The Devourers (7 page)

I
NTERVAL

A
s commanded, or hired, to do, I type out the stranger's handwritten manuscript relating the arrival of three European shape-shifters in seventeenth-century Mumtazabad. After I type out each section, I print it out, fearing that my computer will crash and the stranger's notebook manuscript vanish, leaving me without any sign of this strange episode. It's been a slow process, carefully deciphering his sometimes unruly handwriting and remaining faithful to it. I've also added my own footnotes to the journal, to keep my own thoughts about the whole thing straight.

I often wonder why I'm doing this. I keep teaching my classes, go about my life as if nothing is happening. I tell no one about the stranger. I don't hear back from him, either. Sometimes I'll see an item in the papers about gruesome human remains found in the river, or in the marshy lands amid the city's coagulated sprawl—an unidentified torso, a head, a rotting body eaten away by what's presumed to be feral animals. Nothing too surprising in and around a city, terror and loneliness bleached to mundanity in newsprint, dulled by repetition. But I'll see these headlines, and I'll entertain the odd fantasy that it's the stranger's handiwork, that these are leftovers from his prey. That he's left them to be found just for me to read about over cups of tea, burnt toast, and poached eggs in the morning.

I have very few friends, and I don't much get along with my family anymore. No one I truly confide in. So there aren't a lot of people I can tell about the stranger and the job he's given me, really. All the same, I keep this secret close to me like a bounty, not even sharing it with Gitanjali, the one professor in my department I meet socially and actually get along with to some degree. I want to tell her, but I'm afraid she'll think I'm being stupid, or in danger, befriending and accepting jobs from random strangers with outrageous claims. Gitanjali and I sit in the College Street Coffee House exchanging faculty gossip after we're done with classes, and I feel like an anthropologist who has made an astounding discovery, but is unable to divulge his findings to the world. I grasp my cup in both hands, wanting to flirt vaguely with her like I used to. But I'm unable to. I look at this thirty-something divorcée opposite me, her dark lipstick dissolving in acrid coffee, and I find myself perplexed by my own existence, by the echoing confines of the place we are sitting in, by the civilization around us. I think about the thoughts of those mad souls roaming the streets of Kolkata. I think of the beasts out there beyond the city limits. When I return home after coffee with Gitanjali, I pick up the manuscript and read it again and again, closing my eyes after each page to will myself into a trance. Then, with a glass of whiskey handy, I start typing again from wherever I last stopped. I often wonder about the tale in the manuscript—whether the stranger or someone else has written it. Whether it was first written by an impostor, or a man living a supremely confident delusion, or an actual shape-shifter during the seventeenth century.

Whatever the truth, it matters little now.

S
ECOND
F
RAGMENT

Makedon returns:

O
ut of the water in his first self, emerging naked and washed by the Yamuna. He holds in one hand the severed head of his prey, water trickling from its open mouth. Makedon tosses the head on the ground, where the sallow pearls of its retreated eyes look at nothing.

He walks to me. His body is bronzed in water, long hair clinging in sinuous tattoos to his shoulders and neck. I can smell the recent carnage on him, sticking to his skin. It makes my mouth water, even though we fed well today. It is unease, as my second self speaks to me in hunger, tells me that I need my strength for something.

“Stop staring,” Makedon says, sitting on the ground. He doesn't bother wearing his clothes. “Gévaudan sleeps like a babe in a crib. If you need to, you could probably fuck him twice and he wouldn't stir,” he says with a sneer.

I say nothing.

“I can smell you pining. If I didn't know better I'd think you've taken me for a permanent mate.”

“Don't flatter yourself. How was your hunt? Am I mistaken in thinking that this is not Shah Jahan's head?” I ask.

“I'll leave that a mystery. Now that Gévaudan is asleep, we can talk.”

“About what?”

“About your hunt, yesterday. The one you went on alone,” he says.

“What about it?”

“Tell me again about your prey,” he says.

“I told you already.”

“Tell me. Again,” he says.

“A woman I took off the street. In Mumtazabad. Why?”

“Don't play innocent,” he says and smiles at me. He doesn't blink. His teeth are black from the kill.

“What was it like?” he whispers.

“What?”

“Raping a human woman.”

“I didn't rape her.” The words fall from me before I can stop them.

“If a farmer should in boredom and loneliness fuck a dumb calf fat for his plate, would your khrissal poets call it lovemaking? The calf is his prey, and below him, and a carnal act with it is vulgar,” he says.

