The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

Usman Malik DEAD LOVERS ON EACH BLADE, HUNG

Jee Inspector Sahib, he came looking for a missing girl in Lahore Park one evening in the summer of 2013, this man known as Hakim Shafi. It was a summer to blanch the marrow of all summers. Heat rose coiling like a snake from the ground. Gusts of evil loo winds swept across Lahore from the west, shrinking the hides of man and beast alike, and Hakim Shafi went from bench to bench, stepping over needles rusting in bleached June grass, and showed the heroinchies a picture.

Have you seen this girl, he said.

For all his starched kurta shalwar and that brown waistcoat, his air was neither prideful nor wary. He was a very tall, bony man with stooped shoulders, a ratlike face, and thick whiskers. His eyes were sinkholes that bubbled occasionally, and when we said no, we hadn’t seen that girl, Shafi’s gaze drifted away from the benches, the park, the night sky.

We distrusted him. This lost stranger—we had no doubt he was lost—we watched him wander the park for weeks. Each Friday he came after Juma prayers, that colored eight-by-six photo clasped between his palms, as if the girl in the floral-patterned shalwar kameez and his prayers were intertwined. Before I knew that they were, I laughed along with the others at his inquiries. It was amusing to see this well-dressed gentleman court our company, eyes full of hope, that faded picture in his hands.

In his absence we speculated. He looked in his fifties, maybe early sixties. Perhaps the girl was his runaway daughter. As we injected the queen into our veins, as we gave ourselves up to dreaming in her orbit, we argued whether the rich-born pretty girl with her sad eyes and smooth skin was roughing it with lowlifes while her father searched for her in shadows. We giggled when we thought of that.

You understand how our life is, sahib, don’t you? We heroinchies are the children of the white queen—a tribe unto ourselves. We do not share company with the outside, our years pass differently in her presence. Hers is a shadow that enwombs us: it nurtures us as it suffocates—it is a bit like being slowly, sinuously lowered into an endless grave and watching that dome of light shrink until its memory becomes hateful. You fall in love with the descent.

With Hakim Shafi things might have gone on that way—he on his insoluble quest and we daytiming when we could—but Mustafa, our dealer, he got greedy and fucked up everything. I have wished upon my dead father’s name many times since then for that bastard to rot in hell. Had he not ruined it for all of us, I would not be sitting here tonight with you and the subinspector sahib in this skeleton of a police station with its shadow-draped oil lamps and broken windows and sweat-slick bars. In this stench of metal and piss and—

No, sahib, it’s not like that. Just saying greed is the most dangerous of beasts, as my old dada used to say, and Mustafa’s stupid greed dragged us into the darkness that finally showed its teeth tonight.

So this is what happened with that son of a whore Mustafa.

Before he came along, we used to get our masala behind the flower market in Liberty. A paan-and-cigarette stall owner was our man. His crop was fresh and as pure as any Lahori queen has ever been. It was expensive, but we made do by rummaging through garbage for sellables, snatching cell phones, stealing manhole covers, hubcaps, and begging. Most of us could snag two or three hits a week. Wasn’t much, but was enough to keep the nighttime at bay.

Then came news that Afghan police had set hundreds of thousands of poppy fields ablaze in Kunar. Overnight, opium supply dropped. As the Pakistani army’s battle against militants up north intensified, prices shot up, and we found every door shut and bolted on us with nothing but the habit to keep us company. Such desperate times that many of us became cotton shooters and fluffers. Chicken shit, I know, but what could you do? There was only so much queen to go around.

“I know a man who knows a man,” said Yasin one day. Five of us were crouched around a bench under the oldest peepal tree in the park, and Yasin, a scrawny lizardlike heroinchi who had recently turned to fluffing, sat grinding milk-sugar and a laxative he stole from a dispensary to bulk up our meager supply. “He can get us cheap masala.”

“Nothing is cheap,” someone said, and gawked at the blue velvet of the evening sky.

“It’s that or we are dry. I’m completely out.”

Nothing we could say to this. Enter Shani, Yasin’s man’s man.

He was a fidgety midget with a wispy mustache wider than his face and he offered to help us ride the queen cheap. Word was, he had made deals with police stations in Model Town and Kot Lakhpat for confiscated masala, and knew how to tap into the army’s black market—

Yes, sahib, of course. You’re right. He was likely lying all along, the bastard.

Suffice to say he knew people, and so we eagerly accepted. I was among those who stopped going to the flower market and trusted this fiend for my needs.

As you can see, that was a mistake. My dying is ample evidence of that.

It happened on a Thursday evening. (I remember because one of the heroinchies went to Data Sahib’s shrine to pay his respects.) After the park guard made his rounds to collect bhatta for letting us use the benches, most of my group left to polish-wipe cars and beg at chowks and traffic lights. Seemed as good a time as any to retrieve the plastic-wrapped masala I had squirreled away weeks ago. I pulled out the packet and rolled up my sleeves, and under the swaying elms and peepal, I slipped the queen into my blood.

(Yes, Subinspector sahib, that cigarette is most welcome. Thank you for the light. This close, the flame hurts my eyes a bit, but my hands are shaking and I cannot chase the dragon at this hour.)

Sahib, we sit here today in this gloomy thana. I can plainly see the shadows squirm by the door, the oak and eucalyptus boughs moving in the wind. Hear that whistle in the dark outside. Watch the way your fingers wind the ends of your mustache, your eyes half lidded as you listen to my story. I smell the ash falling to the floor from the tip of my cigarette. See water bead on the plastic sheet over that ice block the subinspector wheeled in earlier, should I prove less than cooperative—and I swear on my mother’s name, this is how clearly I saw my dead son under those wheezing trees that night.

Heroinchies die twice, they say, and we can all tell the story of our first death.

My son is mine.

He was twelve when I beat him black and blue on his birthday. He wanted to enroll in school again. I wanted him to train as a mechanic’s apprentice. He was thirteen when he ran away and fifteen when they found him in a gunnysack behind a dumpster at Lakshmi Chowk. His face was swollen and discolored in a dozen places. His lips were torn. Blood had clotted in the corners.

His throat—

His throat was—

I died the day they found him, sahib, and I died again that night in the park after I injected the masala. And in this fresh death when my son came to me he was smooth and untouched. Angelic was my boy. He bent over me and I thought he had forgotten, that he had forgiven. His eyes were kind. He smiled at me, changing, and it wasn’t his face but a piss-colored full moon shining at me. The eyes were red stars, the darkness between them whipped out and licked my cheeks. The white queen was in a mood, she rose with the tide of my blood, and I saw a giant golden snake tower above me. Its hood pulsated wider than the night sky until it seemed the heavens stood on its flared head, and I knew, I was sure, that its basilisk gaze would be my end.

The world shivered then and came apart. A gaunt man with a bristling mustache leaned across the bench, his hands poised above my chest. He lowered his face, breath afoul with onion, garlic, something else, and said, Are you all right?

I was.

Later, Hakim Shafi would tell me that I was gone. When he found me, head lolling off the bench, my mouth frothed and my eyes were glazed. The left side of my body twitched. When he found no pulse, he pumped my chest and continued for nearly fifteen minutes. That was how long I was dead, he said.

