The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

Usman T. Malik feels his story, “In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro,” is “steeped in Lovecraftian influences. Ancient cosmic warfare, blood libations, hints of a world misaligned and warped — even as it surrounds the characters in the story, and irrupts into their puny lives as they struggle to understand it, and through it, perhaps themselves . . . this all strikes me as the essence of Lovecraftian horror. I intentionally stayed away from any of the Cthulhu Mythos to avoid pastiche; there are plenty of myths and legends in Indo-Pakistan that I could explore and subvert.”

Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and won a Bram Stoker Award. His work has appeared in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, The Year’s Best YA Speculative Fiction, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Tor.com, and The Apex Book of World SF among other venues.

In the Ruins of Mohenjo-Daro

Look for the ghost trees, memsaab, the college chowkidar had told Noor, grinning from ear to ear, and indeed the road to Mohenjo-Daro was lined with them. Rows of acacia, jand, and Indian lilac stood shrouded in clouds the color of steel filigree. Noor pressed her nose to the window, watching the treetops blur and disappear in the half-breathing ether. The November dawn was clear and without a hint of fog, but the strange gray clouds stretched amebic limbs in either direction mile upon mile as if the Sind riverbank was haunted by a limitless phantom coiling around the foliage. When the school bus sped past one such tree, the wind rush pulsed the specter until it filled with sunrise. Branches red-dark emerged in glistening veins.

Locust swarms, insect hordes, cotton candy — Noor’s brain groped for an explanation. Sunlight twitched in one of the cocooned trees and the illusion of giant blood corpuscles recurred. Noor’s vision misted; her temple sizzled. For a moment she feared the onset of a cluster headache. The last was two months ago just after she’d joined the cadet college and it had disabled her for two days. Now was not the time.

She stretched her neck from side to side, and flinched when Junaid touched her shoulder. The headache flared. Angrily she turned toward him. His starched white collar jutted into his neck. The striped red tie with the cadet college crest — crossed scimitars underlaid by pine boughs, surrounded by a half moon — looked uncomfortable, but he was beaming, brown eyes sharp and arrogant. He jabbed a stubby finger past her face.

“Spiders,” he said and widened his thin lips.

“Don’t touch me again,” Noor said, voice cold as glass. When he continued to grin, she looked to the roadside. White crab spiders — hundreds of them dangling in the gossamer mass blooming from the trees. Gently they swayed in the wind, milky beads studding the latticework — which she now realized was webbing.

“Have you seen any flies or mosquitoes since you came, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid’s hand rose crablike to sprawl on the headrest in front of her. “The locals told me this happened after all that flooding last year. Thousands of spiders took refuge in the trees.”

Out of the corner of her eye she watched him finger a strip of leather peeling off the seat. His nails were perfectly manicured. He tore off the strip, drew it into his mouth, and spoke around it, “Everyone was worried about malaria outbreaks. Guess the ghost trees took care of that,” and when Noor didn’t respond, “What? Don’t tell me you’re still angry.”

“I’m not,” she said sharply.

“Come now. It’s Eid. Let’s be festive and forgiving.” He was sitting next to her in a row three seats wide and his breath stirred the edge of her hijab. She edged closer to the window. He smiled and began to chew the leather strip. “Kids are watching. Have to be model teachers now, don’t we?”

Good point, asshole, she thought and closed her eyes. Another reason, other than his over-inflated ego, she’d spurned his advances since her arrival. Then again, this display of dickhood wasn’t limited to him. Many of the faculty — all male except for a quiet burkah-clad parttime lecturer, who disappeared as soon as her classes were over, and Tabinda who now sat left of Junaid in the third seat — took turns leering at her during morning assembly or talking down to her at lunch. Most were graduates of cadet colleges or military academies and had carried the attitude into their professional lives. That she taught English and not history or Islamiat hardened their stance for some reason.

Her students didn’t seem to care. Even though they were clearly not used to female teachers, her hijab gained her a bit of respect; something she’d seen frequently in this area. Part of the rural tradition, she supposed. Briefly she wondered how they would react if she whipped out Oxford jeans and long white shirts, her preferred dress back in her high school days in New Hampshire, instead of the plain shalwar kameez and dopatta she wore now.

She glanced at the boys. They’d set out raucous and excited at predawn, but the motion of the bus had lulled them and they were dozing in their seats. Twelve teenage cadets, heads back, eyes closed, athletic arms crossed over their chests or dangling off the armrest. Dara, the tall muscular kid with sharp green Pashtun eyes, was the only one awake and staring at her. She nodded to him. He raised his chin and looked away.

There’s another friend I made, Noor thought and covered the smile rising to her face with a hand.

About half past ten they entered Dokri. Junaid pointed out Cadet College Larkana to the boys as they passed it: a pink structure flanked by red brick wings and triangular arches opening onto the first- and second-floor classrooms. A cast iron gate blocked the driveway leading up to the school building.

“This is my alma mater. Hundreds of acres. Large grounds, lots of football and hockey fields,” Junaid announced. “We’ll stop here on the way back if you like.”

They left the town with its streets bustling with cloth merchants, laborers, and food vendors. Noor watched the last of the driver-hotels disappear in the distance and, as always when leaving a town, was filled with loneliness, an incomprehensible nostalgia she couldn’t displace no matter how hard she tried.

The feeling lasted until they stopped ten minutes later to fuel up at a small, peeling gas station, and the boys poured out to use the restroom and grab snacks from the mart. While Junaid and the bus driver chatted up the pump attendant, Noor slipped away. She stood behind a row of ghost cypresses and poplars along the riverbank and watched the smoke from her Marlboro Light spiral its way through the spider cocoon swaying above her. Dozens of insects hung dead or twitching in it. Hundreds of eyes glinted. If she reached out with her cigarette, could she set the whole thing ablaze?

“Quite a sight, isn’t it,” said a familiar voice.

Noor snuffed out the smoke on the bark of the nearest tree before turning. Tabinda leaned against a poplar, gazing thoughtfully at the water shining through gaps in the verdure.

“Cigarette?” Noor said. She’d never seen the professor smoke.

Tabinda smiled. She was a plump woman in her sixties with a bovine face and horn-rimmed glasses. Her teeth were rotten but her smile reached her eyes. “That shit you smoke? Nah.” She thrust a chubby hand at Noor as if offering to shake. “Look at my hand. Near the wrist. See where the two tendons join? It used to be easier to find when I was thinner, but can you see the dip in the skin?”

Noor looked at the concavity at the base of the woman’s thumb where it met the wrist. The skin was tinged orange, and paler compared to the dark brown surrounding it.

“That’s called the anatomical snuffbox.” Tabinda lowered her hand. “I used to snort real homegrown tobacco in my younger days, see? Place a pinch in there and snuff it right up. Quit about ten years ago when my doctor found a spot in my mouth. He took it out, biopsied it. Turned out it was pre-cancerous. And that was the end of that.” She nodded to herself and turned back to the river.

Noor watched the sun paint the woman’s cheek golden. They’d talked a few times before. Shared a few superficialities about families. Noor told her about her mother back in the U.S. and how long it had been since she had seen her; how difficult it was to live a translocated life. Tabinda told her about her marriage to a wife beater in Lahore and how she escaped by moving a thousand miles away to teach Pakistan Studies to this unruly military lot in Petaro. Commiserated about Noor’s transfer from Karachi to this “shit-hole town,” as she put it. She had a Punjabi accent and a nasal voice. Noor found it easy to like her; she was so jaded and sassy.

“Looking forward to exploring the ruins, Miss Hamadani?” said Tabinda.

“Noor, please.”

“Noor. Sorry. At my age it’s difficult to discard old habits. I’m used to calling all these men by last name.”

“Creates that distance, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Distance can be quite useful in this place,” Tabinda said, her eyes invisible from sun glare in her spectacles.

“When did you start working here?”

“Oh, about fifteen years ago.”

“The faculty didn’t . . . make you feel unwelcome?”

“Of course they did. That’s what men do. But I also try not to get in their way.”