“We spring from the human soul. She's no dumb calf, nor is any human. No more than you and I.”

“Ever the romantic. Clothing your perversions in language. Gévaudan might be too young or dense to use his senses properly, but I could smell your desire for that female from the moment we walked into the caravanserai yesterday. You can't hide something like that from me. You think yourself old. I ate of sacrificial children on the altars of Arcadia before even Europe came to be, before that tricksy carpenter of Bethlehem died to conjure a new god for the nations to come. The sons of Lycaon himself split my soul in two long before this shape you wear was spewed into existence.”

“Did you follow me yesterday night?” I ask.

“No, you fool. Are you and Gévaudan so dulled by the human world that you've forgotten that your first selves aren't wet clay of human flesh? No, North-
man.
I can still smell that khrissal on you. I can taste her sex on you, in the air.”

“What do you want?” I ask.

He backs away, hitting his chest once. The heavy thump of flesh and bone. “I have you,” he says, his voice low. “Do you even realize? What you've done is forbidden by the tribes.”

“The tribes. You know as well as I that you don't care about the tribes. How can you even claim to know what tenets the tribes here, or farther east, or north or south, follow? We can't just scrabble out the meanings of our existence from the stories of humans, and assume that others of our kind do the same in places we've never even seen.”

“I'm not interested in speeches and debating again, North-man. I'm not interested in pretending we have culture when we don't need it. Leave that to the khrissals. I'm interested in your penance, for repeatedly bringing up this fucking nonsense, and committing an aberration in its name.”

I know that he's right. I am only delaying the inevitable. “I was always a solitary, Makedon. I'm fine with not seeing any of my tribe, when I never truly belonged to any single one. Tell me what
you
want from me.”

“What could I want? I could demand slavery, make you my mate and servant for the rest of your years, to follow my bidding in return for my silence. I've no use for such a slave, miserable and subservient, waiting to kill me in my sleep. No.” He turns away, looking at the moon and shaking his head. He looks beautiful in his sudden calm, his profile traced in a bejeweled line of silver as water drips down his face.

“No. I don't want that, and you certainly don't want that. What I want is for you to give your life. You've mingled with our prey. I won't travel with a khrissal-fucking betrayer. Sacrifice yourself. That's what I ask,” he says.

I flinch as he takes one of my hands in his. I don't resist, letting him lift my palm and press it against his slick chest. “For your honor and for ours. Strip yourself, cut yourself from ear to ear, let your lifeblood fall upon your lap and your hands so you can wash yourself of this deed. Let me feast on your remains. It will be a noble death. You will live on in me.”

“You talk of my perversions, and you would eat carrion of your own kind?”

“To feast on a betrayer is no forbidden thing. You've exiled yourself.”

I can feel his heart beat under my hand. I can feel it split, two drummers beating the cage of his chest. Two hearts separating. Under the slippery cold of water, his skin and muscles burn with fever.

“I see through you, Makedon. You fear what I've done, you loathe it. But you also desire it. You would feast on my flesh, my life, my soul. You'd seek out the stain of a human heart against mine even as you bit into it. You want to feel what I've felt, in union with a human woman.”

He smiles at me. “Maybe I do. It doesn't change anything,” he says.

I pull my hand out of his and return it to my own lap, not wanting to betray my trembling. I don't know how old Makedon truly is, but I have hunted with him. I don't know if I could defeat him in his second self. I can already feel it coming, the energies of his recent prey burning like coals in the furnace of his human shape, blazing in his souls. This is why he went on a hunt, to feed his second self an entire khrissal alone, instead of a communal meal in his first. To give himself strength. It is coming, and I feel nothing. I feel no desire to emanate my second self even though I need to, because all that envelops me is fear and weakness. My second self abhors such things.

“I'll leave and travel on my own. You'd never see me again,” I tell Makedon.

“We're going to the same place.”

“I won't go east. The Mughal Empire is vaster even than the Holy Roman Empire. I'll travel, avoid the tribes. I'm willing to live in exile.”

“No. Too easy.”

“Then what? Will you fight me? Is that what you want?”

“Not unless you want to.”

“Then what stops me from leaving right now?” I ask.

“If you leave, I'll return to Mumtazabad. I'll tear your lovely little human woman apart limb from limb.”

“I'll kill you. I'll kill you before you go near her.” Even as I say it, I know, at that moment, I've lost already.