I believed him. How else could I have seen my son in that gloaming?

Hakim Shafi saved my life that night. A medical man present at that hour in a corner of a park haunted by heroinchies—some might call that a divine act. Maybe it was, but I wonder. Sometimes I think life is like a junkie’s flesh, crisscrossed where kismet injects other souls into our lives. Souls lost as we are. Who knows if the perpetrator of such accidents is God or the Devil?

Whatever force it was, it bound my life to Hakim Shafi’s forever.

“I’m fine,” I said, but he brought me to his small, neat clinic in Old Lahore anyway. Here he drew my blood and took a pinch of the leftover masala for testing. We sat on a moss-colored couch and watched the powder bubble and hiss in a glass vial when Hakim poured acid on it.

“Look at the bottom,” he said. I looked. Molten black residue, like tar, stuck to the glass. “Your dealer’s been shortchanging you,” he said. “I’d guess for a while, too. This heroin has more cut in it than any I have seen. Elephant tranquilizer. It was just a matter of time before something happened.”

I nodded, and it occurred to me I was a bit disappointed. I had been courting my demise for a long while.

“You inject.” It wasn’t a question. I nodded again. He pushed back the spectacles he had put on inside the clinic. They made him look confused. He dragged his knuckles back and forth on the oak desk. “You get your blood tested?”

“No.”

“You know how to chase the dragon?”

I laughed. He smiled. “Right.” His gray eyes went inward. When he spoke, he might’ve been talking to himself. “Maybe that’s the way to go if you can’t kick the habit.”

“What makes you think I want to kick anything?”

Hakim Shafi pulled out a drawer and brought out four tiny vials. He picked up the syringe cocked with my blood, dropped some in each vial.

My mind was fogged up from my death. I wanted to rise and flee to the park, but Hakim’s eyes were fixed on me. Restless, I scanned the room and saw a framed picture on the desk. I pointed. “That your daughter?”

Hakim’s fingers whitened around the vial. He shook it vigorously. “Did you eat today?”

“I’ve seen you take that picture around the park. I know everyone’s told you she was never there.”

Hakim flicked a finger against the glass. The yellow liquid turned red, golden. “I’ll set up some intravenous saline for you.” His lips were pressed into a line. “Your blood is thick from fluid loss.”

He helped me onto the couch and gave me a concoction to drink. When my eyelids grew heavy, he pulled a crisp white sheet over me. It smelled of hospital.

“Sleep well. It’s the only way most of us can dream.” He paused, and in the silence a drowsy moth thunked against the room’s window. I muttered something. Somewhere in the night a baby cried, and its mother shushed it and began to hum. The moth thunked again. I looked, and outside the window, a small boy-shape pressed its face against the glass, mouthing words at me.

“Hakim sahib,” I said, voice thick and sticky. “Who’s that?”

Shafi turned. The shape was gone.

In a room at the back of the clinic, Hakim Shafi showed me snake skins.

“This is how I make my living.”

“By killing snakes?”

He smiled. “By using venom to heal. Similia similibus curantur.” He swept a hand around him at the hundreds of glass vials, filled with pills the size of sugar cubes, arranged on dusty shelves. “Like cures like. Poison will kill poison.” He knuckled the diamond-patterned leathery skin. “My suppliers send me tokens every year. Skins, fangs, vertebra. Keeps up the clinic’s image. Helps the business.”

I scratched the stubble on my chin. “How does snake venom heal? I thought the only thing it was useful for was killing dumb assholes who mess around with creatures they don’t understand.”

“It’s one of the oldest cures. My ancestors have used it for centuries.”

“You’re pulling my chain, aren’t you, Hakim sahib?”

Shafi studied me. “We’re so besieged by newness we forget old diseases haunt us for a reason. Did you know snake venom is being researched at big universities these days? Dementia, palsy, heart attacks—it has a role in curing all of them.” He went to a cupboard and pulled down a large rosewood box from the top shelf. He set it on the table next to a gleaming row of vials and tubes. “For my medicines, I mix most of the substrate myself. The venom varies between species. Some is toxic to human nerves, some to blood, some to tissues and organs. A pinch of the wrong sample, and you’d be dead in seconds.”

He opened the rosewood box. Inside were dozens of matchbook-sized tins. He pulled on a pair of gloves and carefully removed the lids of two. They were filled with tiny snow-colored pellets.

“This”—Hakim picked up a pellet with a pair of tweezers—“is the venom of the common krait. It paralyzes the breathing muscles. If you got bitten by a krait during sleep, you’d scratch the spot, thinking it was a bug bite, and doze off. You’d never wake again.” Hakim replaced the pellet in the tin. “I use it for patients with lockjaw and neck spasms. A millionth portion in goat milk. Highly effective.”

He tapped another tin with the edge of his tweezers. “A couple bring their nine-year-old girl to me every month. She has thin blood. A genetic condition. Bleeds for hours from her gums if she brushes her teeth too vigorously. A knee scrape would be fatal. Most children like her don’t survive childhood. My Koriwala viper venom has kept her alive for seven years.”

I shuddered. My third day at the clinic, and the shakes were beginning to hit me. My skin itched with strange life. I felt it in the bunching of my bowels, at the back of my eyes. The absence of the queen was becoming loud and insistent.

I licked my lips. “Got anything to help my nerves, Hakim sahib?”

Shafi tipped his neck and watched me. He plucked a vial filled with russet-colored liquid from the shelf. “Cobra in laudanum. It will help the diarrhea and muscle aches.” When I eyed it warily, he laughed. “Diluted. Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.”

He shook the vial, dipped a glass pipette into the frothing liquid, and retrieved some. I opened my mouth and he squeezed three drops onto my tongue.

“Easy,” he said when I rolled my tongue around. “Let it settle into your tissues.”

Already the fire in my body was sputtering, calming down. It wasn’t the queen’s embrace, but it was something. When I closed my eyes, a fog rose and surrounded me, whispering me into a lull.

By now, sahib, you must be wondering why I was still at the clinic with the good Hakim; why I stayed for weeks and didn’t steal his medicines, his laudanum, or his money. After all, I had done nothing but steal, steal, steal for years since my boy died and my wife ran away with a shakarkandi vendor. Hubcaps, tin sheets, tools from a garage where I worked briefly, an old beggar’s wheelchair. You name it.

Before I became a thief I used to work in a dispensary—a tiny roadside stall in Qila Gujjar Singh run by a compounder named Ram Lal. He mixed tonics for common illnesses. Occasionally a certified government doctor would check in, but mostly Ram Lal was free to do as he pleased. He was a good compounder, even though he did not have a medical degree. He helped the locals and earned a good name for himself with his gentle manner and willingness to subsidize his prescriptions.

I helped him run the dispensary. I attended seven grades before I dropped out of school and could read labels written in English on pill bottles. My job was to grind pills with a mortar and pestle and wrap them in squares of newspaper to make medicinal puris. We did well and it was a good life. Until my son disappeared.

