Invasive Species (Part 2 of 4)

***

“You’re telling me you were late,” Meg chuckled as she blew on her piping-hot coffee, “because of some comic books?!”

“Not just any comic books. Some rare Hindi ones from the nineteen-eighties and nineties,” I replied between sips of my chai. “Horror comics,” I then added pointedly, as if it made all the difference ––which it did!

Meg regarded me over her coffee cup and arched her black bushy eyebrows. She had impossibly gorgeous hazel eyes, thick black hair pulled back into a bun, full lips, the palest skin you could imagine and with a cute smidgeon of freckles speckling her nose and cheeks. Her mother was Scottish and her father from Nigeria (not that you could really tell, or that it mattered anyway). Her family had moved to the States when she was but a tyke. It had been three decades since we were students at OSU and I’d first fallen in love with her. For all the additional decades that had passed since, she was still every bit as stunning now as she’d been then. She, on the other hand, didn’t return any of ‘those sorts’ of feelings in regards to me, however, and merely considered me a good friend who, for instance, would buy her coffee at a moment’s notice. Nothing more, nothing less.

I handed her one of the comics from the stack I had next to me on the table. She took the battered and worn copy of Zinda Mar Ja, circa 1993, which features cover art by Verma depicting a group of students being attacked by skull-faced ghouls. She flipped through the pages, then absent-mindedly rolled the comic up and shook it at me like a stick for no discernible reason.

I cringed upon hearing the precious periodical’s brittle paper crackle as she then unrolled it and began leafing through its yellowed pages once more.

“Horror comics!” she said, rolling those eyes of hers. Then she smiled before adding, “But you don’t even know how to read Hindi, man. So what’s the point? Oh, I get it: you got ’em just for the pictures, right?! You haven’t changed much, Chris. You’re such a nerd!”

“Hey!” I countered, gingerly taking the comic from her, then gently placing it and the rest of my priceless sequential art periodicals carefully back in my bag.

We chatted some more about the usual nonsense: family, work, sex, et cetera. Meg was one of the few people I could share intimate experiences with, especially those of the sexual kind. She was always curious about my proclivities—such as my habit of dating crazy ladies, for instance—and I was forever probing Meg, whose libido generally swung in favour of women. Currently, her interest was in Subjhit’s girlfriend Subhashree, whom she had recently tactically wined-and-dined in hopes of coaxing the gory details of the recent killings from her (the tactic had apparently paid-off, in spades).

“And,” I said just to say something, then leaned forward, looking her directly in the eyes, then distractedly paused to admire her taste in extra-clingy silk tops.

“And what?” she replied with a facetious pout. “No, I wasn’t about to fuck your friend’s girl, if that’s what you’re asking. Not that she isn’t totally hot, mind you! …Or are you just trying to sneak a peek down my blouse?!” Then she added with coy coquettishness, saucily popping open one more button on her top, “There… happy now?”

Man oh man, she could read me like a damn book!

“Well, thanks for that,” said I, adding “but I right now I’m much more interested in these murders” while trying to catch our waiter’s eye for another round of drinks. Beer would have been preferred by the both of us, but the coffee house didn’t serve alcohol. Since she’d been so obliging, I took another gander at Meg’s cleavage, before we continued with the discussion.

` According to Meg’s source, the lovely Subhashree, the coroner had no less than four bodies on the slabs in the Howrah police morgue at Mallik Fatak. Bodies were typically piled everywhere, sometimes two to a gurney, and there was no refrigeration, so the place got to smelling pretty, uh, ripe at times (to put it mildly). When things got really bad, to the point that the chambers and hallways were filled with corpses, the ‘overflow’ of deceased would be stored outside in the morgue’s courtyard.

Each bloated body lay supine under its own sheet, waiting to be identified and claimed by family members. But the four that had turned up that particular morning were… out-of-the-ordinary. Three were those of women who had been pregnant at the time of their deaths. However, hideously enough, their gestating fetuses had been forcibly removed from the womb by way of the vagina. The murderer’s M.O. was truly savage. Diabolically so, in fact. All three of the pregnant women died from internal hemorrhage––essentially, they bled-out due to the extreme severity of their wounds. Two of the unborn babies were still missing, while the third, as I reported previously, seemed to have been partially devoured on the spot. The fourth woman’s body was more… unusual. It was headless—decapitated—and there was something else even more surprising about it besides...

“There was no incision other than at the spot where her head should have been,” Meg informed me as she nibbled at a chomchom from a plate of sweets I had ordered along with our second round of coffees. “The wound was smoothed-over, and just about everything was gone. The head, spinal cord, lungs, liver, stomach, guts… everything except for the large intestines, bladder and her uterus. It was a clean extraction. There wasn’t even any blood at the scene. Funny thing was that the body disappeared soon after it was delivered to the morgue that evening. Putai gave the body a quick once-over with a sonogram because of the condition of the corpse.”

“You said there was no blood,” said I. “And who is this Putai?”

“Oh, that’s Subhashree’s nickname,” Meg grinned. “Anyways, besides missing its head, the corpse had a weird, ‘sunken-in’ appearance. Like I told you already, the poor thing’s entire innards had gone AWOL! And get this, as well as being totally bloodless, there was no sign of any rigor mortis setting-in. But even that’s not the weirdest thing. Putai left the room to get some paper work or whatever, then two hours later when she returned: no body! There was a window of sorts that had obviously been forced open—evidently from inside the room—but it was at least ten feet off the floor, and it was really small; just used to vent the room, I guess. There was no other sign of how the body could have been removed.” In summation, Meg said animatedly, “Weird, huh?!”

She continued to attack her plate of sweets, oblivious to the fact that I was becoming more and more uneasy about the gruesome details she had related. It’s not that I haven’t seen a dead body before, or hadn’t been to a few autopsies in my day, but now Meg was really getting into the, er, ‘indelicacies’ of the case. She continued by telling me that, having discovered that the fourth woman’s corpse was missing, Subhashree had promptly checked with the morgue’s other attendant. But he’d been too busy watching the news in the employee lounge to have noticed anything untoward. And the corpse hadn’t simply been moved somewhere else by another employee without Subhashree being aware of it. It was common for the morgue to dispose of unclaimed corpses twice a week, otherwise the body storage chambers at Howarah would rapidly fill up. This missing body was a mystery that no one really cared to follow up on. As for the three other bodies, their families arrived to pick them up at dawn the next day.

“Your thoughts?” I asked, knowing where Meg would go with the information given to her.

“Other than for the dead body that all evidence seems to indicate managed to climb up a ten-foot wall and squeeze itself out through a window about six inches square… and without a head, yet?! Not a clue. As for the other bodies, there’s more... I asked around some, and it seems that two more expectant mothers were murdered and had their fetuses taken at this village just outside of Kolkata. I suspect we may have a particularly sicko serial killer on the loose. Or perhaps some grotesque tantric practices are afoot? It remains to be seen.”

Since there had already been such an incident occur close to a Kali sanctuary in Bolpur of West Bengal’s Birbum, I was afraid to ask, but did so anyway, “Where was the body without a head found?” In that other case, the headless body of a man was discovered, raising suspicions among local residents that he had been the victim of a deranged, fanatical follower of the goddess. This case remained unsolved, nor was the victim’s head ever recovered. Personally, I had my doubts about any religious connection. More likely it was some sort of gang-related hit… something to do with drugs or other thuggery, I surmised.

“Where was the body originally discovered?,” I asked leaning into the conversation.

“She was laid out at the edge of the jungle near a park, covered with a blanket. At a really out-of-the-way spot. Not so ‘in-your-face,’ like the other murder victims. At first it made me think they weren’t even connected in any way. But all of these murders occurred over just the past couple of the nights, so I’m guessing there has to be some sort of connection. Otherwise, it defies all logic.”

“Between Subhashree’s bodies and those other ones at that village?” inquired I. Now I was sure it was ‘just’ the work of a serial killer (as opposed to something potentially fare worse), although that headless-and-gutless corpse did have me rather baffled, I must admit.

Meg shook her head, then pulled her knapsack up onto her lap, unzipped it, and carefully laid a stack of English-language newspapers on the table top between us. The headlines she had outlined in yellow highlighter were not subtle: “Woman’s headless body found near Assam’s Kamakhya temple,” “Another Body Without a Head discovered in Chandannagar,” “Dead Pregnant Women found in Dakha with No Babies,” and so forth.

Meg then produced a timeline of the incidents, and it did indeed seem as though the two very different kinds of murders were in some way interconnected, or at the very least related somehow, possibly directly or possibly indirectly. Dead bodies of expectant mothers sans their unborn children were discovered, and also, at times, a headless corpse was found within the same general area. Some reports even suggested that the corpses of the headless women had been stolen from morgues for use in indeterminate black magic rituals. Meg had traced the earliest accounts all the way east to the state of Nagaland and to the border of Myanmar. The further you got away from Kolkata, the older was the discovery-date of the murders. Whoever was doing the killing—assuming it was the same person or persons—was seemingly slowly making their—or its—way through the easternmost part of India…

“Jesus!” I whispered harshly to a god I didn’t even believe in. What the hell was going on?! Meg believed the culprit was someone, and now here I was starting to think it might actually be something…

“Hey,” she said, gathering the newspapers up from under my nose as I was still absent-mindedly perusing them while my thoughts were wandering elsewhere. She quickly arranged the papers, shoved them back into her pack, then got up to leave…causing more than a few pairs of eyes to turn in her direction while doing so. “I have to catch a plane to Bhubaneswar in the morning, so I need to go and get some beauty sleep. Wanna share a taxi? I’m over at a hotel in Santragachi.”

“I’m booked at a place in Taki,” I mumbled, realizing with some disappointment that I wouldn’t be able to share a cab with her, “That’s two hours east of here. You’re heading west. We’ll have to do some catching-up on WhatsApp, I guess.” She then added with one of those smiles I liked to think she reserved only for me, “It was wonderful seeing you again, by the way.”

We hugged briefly, keeping our emotions in check as best we could, being as we were in a public place with people all around us. Once outside the coffee house and on Bankim Chatterjee Street, I waited with Meg until she quickly jumped into her taxi and took off without looking back, but giving me a quick, casual over-the-shoulder wave as though might be seeing one another again within only a couple of hours rather than potentially X number of years from now, as sometimes happened. I watched as she sped off, hoping that one day, hopefully not too far into the future, we’d meet up again, and maybe…just maybe—Nah! What was I thinking? Get real, Blaisdell, you sap!

It was already dark when I ordered my Uber to take me to Taki, and I was still shaking my head as my driver pulled up and inquired through an open window, “You Chris, buddy?” I nodded, got in, and we drove off into the evening, steadily gaining speed as we went.

***

The Taki Golpata Forest was immense and densely thick with trees—almost impenetrably so, so it seemed from the road—and the car sped through the night with no street lamps to light our way and only the occasional homestead or factory briefly illuminating the road in passing. Had I not become so accustomed to such reckless driving, I would have white-knuckled it all the way, like some first-time flier in an airliner under turbulence. But this was India, after all, so I had no worries about the shoulder-hugging hairpin bends, taken at extremely high speed, and periodic close calls as my driver narrowly swerved out of the path of oncoming traffic. In fact, so deeply lost in thought was I over the course of the journey, that I barely even noticed such mundane matters. No, I was much too preoccupied with other, more frightening—possibly even utterly terrifying—things right then to bother about such comparatively minor concerns as the Uber dude’s driving skills…

No sooner had a road sign for the town of Taki come into view than my empty stomach began growling, and I wondered if the driver knew of any decent place to eat locally.