The rebuke was subtle but unmistakable. Noor stared between the moss-covered trunks at the bus across the road. “What they were doing — it was wrong.”

“Bloodshed and sacrifice is a way of life here. Has been for centuries.”

“They don’t know any better,” Noor said. “I can’t stand the sight of blood, but that wasn’t why I stepped in. Teach kids to enjoy violence and they’ll carry that lesson to the grave.”

Tabinda laughed. The sound was deep-throated and made her jowls jiggle. “Half these cadets will be dead before they hit thirty. That’s the nature of their game. In their hearts they know it and it makes them arrogant.” She turned and walked toward the bus. She was agile for her age. Her voice carried back: “This has always been a land of heroes and monsters, Miss Hamdani. Here you pick your battles.”

A soft wind soughed through the spider cloud, making the dead shudder. Insect dust pattered down on Noor’s shoulders. She brushed it away. You’re wrong, she wanted to say. This is exactly how it begins. Hand them a weapon and tell them to man up and that’s the way to the mother lode of horror.

But of course she said nothing.

She had come upon them by accident the day before during her morning walk. The boy’s name was Abar and he was holding the trussed goat down with his knees digging into its well-fed side. Two other boys Noor didn’t know joined him, each squatting to hold the goat’s legs firmly. The animal — one of the beautiful tall Rajanpur breed with spotted ears and a milky body — bleated and thwacked its head on the bleached summer grass under the Kikar acacia. The sight made Noor’s blood pound and she found herself stomping toward the trio.

“Hey,” she called across the football field. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The two newcomers flinched as boys will on hearing a teacher’s voice and looked up. Abar just smiled and jerked the goat’s head back by the ears.

“Sir Junaid’s orders,” he yelled and positioned the slaughter knife across the animal’s throat. The blade glinted silver. It threw a dancing shadow across the green and Noor’s vision rippled. For a moment she didn’t know where she was, and anger swept over her.

“Put that goddamn knife down. Now!” She was only ten feet away and her voice boomed in the narrow grove of trees dividing the football and hockey grounds. The newcomers dropped the goat’s legs and sprinted away, but Abar didn’t move. He pressed the animal’s head down, an ugly grimace of anger and effort on his face.

“What’s the matter, Miss Hamdani?” Junaid had materialized from behind the grove of trees. In his hands he held half a dozen steel skewers, a chopping knife, and a cutting block. Without taking his eyes off Noor, he set these next to the acacia and mopped his brow dramatically. “How can we help you on this fine Eid day?”

“Did you ask the boys to do this?”

“Do what?”

“Slaughter animals on their own?”

He lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise. “Yes.”

“Why? Where’s the butcher?”

“Sick. Off duty. Does it matter? It’s sunnah to slaughter your own animals, isn’t it?” He grinned at her. He had what her dad used to call a copstash mustache: a thick wad of hair that bristled at either end. With his crew cut hair it made him look like a thug.

“Tell me again what the Prophet said about teaching mercy.”

He pointed at the bleating goat. “That is mutton. You eat it every day—”

“I’m vegan!”

“—and today’s Eid. Someone has to slaughter the animal to commemorate Ibraham’s gratitude to God for sparing his son’s life. It could’ve been Ismael under that knife. Then we’d all be in a boatload of trouble sacrificing our sons and all, wouldn’t we? All I’m doing is teaching our glorious cadets to do it themselves. Very important, learning to steel your heart.”

She wanted to punch him. “They’re kids! They need to learn kindness before cruelty.”

His eyes were chips of hot mica. “Not my cadets. Not in these times. And this is not cruelty.” He placed the skewers crisscross on the wooden block. “It’s necessity.”

Helpless, Noor glanced at Abar. The boy was smiling, a cold twisting sneer that was frighteningly familiar. The feeling of unreality, of red-hot memory, resurged. Noor turned and strode away, blinking away the warmth in her eyes. Behind her rose the chant “In the name of God . . .” and the animal was screaming, a loud gargling sound. If she kept walking, Noor thought, she could outpace the sound. Walk away before steam rises from the animal’s throat in the winter air, before the red curtain drops in front of her eyes and the strange staring faces emerge . . . one of which will be Muneer’s. Always his.

As she fled, the sound was cut off suddenly.

Then there was chopping.

Through a thicket of trees they trundled into the low-lying areas of Mohenjo-Daro. The Sind River curled a blue finger around the plateau in the distance. Tabinda pointed out dull squat structures that formed the mounds on the ruins’ outskirts.

“Pariahs lived in some of these,” she said.

The museum at Mohenjo-Daro was a solid red brick building with life-sized bronze replicas of ancient relics flanking its entrance. Two hundred meters away in the desolate sprawl of the ruins the Buddhist stupa rose from the giant mound like a skin-colored tumor. Junaid and Tabinda disembarked to set up a picnic lunch, leaving Noor and the cadets to hurry into the museum.

“Had you come in spring,” said the curator, “it would’ve taken you eight hours to get here from the college. You chose wisely. But, still, this late?”

Noor fingered the seated Priest-King statuette the curator had been showing the class, a tiny resin replica with pressed lips, closed eyes, and a gouged nose. A crack ran down its forehead to the left cheek. “Why? What happens in spring?”

The curator glanced at the wall clock. It was quarter past eleven. He scratched the crab-shaped mole on his cheek. “The Sarwar Fair. Hundreds of pilgrims from villages all over the Indus Valley converge on the saint’s tomb in the Baluchistan hills. They travel by foot and donkey carts and often clog up the roads all the way from Dadu to Sukkar. The soil of Sind is filled with miracles and magic.” His gaze didn’t leave the clock.

Noor placed the resin figure back on the counter. “What time does the museum close?”

The man sighed. He was short and swarthy, dressed in a checkered ajrak shirt, white shalwar, and an embroidered Sindi cap. His nametag said Farooq. As he looked at the mass of teenage boys loitering about the lobby, distaste crept into his face. “Now.”

“It’s not even noon.”

“It’s Eid. We’re usually closed for the holidays. I made an exception for the cadet college because I was told we’d be done by ten.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. They had been delayed at a military checkpoint in Dadu. Apparently a suicide blast had occurred at a small mosque in the outskirts of Khairpur, killing an elderly woman and her two grandchildren. The area was flooded by police and army personnel; checkpoints had been established at various junctures from Larkana all the way to their college at Petaro. The military was worried about a follow-up attack. Junaid said he wasn’t surprised. Most terrorist attacks happened in double strikes, a well-known MO used by the Taliban as well as the CIA (where they used drones for warfare).

“Sorry,” she said to Farooq who was fingering his mole, “but we traveled a long way for this. Most cadets go home during holidays, but they,” she pointed at the boys peering at a representation of the famous bronze Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro and rows of clay urns lining the glass cases, “had no one to take them. Either their families are away or they have no families. So a few of us volunteered—”

“Yes, yes.” Farooq waved his hand impatiently. “Spare me heartbreaking accounts of army orphans. I’ll give you a quick tour. Is this your entire party? Where’s Ms. Tabinda? She’s the one who called me.”

Noor glanced to the exit. Junaid and Tabinda were setting up lunch. She felt guilty that she couldn’t help with such chores; her inability to speak Sindi prevented communication with the bus driver whose Urdu was rudimentary. She wished the older professor could at least take the tour. The Mohenjo-Daro trip was her idea.

“Seems like we’re the only ones for now.”

Farooq nodded glumly. “This way then. We’ll start with the Memories of the Ancients display.”

She nudged the cadets and they followed him up the northern corridor.

His voice echoed as they passed through an arched doorway into a long hall flanked by glass cabinets on either side. “Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Indus Valley are the three earliest civilizations of the Old World — China came later — and all, of course, developed along water bodies. We used to believe they evolved and thrived in isolation, but now we know that Indus Valley and Mesopotamia traded with each other for centuries.” He pointed left and right at carnelian necklaces, sculptures, gemstone beads, ivory combs, and brass containers with traces of herbal collyrium.