I suppose being in a similar environment with Hakim Shafi brought back those memories. For years I lived in that park—scabies-infested, filthy, often hungry. I had grown addicted to the darkness, but I suppose I was ready for it to end when I overdosed. Shafi came along, saved me, and cleaned me up, and I guess I was just too tired of myself to rob him.

I don’t know, maybe every heroinchi also wants one story with a happy ending.

Shafi helped me through the next week. Quitting cold turkey was like being cooked on a spit. I ground my teeth, sometimes I writhed and screamed; but his tinctures helped. I suspect he could have done more, but I think he knew this was my battle and would only go so far in steering. The ship and its course were mine and mine alone.

Like cures like, he’d said.

On the seventh day, when I had more strength, Shafi showed me the terrariums.

His clinic was located in Old Lahore. Squeezed between a shoemaker’s shop and a cloth merchant’s, it was more like Ram Lal’s dispensary than a real clinic. His patients came in lines of worn, sickly faces, most of them women and children. They crowded into the dingy waiting room up front where whorls of Quranic calligraphy draped the walls and the smell of formalin and bitter salts hung in the air.

Once I had enough vigor to navigate past the front hall to the backyard, the fierce, sudden beauty of it shocked me. A statuary of ceramic children laughing and kneeling in the mud stood in the center of a lush zoysia grass patch. Creepers hung from trestles arrayed across carrot patches, weaving between the half-dozen mango and orange trees that circled the statuary. Exquisitely kept and trimmed, the yard smelled of citrus and honeysuckle.

I whistled when Shafi told me he did the landscaping himself. “That’s hard work.”

He nodded. “My wife helped me do it. She was a wonder.”

“Was?”

“Yes.”

I turned to a row of empty glass tanks in a corner of the yard. “What are those?”

“Terrariums.” He crouched and ran a hairy hand over them. Monsoon season was upon us, and night drizzle had left the glass shiny and clean. It twinkled in the afternoon light, slanting red shadows across the grass.

“You kept snakes?”

“My wife did. She was a herpetologist at the University of Punjab. Russell vipers, sand boas, Indian kraits, striped keelbacks—she kept them, fed them like babies.” He showed me cracks, little spiderwebs, in the glass. “This is where her cobras tried to bite us.”

“What happened?” I said. Shafi yanked a tall weed poking its head from between the cages. We both knew I wasn’t asking about snakes.

“I sold them,” he said. “Couldn’t bear to look at them anymore.”

A thought hit me, a realization that must have shown in my face; when Shafi looked up, his eyes changed. He rose and went inside the house, his footsteps impressing upon the muddy banks of the flowerbeds, a trail leading into his past.

I got up to follow, stopped, and went to the back wall. I bent down and fingered the human footprint under the windowsill. It was fresh and clear and a child’s. The toe prints were filled with rainwater.

As I watched, a worm snaked its way out of a toe print and began wriggling madly in the rain pool.

The girl in the picture was not Hakim Shafi’s daughter.

It was his wife—his child bride.

Shafi said nothing when I voiced my conclusion. I ran my fingers across the picture, across the large black eyes gazing out at the world, nose proud, chin firm and defiant. The girl, probably in her early twenties, sat sidelong, a half-smile covered by a hennaed hand. With the nose ring, her broad forehead, and that chin, she reminded me of those desert women from Thal and Rajasthan who meander with their tribe across the wasteland, grazing cattle stock.

I said as much to Hakim. He flicked at the end of his nose. “Eighteen years ago I was in Hyderabad for a relative’s funeral. I bought her from a band of gypsies who camped at the outskirts of the city. She was eight at the time.”

“Eight.” I wasn’t shocked. I come from a family of moonshiners and shanty-dwellers, sahib. My father ran errands for a pimp most of his life. I knew how some old customs work. “You raised your wife,” I said to him.

“Yes.”

I stared at the picture. “Where is she now?”

Hakim polished a row of bottles with a rag.

“Why do you keep returning to the park?”

His voice was low. “Maliha loved the park. She used to feed those stupid ducks at the pond. Loved their ugly dirt-colored feathers. She said they reminded her of the desert. I used to laugh at that.” He yanked out a drawer and removed a brown pouch, its top cinched by leather thongs. He tugged at the drawstring, removed a wrapped sheet of paper from it, withdrew a necklace strung with three large stones from the sheet. They were cracked and yellow. “These here are the bones of her childhood.”

“What?”

“Desert pearls. Sandstone baked by heat for years. Maliha didn’t remember much of her early life. Her parents were dead, which is why her tribe wanted to sell her to someone willing to take care of her. But she said she remembered her mother giving her these. Her ma told her they had magical powers and would protect her from jinns.” He smiled. “My Maliha believed it till the day she disappeared.”

“When’d she disappear?”

“Two years ago.”

“How old was she?”

“Twenty-six.”

“You loved her?”

It was a stupid question, sahib, I know, but asking it came so naturally, it surprised me. Maybe it was a bond of understanding between sinners. I could see his love for her nestled in the crow’s feet around his eyes, I could see his entire life in those eyes: feeding her, clothing her, raising her, falling in love with her, sending her to college. But he had bought her with rupee. Her heart, then—did he win it, or chain it with need?

Hakim held the necklace. “Yes, I loved her.”

“You didn’t have children?”

“We were barren. I was.”

“Why’d she run away?” I didn’t mean to say what I said next, but I said it. “A younger lover?”

His fingers pressed the stones as if telling beads on a rosary. “She loved me. It might have been a mixed kind of love, but she did. I’ve always known that. She went away because she was looking for something. A dream. Something she heard when she was a child.” He brought the necklace close, until it brushed against his chin. “Many times I thought she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she was a precocious girl—always had been—and I trusted her.”

We were sitting at the table in the clinic’s little kitchenette. Hakim got up and poured us green tea from a boiling pot. The scent of it drifted between us, sweet, spectral, ephemeral.

“Sometimes I can feel her in the house, breathe her perfume. She left this necklace behind, you know.”

“And that has you convinced she’ll return?”

Shafi sipped tea.

“What was the dream she chased?”

“I don’t know. It’s a little insane, if I’m to be honest.”

“What was it?”

He put the cup down, shook his head. “Not now. Another day, perhaps.”

Sahib, you might wonder why was he telling me all this. Why a respectable man like him would open his heart to a stranger, a heroinchi. I wondered the same, so I asked him.

He wrapped the necklace with the sheet and paper and placed it in the pouch. When he turned, his face was inscrutable. It comes out at last, I thought. No one is so good, so pious, so righteous they’ll pick up a dying needler from the garbage and take him home.

“I want your help,” Hakim said. His gray eyes were feverish. “I want you to help me find my wife.”

“How can I? I haven’t left that park in years.”

“Maliha disappeared from that park. I know it in my gut.”

I watched him. If his wife did visit her precious duck pond, I never saw her. Then again, in the darkness in which we thrived, she could have danced around us naked and we might have missed her.

He persisted. “I want you to ask your friends. They won’t tell me anything, but they will tell you. Someone must have seen her.” His hand trembled and tea spilled on the table. He wiped it with his sleeve. “I’ve looked for her for two years now. I have talked to the police, and they’ve done nothing. They—” He stopped, clenched his fingers. “Will you ask your friends? Please?”

