The Devourers Read online

  She heard me, and saw me, though she slept while I whispered in her ear. She smelled my musk of swamp and blood, shit and piss and rank fur, hair and smooth human skin. She saw the lamps of my green eyes, and the pools of my brown eyes. I saw her face twitch as I spoke. She smelled of the stale sweat of travel, of the rich green of sleeping on grass, of the slick of oil on her lips from the roti and sabzi she had eaten before sleeping. I kissed her once. A chill ran across my neck as I did, because she reminded me so much of someone gone.

  I look in the stranger’s eyes to see if they are still brown. “I don’t feel well,” I say. Shhhh. The susurrus of reeds in the breeze. The music of the bauls is unearthly now, their howls and shrieks like banshee wails. The lights are swaying, cutting white trails in the air. The kitten is coiled in my lap. The scrabble of paws, outside.

  The stranger shakes his head. You don’t interrupt the storyteller, he says with a gentle smile. I can feel the swamp outside, the city gone, the beasts gathering for the hunt in the misty wilderness. My fingers tighten around the kitten. The tent is an oasis of light, hot smell of electric lamps. Wood smoke. Wilderness encroaches.

  Close your eyes.

  She heard me in her sleep, this baul woman with dirt in her hair, her lips sticky with just a little oil. It is clear that she remembers my warning, but she has not run away. Perhaps one of the bauls is her father, or mother, or sibling, or friend, or lover. It does not matter. She will not leave them behind. She begins to sing with them now, her scared voice strained. She remembers my smell, senses it now beyond the fire, in the tangle of the dark.

  More of us come from the horizons. The scent of cow’s blood, a slaughter on their muzzles. They have eaten. But their hunt is not over. Their eyes weave trails as they run, leaping fireflies tracking their loping gait. They flank the group of humans, cutting off escape.

  The full moon watches through the clouds, eager for massacre. With a bark of exhaled air, the clatter of tusk on fang, we spring. The bauls’ song is loud, and beautiful in its imperfection. It is their last. I run with my pack. My tribe. The bauls are surrounded. They sing till the very last moment.

  The first kill is silent as our running, a glistening whisper of crimson in the air. The last is louder than the baying of a wolf, and rings like the bauls’ mad song across the marshes of what is not yet Kolkata. I can hear the howl as I run with this human in my arms, into the darkness, away from the shadows of slaughter. The howl curdles into a roar, enveloping the scream of the last dying minstrel.

  But she is alive, against me, shivering against my dew-dappled fur. She is alive.

  —

  I open my eyes. The tent is still here. The city is outside. Mosquitoes feast on my neck and arms, leaving welts.

  “You can guess the rest, I’m sure,” he says.

  I wipe a sheen of sweat from my neck, shaking my head. “I think I got a bit much of your smoke,” I mumble. But I know whatever just happened wasn’t me getting a contact high. I feel like I’ve just woken from the most vivid dream I’ve ever had. “Don’t tell me, you run away with this baul girl and live happily ever after. Never mind that you kidnapped her, and got her family and friends killed in front of her.”

  “Happily ever after,” he says. “Isn’t that ironic, considering I’m sitting right here, right now.”

  “Immortality is a side effect of lycanthropy, is it?” I ask. Remembering the kitten, I give it some more attention. It mewls, eyes narrowing to sleepy slits.

  “Please, Professor. A lycanthrope is a person who mistakenly believes they can turn into a wolf. I’m not a person, I don’t turn into a wolf, and I’m not ill. What I am has no basis in science or medicine.”

  “My mistake. You didn’t answer my question, though. Are you saying you’re immortal?”

  His shoulders twitch. A silent laugh, perhaps. “Take what you will from my story. I never said that I was the hunter in the tale. It could have been one of my ancestors. A story passed down.”

  “I closed my eyes and I saw it. I smelled it. I don’t even believe you, and I felt it. I felt it.” I shake my head. “Are you a hypnotist?”

  “I happen to be a good storyteller.”

  “Modest,” I mutter, and shake my head. “So you’re rationalizing after telling me you’re a werewolf.”

  “Half werewolf. And, Professor, I am merely showing you the benefits of rationalizing a story. There are none. Stories are fiction. Made up.”

