sounded close, and like she was trying to reassure herself. “You stay there for just a bit and then go somewhere else.”

  “Again with the parking lots?” Aru joked shakily.

  She breathed a little easier when she remembered that, in Hinduism, death wasn’t a place where you were stuck forever. It was where you waited to be reincarnated. Your soul could live hundreds—maybe even thousands—of lives before you got out of the loop of life and death by achieving enlightenment.

  A dog woofed in the distance.

  “Why so serious?” asked a deep voice.

  “Serious, or Sirius?” said a different voice, this one high-pitched. “We know that dog, don’t we? Howls at the stars? Chases the sun?”

  “You ruin everything! I practiced that opening for a whole year!” grumbled the first voice. Now it wasn’t so deep.

  “Well, how was I supposed to know?” said the second.

  “The Dark Knight is my favorite movie, remember? You should listen to me. I’m Ek, after all! You’re only Do.”

  “Just because you were born first doesn’t make you more important,” said Do.

  “Yes, it does,” said Ek.

  “No, it doesn’t!”

  Ek? Do? Aru knew those words. They were the names of numbers in Hindi, the most commonly spoken language in India. Ek and Do meant one and two. They sounded like ick and dough.

  Aru’s mother had grown up speaking Gujarati, a language from the state of Gujarat. Aru didn’t speak either Gujarati or Hindi. All she knew were a few words, including some curses. (Which she hadn’t even known were bad words until the time she’d stubbed her toe in front of the priest at temple and just let loose. Her mother had not been amused.) When her hand tightened on the golden ball, it turned into a dim flashlight.

  Four sets of eyes peered at Aru and Mini. In the glow of the ball, Aru could make out the shapes of two giant dogs.

  Ek and Do each had two rows of eyes, and short brindled fur. When they walked forward to sniff the girls, their coats rippled and shimmered. Aru wondered whether they were soft.

  Mini had pulled up the collar of her shirt and was pressing it over her nose. “Ermarregictodaws.”

  “What?”

  She surfaced from the cloth. “I’m allergic to dogs.”

  “Of course you are,” said Aru.

  “Are you dead?” asked Ek, the dog with the high-pitched voice.

  “I don’t think so?” replied Mini.

  At the same time, Aru said, “Of course not!”

  “Well, you can’t come in if you’re not dead,” said Ek. “Those are the rules.”

  “You don’t understand—” started Aru.

  “Ah, but we do!” said Ek. “You have two choices. You can die on your own, or we can help by killing you!”

  Do wagged his tail. “I love helping! Helping is fun.”

  Who’s a Good Boy?

  “Nope!” said Aru. “No thanks! We’ll find another way in—”

  “I’m not going anywhere!” said Mini.

  Ek yawned as if he’d heard this before. His teeth were really sharp. Why did they need to be that sharp? And was that…blood on his fangs?

  “You don’t have to go anywhere to die, little one,” said Ek.

  “That’s not what I meant. I’m not going anywhere, because…because this is my kingdom?” said Mini. Her voice went up at the end. “I am the daughter of the Dharma Raja, and I demand entrance—”

  “And I’m the daughter of Lord Indra!” butted in Aru.

  Mini glared at her.

  “Celebrities! Oh! Welcome, welcome!” said Do. “Could I get your autograph? We could do it before or after the whole killing-you thing. Whichever is most convenient.”

  “Who cares if they’re celebrities? Death is the greatest leveler of them all! They are not the first. Nor the last. We’ve carried the souls of queens and murderers and infernal Yogalates instructors between our teeth,” said Ek proudly to the girls. “Even the Pandava brothers had to die. Even gods reincarnated in mortal bodies have to die.”

  “That’s true,” said Do agreeably.

  “It’s just a body!” said Ek, staring down his nose at them. “Leave them behind! Then we’ll let you through.”

  “You can get new ones!” said Do.

  Aru saw the telltale signs of Mini’s confidence waning: glasses off-kilter, lip tucked between her teeth.

  “Um,” said Mini.

  Ek’s teeth gleamed whiter. “We’ll make it quick.”