“You are welcome to try,” he says, shaking his head. “But if you fall under my tooth and claw, you'll still forfeit the lives of your khrissal mate and her unborn child, if you've left one in her womb.”

“Don't. You'll never see me again. I swear to you. Aren't we companions, joined under the tribes?”

“Oh, now we're joined under the tribes. Now the tribes matter,” he says.

“We've traveled far together. We've been a pack, shared the ghost fires. Do this for me,” I plead, repulsed by my own desperation.

“What's going on?” Gévaudan asks, clambering up, mud caking his furs. I can't tell if he's been listening for long, but he seems wide awake, gripping the serpentine corpse around his neck and shoulders. His sudden awakening is almost comical, though the circumstances prevent me from appreciating this.

Makedon's fingers are around my neck. I ram my fists into his sides. His ribs crack under my knuckles. The pain only feeds his desire to emanate, his grip getting stronger. Gévaudan grabs his shoulders and pulls him off me but is elbowed back. “Stop, you two,” he wheezes. I get up, also coughing.

“Mewling boy-cunt.” Makedon strikes Gévaudan on the chest, shoving him back.

“Makedon, stop,” Gévaudan says.

“He's challenged me, Gévaudan. Let him be,” I say, rubbing my throat. I begin to strip. Makedon turns away from our companion. He starts pulling his bone trophies, stretching his skin as if it were a garment he was itching to tear off. He squats. The rib shards burned into his back move as he flexes his shoulders.

“You choose battle, then,” he says.

“Yes,” I tell him.

“Don't
do
this. We're a pack,” says Gévaudan:

I take off the layers of animal skin that cover me, leaving only the one that mimics a human. I am flaccid, shivering even in this weak winter. Makedon strangles his flushed cock, grown stiff in his hand. He will enjoy this battle. Gévaudan walks toward him, hesitant.

“Step back, whelp,” Makedon says to Gévaudan, his voice grating and inhuman. I feel a pang of regret for rejecting Gévaudan earlier. I wonder how these two will travel without me. They probably won't. I take off my boots, and am naked like Makedon. The earth is soft and startlingly cold under my feet. I dig my toes in.

Then Gévaudan steps lightly behind Makedon and pushes him. Startled, Makedon stumbles forward, his legs buckling. There is a knife handle sticking out of his spine like an ornament. Gévaudan removes the serpent from his shoulders and whips it around Makedon's neck with resigned grace. Our young companion is fast. He tightens the mordant noose. I see Makedon's eyes bulge in their sockets, even as he tries to free the blade in his back.

In this moment, what is Gévaudan but utterly human, hairless and worm white in skins peeled from other animals. His soft face twisted not in savagery but calm, premeditated malice. There is no majestic beast rearing behind Makedon clothed only in the tangled mane of its own fur. There is no clash of two titans, no revel in the glory of spilling blood, blood of second selves rich with the memories of thousands upon thousands of human prey.

No, there is just the white hand and its brittle fingers, curled around the handle of a knife. He pulls it out of Makedon only to return it to his quarry's neck. The blade slides through tendon and artery, above the choking coils of the serpent. I watch as Gévaudan cuts and cuts through the steam of escaping breath, slicing deep to release the ruby sheets now draping Makedon's naked form.

Makedon pulls Gévaudan's hand away from his slashed neck and bites it. The oldest of us tears free and falls to the mud, trying to free himself of the deadweight of the serpent. Gévaudan kneels over him and slams the knife into his spine again. I hear a crack of metal pushing between bones. Drooling, he pulls the blade out and holds Makedon's head by the hair. Makedon claws into the mud. Knee against broken spine, knife between teeth, Gévaudan ties Makedon's arms behind his back with his lifeless reptilian familiar.

There is a fury in Makedon's wide eyes. Centuries, millennia of lived life bulging against darkening irises. I feel a dread witnessing this—this ugly killing, none of us three in our second selves as it should be, our mate trussed and butchered like a human being murdered by one of his own. Our companion, our pack-mate, his voice drowned. This is my fault. He spits, recognizing the inevitable end of his age-long life, but not accepting it, burying his toes into the ground rigid till the very moment Gévaudan cuts his head off.

Sick with gratitude, I close my eyes in the red rain.