I took another look at his face and I relented, sahib. God help me, I told him I would.

There are days when I wonder if I should have refused, if I should have got up and left his clinic and walked away fast as I could. In the end, I didn’t. Not because he saved my life—I owe him no debt for that; he saved me to answer his own needs, I think—but because I had nothing to go back to. The world is big, yes, but I had my own ghosts chasing me, and if I left, they’d just catch up sooner. Also, Hakim’s love was naked and trembling, pinned to the wall. He was asking me to help him take it down, and I couldn’t refuse.

I told him I’d ask around.

When I began the inquiry, my friend Yasin—I believe I mentioned him before—directed me to some of the heroinchies who kept an eye out on the goings-on in the park. One of them told me that two years ago, around the time Hakim Shafi’s wife disappeared, the qawwals were in town.

Every year a band of musicians comes to Lahore Park to take part in a qawwali festival. They’re led by a maestro named Tariq Khan.

Yasin has a stereo he salvaged from a junkyard. When he shot up, he would often listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his head thrashing to the alaap and raagas. Occasionally I’d join him. Khan sahib’s love songs are great, but we especially adored those that lauded the merits of sin. And whenever the qawwals came to town, we tried to attend the free performances in the park square.

I have never heard Tariq Khan sing, but legend says when he was a young man he was visited by the legendary Tansen in a dream and trained by him. That at the peak of his prowess, Tariq Khan once set a dozen candles alight just with his singing.

“I saw her twice,” said Yasin’s heroinchi confidante. “A young woman hovering around the maestro Tariq Khan. Lovely girl. Beautiful dark eyes.”

When I prodded, his description of the girl matched Maliha’s. The coincidence was too big to ignore. I asked Yasin to talk to the festival organizers, and he returned and told me that after each performance in Lahore, the qawwals left for Panjnad in southern Punjab. Perhaps Hakim Shafi could learn more if he visited the area?

I talked to Shafi.

At first he was incredulous, then his eyes widened. “Ya Allah.” He wheeled and, ignoring my startled face, ran to his room and locked the door. I waited in the kitchenette for nearly an hour before he emerged.

“I know where she is,” he said.

“What? How?”

Shafi wiped a callused hand across his pale face. His fingers were grimy. “Her family, her people—they were gypsy singers. They came from a lineage who were once known as professional mourners: folks who’d come at the bidding of rich families to wail at funerals. To add glamour to their dead, so outsiders would think the departed was dearly beloved. Maliha would feel right at home with qawwals and their lyrical lamentations.” Shafi turned and stared out the window. “At first I thought she went looking for her people. But she wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t leave me for her folks. They sold her. She hated them for it. She’d never say it out loud—she wasn’t one for self-pity—but I knew it.” His forehead creased and he talked in a low voice, as if to himself. “No, she went looking for naag mani. That’s the only explanation.”

“Naag mani?”

“She’s gone looking for her childhood.” Shafi turned his strange-colored eyes on me. Nightfall was at hand, behind him the window was darkening, and I thought I saw something pale and glistening peer in. Hakim coughed and threw something across the table.

I looked down. It was his wife’s necklace with the three desert stones.

“She’s gone to Panjnad,” Shafi said, “looking for the mythical serpent pearl.”

This is how Hakim Shafi gave away his life: First he closed his shop. Next he sold his house.

“What in the name of God are you doing?” I said.

Shafi grinned. That grin raised the hackles on my neck, sahib. “Burning bridges,” he said.

I looked at him closely. In the four weeks since I’d told him about the qawwals, he had shaved his thick mustache and lost ten kilos. He was always thin, but now he looked like a needler at the end of his days. His temples were wasted, the flesh of his face pulled taut across the blades of his bones. His eyes discomfited me the most: the gray in them swirled madly, like smoke from charred moths after they crash into candles and explode into flame. It was as if a light had flicked on inside Shafi’s head, bathing his body in an otherworldly glow whose secrets only he understood.

To be honest, I was becoming rather afraid of this skeletal man, sahib. I decided it was time for me to return to my world, leave the clinic and run to the park—

Which was when I discovered the true extent of the damage that motherfucker Mustafa, Yasin’s dealer, had wrought. We’d thought Mustafa had cut heroin deals with police stations only. Turned out he’d gone a lot further than that.

He had swindled the Poison Men themselves.

I don’t know who came up with that name. When the opium fields up north were razed, many folk lost a lot of money. Folk other than the militants, with connections outside the country. To whom many body bags in Lahore and Karachi were attributed.

Mustafa had been heavily scrounging the white queen from these people. In his greed to set up a drug cartel in Lahore, he lied and told the Poison Men his clientele was the city’s elite; that we, the park heroinchies, were suppliers for children of bureaucrats and feudal lords. Cunningly, he plotted it all out so that we became the swindlers and betrayers.

As they say, though, no one plots better than God. The Poison Men discovered that Mustafa was lying. He had been selling the queen and its substrate masala to their direct competitors in the international market.

Mustafa and his affiliates went missing.

Five of my friends paid the price for their greed as well. Yasin was among them. Their bodies were found floating in the pond near the banyan trees in the park, throats cut from ear to ear, rusted needles jammed inside their penises. Their fish-nibbled fingers—what few were left—were trapped in tree roots.

Word was that I was on their kill list as well. They were looking for me and a few others. We were condemned. Dead men walking.

So . . . I resolved to stay missing. Hakim Shafi had made preparations to journey to the town of Uch, close to Panjnad, where, he had learned, the qawwals had gone. I begged to join him, and he was happy to have my company. He was expecting me to go with him all along, he said.

At noon we got off the train at Bahawalpur Station and Hakim rented a taxi that would take us to Uch—a three-hour road trip.

On the way he told me how he finally realized his wife’s destination.

“When she was eleven or twelve, Maliha used to talk about a mythical stone. She called it naag mani, the serpent pearl. A precious stone gifted by the Serpent King, who rules the underworld, to his queen.”

I stared at him. He didn’t look like he was joking. “And you think your wife went after this magic rock a snake gave his begum as a wedding present?”

Hakim guffawed as if it were the funniest thing in the world. His eyes were too bright. “Why wouldn’t she?” He chewed at his lip. “Her people came from the desert. Her mother gave her that sandstone necklace and told her it would keep jinns away. There are stories of such stones in every culture. It hardly matters what I think. It’s her assumptions that have brought us here.”

“Hakim sahib, that is insane. I thought she was an educated woman.”

He lifted his chin and stroked his throat. “I have been thinking about this for a while, you know. In her mind, she probably came up with rational reasons to look for the stone. I believe she talked herself into looking for it. You’re still sniffing and shaking your head.” He reached into his pocket, brought out his wife’s necklace pouch, withdrew the wrapped necklace. He unfolded the sheet of paper. “I should have thought of it much sooner, but . . . this is a copy of a letter she wrote to a herpetologist in America.”

I took the note and tried to read it. It was in English, sahib. Hakim saw me squinting at the writing and took it back. He read it and translated it for me.