  “You told me that story was true,” I remark, feeling smug.

  “It is.”

  Even as he says this, I see the look in his eyes and know that his heart has been broken by someone with black hair that melted into night, someone whose crippling revulsion toward him, whose grease-stained kiss, still linger in his mind. I give him a moment of silence, surprised by this realization, as mundane as it is. After all, whose heart hasn’t been broken by someone? He seems suddenly too old to look so young, with his smooth face and lush, long hair (touched though it is by the occasional strand of gray). We share a long silence for the first time. It disturbs me, the ease with which I feel sad for him after he’s told me a story steeped in carnage, not to mention a rather romantic outlook on kissing people in their sleep.

  “What happens afterward?” I venture, too curious not to ask.

  “You’re not a professor of literature, but you are a professor of history. History has all the stories. Make it up. Guess. A variation on the tragedy, I suppose. The woman is neither immortal, nor willing to forgive her kidnapper, this rakshasa, this monster. He leaves her in the village of Kalikata, or at the banks of the Hooghly at Sutanati, where her fellow travelers were bound.” He pauses, taking a deep breath. He continues.

  “Or even if he charms her with a shape-shifter’s magic and they wander off and get married, she dies and he lives on to survive and tell his story to a random wayfarer centuries later. Either way, he is alone. His pack is not forgiving of intermingling with humans, nor sabotaging a hunt, making him an exile from his own kind. They can smell his betrayal from a mile away.”

  “This isn’t too far from a story about a chosen one rising to lead his tribe to salvation, is it? Lone exile, wandering into the future, unable to die, shifting between shapes, all that.”

  He nods. “I’m just giving you some options. But I knew you had it in you, Professor. You can tell someone the rest of the story. Or tell it to yourself. Romance, fantasy, horror, realism, moralistic fable, history, lies, truth. It’s all there for you. Pick and choose, my friend.”

  “You’re the first Indian werewolf I’ve ever heard of.”

  “Werewolf is one word. A European one. We’ve been called many, many things. You can call me anything you like. The shape-shifter is a common thing in the end, and our stories are told here as everywhere else.”

  “And yet you used the European word,” I say.

  He nods. “You’ve got me there.” I see him shift a bit in his chair, and wonder if I’ve made him uncomfortable.

  “So if shape-shifters are so common, how come nobody knows about you?” I ask.

  “Everybody knows about us. Most of them just don’t believe that we’re real anymore.”

  “Why don’t you tell them you are?”

  “Maybe in this day and age we just want to be left alone.”

  “And occasionally tell a story to a random wayfarer?”

  “Exactly.”

  The kitten squeals and leaps out of my lap. The stranger has caught the animal before I can even react.

  “Once everyone leaves, the dogs outside will chase this kitten down and tear it to pieces. For sport,” he says, running his long fingers through the little creature’s dirty fur. ‘ “And humans have the arrogance to say they’re the only animals capable of cruelty.”

  “Humans?” I try to laugh. “You’re generalizing just a bit.”

  “Apologies.” He looks at me. The crowd bursts into applause as the bauls finish. Chairs clatter against one another as several spe
ctators stand, some drunk. I didn’t even notice that the song had ended. The stranger speaks despite the cacophony, and his voice is clear enough that I can hear him. “You know what distinguishes us from the dogs out there?” he asks me. I nod, despite myself. I want to give him a laundry list of things, but I don’t.

  “We can tell stories,” I say instead.

  “Well done, Professor. Perhaps my story did not fall on deaf ears after all.” I say nothing. He gets up, surprising me. “Wait.” I raise my voice. “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “I’m going to walk away with this kitten, of course. The dogs won’t come near me. I like dogs, myself, but they can be a tad cruel sometimes. So can cats. So can we all. Anyway, that ragtag pack outside won’t come near me. I’ll feed this little thing till it has the strength to survive, and I’ll let it come and go as it pleases after that.”

  “Ever the compassionate werewolf, are you?”