—

And as I do, I think of you, of the moment of my shame and your despair:

The caravanserai was silent at night, except for the soft snuffling of camels in stalls, sitting by their sleeping owners in dolorous gratitude for their shed burdens. A few of the stalls surrounding the courtyard still glimmered with the weak light of tapers behind curtains. In my hand I held the piece of you that you gave to me. It guided me through the empty courtyard, showing me the tracery of your wake coiling in the air amid the vapor of camel shit and dirty fur.

The knot of your hair a circular rune in my outstretched palm, I watched my shadow stride across the stone, my boots silent as a panther's paws. I came to your stall and parted the curtain. A whisper of disturbed fabric against the floor. You were ready for me, your intruder. Moonlight drifted on the dust and fell into the blade in your hand. I could hear you breathing, lungs heavy with fear.

“I'll kill you if you come one step closer,” you said with admirable fervor. What was I to you at that moment, with the moon at my back, setting the pelt on my shoulders ablaze with blue fire, my wild braids a mane for my head, face dark but for the pinpricks of reflection in my wet eyes, my great shadow yawning cold upon your body? Was I a beast in human form?

“I won't hurt you,” I said, soft as I could.

“It's you,” you said, after a moment of silence.

“Yes,” I said, and entered the stall. You backed away like a cornered animal, and I felt the pangs of pity. Fear was not my intent, though inevitable.

“Please, don't be afraid. If you scream, I'll kill you as swiftly as a tiger on a weakling calf. There's no need for that. It would hurt me to do that.”

“What do you want?” you asked.

“What's your name?”

Perhaps you knew that I meant what I had said, so you answered, “Cyrah.” I thought it as wonderful a name as I had ever heard.

“Cyrah. Are you scared?”

“Yes. You may think by my size that I've no chance of fighting you off, white man, but know this. If you hurt me, I'll hurt you back. Even if you leave me dead, I'll leave you blind and a eunuch if I have to.”

“It wouldn't do much lasting good to do either to me, but fairly said. Then I'll make this promise to you: If you don't hurt me tonight, I won't hurt you.”

“I don't hurt people unless they give me cause,” you said.

“Unless you see the very trade you live on as cause for hurting me, I will give you none tonight. I don't want to harm you.”

“It's not a trade. It's something I do to survive in this land run by men, as a woman, and one without a husband at that. I told you, no harem protects me.”

“You're beautiful, Cyrah.”

“You must be joking. And you're a lurking pig-fucker. Why didn't you give me custom today at noon, when you met me, when I asked you? Why have you come here at night like a criminal, if not to hurt me?” you asked me with a sincerity that brought tears to my eyes. Despite your bold words, you were terrified.

“I've never slept with a human woman,” I said.

You were silent, before you asked me, “So what?”

“It's against the tenets of my tribe to lie with a human woman. I couldn't buy your company in front of my companions.”

“Again, with these white man's lies. I'm not a child, I won't believe these fancies. How do you beget children in your tribe?”

I shed my pelt and raiment.

“Stop,” you said.

I took off my leggings and boots.

“Fucking stop,” you said.

“We don't bear children in our tribe, Cyrah,” I said, and walked forward naked as a newborn.

“Don't come closer,” you said. I came closer, without weapons. You held out your blade.

“We have our mates, who come and go. But we have no love. We are forbidden from making love, from fucking in our first selves, our human shapes. We've forgotten, but we all came from human wombs, before we were initiated into the tribes, before we were born again, and freed our second selves.” You must have thought me insane, a terror. And yet I spoke on, like a confessor, eager to let my words fall on human ears.

“My companion Makedon says the first of our kind was a king named Lycaon, who believed himself transformed by a god he called Zeus. But the human is the only creature on this planet that can manifest the demiurgic instinct, and this Zeus, I believe, was at first merely a powerful man, one who could hold sway over other humans and help them transcend their humanity.”

“Stop it. I don't understand what you're saying…”

“Listen, Cyrah, and you will. You will understand why I must do this, why my kind and yours are connected. Lycaon was just one king. There are stories of our tribes in many forms. In Europe we are oft made wolves, the devil's children, but in the arid lands between the Bosporus and the Indus, where you came from, the tribes of our kind take the name of djinn, from stories the Khorassians wove of beings who can change shape, created by your Allah from a smokeless fire. In the African plains, perhaps our unknown kinsmen take the second selves of great hyenas laughing under a blood-red moon, slack-tongued lions stalking the savanna. In the flesh of sailors who hailed from beyond the Red Sea, I've tasted rumors of jackal-jawed cenobites of Anapa roaming the dead cities of the pharaohs. And what are we here, in Hindustan? Perhaps here our other selves are chimerical tigers burning bright in the Asiatic jungle, not so far from here.”

You were stunned by this ungainly history vomited from my mouth. I walked over to you and winced as your dull blade found a path across my forearm, parting my skin. You sprang away nimbly, but I have strength and speed to beat any khrissal, and grabbed you by the arms. You held the blade still in your fist as I stayed your hands, and you stared me in the eyes. I could hear your teeth grinding together. My face was close to yours.

Panting, you said, “I suppose you want me to spit on your face in fury. I'm not going to, you smear of pig shit. I'm not giving you any more parts of myself.”

Your anger hurt me, but I went on.

“I don't know how we came to be,” I told you, hoping, hoping to entrance you without magic's aid. “But none of those tales, none of our history is hidden from your kind. None of it recorded by our own tribes. It is all written and told by humans, not us. Look to the tales of ancient Greece, and you will find the history of Lycaon and his fifty impious sons. Perhaps we only steal your history to make of it ours, just as we steal your lives to extend our own. We call ourselves hunters, but we are scavengers.”

In black drops my blood fell on you from the wound you made, painting a trail of crimson blossoms from your hurriedly worn headscarf to your plain blouse.

I took both your wrists in one of my hands. With my other hand I reached out and touched your face, illuminated by the scents that emerged from your cheeks and lips and neck and eyes, the different elixirs of the body shimmering around your bones—sweat, tears, oils, spit, turning with the fevered heat of fear.

“Do you see now, fragile Cyrah? Like thieves we snatch babes from their cribs, children from their parents, and perform the rites on them, and they become our kin, shape-shifters. Like murderous bandits we attack men and women, wound them with our teeth and claws, and tear their souls into two so that they may join us. We cannot bear offspring—only creatures bound to one shape can hold a life in the womb. To give birth means banishment to the weaker self for nine months, and that is abomination enough to be exiled from the tribes. Our second selves are hermaphroditic, so we shift, and mate among one another, though no offspring is born. We are the devouring, not the creative. That is humanity's province, and we've gone beyond human. So now I seek a human. Do you see?”

I pushed my thumb against the warm crevice of your mouth, as if to free the words from your coiled form. You uttered a guttural, animal sound as your entire body hardened. “Please don't be afraid,” I told you. “I think our time is waning. I only want to create.” I could feel the tears streaking your face, salt lines crawling under my fingertips. The slick stones of your teeth. Behind them, your tongue moved, and you said, the words humming against my thumb, “Allah curse you, bastard.” You turned your face away, grimacing, each movement cutting me as sure as your blade did. No, you were not entranced, and spat my thumb from your mouth.

“Cyrah, I will kill you if you try and fight,” I said again, though it pained me.

“You really mean that, don't you,” you said.

“This is important to me. I will slaughter everyone in this caravanserai if they get in my way.”

Your eyes glistened with rage, or fear, or both. “The world is yours to take, you loathsome child, you white boy,” you whispered.

I was shocked to find myself shaking, like you. I didn't want to kill you, but it seemed like you were testing me, like you were pushing me to that. But you said instead,

“Fine. Let me go. I'm no fool, I won't try and fight. I've no dying wish.” No words could give me sweeter relief. I let go of your wrists. Slowly you put down the knife and took two steps back, your eyes always on me. “Listen to me, white man. You've no right to buy your way into a woman's bed with nothing to barter with but fear. If you will not stay your hand, I want my fucking payment.”

“I gave you coins.”

“For my hair. Not this. Not this,” you said through closed teeth.

“I will pay you, then.”

You wiped your eyes and nodded. I saw the muscles tie their graceful knots under the skin that covers your jaw. “Do not think that this will in any way repay the debt you've incurred tonight. For that you must barter with your own god or devil in whatever hell they send you to,” you added.

“If I have any god or devil it is myself, unfortunately.”

“The blade stays by my side,” you told me, pointing to your blade with one shaking hand. I nodded.

“Do what you will, you mad fucking son of a bitch, and stop telling me your stupid stories.”

She-wolf you, Cyrah, moon-shone maiden, I kissed you on your lips, licking the aphrodisiac of your burning anger. My second self struggled to emerge like the latent orgasm but I held it back, you in my arms. As if human-to-human, I came into you. Silent my child came to be, in you, unformed, a seed in the soil, a thousand tales untold.