Incidentally, it is the same note, sahib, that you retrieved from the rosewood box later. There, Subinspector sahib, that’s the one. If you like, you can read it yourself. No? I see. It is to be part of my testimony. Well, I will tell you what I remember.

(Item #13 pertaining to Case 546D3: Copy of letter from one Maliha Shafi, Evidence Collection Lab, Lahore)

I raised my eyebrows. Shafi smiled. “Still think I’m a fool for coming here?” he said.

“She came to Uch in search of the cobra stone,” I said, piecing it all together. “Probably with the qawwals, since they knew the area. Why wouldn’t she tell you before she left?”

“She used to do this kind of thing all the time. Go on these ‘research trips’ without telling me.” His lips twitched. “My Maliha was a wild one. You can take the girl out of the desert, I suppose, but you can’t—” His gray eyes wandered, found the horizon, settled on it. “I thought she’d outgrow it, you know,” he said. “I thought a day would come when she’d settle down. We would adopt children. We’d grow old together.” A salt-and-pepper stubble had grown on his cheeks. He rubbed it vigorously. “Maybe something happened to her. God forbid, an accident perhaps. Otherwise, I know she would have returned home.”

I nodded. The letter seemed to be carefully worded. Maliha came across as thoughtful and practical. Imaginative, but calm and collected.

Maybe something had happened to her.

“Tell me more about this stone,” I said.

“Myth and speculation more than anything else. She was full of stories from her tribal days. She would laugh when she narrated them, watching my face as if she expected me to laugh at her.”

“Did you?” When he said nothing, I asked, “What stories?”

“Her favorite was the tale of the Serpent King and his queen.” Hakim rubbed his fingers together. “The Sheesh Naag, king of serpents, ruler of the underworld, asked his wife what she wanted for her hundredth name-day. The Serpent Queen, having grown tired of time’s ravages upon her body, asked the king to grant her youth and immortal beauty. The Sheesh Naag told her he couldn’t reverse time, but he would grant her immortality via metamorphosis. By virtue of the stone’s magic, she would turn into a beautiful woman, a snake-nymph with skin smooth and white as polished marble.

“The queen agreed. Since that day, on the lunar fourteenth when the moon is at its brightest, she rises from the underworld in human form and gazes upon our world, sighing at time’s cruelty. Those who have seen her claim she wears the serpent pearl on her forehead.” He tapped his own. “It is said that this serpent stone is a gateway to other worlds than ours. That the possessor of the pearl shall rule animals and birds, be immune to all the venom in the world. Even become immortal.” Hakim shook his head. “Oh, Maliha could tell these stories so dramatically.”

“Yeah, it’s dramatic all right.”

“Isn’t it?” He smiled without mirth. “And to think we’re in the middle of it, traveling to find a woman who thinks this gem really exists.”

“Although to be fair, her interest seems academic.”

“Like I said, my wife rationalized well. By the way, want to guess which species of snake the Serpent King is according to legend?”

“Which?” When Hakim grinned, I knew. “Ophiophagus hannah,” I cried out. “The king cobra.”

He laughed, and for the first time in weeks it was open-throated and heartfelt. “By Allah, that’s it. Driver, what is it?”

The taxi driver had braked and stopped the car. Now he was getting out, muttering under his breath. “Fallen branches, sahib,” he said. “Probably from a dust storm. They said one passed through here a few days back. I’ll take care of them.”

We peered out. Two large branches lay across the road. Something large and white lay curled near them under a swarm of flies.

“What’s that?” Hakim called.

A couple of vultures hopped back, hunching their shoulders as the driver approached, their yellow beady eyes fixed on him. “Hussshhh,” yelled the taxi driver, and waved his arms at them. “Get out of here.” The vultures jerked their way to the gravel roadside, where they paused and waited.

The taxi driver called over his shoulder, “Roadkill, sahib.”

My gaze went to the whirling blowflies, then to the carcass. Afternoon was dissolving into dusk, and I couldn’t quite make out what it was. The driver lifted the second branch and heaved it at the vultures. They scattered, casting venomous looks at the intruder.

When the driver slipped behind the wheel and turned the ignition, Hakim tapped him on the shoulder. “What was it? Raccoon?”

“Nah, sahib.” The driver looked at us in the rearview mirror. “Just a dead snake.”

Hakim looked at me, eyes wide, and laughed. I wouldn’t say anything. My heart thudded in my chest. Just beyond the tree line on our left stood a boy, arms crossed and hugging his chest. The woods were dark, and though he was too far for me to make out his features, I was sure it was the child I had seen at Hakim’s clinic peering in from the window.

As I gripped the edge of the rolled-down window, the boy turned and disappeared into the woods.

“The qawwals are in town indeed, and tonight they will sing,” said the owner of the guesthouse we were staying at.

A large musical mehfil was planned for the evening. Hundreds of people would gather at the shrine of Bibi Farida, a female mystic who died centuries ago. The qawwals would sing the nostalgic folklore of her life and the tireless work she did for Uch’s children during a fatal dysentery epidemic.

“Who was she?” I asked.

The guesthouse owner, an elderly man with no teeth, shivered with reverence. “An angel, sahib. Personification of Allah’s mercy and glory,” he said in a voice garbled by toothlessness. “Our elders used to say her goodness migrated into her skin. Her forehead shone with Allah’s light. On dark nights it could be seen for miles.”

“Who built the shrine?”

“An Irani prince who fell in love with her, they say. In the Mughal days this was a common route for Persian princes and amirs to travel on their way to East Indian cities. The prince wanted to marry her, but Bibi Farida declined, choosing her orphan paupers over the prince.”

It was our second day at the guesthouse, a small bungalow on the outskirts of Uch. The owner had situated it on the banks of the Panjnad River, offering his guests a glorious waterfront view from the porch that ran around the back. You could sit there and drink tea and gaze into the night-darkened river.

Hakim had no interest in tea or scenic beauty. His agitation was visible. For the first time in two years he was close to finding out what had happened to his wife, and the anticipation was gnawing at him. He rubbed his forehead, muttered prayers, and gripped his rosewood box—the one with the snake venom tin boxes—as if he’d never let go.

“Why’d you bring that?” I said.

His fingers drummed on the steel flip-lock. “It was a present to her from my mother. Maliha used it for her trinkets before she went to the university. The venoms are mine, but the box was always hers.”

“And what exactly do you plan to do with it?”

He didn’t answer. A thought occurred to me. “The venom you gave me for the shakes—does that cause visions? Hallucinations?”

“No.” His eyebrows knotted. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said, staring over his shoulders. The window was empty. I went to change into something comfortable.

We left at dusk. Following our landlord’s recommendation, we took the trail that ran along the Panjnad River, a two-mile hike to the shrine.

The river breathed in and out, a shimmery line trembling below the mud bank. Rocks crouched amid wind-hissing reeds and apluda grass, like men prostrated before a dark deity, their mineral-gleaming humps desolate. They made me think of the floating bodies of my friends murdered by the Poison Men. Waterbirds cooed and flapped above us. The landscape of sand and mud sprawled and tilted into the water, and I saw someone standing motionless in the distance, a dark speck haunting the liquid loneliness.