Noor’s belly cramped suddenly. Period pains? But she wasn’t due for another week. It would explain the headache she had earlier that morning. Wincing, she rubbed her abdomen.

“Discovered in 1922 by an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India, Mohenjo-Daro is thought to have been the most important city of the Indus Valley Civilization. Spread out over two hundred and fifty acres on a series of mounds, its heyday was from 2500 to 1900 BC. It was suddenly abandoned then. No one knows why.”

Noor glanced over her shoulder. The kids looked suicidally bored. They drifted behind her, listless, eyes glazed. The Pashtun boy, Dara, had his nose pressed against a cabinet, palms splayed against the glass, but she thought his reflected green stare was fixed on her. His biceps bulged on either side of his head.

“A Buddhist monastery was discovered atop the city’s main citadel. You can still see the stupa. We don’t know why the builders decided to erect it there hundreds of years after the city was abandoned, but most of Mohenjo-Daro still lies underground. The mounds grew organically over centuries as people built platforms and walls for their houses. The name Mohenjo-Daro means ‘Mounds of the Dead’ in Sindi.”

Farooq waved at a ceiling-high stucco wall covered with black-andwhite and sepia photographs. A flicker of interest went through the cadets. They crowded around aerial and ground views of the ruins.

Noor had seen these in slideshows Tabinda put on before the trip. She went to Dara who hadn’t moved. He edged left to allow her to lean against the cabinet. This close, he was taller than her. He smelled of sweat and cologne.

“I’m sorry about the other day,” she said in a low voice. “I didn’t mean to barge in on you two like that.”

The tips of Dara’s brown ears darkened. She could see the tension in his bunched neck and shoulder muscles.

“And here,” boomed the curator’s voice, “is the most famous statue found in Mohenjo-Daro. You might have seen the Priest-King’s picture in textbooks on Indus Civilization. This is a detailed replica made from a mold of the real thing kept in the National Museum in Karachi.”

“It’s okay. Really,” Noor told Dara. The boy’s fingers had closed over the edge of the cabinet. “I won’t tell anyone. Some of my friends back in the US were like you. One of them was bullied and ended up struggling with depression for years. I hated that.” Her gaze went to the cadets gathered around the pictures. What would they do if they found out about this kid or his friend currently away during winter break? She didn’t want to imagine. Seized by instinct, she lifted the corner of her hijab and hissed at him, “We all have secrets. Look.”

He didn’t turn to face her, but his eyes flicked in her direction. They widened when he saw her left shoulder.

“Some think the Priest-King is neither a king nor a man. Some believe this is in fact a woman of considerable importance to the people of Mohenjo-Daro. A high priestess or maybe a eunuch who led their religious rituals.”

“We all have secrets,” Noor said again. Dara looked at her with wary eyes. He was a quiet backbencher, rarely said a word. His grades were average. She used to wonder if he was slow.

She dropped her hijab into place.

Dara rapped a knuckle against the glass, and his eyes were green fires. “You don’t know anything,” he whispered fiercely, turned, and fled down the hall.

She watched him go, then walked back to join the cadets peering at something in a glass case. Farooq glanced up as she approached.

“So glad you could join us.” He adjusted the Sindi cap on his head. “I was just telling this young man about seal thirty-four. Dr. Gregory Fossel of University of Pennsylvania believes it represents a sacrifice ritual. Care to listen in?”

She watched him unlock the case and withdraw two artifacts. In one hand he held a reproduction of the tan soapstone seal. The boys murmured and jostled to get closer. A tall angular deity with a horned headdress and bangles on both arms stood atop a fig tree. With a gleeful face it looked down on a kneeling worshipper.

Nearby was a small stool on which lay a human head.

“Seal thirty-four is taken as evidence by some that human sacrifice was practiced as a fertility rite in this region. Similar to such offerings to Kali in certain parts of India.”

Noor looked at the seal. Below the kneeling worshipper were a giant ram and seven figures in procession. They wore single-plumed headdresses, bangles, and long skirts. The sight chilled her; it was so brutal and somber. Her belly cramped again.

“Dr. Fossel, however, has argued that the presence of Pashupati’s seal,” Farooq held up the stone in his other hand. It showed a naked figure with three grim faces and ram horns seated on a stool surrounded by deer, rhinoceros, and elephants, “means that the people of Indus had the option to proffer animals as substitute for humans.”

“Pashupati?” Someone chortled. Noor glanced up. It was Abar, the boy who had slaughtered the goat on Junaid’s orders. He had a malicious grin on his face. “What kind of faggot name is that?” He elbowed a friend.

“One of Shiva’s names.” The curator glared at him. “His incarnation as the Lord of Beasts.”

Both boys burst out laughing. A few others smiled uneasily.

“That’s enough,” Noor told the boys. Giggling, they strolled down the hall. “Sorry about that,” she said to Farooq.

His face was pinched and red. “That’s the sort of kids we’re raising now. Forget it. It’s closing time anyway.” He muttered something inaudible and led them back to the lobby.

At the exit, Noor flashed a smile and said, “Thank you for the tour. Very educational.”

He nodded and began to shut the door.

“Every place has its secret flavor,” Noor said through the door opening. “Here’s a question I always ask curators and guides.” She touched his sleeve and smiled brightly. “Tell us one thing about the site you normally wouldn’t tell visitors.”

He looked at her with a cocked eyebrow. “Lady, you’re not from Sind, are you?”

“Not a difficult observation, I guess, but why do you say that?”

“A local wouldn’t ask me that question.” His gaze went over her shoulder. Past the verdigris-laced brass statue of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro with an emaciated hand on her hip at the entrance, across the rocky slope. He stared at the citadel mound visible from the museum steps. “What does it matter? I’ll tell you two things,” he said, lowering his voice. “First: on the Day of the Goat, no one from Larkana district will stay in these ruins past dusk. Not even the watchman.”

“The Day of the Goat?”

“Second—” His eyes gleamed in the doorway. Incessantly he picked at his mole until a drop of blood appeared below its twisted, spidery shape. “Why don’t you ask Ms. Tabinda about devil glass? Ask her why she and her crew stopped the restoration dig here in 2001.”

“What?” Noor stared at him, but he was already stepping back in, slamming the door, slipping the bolts, and she was left on the doorstep with her cadets milling noisily about her.

They dipped sheermal in chicken-and-lentil soup and chased it down with yogurt lassi. Junaid described the strategic importance of the site’s location near a body of water, but no one was interested. The cadets were restless; they wanted to explore. Noor’s eyes were riveted on Tabinda who was quietly munching a piece of bread, her gaze never far from the ruins.

A cold wind followed them up the dusty gravel path winding between the citadel mound and lower town. Two miles west of the citadel was lush farmland. Odd that no human dots speckled the furrowed fields. They hadn’t seen any ox carts, motor bikes, or bicycles on the road leading into the city either. Noor assumed the laborers and farmhands had taken the day off for Eid. Her belly had settled and she felt more cheerful.

The farmland was separated from the salty sediment of the ruins by a levee. Tabinda said this was reinforced every year to help control the annual flooding.

“Not that it always works. Last year heavy floods topped the levees and brought the white crab spiders out.” She smiled. “The locals fear those spider trees, let me tell you. They think them a terrible omen.”

“Omen? Of what?”

“Apparently there’s a folktale about demon cattle that feed on the leaves of such trees. Some time ago Karachi University published a survey showing that in certain years coinciding with old Sindi lunar calendars, animal sacrifice activity intensifies in this region.” Tabinda rubbed her knuckles. “The fact that the floods nearly destroyed the site last year doesn’t help ease their minds about evil forewarnings.”

She was correct about the damage. By now the city proper had closed around them like a bony fist and the narrow alley they walked was flanked by massive crumbling buildings topped with mud slurry for preservation. Windows gaped in the brick houses laid in a perfect grid. Some houses with exterior staircases that led to the second floor had chipped and eroded steps. The city’s smell hit Noor — salinity and dust, floodwater and age — and for a moment she felt as if she were falling, collapsing inside a claustrophobic funnel down into nothing. The feeling passed, leaving her slightly dizzy.

