Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  She wanted to turn the headlights on but was afraid of what she might see; the dream hadn’t left her yet. At least her headache was gone. She made her way to the exit and peered out: white upon pristine white. Wasn’t white the sum of all colors? Was it Goethe who said color itself was a degree of darkness? She couldn’t even see three feet away. There was a metallic tang in her mouth as if she could taste the vapor.

  “Junaid,” she yelled. Instantly the fog devoured the cry. “Abar. Tabinda. Anyone.”

  No answer. Just a susurration of dust and weeds in the wind. No night birds sang. No insects chirped. She was blind and alone. Terror came then on dark wings, engulfing her heart. She shoved it away, even though her stomach and bladder quivered. How could she not have heard them leave? She retreated from the door and clicked on an overhead light. The glow spread like a thin puddle. Her brown eyes were wide and crimson-webbed in the rearview mirror; she looked like she was about to scream. Her hijab had fallen off and lay draped over her shoulder. Noor fixed it with trembling fingers.

  Maybe she should drive away. Leave them all here. The thought was so powerful she actually took a couple steps toward the driver’s seat before stopping. There was no key in the ignition. Of course, Junaid had it. Movement in the periphery of her vision made her turn.

  The bus door had slid open. Tabinda stood in the doorway, a silent rotund silhouette with streams of fog snaking between her ankles. Helplessness had left her eyes, leaving a glassy calm behind. “I came back for you,” she said.

  Noor wanted to weep for joy. She ran and flung herself at the older woman. Tabinda’s arms tightened around her. “Sorry. The kids were cold and you were sleeping.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “In a warm place.”

  Noor squeezed her one more time and stepped back. “Let’s go. Have you seen Junaid?”

  Tabinda shook her head. “No.” Her face was half-paralyzed now. The corner of her mouth sagged. Her left eye was half-lidded.

  “Are you all right?”

  Tabinda massaged her cheek. “I had a stroke some years back. This happens once in a great while.”

  “Were you here in the ruins when you had the stroke?” Noor said. The question came to her familiarly, as if she’d asked this before in a dream.

  Tabinda’s lips had cracked from cold. They bled a little when she tried to smile.

  “How’d you know?” She held the door open. “Shouldn’t we get going?”

  *

  They strode through air dense as snow. Noor couldn’t, for the life of her, understand how Tabinda kept her bearings. Shadows heaved and parted before them. They stepped on twigs, nettles, sharp rocks. The fog sucked its breath in, exhaled and rushed past. When the texture of the ground changed, she knew they were on the city streets. Chips of masonry crunched underfoot; stones, brick shards, gum wrappers, a worker’s implement. At least that’s what she thought it was. Long and pale, it gleamed in the moonlight. Before she could bend to look at it, her companion took her hand and jerked her in the opposite direction. “This way.”

  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, then 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 os 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.”

  They placed the bundle before the brick-lined drain. Tabinda stooped, rummaged, and heaved out a lolling object, which might have been a human head. The oil lamp nearest her winked out. The bundle twitched and began to move. Tabinda tilted her head to the sky. The incense swirled a wreath around her head.

  “After the laborers died, after the attempt on his life, Fossel was so shaken he flew out the next day. I left quickly myself. Spent years convincing myself it was a bout of madness. PTSD or some shit like that, but the nightmares just wouldn’t stop. Every night the same voices and faces. This fucking room with its heaps of glass. Then I read about exposure therapy. Flood yourself with what you fear most. Sounds like a good idea, I thought. Return to the city on the anniversary of the day the horror began. Pop in, pop out, be done, never go back.”

  Noor was shaking. Her bladder let go and wetness spread from her thighs to her navel. The cadets had begun to chant. The voices loud and eerily synergistic in the murk rose higher and higher. “Our blood Yours, our meat Yours. On this day gladly we give You our sins … ”

  Tabinda uttered a sudden sob. Her eyes were craters filled with fear and exhilaration. Abar stepped forward. “Don’t cry, slut. Don’t you dare,” he said in a guttural voice that wasn’t his. “For this part, we steel our heart.” He handed her the knife. It nicked the hollow below her thumb and a drop of blood appeared. Tabinda held the glass knife high like a hammer. The muscles of her shoulders were quivering. The knife blade lashed out. A gurgling sound, and the bundle was thrashing. The perfect fingernails drummed. Tabinda’s hand sawed back and forth and glistening dark liquid gushed into the hole.

  “He whose house is a-boil, the Adar Anshar. The Croucher in the Mounds. The Terrible Emperor of the Night.”

  Noor was mute with fear. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. She was at the college in Petaro, there had been an accident, and she was in a coma. She was still in the Burn Center at New York Presbyterian after the blast. Her shoulder burns had become infected and she was delirious, watching her wounds glisten blue-green.