“No respite for the seeker,” murmured Hakim. I looked at him sharply, but he was staring at the ground, where mica and water-smoothed pebbles gleamed. As he walked, the rosewood box rattled in his backpack.

“Are you all right?”

He gave me a tired smile, a sickly man with sunken eyes. “Never better.”

“What are we going to ask the qawwals? You know, when we get there?”

He shrugged and shifted the backpack to the other shoulder. “Whether a lady researcher came here with them.”

“What if they say no?”

“Then we ask others.” His smile was gone. “Every fiber of my heart tells me she’s here. Somewhere in this town.”

How can you be sure? I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue. What use disrupting any man’s illusions? Hakim would leave no stone unturned in his search for his beloved, for it was clear to me that the man was maddened by love and had been for a long time. What kind of love, I didn’t dare ponder. What does it take to raise a child bride, what transformative alchemy must happen between a man and a girl as age eats innocence and the infatuation evolves into its adult counterpart? I didn’t know, didn’t want to think about it. The prospects were too disturbing.

We turned from the river to follow a winding trail leading up to Uch Lake, an artificial canal created by the dam at Panjnad head. That was where the shrine was located, the guesthouse owner had said.

“She once told me she loved snakes,” Hakim said, “because when they shed their skins, they live anew. She said snakes are lovelier than butterflies, for a cocoon hides a butterfly’s ugly childhood, while snakes don’t worry about the artifice of beauty.”

Then we were nearing the shrine, and Hakim stopped. My heart lurched a little as we stood there, gazing at the towering structure in front of us.

“Holy heart of God,” Hakim murmured, his face full of awe.

The shrine was spectacular, a dazzling three-tiered octagonal building erected close to the lake on a sand base. The top tier lifted the marble dome, while eight towers of carved timber supported the base tier. The exterior was patterned by many shades of blue and white mosaic tiles, themselves covered with coils of extraordinary calligraphy in cyan and gold.

“This is where the qawwals come every year.” I exhaled a shuddering sigh. “No wonder.”

It was a building of heartbreaking beauty, a glittering fortress in the arid landscape around it. It made me feel lonelier than ever. It made me want to flee from it.

Hakim’s lips had tightened. His eyes glowed in a shaft of bleeding sunlight.

“Should we go in?” I said gently.

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the dome. We joined the throng of visitors come for the great musical event. We passed under the arched gateway into the courtyard and crossed a sandy yard broken by rows of cemented graves of sinners wanting the sacred proximity of Bibi Farida.

The qawwals were gathered in front of the shrine proper, its entrance locked and bolted at this hour. A boisterous bunch, they chattered happily, their glances roaming but inevitably wandering back to their leader, a squat, morbidly obese, bald man, who waddled his way around the courtyard, greeting acquaintances with a wide smile under his handlebar mustache.

“That’s him. Tariq Khan,” I whispered to Hakim. I lifted my chin and nodded at the maestro as he passed by us. Hakim found us two empty plastic chairs five rows down from the stage and we sat.

“Do you want to talk to him now?” I said.

Hakim’s eyes scanned the crowd, his fingers futilely trying to find the phantom ends of the mustache he had shaved. “After.”

The carpeted stage was adorned with four teakwood tablas, microphone pedestals, rolled silk pillows, and red-velveted bolster cushions for the singers. A harmonium fronted the tablas near a large tray filled with small paan-daans and filigreed spit utensils for the lead singer’s betel-chewing and spitting pleasure.

Hakim leaned over. “You see the harmonium?”

I glanced at it, then at him. “Yes?”

“Look closer.”

I peered at it again. It was a beautiful hand-pumped instrument crafted from rosewood, its white teeth gleaming in the spotlight. I could see nothing strange about it. “What?”

Hakim’s hand reached out, took hold of my chin, directed my gaze. “Look at its right corner.”

I did.

Even from the fifth row, the large white-and-gold symbol was visible against the dark mahogany: twin snakes coiled around a ruby emitting rays of light.

Sahib, my throat is dry. May I have some water?

Thank you for the shawl, Subinspector sahib. The weather must be changing. Your station is so cold. I don’t know how you get any work done. Although I suppose this chill is ideal for what you do here. Must be more efficient to torture and break a freezing body.

Are they still standing out there, Inspector sahib? The Poison Men?

Come now, sahib, you can tell me. We both know I’m not leaving this station for a courtroom.

All right, sahib. As you wish.

About the music mehfil.

The shrine rang with the qawwals’ music.

Dholki thumped, harmonium dueled with the vocal alaap, the background chorus clapped their hands to the thrumming tablas. The lead singer, a chubby, red-jowled man, screamed loudly, his ululating falsetto soaring high in the night.

Hakim was not impressed. “I think my head’s going to explode,” he whispered. “Where is he?”

I shrugged. The maestro Tariq Khan hadn’t made an appearance, cameo or otherwise.

Hakim rose. “I’m going to look for him.” Before I could so much as open my mouth in protest, he turned and disappeared between the aisles of chairs and standing bodies.

I labored to my feet and combed the crowd: farmers, carpenters, shoemakers, and shopkeepers. They swayed to the music. A strong earthy odor exuded from them, mixing with the sweet smell of the cannabis they smoked. Some had bowls of bhang, which they downed like lassi. Mesmerized by the music, some old men and women had begun the dhamaal, that mystical dance in which the audience aspires to become the music. They jittered and whirled, faster and faster, eyes glazed. A burly man, naked except for a dhoti, looked at me, a beatific smile on his face. He rolled up his sleeve and began to inject a pale liquid into his arm.

I turned away. It had been months since I’d had anything to do with the white queen, but still the vision of that needle dimpling and piercing his skin left me shaky. My head pounded with the tabla beat, my flesh bunched up in gooseflesh. Men laughed. Someone thrust a cup of bhang into my head. Another clapped my back, whispering. I chugged the liquid. The crowd spun, the sky wheeled, and I glimpsed Hakim. He was slipping through a knot of hard-faced white-turbaned laborers at the back of the crowd. I weaved my way after him, ignoring the listless mutterings in Saraiki and Punjabi. By the time I reached the laborers, Hakim was gone.

I don’t know how long I looked. Could have been hours or minutes. The smell of bhang, cannabis, and the white queen wrapped around me. The migrainous music swelled and abated, the dancers danced, the colors of the evening changed. My heart fluttered, and little pale children flitted between the legs of the surging audience.

At some point I stumbled from the grasping hands of the multitude to a narrow, uneven gravel path twisting through the shrine’s outer towers. Night deepened and shadows swiveled, pirouetting to the drumbeat, and I found myself in front of an arched postern door.

A large padlock hung open from its latch like a broken jaw. I gazed at it. The keyhole stirred. A black threadlike snake nosed its head out, slithered down the door, and disappeared into the gravel. I pushed the door open. Beyond was a black gullet softened by gleams of distant green light.

I went in.