The cadets began to meander. A few headed to the alley leading up to the citadel mound. Noor let Junaid uselessly attempt to herd them together and strode to catch up with the elderly professor walking briskly as ever.

“You didn’t tell me you used to be an archaeologist,” she said.

Tabinda frowned. She was holding a palm against her mouth, two fingers pinching her nostrils. The edges of her eyelids behind her spectacles were pink. “I hate this weather. Winter brings out all my allergies.” She sneezed and rubbed her nose. “I’m not an archaeologist. I assume Farooq told you something. The man couldn’t keep his mouth shut if you sealed it with mortar.”

She went up a stone staircase and lowered herself onto a platform jutting from the roof. Noor sat down beside her.

“He said you were involved with a dig here.”

“Yes. As consultant anthropologist. Greg Fossel and I were working on restoring parts of the site’s drainage system. You’d be surprised how extensive it was. One wondered why they went to such lengths for a city this small.” She dangled her legs back and forth, her face thoughtful. “Then again, most of it remains underground according to sonar sweeping.”

“Why’d you stop?”

Tabinda patted the edge of the platform. “Circumstances.”

Together they gazed at the ruins sprawling around them. In the lower part of the city between copses of trees and rocks was more evidence of water damage: caving walls, piles of broken masonry, weathered facades. Here and there the rubble twinkled.

Noor said, “What did Farooq mean about devil glass?”

The professor’s black eyes were glazed and inward. “Vitrified pottery of course. Sediment and relics turned to ceramic glass by extreme temperatures.”

“I don’t understand.”

Tabinda laughed. The sound echoed in the alleys, as if it came from within the ruins. “Why would you want to? It’s only of interest to old farts like me.” She rose and made her way to the staircase.

“Why did he call it devil glass?”

Tabinda stood at the top step, her silhouette dark and bloated against the sun. She seemed to be transfixed by the ruins again. Behind her the stupa and the citadel mound thrust against a desolate winter sky empty of birds.

“When the site was first discovered,” she said in a flat voice, “the excavators found piles of glass spherules and silica chunks like those found in Libya and the Sahara. In some places large craters were present. It was assumed that either meteor impact or plasma discharges from lightning had melted the minerals. Fused soil into glass. None of which, of course, explains the hundreds of human skeletons lying bleached in the streets and alleys on top of the glass heaps.”

“What?” Noor pushed herself up from the edge. Two streets away one of the cadets was pissing in the shadow of the ancient wall, his shalwar pooled around his ankles. She couldn’t tell who. She wanted to yell at him, but the urge was gone as suddenly as it had come. “God. What killed them?”

“Who knows?” Tabinda turned to face her. She shrugged, but did something flicker in the dark of her eyes? Noor couldn’t be sure. “Carbon dating approximated it happened around the same time the site was abandoned. The city didn’t recover from the catastrophe. Whoever killed those people killed the entire civilization.”

A gust of wind swept Noor’s hijab back and she stepped away from the platform, chilled and uneasy. Tabinda’s fists were clenched by her sides.

She said whoever, not whatever, Noor thought.

“What happened here in 2001? Come on. You obviously have bad memories.”

“We lost three men. All superstitious laborers. One went mad and threw himself off the top of the citadel, smashing his head on the rocks. He was already disturbed, we were told. Another just disappeared. The third tried to kill Fossel and was shot and killed by one of the watchmen.” Tabinda shivered. “It was a dark year. And I had such nightmares.”

She gave Noor a tired smile. For the first time Noor noticed a mild droop to the left of her face. An old stroke or nerve palsy? The crease of flesh between her nose and lips was flat.

“So I left. Went back to Petaro. Rejoined the cadet college. I haven’t looked back since.” Tabinda pushed her spectacles up her nose, squinted, then pointed with a pudgy finger. Junaid was walking toward them, waving both hands. His arms looked strange and loose from up here, kameez sleeves ballooning and fluttering like desert birds.

Noor hesitated, then said, “He probably wants us to start gathering the boys. We should leave.” Her stomach and flanks tingled. An insistent pressure surged through her lower abdomen. Early, but this was it, no doubt about it now. And she didn’t even have pads.

Together they descended the stairs into the lengthening shadows of the city. Noor glanced at her watch. It was three in the afternoon.

Junaid finally caught up with them, panting and shaky. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?” he demanded, glaring at Tabinda.

“My purse is in the bus,” she said. “Why?”

“We were just about to call the boys,” Noor said.

He shook his head. “No. I don’t want to create a situation.”

“What?”

His face was pale. “Colonel Mahmud just called me. There was a terrorist attack at Cadet College Larkana. At least fifty armed men stormed the premises.”

“In Dokri?” Noor’s hand went to her mouth. “But we were just there this morning. Oh my God. Are people hurt?”

“Ten dead, and they’re holding the surviving cadets and teachers hostage. Two military contingents just left for the town. But that’s not the worst of it. Army’s got word that a twin attack’s been planned on Petaro as well. They’re targeting cadet schools for maximum reportage.” His manicured fingers rubbed his throat. “Mahmud doesn’t want us to return. He wants us to stay here and go to the army base in Sukkar when possible.”

“Sukkar?” Tabinda’s voice was full of incredulity. “That’s a hundred and fifty kilometers away. How will we get past Dokri? The road to Sukkar goes through the city!”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” His voice was getting louder and a pair of cadets turned their heads.

“Lashkir-e-Jhangvi?” Tabinda said in a low voice.

“No. Pakistani Taliban.”

“How far to Sukkar if we go south first and take a detour?” Noor said.

Junaid’s nostrils flared. “Four hours by bus.”

So at least ten to twelve on foot? She imagined trudging on the cracked, unpaved road under a moonless sky as night fell and surrounded them on all sides. The thought was unpleasant and ridiculous and she pushed it away. They had a bus and a bus driver, and these were cadets, not kindergarten kids.

“Did you talk to the driver?” Tabinda said. “What did he say?”

“He wants to leave. He knows the area well and says he could take back roads, but, look, the problem is the goddamn Taliban.” He spat in the dust. “They have spies everywhere. Until it’s certain the townsfolk won’t snitch on us, Mahmud doesn’t want us to leave Mohenjo-Daro. There is an airstrip five kilometers west of here. Worst case: if the hostage situation doesn’t clear up, he can call for a large chopper to airlift us out.”

Stuck in the ruins. Noor cast a glance at Tabinda. Her face was a mask.

Junaid sounded distracted. “It’s cold but there are blankets in the bus, and food, and I can get a fire going. We’ll tell the boys it’s an Eid bonfire. Dammit,” he said through gritted teeth. “I want to be there with the rangers. Larkana’s my school!”

“Our first responsibility is to the students, don’t you think?” Tabinda said. “Besides, you wouldn’t leave two women alone with a dozen kids in this place, would you?”

His fingers tugged at his mustache. The ends bristled. “I guess not.”

“Good. We need to be calm and think this through.”

“Don’t tell me to be calm. I am calm.”

“Of course you are,” Tabinda said speaking each word slowly and Noor looked at her again. The professor had steel in her eyes. Her lips twitched when she smiled at Junaid. “Tell you what, see the citadel mound? It used to be a giant communal bath for the city. There’s a rocky grotto right below it. Good place for a fire pit. Why don’t you get it going there? I have chickpeas and nuts. We can roast ’em and tell ghost stories and pretend we’re on a camping trip.”

Junaid’s eyes were riveted on Tabinda. The panic had left his face and that mean, arrogant look had returned. “Don’t be fucking condescending, you hear me?” He swiveled on his heel and stalked off toward the bus.

Tabinda watched him go, then turned to Noor. Her cheeks were blanched, the facial droop more pronounced. “This is bad.”

“Yes.”

“This is very bad,” Tabinda said and licked her lips. “We shouldn’t be here after dusk.”