  He shrugs, looking weary. “Come now. A moment of compassion every two centuries hardly makes one compassionate, does it? You don’t want to hear about the things I’ve done in your and other lifetimes. But there it is. Just today, I saw two dogs—they were licking each other, lapping at each other’s muzzles as if they loved each other with every cell in their bodies. Did they? Or was it just two animals sniffing out compatible genes? When two humans kiss, isn’t it the same thing, deep down? I don’t know. It was a moment I found worthy of keeping in my memory, and telling someone. I have done so. I thank you for lending a willing ear. I’m going now, Professor.”

  I don’t know what to say. He gets up to leave. “Walk with me, if you like,” he adds.

  As if this has been his plan all along, or mine, I get up and follow him. So we leave, together. The dogs trail us at the edges of my vision, eager for the fragile prey curled up in the stranger’s arms.

  In the warren of narrow roads beyond Shaktigarh Math, we lose the sounds and music of the mela. They’re replaced by the tick of claws on asphalt and concrete eroded by rain. I’ve always been afraid of street dogs at night, but they keep away, don’t even bark. As if they smell something strange in the air. They watch us, ears pricked, silent Anubis-faced sentinels on the deserted street corners of Jadavpur. The rows of blanketed bodies on the footpaths give the streets the feeling of an open tomb. The dogs uncaring guardians to these sleeping humans who share their nocturnal territory, this electric-lit kingdom lined with the twinkle of broken glass, shadows etched across stucco and worn paint, walls glyphed with graffiti in Bengali, Hindi, English.

  The stranger holds the kitten to his chest. Madonna and child. His hair catching light to halo his head. We pass a rickshaw parked by a piss-streaked wall, field rats huddling around its wheels, its puller wrapped in a shawl under the canopy. Beyond the corridor of the road, the flare of passing headlights pales the stranger’s face for a moment.

  “Do you want to hear more?” the stranger asks. I can’t tell if he’s hesitant or just being soft-spoken. His face stippled with the shadows of leaves, sandals slapping the road.

  “Yes. Finish the story.”

  “Maybe someday. Tonight you deserve another one, for being such a good listener.”

  “If you like,” I say.

  “You know now. What to do,” he tells me. I do. I close my eyes.

  “Keep your eyes half open. As if meditating,” he says. I let some light under my lids. I can smell the stranger now, as if his storytelling has worked him into a sweat. A smell that on anyone else would make me hold my breath. On him it feels alluring, like the smell of my own sweat on summer nights, sublimating on skin flushed with arousal, pooling in my armpits.

  “Tell me if I’m about to trip over something,” I tell him.

  “What do you see when you think of a werewolf?” he asks me.

  “I…”

  “Don’t answer, just think.”

  Something takes hold of me—the cold night air and the smell of the stranger making me feel faint. That stupor, like in the tent at the mela. I realize I want it. I think of what he’s asked me to think. Of man and wolf, man and animal, man and woman and animal, twisted together, fur and bones and flesh and claws and teeth, glowing eyes and arched spines, human skin peeling and tearing to spill out flea-bitten fur, a mass of memories from literature and film and myth and art.

  “You know, of course, of the men that lived far, far from here and now, wearing dead wolves and bears on their backs as they fought and killed.”

  His presence beside me is a bonfire, infecting the wash of streetlights with its warmth, even the mist becoming smoke.

  “And here where we stand, long before India, before its empires and kingdoms, there were human tribes who identified with dogs and wolves, with wild animals. And there were, and still are, tribes who are not human, who identify with humans in similar ways. Who take the shape of humans, just as humans took the shape of animals by wearing skins.”

  The vestigial coat of my animal fur rises up, pathetic prickles under my cotton and wool clothes. I want to say something but can barely speak. His hand brushes my shoulder, and the contact courses through my entire arm. “It’s all right,” he says. “Now listen to me.”

  I walk forward half blind, guided by the sound of his voice. The lapping of tongues, clicking of fangs behind us. The minute vibration of the kitten’s chest. I become aware of how cold it is again. The stranger speaks, or chants, and it sounds like English. But his accent seems different now, more guttural. I can almost hear other tongues behind his voice, like the overlapping tones of a throat singer’s song.

  I hear the panting, the claws, behind and around us. Even as I walk, I dream, of something next to me in the stranger’s place, massive and hunched, rippling like the wind made flesh. Something neither human nor animal, bristling with an energy that I can only describe as elemental. I feel its heat, smell its pungent musk of blood-spiced piss and shit and mud-caked hair, feel it ready to lope out of this distant corner of my vision, on sinewy legs covered in fur, shimmering under streetlights eclipsed by its size. Those very streetlights become rows of high torches rippling with fire, a path for us two, human and non-human, leading into the well of a night long past, leading backward into the stinking dark of fermented history.

  —

  The stranger speaks, or chants, and it sounds like English.

  The Úlfhéðinn pants like the beast he is not, like the dead wolf he wears on his broad back. Spittle flies from his froth-flecked lips, and his breath pours steaming on the cold air. Blood-rimmed pupils full and black, he stares at me. I am the beast he sees in himself, hot and rank and vast, bear and wolf and man. I am his doppelgänger, grown huge on the nourishment of his faith. His spear is held high and trembling, his shield streaked with spit where he has bitten it in frenzy, his boots stamping the frozen ground. My claw is firm, sunken in the soil. I am ready. He kicks the ground and runs to me.

  It has been months since I’ve eaten of human, but I am not afraid. I am like Fenrir before Týr, come to bite the war god’s hand, or to swallow the All-father himself. I am kveldulf, the evening-wolf come sunset. I see him, human beneath his bloodlust and dye. I am more than human. My howl drowns out his cry.

  But he, too, is fearless. His spear slams into my head, the shaft quivering from the impact. His aim is perfect, his movements quick, and his arm strong. He leaps toward me as I slow down. There is a rain drizzling upon the earth and my naked fur and it is blood. It comes from the fresh hole beneath my blinded left eye, stanched only by the weapon that made it. The Úlfhéðinn pounces. The metal edge of his shield crashes into my face, cracking the bridge of my muzzle and shattering my curved fangs. He throws the shield to the ground and jumps onto me, gripping his spear. I look up at him in crippling disbelief, this human perched on my great form, and under the fanged crown of dead wolf’s gums I see him turned. He is no shape-changer, and yet he has become a god in that moment. He has struck down Fenrir.

  And then, I am afraid.

  It is a
terrible thing to be afraid in this shape, to hear my deafening howl twisted to a withering whine as the Úlfhéðinn throws his human cry up to the stars. His boots on my shoulders, he drives his weapon deeper into my head. Each turn of the broad spearhead widens a split running from the crack beneath my eye.

  I am awakened by panic. I will die if I do nothing. I embrace him. My talons are too sharp for his unarmored sides, gouging deep lines across the seamed muscle of his torso. He tumbles against me, drenching me with his wounds. I rip him open and fling him off. Mouth mad and red, he gives me one last bloody roar of defiance. I return the cry tenfold and lunge.

  His skull cracks beneath my tusks. Scarred hands spasm around the spear still in me, slide off the wet wood. I shake my wounded head, snapping his neck. The sound rings loud in the silenced forest. Limp, he falls from my mouth. The frozen ground melts to dark mud under the Úlfhéðinn’s broken body. It is done.

  I pull the spear from beneath my useless eye, opening the cleave in my skull. It spatters and hisses into the muddy snow. Seeking the rich scents of my prey’s flesh and soul, I crawl on all fours to his corpse, touching my teeth to his stomach. A desperate hunger seizes my shuddering body and I devour him.

  He has nearly taken my life, and now he returns it to me with each bite I take of him, burning in my gut like the flesh of some prophet imbued with divine flame. I feel as if I am eating of my own people, of the carcass of a shape-changer. Above the trees, the night sky is hung with the glowing banners of the Úlfhéðinn’s gods. I eat of him as if he is my last supper. With his bones I go down into the cold hard earth, burrowing deep into the frost, my hide crisped with blood and water.

  Night ends and I am still alive. I burst from the frozen grave I buried myself in, now turned to wet womb from my heat. Sunlight washes over my skin, now without fur. Bitter winter cuts me despite dawn’s light. I am smaller, weaker, though still stronger than any human. The gleam of starlight as only my second self can see it vanishes to give way to the unsubtle glare of man’s morning. I am more than human, but less than my second self.