The corridor meandered. It came at me with drunken angles, or perhaps I was drunk with the bhang from the mehfil. The qawwali music receded and a strained silence took its place. I lurched toward the green light’s source in this unnerving quiet. Even the earth dreams and murmurs in its sleep, but here I was benighted by the claustrophobic endlessness of that corridor jolting, tilting, and looping back on itself.

A burst of emerald light drew me out into a vast space. I sensed it more than saw, because my eyes had closed. I blinked rapidly and slitted them. Acid green flickered in the periphery of my vision. The stone floor felt uneven. The dip and rise of the high ceiling, the damp feel of the granite wall I ran my hand across—this was a natural chamber of some sort. Perhaps a cavern under the shrine.

Again I blinked against the pulsing light, a verdant web that receded and expanded with my breathing. Something moved in the web’s center. I raised a hand and plunged forward. The source of the light materialized: it was the top of a large marble slab. A gravestone.

Hakim Shafi loomed over it.

He stood by the grave. His shirt was torn; the rosewood box lay discarded at his feet. He had his back to me, a scarecrow’s relief in the green light, as the portly maestro Tariq Khan leaned and whispered in his ears.

I stopped. The maestro didn’t turn to look at me. His thick lips puckered like fat slugs near Hakim’s earlobes, his chubby fingers gripping Hakim’s wrist. A strange humming came from him.

Something was clearly, horribly wrong here. But my legs wouldn’t move. Maybe it was the bhang, maybe terror—a bristle that migrated up and down my flesh. My feet were magnetized to the rough stone floor. I leaned forward, straining to hear what the maestro murmured to Hakim, and found that he was singing.

Sahib, I swear on my mother’s grave, I have never been more horrified, more enthralled in my life. The paunchy qawwal’s stomach heaved in jellylike movements as he whisper-sang strange tunes into Hakim Shafi’s ears. Melodies jerked and slithered in swift tenor across the thrashing web of light. A gurgling song made entirely from vowels, a deep vibrato alaap that lunged and rose and pitched, as if the maestro intended to gut the cavern walls.

I put out my arms, intending to run and shove Tariq Khan’s massive bulk off my friend. Before I could move, the maestro dropped Shafi’s wrist and withdrew his lips from his ears. Shafi shuddered and let out a sigh.

The maestro threw his head back and began to sing at the ceiling.

The emerald light blazed. A torrential luminescence that spun in circles and flooded my vision. The gravestone was shaking and the light source shook with it, throwing juddering shadows of the two men across the ground, stretching them like tar. Hakim shook, as if in the throes of a seizure, then turned around, smacking his lips. His tongue drifted out and receded. His gray eyes shone like moonstones. “My darling,” I thought he said. In the inhuman wails from Tariq Khan I couldn’t be sure. The maestro sang and stepped back, sang and back-trotted, until he stood at the far end of the cavern, his woeful music lapping across the stony distance. It made my head pound, turned my blood viscous.

Something shimmered at Hakim’s feet. A child. No, a woman, with hair like moonbeams, crouching. She rose and stood silently as Hakim gazed at her in awe, at the clearness of her marble skin, the perfection of her nose, her softly moving lips. She smiled at him and drew herself tall and Hakim grinned back. She reached, plucked the glowing stone from the grave slab, and placed it on her forehead, where it shone, the brightest star there ever was. She whispered. The sound was like insects rubbing their legs together, or lonely reeds sighing on cold alien shores, or hundreds of serpents—

“You could have just asked me to join you. Why make me suffer?” Hakim said, and laughed heartily at the intensified buzzing that came from her. Did he think she was his wife? In the throbbing light, the woman’s features blurred, softened, became a child’s, and for a moment they were so terribly familiar that sweat broke out on my forehead.

Carefully I retreated into the dark. The woman’s hissing came again, loud and clear, and I realized I could understand it. Words were buried inside its peculiar cadence. Rhythmical words, like a monstrous lullaby, or a soothing self-annihilating qawwali.

Tariq Khan was gone. Sometime between the woman’s apparition and her whispering, the maestro’s song had stopped. The cavern was quiet, except when she murmured; her bone-white hands rose and settled on Shafi’s shoulders, drawing him close, and she was taller than he now.

“Anything for you, my love,” Shafi was saying, his arms encircling her waist even as she lowered her face to his, her pale skin glistening in the light. Drool fell from the corner of her mouth, snaked down Shafi’s cheeks, inflaming them. Hakim grinned wider and licked his lips. “Anything,” he said.

She wrapped herself around him, her arms, then legs, rising and coiling. Her weight staggered him for a moment, but he recovered and stood swaying as she hung from him, a giant spider, or a leech planted on his flesh. Her eyes burned, her lips never stopped moving. The light cascaded around their conjoined bodies, and I thought of giant cobras in sprawling fields playing with fireflies.

I must have cried out, for she lifted her head and gazed at me. Her eyes were green, like squeezed summer grass. Like strange planets roaming across a vast black cosmos reflecting light from dying suns. Like the sparkling jade-colored dress a king might have gifted his queen, come another spring.

She smiled dreamily at me, this marble-skinned woman, showing her fangs, and the terror in my heart was so great that I began to shake. Deranged thoughts raced through my mind: this is the queen the true white queen and up till now whatever we imagined about the world our world their world was a mote of dust licking its own tail in the tiniest sliver of light unaware of the biting dark stretched endless around it.

The pale woman jerked her head away. The spell broke. I wobbled and fell to the floor, hugging my chest. The Lady of the Stone kissed Shafi’s neck. Her lips parted and a torrent of sharp teeth, like nails from a nail gun, drove into his flesh.

Shafi never uttered a sound. Instead he closed his eyes, sighed, and began to pant.

He never stopped panting.

Even as his skin gurgled and fell away; as the venom softened him, reshaped his flesh, melted his face. As her legs fused at his back and her skin began to shed, a diamond-patterned second skin emerged from beneath. Her fingernails flailed, tore at Shafi, flayed him, unhooking his flesh from its burdensome wrapping, as the toxin congealed his blood and plugged the gashes. Her teeth and fingers roved and split, peeled and stretched, so that when she was done, Hakim Shafi was a pillar of clotted blood and liquefied bone pulsating with each beat of his encased heart.

The snakewoman paused. She examined her handiwork, angled her head, and opened her jaws. Wide, wider, stretch, expand, until her maw was a black gullet around which flared her spectacled, ribbed hood. Her mouth crackled and thrust and wrapped around Hakim’s bubbling head. His eyelids were gone, his pupils dull, and I saw he was still trying to smile.

Sahib, I . . . I cannot go on.

I need to breathe. I cannot breathe.

Inspector sahib, you sit there, smug.

You’re thinking to yourself that, at last beyond any shred of doubt, you know that this junkie, this peddler, this heroinchi, is mad.

A raving lunatic who murdered Hakim Shafi and secreted his body someplace so you never found it. You say to yourself, A little more, just a little more nonsense out of him for the Poison Men, and you can wrap it up and call it a night. Cold iron bars for the maniac with rats and vermin for company, and a warm bed for you and the subinspector, with perhaps your wives pressing your sore legs before you fall asleep.

You are wrong.