Again that feeling, that sensation of her mind separating from her flesh and eddying down a dusty funnel. Noor’s head blazed, pain streaking through her like a dull saw. Dizzy and nauseated, she shot out a hand to clutch a nearby wall.

“. . . okay?” Tabinda was saying.

Noor leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “I think so.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” She tried to control her breathing and it whistled down her throat. “I get cluster headaches sometimes. Maybe it’s my period triggering it.” She massaged her temples with both hands. Her right eye was beginning to water. “What’re we gonna tell the kids?”

“I don’t know. We’ll think of something. Let’s go before they think the city ate us alive.”

They trudged between the battered walls, corralling boys along the way. Noor noticed something odd: it felt as if there were more kids dashing, jumping, peering out from behind tall uneven walls and skidding through the dust than a mere dozen. Other tourists? She hadn’t seen any vehicles except for the site watchman’s Honda bike lolling on a rusty kickstand in the gravel lot. Certainly the two figures — so tall their heads brushed against the doorframe — who goggled at her from one of the houses then danced back into the gloom — were not their boys.

She rubbed her watering eye and continued walking until they reached the bus. Junaid and the bus driver, Hamid, were talking. They fell silent when the cadets approached, but Noor didn’t miss the uneasiness in the driver’s face and the way he muttered when he thought no one was looking his way.

“Is Hamid from around here?” she asked Tabinda as the kids settled around the heap of firewood.

“The driver? Don’t know. Why?”

“Just wondering. He didn’t seem too keen on staying here tonight.”

“Tell him to join the club,” Tabinda said dryly. She was squatting next to the Pashtun boy, Dara, her back to the citadel’s eastern wall. The structure towered above them, its shadow pawing the network of alleys that branched and twisted into the city’s labyrinthine heart. They were shelling chickpeas and walnuts and tossing the husks inside a metal bowl. Dara had wandered over after Noor and Tabinda cleared broken masonry and stones from the excavated grotto and volunteered to help. He kept his eyes away from Noor’s, but she was glad to see him.

She looked across the plateau toward the bus parked by a clump of rocks in the visitor lot and was startled to discover how dusk had whittled the day down to an unsettling purple. The shadows were long and jagged. She could hardly make out the driver carrying stacks of blankets from the bus. He and Junaid had roused the cadets into two wood scavenging teams, and they had piled acacia and poplar twigs crisscross with kindling on top. Noor doubted it would last more than a few hours, but it was better than nothing. Most boys had college sweaters on anyway — navy blue cardigans — and blankets would serve the rest. The remains of the picnic basket had been spread out. Kinnows and apples. Raw peanuts, walnuts, and channa chickpeas all ready to be roasted. Really they were all set to face the cold night.

So why this uneasiness in her body? Her bones felt knobby and sharp against the stony ground, her limbs filled with tar.

Junaid knelt down by them. “Is your phone working?” he said in a low voice.

“What do you mean?” Tabinda said.

“Is your damn phone working? I can’t reach Mahmud.”

Tabinda flicked a peanut shell into the bowl and pulled her Nokia out. She peered at it, raised it high, and frowned. “That’s strange. I have no signal bars.”

“Me neither. I can’t reach anyone.”

“Weather, you think?”

Junaid lifted a hand and rubbed his cheek. “It’s not raining and there’s no storm.”

Tabinda’s eyes widened. “No!”

Junaid nodded miserably.

“What?” Noor said.

Junaid looked at Dara, who was quietly peeling nuts, and got up. Noor understood. Rubbing her hands together, she rose and followed him until they were a safe distance away.

“They blew up the signal towers,” Junaid said without preamble.

Noor stared at him. “What?”

Junaid bent his knee and placed a boot against the jagged edge of the house behind him. “Cellular base stations. The closest is in Dokri with a network of small booster towers along the way. I’ll bet you anything most of them are gone. Which means the fighting is closer than I thought.” He sagged a little. “We’re stuck here unless they send an air carrier. Or we can drive back.”

“You’re suggesting it?”

“No! We don’t know what’s going on out there. This place is safer at the moment.”

Noor opened her mouth, closed it. Her gaze went to the vast, empty buildings towering above her. It was quite dark now, the sun just a blood smear on the horizon, and the houses of Mohenjo-Daro pressed together. Broken platforms poked and plunged unevenly; black and formless holes gaped in the walls. Above, an icteric moon sat distorted by a low cloudbank, its light not a promise, but mere possibility.

“We’ve got to tell the kids now.”

“Yes.”

Noor shifted her weight; the icy evening wind cut through her kameez and woolen shawl. She shivered. Her abdomen tensed. She hadn’t begun bleeding yet, but she would soon.

“Let’s get it over with,” she said.

They returned to the bonfire. The cadets gathered around and listened to Junaid. Their faces were shocked and delighted by this new excitement. Spend the night in the ruins! Eagerly they asked how long the trouble would last.

“I don’t know yet.” Junaid shook his head. “We’ll just have to be patient.”

They left the boys chattering and walked to the bus where Hamid the bus driver was talking with the site watchman, a bald paunchy man with a pockmarked face. The watchman swept a hand toward the mounds and it triggered another round of debate between the two.

“What’s going on?” Noor said.

Hamid lifted his head. He was tall and very gangly, features chiseled and filed by many summers spent in this unforgiving land. He wore a khaddar chador around his shoulders in the fashion of northern Pashtuns. He stared at Noor through narrowed, kohl-lined eyes, then turned to Junaid and spoke rapidly in Sindi.

“What’s he saying?”

Junaid pressed his hands together. Slowly he began to crack his knuckles. “He says the watchman wants us to leave. He’s leaving as well and won’t be back for three days.”

The museum curator was right. The locals didn’t linger here on . . . what had Farooq said? The Day of the Goat. Noor looked at Tabinda who was studying the darkening sky.

“Why?”

“Superstition. They don’t like this place at night.”

The watchman muttered something and even in the moonlight Noor saw color drain from the bus driver’s face. He whispered to Junaid who spoke back angrily. Two cadets who’d followed them here giggled.

“Chario Hamid. Geedi Hamid,” they cried.

Noor knew geedi. They were calling him a coward. Hamid turned and yelled at them and they laughed and ambled away. Noor didn’t like the sound of that laughter; it had a tinge of hysteria about it. Hamid and the watchman stood together, shoulder to shoulder, their faces stubborn and scared.

“Maryal suyyji waya ahein ayyh raat,” said the watchman. Hamid flinched and began to murmur what sounded like a prayer.

“Will you please tell me what they’re saying?” Noor hissed at Junaid.

“Rubbish.” He pulled out his cellphone and looked at the corner of the screen and grimaced. “The dead swell here tonight,” he muttered. “What fucking nonsense.”

The cold was making Noor’s skin tingle. She glanced at Tabinda. She was looking away from the confrontation at the rows of dilapidated buildings ancient and silent on the plateau. Hamid said something and Junaid snapped at him. The driver threw up his hands. The watchman closed his fist and flung all his fingers out at Junaid, a gesture Noor understood without need for translation: go to hell. Then he turned and disappeared behind the mounds.

Hamid glared at the three of them, spat something out in Sindi and climbed into the bus. He turned the key and began to rev the accelerator.

“Is he leaving?” Noor said, alarmed.

Junaid’s face was furious and helpless. “Yes. He’ll leave without us if we don’t go now. We’ve got to gather everyone.”

The fire was guttering out when they got back to the boys. Burning wood crackled and orange flames edged with black turned the cadets’ faces sly and shadowy when Junaid announced they were leaving.

“We can’t go yet,” said one in a gruff voice, a freckled rat-faced boy named Tabrez whom Noor recognized as part of Abar’s posse. “We need to wait.”

“What do you mean?” Junaid said sharply. “Wait for whom?”

The boy popped a handful of roasted chickpeas into his mouth. Crunched them. “They said they had read about a secret room in the ruins. Went treasure hunting . . . Abar and Raheem.” Seeing Junaid’s aghast expression, he smiled sweetly and added: “Don’t worry. They have torches and shovels.”

A mile from the city proper, in a narrow ditch between two rocks, Noor undid her nala string, lowered the shalwar, and squatted. She put a hand between her legs, brought it out, and, stared at the viscous stain glisten in the flashlight’s glow.

Blood.

The smell was stronger than usual. Fishy. Perhaps it was the air down here. She wiped her hand carefully on the rock, leaving a handprint with beetles squirming in the digits, and let the flow abate. She finished up with paper napkins and bottled water, then rose and stood watching the dot of fire amidst the mounds, one finger scratching beneath her hijab.

She had shown Dara her scars, the raw pink-white ridges coiling serpentine around her collarbone and left shoulder. The thought filled her with amazement at her own daring. She’d never shown them to anyone, not even cheery, gentle Mark with whom she spent one night in Hanover before she left for Pakistan. Her lawyer had appealed for repatriation and to everyone’s surprise — most of all, her own — succeeded. She supposed it made sense. She’d never been charged and couldn’t just be guilty by association. Regardless, it was a frightening time, the last of her teenage years.

Mark. God, she hadn’t thought about him in a decade, although in the beginning he was all Noor could think about. They had met at rehab soon after they released her. She was required to attend weekly sessions while arrangements were made. Mark was bipolar. Noor was benighted by despair. Terrified of what her past held and what the future might bring. They had made love in darkness, his lips pressed to her neck, the comforting smells of his hair and his body and his seed caustic to her senses; and if he noticed the roughness of her flesh or was dismayed by how she sobbed afterwards, clutched her clothes, and fled never to return, well, he did not call to ask about it.

The night wind gusted, making Noor shiver. She patted her hijab, tucked her kameez into place, and walked back to rejoin the group huddling by the fire.

Junaid crouched on his haunches. He held a lighter in one hand and a newspaper roll in the other. He clicked the wheel and a flame sprouted between his fingers. A red-hot tongue of fire whooshed to life and began to devour the paper.

“Did you find them?” Noor said.

He shook his head. “It’s a big place. They could be hiding anywhere. Although, when I do,” he gritted his teeth, thrust the burning roll into the dwindling flames, and stirred the cinders with a twig. “I’ll beat them to a pulp, I swear.” The fire shuddered in his eyes.

They had reached a compromise with Hamid: he would leave the bus behind, in case it turned freezing cold, and hitch a ride with the watchman to Baner, the nearest town. There, he’d try to contact and update Colonel Mahmud on their situation as well as find out details of the confrontation between the military and the militants.

“I really wish you would all come with me,” he had told Junaid in Sindi before hopping on the bike, but that was impossible. Abar and Raheem were still missing.

“Mr. Junaid,” one of the cadets said. “May we have some more sheermal? We’re hungry.”

“In a bit,” he said, then whispered to Tabinda, “How much food is left?”

“Another meal. Maybe two if we’re stingy. We didn’t prepare for this.” She raised her palms to the fire, then shouted, “Who wants to tell ghost stories?”

“Me,” called someone, and another muttered, “Dork.”

They told stories. Gathered around the flames, ignoring the thrumming black, cold licking their flesh, they gushed out tall tales that became stranger and stranger:

A silent ugly schoolboy bullied by his classmates is wrestled and stripped and thrown to the ground. He turns into a horned beetle, burrows into the earth. Returns night after night as a monstrous insect with a boy’s face peering into his tormentors’ windows, tapping and chirping, until they go mad from lack of sleep.

A man on a lonely mountain road comes upon a goat, decides to steal it and carry it home — only to find the animal growing heavy on his back, its limbs elongating, cleft hooves dropping until they dangle an inch above the ground. The thief throws the animal off and flees, and monstrous laughter chases him all the way home.

The soot-covered raven man flitting from tree to tree in a Hindu cremation ground.

The pregnant woman in the bushes with snake tresses and backward feet.

A knot of wood exploded in the fire and an ember landed between Noor’s legs, startling her. She toed it out with her sneaker, shook the stiffness from her back. She opened her mouth to ask if anyone wanted another blanket. “I know a good one,” she said instead, and blinked with surprise.

They turned, fire-lit faces pale and somber. Eyes rheumy from smoke and ash stared at her.

“My mother was a teacher at an Ashkenazi Jewish center in America,” she said. Her pulse was pounding in her throat. “She told me the story of the Sent Goat. It scared me witless as a child. Have you heard it?”

They shook their head.

“In the old days, the Israelites performed a rite called the se’ir mishtale’ach on the Day of Atonement. Two goats were selected in a ceremony. Healthy, unblemished specimens. Lots were drawn over them: on one was written ‘Lord’, on the other ‘Azazel.’ The goat whose lot drew ‘Lord’ was slaughtered immediately as redemption for the nation’s crimes that year. The other . . .” She looked around the campfire, at their reddened, glassy eyes and quivering mouths. “Anyone know what Azazel means?”

“Yes,” Tabinda murmured. She was sitting next to Noor, her hands knotted together in her lap. “A demon of the wilderness.”

“That’s correct.” Noor nodded. “The second goat was sent into the desert, supposedly laden with the sins of Israel, to Azazel the wild demon, the pagan god, waiting to devour it. Azazel also translates as ‘the goat that departs.’ The word scapegoat in English comes from that.” She smiled bitterly. “The animal sacrifice and exile were symbolic of what might happen to an unrepentant tribesman. This was how they made themselves feel better.”

The cadets’ faces were masks dappled orange and black. They watched Noor with unflinching eyes. The freckled boy, Tabrez, leaned and whispered in his neighbor’s ear and they both giggled.

“That’s a horrible story,” Junaid said. His teeth gleamed in the firelight like a serrated knife. “I didn’t know you were so twisted, Miss Hamadani.”

He wet his lips and grinned. His hand moved slowly to his lap. Was he turned on? Oddly she didn’t feel repulsed, just frigid and tired, and grateful when Dara got up and brought more tinder.

Tabrez whined for dinner and Tabinda handed out four foil-wrapped packets of sheermal. They disappeared quickly. Someone wondered why Abar and Raheem weren’t back; perhaps a small group could go look for them in the ruins. Tabinda said “No!” so forcefully it startled them into silence.

Junaid stared at her and said he was sure they’d be back when they got hungry.

The fire whooshed and retreated from the night and Junaid and Dara piled on more wood. A couple of cadets laid out their blankets on the ground near the fire. Before they could start settling in, from beyond the looming citadel came scraping sounds. Pebbles rolled.

Someone was walking the dark near the Buddhist stupa.

They all glanced up. Just a black sky crinkled with a faint yellow moon. In the distance a door swung open on screeching hinges. A shout and a crash.

“Abar,” yelled Junaid, springing to his feet. “Is that you?”

One of the cadets screamed and shrank back from a night-thickened alley twenty feet away from which a tall figure jutted its shadowed face. It spasmed briefly, rotating its arms laden with glinting glass bangles above its head, and vanished. The pounding of boots on stony ground. In the ruins someone laughed. The sound was shrill and intermittent, more birdlike than human, and masked the running footsteps until they faded. Junaid shouted the boys’ names and plunged into the dark beyond the fire, the halo from his flashlight jittering up and down the streets.

A sound came from beside Noor. She turned. Tabinda’s face was doughy, a faint twitch at the left corner of her lips. Her forehead glistened with moisture. Her chubby hand was at her throat, massaging it vigorously.

She’s sweating, Noor thought with wonder. In this cold.

An unfamiliar dry smell flooded her nose, triggering memories that disappeared before she could seize them, leaving her breathless and frightened. Her eyes teared up from a sudden raging headache. Tabinda whispered — so softly Noor doubted anyone else heard. The words made the hair stand on the back of her neck. She would remember them later, like a dream song or a grief prayer running in her head again and again while the abandoned city rustled and the river stink of dead fish and reeds and gelatinous old creatures crept into her nostrils.

“He opens his mouth so,” said Tabinda. “The Terrible Emperor of the Night.”