  “I don’t really feel like rending someone apart,” mourned Do, even as his fur turned more bristly and his fangs elongated. “Why don’t we go out to the cremation grounds instead and bury bone shards? Or we can play Catch the Beheaded Thing! I’ve always liked that game.”

  Ek growled. “Not now, Do! This is our job! Our dharma! Our duty!”

  “Ha. Duty. Doo-tee.”

  “Do, now is not the time—”

  “It’s never the time, Ek! Yesterday you said we could play catch. Did we? No!”

  Aru nudged Mini. Just beyond the two dogs, a thin sliver of light appeared. Maybe that was the true door to the Kingdom of Death and this was just the stuffy front hall. In which case, the reason it was opening now was probably because it sensed that someone was about to be dead. Aru gulped. If they could just get past these guardians, they could get into the kingdom.

  Not that Aru was particularly excited about entering.

  Something seemed to call to her from beyond that door. Something she already knew she did not like. Something that taunted. It reminded her of the Sleeper’s voice in her ear.

  But still, anything was better than being torn apart.

  “Wait till my father hears about this!” bellowed Mini. “I mean, my godly father. Not the human one. My human one would be mad too, but—”

  “Mini,” Aru interrupted. “You’re not supposed to explain yourself after you say ‘Wait till my father hears about this.’”

  “The girl is a brat,” hissed Ek.

  “I thought she seemed nice,” said Do. His ears flattened against his skull.

  “I can’t believe they’re not listening to me…” said Mini, shocked.

  “Maybe it’s because you sounded like a brat?” suggested Aru.

  Ek, who had grown to the size of a respectable town house, laughed. It was not a friendly laugh. “It certainly didn’t help.”

  “Aru…” said Mini, her voice squeaking.

  Aru had little experience with Door of Death dogs. But she did have experience with regular dogs. Last summer, she had taken Mrs. Hutton’s poodle (P. Doggy) on a walk and almost lost her arm when he spotted a cat.

  “Compact,” whispered Aru, not taking her eyes off the two dogs. And
then, in an even softer voice, she said, “Cat.”

  “How shall we choose which one to eat first?” asked Ek. “Perhaps in a game of heads or tails?”

  “Heads!” said Do.

  “Are you flipping a coin?” asked Aru.

  If she could distract them, maybe they wouldn’t see what Mini was conjuring with her compact.

  “We’re not flipping coins!” said Do, excited. “We’re deciding which one of us gets to go after which parts of you!”

  “But we don’t have tails,” said Aru.

  Do looked at her for a moment longer, as if just realizing that she did not, in fact, possess a tail.

  “Oh, that’s true….” Do looked to Ek. “Can we still eat them if they don’t have tails?”

  “I meant ‘tails’ in a metaphorical sense,” said Ek.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Metaphorical means symbolic, Do. Honestly, it’s like you never paid attention in class! A metaphor is a word representing something else. They don’t have tails per se, but they have a top and a bottom. So the head is the top and—”

  “What’s the opposite of metaphorical?”

  “Literal!”

  “But then—”

  While the two of them bickered, Aru and Mini put their heads together. (Metaphorically and literally.) Purple smoke emerged from the compact Mini was clutching. The smoke took a shape and began to grow a tail and a head. (Literally.)

  “Ready?” asked Aru.

  “Ready,” said Mini. She stayed hunched over the smoke.

  “Hey! Ek and Do!” shouted Aru.

  She looked at the glowing orb in her hand. She rolled it between her palms, wishing it weren’t so tiny. As she thought about it, it actually changed. It grew to the size of a tennis ball.

  Do cocked his head. One fat pink tongue lolled out the side of his mouth.

  “No!” growled Ek. “It’s a trap!”

  “IT’S A BALL!”

  Aru threw the ball as hard as she could. Do bounded off after it.

  Ek stayed put. “If you think that a ball—”

  Mini let go of her enchantment. A sleek purple cat leaped out of her arms and away into the darkness. Ek’s eyes turned huge. His tail started wagging, and the darkness began to vibrate around them. The crack of light just behind him widened.