  The cadets crooned and gathered around her. The glass spears were thrown away. Between them they hauled her to the edge of the hole, bare feet chaffing on the brick. Tabinda paused, leaned back, wiped her forehead. In the lamp flame the liquid pouring down the hole was ochre. Tabinda murmured. Abar grabbed Noor’s head and yanked it back. Fiery bits of glass impaled on metal skewers were jabbed into her nostrils. She struggled but it was futile. The smoke singed her sinuses, parched her tongue, flayed her throat. She gasped for water. A metal chalice was thrust into her hand and she drank eagerly, a grainy hot liquid that could have been molten glass or blood swirled with sand.

  In this new state, this moiled clenching, Noor rose. She was twisted upward in a spiral beguiling as the lines on a newborn’s palm.

  Below her were barren lands stripped by heat, their dwellers evolved into the formless. Towering mammoth structures squelched in magma. Half-buried in this boiling ground were giant hunchbacks whose humps formed the city’s mounds. When they stirred, brackish fluid gushed through ciliated maps wavering from their flesh. The maps beat with an unnatural rhythm. Drawn from the hunchbacks’ vasculature, they pumped pyroclastic liquid through the land’s anatomy. A veined umbilical cord surged from the city center, rising higher and higher, trembling through its singed sky, until it traversed it. The cord shot outward, connecting this world with a blue-green one.

  My blood is Yours. My skin is Yours.

  Noor splayed her hooves against the throbbing meat tunnel of this omphalos and crawled up-down inside it like a spider. She had three faces, myriad eyes, and a swollen belly. Her brother Muneer hung impaled on a giant claw on the opposite wall. His tongue was rotten, he was covered with running sores. As she watched with her dozen eyes, he swelled suddenly and exploded.

  Noor cried out. Her many limbs retracted; suddenly she was falling, tumbling, plummeting until she landed on a hard surface, shattering her extraneous appendages. A dense liquid clogged her airways. She couldn’t breathe. She gasped and kicked and someone slapped her back, grabbed her hair, pulled her up.

  She sat before the now-bubbling aperture, drenched in hot blood. Clots were already beginning to form in her hair. The citadel was dark except for the intermittent flaring of oil lamps. The mist was thicker, the whirling of the procession speedier. Noor couldn’t make out who they were, how many they were. The locus of the dance had shifted away from her toward the other end of the pool. She couldn’t see Tabinda anywhere. Her hands and feet were still tied. Sobbing, she slid backward on her buttocks, turned, and began wriggling to the ledge like a worm. Faces glistening with blood protruded from the mist and disappeared. Hundreds of eyes blinked and died.

  Someone touched her foot. Noor screamed. Images of that monstrous city swirled in her brain and her eyes bulged until a red curtain slipped over her vision—just like in the early days after Muneer’s death. The smell of his flesh, cooked from the blast, on her skin; the sharp iron odor of his blood; the taste of her own misery and terror as she stood shrieking in the summer wind, watching the red-and-white debris that was once he
r brother—they would come to her months after she left the hospital.

  In the end, Muneer had been the only one to die that terrible day. She—she had run to a cop. Had fled her murderous sibling and had been fleeing since. But, afterward, everywhere she looked was a skein of red death wavering like a heat cloud—in the evenings and in the shadowy mornings, until she could hardly leave the house.

  Her removal to Pakistan had been a relief.

  The Pashtun boy Dara’s face loomed above her. It was covered with gashes. He had blood around his mouth. He put a finger to his lips—sshh!—slid a glass knife out, and began to hack at the rope around her ankles.

  The air thrummed. Voltaic ideograms crackled in the mist. A blue-black diagonal shimmered twenty feet away. A door set low and very wide. The oil lamps were clustered around it, flickering like fireflies.

  Dara’s hands dripped with sweat. A final swipe, and her feet were free. She couldn’t believe it. She could move her legs. Sobbing with relief, she flexed her thighs until she was on her knees. Her period was flowing again, but she hardly noticed. It pooled around her feet and snaked toward the libation hole.

  The knife moved to her wrists.

  “Goat,” Dara said, his eyes dead and crimson. “Depart, goat. Leave before He arrives.”

  He slashed at the rope on her wrists until it, too, gave. Noor tottered to a stand. The room tilted and her vision turned foggy. She shook her head. A loud noise, like a door banging shut in the wind, came from behind her. Someone screamed in terror or triumph.

  Without looking back, Noor broke into a run.

  Blackness behind her and darkness in front. She lurched to the stairway and took them three at a time. On the ninth step she slipped and the crack of her butt landed on its edge. Such pain rocketed through her, she thought she’d fractured her spine. Scraping noises in the distance, then galloping. Whatever it was, it moved fast. One hand on her hip, teeth clenched, heart thundering in her ears, Noor glanced back.