I know this now, sahib: Our world is not our own, it is borrowed. Sometimes it is shared and occasionally it’s taken and reshaped against the will of its possessors, but always briefly.

We heroinchies were mistaken. We are neither lovers nor children of the white queen. The real children of the true white queen are hidden, a tribe of men and women who have infiltrated our puny civilization. They lurk in shadows and come forth only at the call of their mistress.

Which is why I did what I did. Why I didn’t flee when they came out from the darkness that night, although I was terrified and half out of my mind. As the spawn of the white queen surged from the depths of that cavern, a tide of venomous children rushing toward the smoking pillar of blood that used to be Hakim Shafi, it came together in my head, and I realized my true purpose at last. I understood why God or whatever force it was saved me the night I died in the park.

The snakewoman’s translucent children licked and ripped and gorged on the lower half of Hakim Shafi; he was already waist-deep inside their mother’s maw. As his blood steamed, they chased the crimson smoke with their spade-shaped mouths and muzzles. They followed the blood vapors with their snouts and lapped the condensate. Their smacking, slurping sounds filled the green-lit cave and they pulled and dragged Hakim away, their mother still riding his head.

It took all my will to creep forward and grab the rosewood box when they were gone. It was slick with blood and slime. I tottered and nearly fell across the yards of snakeskin molted across the cavern’s floor: a squamous, gory, leathery thing that twitched like a lizard’s tail.

Trembling, I reached out and fingered its coiled edges. As the green light from the gravestone fell on it, the snakeskin blossomed, and etchings suddenly burst onto its surface: strange geometric patterns, jagged whorls, spiraling curlicues and scripts. An enchanted map borne of the white queen’s inhuman flesh. A primeval cosmos unfurled like a lotus dipped in blood. How the light made those secrets glow! Their mysteries burned into my eyes so everywhere I looked the universe was naked and serpentine, the light of the snake pearl limning those mysteries; and when I looked down, I saw the minuscule particles of my own skin shedding as I became something new and never known before.

I gasped at the enchantment, trying to understand it. The light twitched and the snakewoman’s hum wrapped around me. Love me, it said, Love me. Stay with me. I shall show you sights beauteous and teach you ways of embracing your astonishment. Worship me and you shall never want again, dream again, fear again. Not even your little boy.

And then there were too many faces in the cavern. They dripped from the ceiling, they draped the floor, they licked with blackened tongues the wounded skin of their mother. They poured down, and I dropped the snakeskin. They swarmed around me, dead and lolling, and I screamed.

Clutching the rosewood box, I whirled and ran. Back the way I came, up the dark corridor leading into this den of quietus, the domain of the Lady of the Stone with her green gem shining like a murderous beacon.

Before I fled into the tunnel, I turned for one last look and saw that what I had thought was a cave was really an ossuary. The walls were lined with skulls and bones, and the wetness of the granite was damp moss flourishing on snakeskins tautened across this ossified legion.

A yellow moon sickled the night clouds when I stumbled out from the postern door. Somewhere a cock crowed.

I gripped Hakim’s box and ran across the brick path through the shrine’s towers.

The qawwals and their audience were gone. Brass bowls, bottles, used needles, and crushed joints lay scattered where the stage was. I lurched between the cemented graves filled with sinners, my eyes aching with what I had seen. My stomach heaved. I think at one point I vomited on a grave, yanking at weeds and cemetery dandelions to wipe my mouth. Then I got up and labored onward, onward, until my lungs were on fire, and I collapsed on the banks of Uch Lake.

I must have lain there for hours. I dozed and dreamed, and in my dreams the river and the lake and all the oceans of the world were nothing but giant blue snakes wrapped around the earth. The moon and the sun were their alien eyes, the horizon the burning mottled flare of their hood supporting the heavens. Like the towers that raised the dome of Bibi Farida.

I thought of the maestro Tariq Khan and his band of qawwals and the town of Uch and the townsfolk. I thought of the little pale children I had seen at Hakim’s house and on my journey into the queen’s realm. Who watched Hakim? Who watched us all? I lay curled like a fetus and dreamed fetal dreams; and at some point I woke and went to the water and drank and opened the rosewood box. From it I took Shafi’s venom boxes, mixed the powders, and tossed fistfuls of them into the docile lake. Coppery red and black smoke drifted in the wind, blown across the lake’s surface, and I thought again of Shafi’s steaming offal billowing from the pillar of his petrified blood.

When the tins were empty, I looked inside the box and saw the sandstone necklace Shafi’s wife had left behind. I counted the stones and flung them into the lake as well. I went back to the guesthouse, where I gathered Shafi’s things, called a taxi, and left the wretched town of Uch. I had enough money to be taken to Sangchoor, a nearby town, and there, in a shabby motel, I hid and waited.

Two days later, news came that a hundred people, including a band of qawwals, had sickened from a mysterious epidemic in Uch. Five days later, the papers said, traces of potent poisons were found in the blood of some who died. Foul play was suspected.

A week later, the children of the white queen came for me.

It was a river of faces that flowed inside the walls of my motel room. I glimpsed them in the ceiling cracks, heard their chatter in the eaves, felt them thump against the windowpane. One night the torrent rushed at the glass, hit, and broke into a million poisonous children, tiny-limbed, gelid, and familiar. They exhaled fog on the glass. They wore faces that dissolved and reemerged. Last night they came for me again, and . . . and sahib, I was done. I was utterly exhausted.

Which was why I finally decided to come to your police station.

This is my story, sahib. Of a heroinchi courting a third death.

I see by both your and the subinspector’s eyes that you don’t know which part to believe. That I am mad and tried to murder a hundred people, half of them children, or that under the shrine of Babi Farida there breathes a different life. The paradox of my insanity doesn’t nullify either truth.

I am so cold, sahib. So cold. Just look at my arms; have you ever seen such hideous discoloration, such scales? I know what Hakim Shafi would say: I touched his poisons with my bare hands, but that is not it. Already I can feel my fingers shriveling, the skin becoming thick and cracked above the knuckles. Sometimes I have difficulty chewing, as if my jaws have become too big for my meals. My teeth feel so pointed they appear suited for entirely different purposes now. I would go to a doctor, but which antidote would they give me? I handled hundreds of those poisons, I handled her dead skin, and, well, only like can heal like. Her skin.

One was a hidden treasure that needed to be discovered. A goddess returned to her people.

I see your eyes. You think I killed them both, Shafi and her.

You’re standing up. Of course. You have to hand me over to the Poison Men. I do wonder how they found me this quickly. Perhaps a phone call from you? But how did you know I was wanted by them? How did the police inspector of Sangchoor know gangland members from the big cities wanted me?

I also wonder why their shadows look bloated and misshapen when they pass the window. Why they seem to be holding some kind of drum under their arms. It almost looks like a tabla.

In my mind, it’s so difficult to keep everything in order. I keep returning to the song the Serpent Queen sang. It warbles in my head, it whips my bones. Perhaps I shall hear it when they slice my throat. Her words—they come to me in my dreams, buried in that hissing cacophony. Magic words, ancient words, shards of glass in an ambrosial meal: