“And the village?”
He shook his head and covered his eyes again, his shoulders shaking, his voice cracking as he said, “An hour later, everyone was dead.”
Asha looked away to the north, to the edge of the bamboo forest where the aether mist was seeping out into the sunlight. “And Naveen doesn’t remember what happened?”
“No. And I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I can’t.”
“I believe you love your son,” she said. “So I won’t tell him the truth, and I won’t tell you to tell him the truth either. But it would be better for you both to leave this place and find a new home.”
Chandra nodded. “You’re right. But I can’t move him like this. He’s too sick.”
“He’s not sick,” Asha said. “He’s possessed.”
The man stared at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not and he is. His high temperature, the racing pulse, the sensitivity to light and sound, and the strange things he’s saying. I’ve seen this before. He’s possessed.”
“By a ghost?” Chandra looked back at the house. “By a ghost of someone who died in the village?”
“No. By the ghosts of everyone who died in the village. All of them.” Asha sniffed. “I’ve never seen a heart rate like his, beating so fast you can barely hear the individual beats at all. If we don’t stop it soon, his heart will fail completely and he’ll die.”
“You have to help him! Isn’t there something you can do?”
Asha slipped another long sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “Maybe. How do I find the village?”
4
It was a long hour’s walk along a seldom-used path through the forest down to the bottom of the valley. As Asha descended the trail she felt the air grow steadily cooler and the white mist swirling around her feet brushed her skin with a sharp chilling caress. The path itself was carpeted in brown bamboo leaves. Here and there a long slender branch lay across her way, and from time to time she found a young bamboo shoot in the center of the trail, some of them as high as her shoulder.
She walked softly, pausing every few steps to listen to the vast stillness around her.
Still nothing.
Still no birds, no crickets, no anything.
Eventually the trees thinned and parted. Asha stepped out onto the edge of a grassy field dotted with large gray stones and ancient cracked stumps. Fifty paces away she saw the brown line of a dry stream bed running from east to north along the valley floor. And everywhere she looked stood the broken remains of bamboo homes.
The houses closest to her still bore the black marks from the aborted fire, but the wind and rain had torn off most of the roofs long ago and the wooden slats and poles of the walls were cracking, sliding, and hanging away from the buildings on their slow journey into decay and oblivion.
As she moved through the village, she saw through the doorways the irregular mounds of earth that she took to be the graves that Chandra had mentioned.
After a few minutes in the village, a sound seeped into her right ear that wasn’t the whisper of the wind or the rustle of the bamboo leaves. It was a deep, soft rumbling like distant thunder, only it had the regular ebb and flow of a tide, like breathing. Asha recognized it and she felt her own pulse quicken. She gripped the strap of her bag tightly in her sweating hands.
She eased around the corner of another collapsing house and found the bear sitting on the roof of a small shack chewing on a thin branch bearing a handful of pale yellow flowers.
“A sloth bear.” She grimaced. “Perfect.”
The animal was tall but thin, its long fur standing up at wild angles, its long slender muzzle licking and chewing on its stick. Against the pale blue sky, the bear’s black fur created a sharp silhouette high on the shack’s roof and the narrowness of the bright white chevron across its chest showed her all the more clearly how starved the animal was.
Asha stood very still and very quiet. The bear was facing her but she couldn’t be certain it had seen her yet, though it would only be a matter of moments before it smelled her. She knew that sloth bears ate fruit and insects and they hunted at night, normally. But she also knew that on rare occasion they were known to fight tigers, and to fight packs of dholes, and even to attack armed men. And sometimes they won.
When the bear dipped its head to bite a fresh part of its branch, Asha stepped back smoothly into the shadow of the house behind her, backing away faster and faster to put more distance between them. With two crumbling buildings between her and the bear and still no sign that she had been seen, she slowed down and breathed a long deep breath. Then she turned to circle back to the trail through the forest and stumbled over a pole that had fallen from a nearby wall. She fell to all fours with the pole snapping and cracking beneath her knees.
Behind her, the sloth bear snorted, grunted, and roared.
5
Asha ran. She didn’t dare make for the trail now. In the narrow corridor between the bamboo walls there would be no place to hide and she couldn’t hope to outrun the bear. Instead she bolted down the hillside, following the dry stream bed north along the edge of the village and down across a wide grassy field strewn with large round stones.
The bear grunted and growled from the top of the slope behind her.
At the bottom she found a second creek that merged with the first in a small depression, but this one held a meager thread of silver water running over the brown earth. The grass gave way to bare dirt and small stones, the result of some ancient landslide or perhaps a more recent monsoon that had carried only the smallest and lightest bits of the valley walls down through the thick bamboo forest.
Glancing over her shoulder, Asha saw the sloth bear loping down the hill straight toward her, its long jaws hanging open to reveal yellow teeth veined with dark brown rot.
She ran. She ran with every fiber of muscle in her legs, with every shred of strength in her feet. There was no pain, no weariness, nothing but the cold clear knowledge that she wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds if the bear caught her.
Along the bottom of the valley she dashed between and around larger and larger rocks. Some were boulders that had tumbled down from above, but many were jagged spears thrust up from the ground and she began to spy deep, dark cracks in and among the rocks. She looked for one that was narrow enough and deep enough.
A gnarled tree leaned across her path and she spotted the same yellow flowers that the bear had been stripping from its branch when she first found it. Reaching out, she snapped off a branch of her own and ran on.
The bear roared, the sound echoing down the valley through the rocky corridor of the stream bed, and the sounds of clattering pebbles and heavy paws splashing in the meager waters followed close behind the running woman.
Finally Asha spotted an opening in the rocks to her left and she veered inside. It was a narrow crack but also a low one and she had to dive on her side to squeeze through. As she squirmed and wriggled her body forward, she heard the sloth bear huffing and shambling close by her feet and she grabbed the stones around her head to haul her legs farther into the shadows. But she soon found it was far from dark in her little cave. A long thin crack ran the length of the space just above her head where the two rock walls did not quite meet, leaving a jagged white scar of daylight across the ceiling.