The cadets held hands, bleary eyes peering in every direction. The ancient houses were entombed in night. Narrow alleys meandered off into the black. So much space devoid of life, yet something stirred; somewhere in the ruins Junaid stumbled, crashed, and cursed before falling silent.

Noor’s vision pulsed with her heartbeat.

“What’s happening, Miss?” cried one of the boys.

“To the bus,” she hissed. “Now.”

They gaped at her before turning and dashing to the vehicle. Falling over each other, they covered the distance in seconds, piled into the bus, burrowed into their seats. Noor slammed the lock home once Tabinda was aboard. They all stared at the mounds gleaming like gravestones in the moonlight.

“What was that?” said one cadet in a hitching voice.

“Someone turn on the light,” said another.

“No!”

“The boys,” Noor said. “Probably lost and calling for help.”

“By laughing? Are you fucking kidding me?” Tabrez said incredulously.

“Watch your language.”

“Screw that. Did you even hear it?” He leaned his brow against the window glass and gazed at the bonfire wavering by the citadel. “That wasn’t Abar. Didn’t even sound human.”

“I shouldn’t have returned. I thought, I thought . . . I was wrong,” Tabinda cried. She had sagged into a back seat. Her hands, like small animals, were hiding beneath her ample thighs.

Noor swallowed. Her lips were parched.

“Maybe an animal. A jackal perhaps,” she said.

“Didn’t sound like a jackal either,” Tabrez said. “Who was that man in the alley?”

The Terrible Emperor of the Night, Noor thought incoherently. She didn’t have the energy to grope her way back to question Tabinda. The woman was sunk in her seat, head lolling on her breasts like a rotten fruit.

Noor took note of the remaining water bottles under the bench behind the driver’s seat. Two twenty-four packs. She removed one, drank from it, passed it around. Someone made a choking sound then fell silent. Noor raised a fist and knuckled her throbbing right temple.

Tabrez rapped at his window with his knuckles. Someone told him to shut the fuck up. He glared back. Tap tap!

They waited for Junaid. Their breath misted the windshield glass and white sheathed it until their peering faces disappeared.

Tap tap. Tap tap tap.

Some time later sheermaal was handed around again. Noor declined the bread. An odd lethargy had settled on her. The kids chewed, filling the bus with sounds of gnashing teeth and crumpling aluminum. Noor’s neck ached as if steel rivets were being driven into it.

She fell into sleep.

She was a teenager — dressed in a black shirt, blue jeans, and leather boots — standing in the middle of Mohenjo-Daro with a bomb vest strapped under her clothes. Her hair whiplashed in the desert breeze. Her gaze was fixed on the citadel — now shaped like the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, stripes of neon blue and red racing around its sides. Noor’s finger caressed the trigger poking her flat stomach. Her throat was dry.

A finger prodded her in the small of her back. Muneer. He was young and sallow, exactly how she remembered him. Eyes large and white from thyroid proptosis.

“For Dad,” he said, voice guttural, toad-like. He pointed a bitten fingernail at hundreds of skeletal men, women, and children twitching their way through sun-baked alleys. They wore business suits, sweatshirts, dresses, and tourist caps. Suitcases and backpacks dangled from bones picked clean by time. They converged at the terminal like pilgrims at the Kaaba, pawing at the steel armature, phalanges digging into bricks, clenched fists thudding on glass.

“For their sins. Go, little sister, go.” Muneer looked at her. His bulging eyes made him look shocked and insane. “Soon I will join you.”

He shoved her forward. She staggered and began to walk. The people of the city pounded on the walls of the terminal. The half-flesh on a few faces was swollen and distorted, washed by electrified colors blazing from the building’s facade. Noor’s vest was rough and heavy and it was difficult to breathe. It was summer. She was sweating. Her finger itched.

I can’t, she whispered. I don’t want to.

But no one was listening, not even God. Faith yanked her forward and she went on a loyal trot, getting closer to point zero. The crowd jittered to the tune of death. An infant drooped from his mother’s shoulder and pulled her straggly hair; and in a minute there would be blood, there would be devastation.

Noor turned and bolted. The ground shifted beneath her. Muneer’s face was everywhere. “No, you bitch, come back. Coward!” he screamed. The world was white noise and it hurt her head. She ran and ran and ran. She would hide somewhere; if she could just reach safety, everything would be all right. No pain, no suffering, no dying, no shame, no guilt. Noor sprinted and the dead sprinted behind her, hundreds of taluses, tarsals, and metatarsals rattling on the ground.

“Pashupati is dead, you miserable slut,” her brother shrieked. “He’s dead and nothing will do but youthful human blood.”

Noor woke, shivering. It was freezing and quiet. The bus was dark, the seats empty. Did Junaid return and take them all elsewhere? Why wouldn’t he wake her? Empty bottles, squares of foil, and sheermaal crumbs littered the bus floor. She pulled the shawl tight around her chest and struggled upright. The windows were blinded with white and for a moment she thought they were covered with snow like her bedroom window back in Hanover after a storm. Dad would clear it, his gloved hands patting the glittering frost off.

But Dad was gone. Extraordinary rendition, her lawyer called it.

She peered closely and saw the white was fog. Thick smoky layers pressed against the glass, consuming the bus. Sometime during the night it had crept in from the river. She glanced at her watch. It was just past midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are they now?”

“In a warm place.”

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

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

“Are you all right?”

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

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

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

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

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

Tabinda scythed the haze with an outstretched arm. They approached a towering structure. The Buddhist stupa. Noor put her hand out and scraped a fingernail across the wall. How cold and brooding and alien it felt with mist clinging to it. She remembered her dream — shiny white phalanges groping the building — and her stomach turned. She pinched her shalwar and rubbed the brick dust off.

“I liked your little history lesson,” Tabinda said. “But it has more meaning than the Israelites gave it.”

“What?”

“It describes existence accurately. The two goats are life and death, both horrendous conditions. Gods are vindictive, after all. Would you like to hear a similar story? It’s from the Mahabharata.”

Noor hesitated. Cautiously she said, “Sure.”

“In the beginning were three cities that orbited the earth. They weren’t happy places.”

In the distance vibration rose, faint as insect static. Noor cocked her head. It was coming from beyond the citadel deep in the night.

“What’s that?”

“The cities fought each other with iron thunderbolts smelted in a hundred thousand suns. Until one invented a unique weapon.”

Tabinda stopped. Before them was a twisted iron door flanked by massive brick colonnades. Rust blanketed it from top to bottom, except for the emblem of the Dancing Girl, hand on her hip, stamped in the middle. Parts of the figure were eroded by age but even through tendrils of fog the dancer’s eyes, now open and swollen with madness, were visible. A brass padlock dangled from a moon-shaped hasp. The door was ajar.

“The weapon was wielded with the force of the universe behind it and it annihilated the rival cities. The cost of preparing it was grave, though. The inhabitants of the triumphant city had to use the blood of entire nations on Earth.”

Tabinda pushed the door and it screeched inward, trailing the vapor pall draped over it. She stepped back, letting Noor peer in. “After you.”

Inside was blackness thick as blood. The noise in the sky was louder now. Whack whack whack! It sounded like a piece of meat stuck in the blades of an electric fan.

“Hold on. What is that?” Noor said uneasily. Her breath steamed and dissolved in the mist.

The professor stood enshrouded in white, her uneven face still as a deep dark pool. “It’s the army chopper come looking for us,” she said. “Don’t worry. They can’t land in this fog.”

Noor tried to back out, but Tabinda was quick. A two-handed fist slammed Noor’s shoulder blade. Agony shot through her spine, buckling her, sending her flying through the doorway. The black rushed at her. She flailed her arms, trying to grab a handhold but tripped and smashed headlong into something solid. The world exploded into fractals: gray and black and grainy. A buzzing in her ears, something circling her brain, enfolding it like a reptile’s maw — and Noor disintegrated.

Someone scraped up her pieces and put her together. She was slithering down steps as cold and unforgiving as faith’s hold. Liquid heat simmered in her eyes. Her knees bumped and banged. One shoe jammed in a crack at the edge of the staircase; someone yanked her foot out and continued dragging her.

She was placed on a hard surface. Mist and incense smoke roiled in a vortex around her. Her eyes watered from the fumes. Through the haze she glimpsed figures revolving slowly. Half a dozen, maybe more. They drummed long spear-like objects on their sneakers and boots. She licked her lips. Her tongue was a festering ulcer, her head a beehive of bewilderment.

Pain squeezed her shoulders when Noor raised her head. She moaned. She was lying on her stomach on a narrow ledge inside the citadel, a long rectangular room with a brick ledge running from end to end three feet above the dry communal pool. The great bathhouse. It took her a minute to realize that her wrists were throbbing. They were bound with rope. So were her ankles.

“For a long time I wondered why the inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro were so particular about the drainage system,” said Tabinda. She was standing in the middle of the pool before a brick-lined circular opening about six feet wide. Mist wreathed the hole and Noor couldn’t see inside it. Tabinda wore a fan-shaped metallic headdress with its edges dipped to create circular indentations at both ends. Flames flickered in small clay lamps placed inside these hollows. Her face was red with heat and perspiration, the half-paralysis so bad it seemed she was scalded on one side.

“Every house had its own drain connected to a network of brick channels in the streets. The channels ran clever courses and ended here in the bathhouse. I couldn’t understand why they’d want to dump sewage here. It didn’t make sense.”

Tabinda was surrounded by a procession of seven figures: cadets wearing glittering bangles on their arms and circling diya lamps in the dense air. Smoke plumed in rapid spirals, thickening their features, sending sooty entrails across faces shining like glass. Tabrez and Raheem were among them. Tabrez’s freckles glistened.

“It wasn’t until Fossel and I unearthed the intricate network of brick-lined conduits below the citadel that we understood the purpose of this extensive system.”

The seven boys began to gyrate their way across the pool. Their eyes were glassy. The lamps flared and guttered. They disappeared in the murk. Noor’s heart beat so fast she could feel her limbs jerk with every pulsation. Terror had driven the pain away.

“To this day the Indus script remains indecipherable to others, but Fossel said he had translated it. The meanings of the symbols came to him in a dream, he said.” A grotesque half-smile cracked the right side of her face. “Inscriptions he found on some seals describe the residents’ belief in a supreme father. They called this deity the Terrible Emperor of the Night. Said that he ruled the meat-city in the sky with a lightning arm and a thunder fist, and that he had a hungry mouth on earth. Ancients in other cultures knew of this mouth. In their poems they called it the ōs dhwosos.”

She was mad. The woman was mad. Noor’s blood was ice in her vessels. She strained at the ropes binding her limbs, but it was useless; she was tightly trussed. She arched her back and looked at her captors. Abar had materialized beside the professor. In his hand was a long piece of black glass the size of a child’s femur; similar, Noor realized, to what she had glimpsed in the street. Devil glass. Abar’s blank gaze was riveted on her. He ran a finger across the jagged edge of the weapon and it came away black with blood.

Abar wiped his finger on his school sweater. There was no cut.

“This wasn’t a bathhouse, you see. This was an ablution pool,” Tabinda said gently, as if explaining to a child, “filled with the city’s libation.”

It took Noor a moment to understand what that meant. When she did, her flesh went cold.

“Once a year the omphalos would tauten and the door to His house swing open. At some point in their history, during years of drought and starvation perhaps, the residents turned to their children. Always the oldest offspring lain carefully by the blood gutters. It wasn’t until enemy races conquered Mohenjo-Daro that the practice finally came to an end,” Tabinda said. She rubbed her throat absently. “The following year, however, in one night the entire city along with its new rulers was destroyed.”

The cadets reappeared, dragging a sizable bundle across the dry pool. It left a glistening black trail fading into the mist. A hand dropped from the bundle. Noor began to tremble, her breath hitching.

The fingertips were white, the nails perfectly manicured.

“How could we have known when we began the dig?” said Tabinda. Behind her Abar stood passing the glass knife from one hand to the other. It sparkled in the gloom. “I wanted to flee when the dreams started, but Fossel wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to study the darkness, as he put it. The tablets and seals indicated the secret room was real. And he said he would find it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My blood is Yours. My skin is Yours.

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

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

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

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

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

Her removal to Pakistan had been a relief.

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

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

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

The knife moved to her wrists.

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

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

Without looking back, Noor broke into a run.

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

Tabinda was at the first step, snorting, pawing at the bricks. She was on all fours. Her face was completely static now, her forehead smooth. Not a fold, not a single crease, as if she were made from polished glass. Drool dangled in corkscrew threads from her chin.

As Noor watched, Tabinda lowered her head, sniffed the bricks stained with Noor’s menstrual blood, and began to lap at them.

Noor turned and scuttled up the rest of the stairs. Pain chewed her ribs and back and hips, but she leapt blindly, not caring if she broke every bone in her body. Tabinda’s smell behind her was acrid and meaty. It rushed at Noor. Noor vaulted across the last step and sprang toward the iron door.

Outside, the fog was a solid wall. Noor slammed through it, running — blind and barefoot — using the brooding stupa as her only directional marker. Chips of glass and sharp pebbles stung her soles. Branches and what felt like bird bones crunched. Something bellowed behind her. A loud animal grunt, then a pause. Noor clapped a hand over her mouth and kept running. She was wet and cold and trembling. Where was the fucking chopper? The night sky was silent. Her shalwar was soaked. She expected to crash face first into a wall any moment now. Instead, the sounds of the creature faded behind her. Was it licking her blood trail at every step?

Noor fled, weeping. The sharp bites of the alley became hard ground. The fog thinned, showing her the school bus sprawled in the lot like a dead animal. She bounded toward it before remembering she didn’t have the keys.

Noor wanted to scream, to slap her breasts, and fall down, crying. She fought the impulse. Behind her the city was wailing. An earsplitting surreal ululation that bounced from wall to wall, door to door, and razored through her head. Lights bobbed in the corner of her eye. She sped past the vehicle, heading toward the road winding out of the ruins, spraying up dirt behind her.

The fog thickened again. Icy air knifed in and out of her lungs. When the sounds of the ruins died, she slowed to a trot. She was shaking all over and crying. Hot tears on frosted cheeks. Her feet were slippery with blood and stung in a hundred places. She had no idea where she was and the moon was dead somewhere. She was plodding through squelching mud now. Another step and her foot sank ankle deep. The wind whistled and picked up. Something rattled. She flinched from the sound. Pattering of feet or clomping of hooves? Terror washed over her. She yanked her foot out, lunged, and landed in gelid water. Something slithered over her foot. A shower of water plumed over her when she struggled upright, tripped, and nearly fell again.

A misshapen root wide as her arm. She was at the riverbank. Had she once thought its smell rotten? It was mossy and sweet. The Sind River gurgled and babbled. Malformed cypress knees poking out of the fog like tombstones. Ghost acacia and lilacs swayed above her, their cocooned branches rustling. Glinting eyes speckled the webs. They undulated and disappeared as she splashed through the tree line. The fog curtain was so dense now she could wrap it around herself and disappear forever.

A figure bobbed ahead in the trees. A flash of light that ignited the mist briefly and was gone. Noor’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched and began to thunder in her temples. Part of her wanted to turn and bolt, but what if it was the army come to find them? With utmost care she lifted the cuffs of her shalwar and tiptoed through the water. Curls of dark moss like a woman’s hair floated between her legs which gleamed with congealed blood. The cypress knees were more numerous here. They protruded in various geometric shapes.

One was almost like a little stool.

Her sight rippled, but not before she saw the figure crouching in the foliage. It was very tall and angular and seemed to perch on or by a poplar trunk. It wore something around its head, which could have been a headdress or a shawl.

Hamid! The bus driver. It had to be him. Dear God, let it be him. Noor choked back a sob and sloshed through mist and river water toward the silent figure riding the trees.