“Bhāla khābāra? Bhāla rēstōm̐rā?” I asked him in broken Bengali.

“Yes, yes,” the driver responded, in English that was a whole lot more fluent than my Bengali. A few minutes later he pulled up to a small roadside diner. I paid the man what I owed, then, with his help, gathered-up my bags from the boot of his car.

“No hotel?” he asked, looking at the nearby so-called “Kali Maa Guest House,” which was little more than a glorified shack on the side of a dirt road.

“No hotel, dhan’yabāda. I will get a taxi later.”

“I wait for you?” asked the driver. “Not much more. 500 rupees more?”

I considered the offer, which was a good one. It was already nearly 10 p.m., and there was no telling if I’d be able to hire another car after having a brief bite to eat.

“Okay, I’ll be only a short while. Will pay you when I get to the hotel.”

“Okay,” agreed the driver.

He then pulled his cab up to the side of the, um, ‘building’––a shaky shack-like structure that didn’t quite warrant said descriptor––and helped me put my bags back in the boot again. Then I checked my pockets for cash before strolling into the roadside diner.

Confirming once again that you can’t judge a book by its cover, belying its ramshackle, rundown exterior, the joint was surprisingly clean and tidy inside. The lighting was low-key, and the Kali Maa’s dining room was packed wall-to-wall with customers eagerly chowing-down on all manner of local dishes. Did it ever smell wonderful! My belly began rumbling all the more insistently now that I was savoring the various enticing aromas of the place, all comingled into one, which had really set my mouth to watering with a vengeance. But was there a table open for me, or would I have to wait, drooling on the sidelines, till one made itself available?

As I wandered down the center aisle of the diner, I was met with a series of hard—if in many cases, not entirely inhospitable—stares from most everyone in the place. I must confess that the natives’ blatant, unselfconscious habit of staring at others (not always just strangers) was one particular aspect of Indian social customs that I had yet to grow accustomed to it. If I would ever be able to be completely, as my western sense of privacy being so deeply ingrained in me by this point. Granted, I was a quite odd-looking white fellow who’d just walked through the door at ten o’clock at night, so this display of curiosity from the other patrons was to be expected, I suppose. Here I was, a tall foreigner with an unruly shock of frizzy white hair, bushy sideburns the size of young ferrets, and a long goatee equally as white as the rest of the hair on my head. So I did kind of stand out in a crowd, you could say. Why, even at midday in broad daylight I’d probably draw more than a few curious looks.

It would seem that most Indians find white skin ‘different’ and intriguing. Staring at foreigners is not in and of itself in any way harmful to those being stared at, I understood that, but speaking for myself, it sure does make me feel self-conscious and uncomfortable, reasserting as it does my sense—whether justified or not—of being an Outsider… a ‘stranger in a strange land,’ if you will. For, however much I might have become familiarized and acclimatized to certain aspects of India’s ancient cultures and feel in my element and welcome here, I nonetheless cannot get over my lingering sense of strangeness, both in regards to myself and the milieu, and, no, xenophobia has nothing to do with it.

Try being stared at for centuries, my white friend. That is when you’ll really understand your place in this world!

“Wait… huh?” I looked around the room, wondering where the voice I’d heard had come from. A smiling waiter was approaching me, but it definitely wasn’t he who’d spoken.

Go with him, the voice in my head said. Talking to you this way makes me tired.

“Please, Sahib. This way,” said the waiter as he guided me to a table that was already occupied by an eccentric-looking gentleman wearing sunglasses (indoors, at night, no less) and a dark-colored naru jacket. As the waiter seated me, he asked what I would like to order even before offering me a menu.

“The puchka is satisfying and very filling,” muttered my host to the waiter in a low, breathy voice. “…And some chai,” he shortly added, reaching out with two of his fingers to lightly tap the waiter on his forearm. I couldn’t help noticing how the strange man’s hands were distinctly claw-like, with gnarled knuckles and atypically elongate and pointed fingernails. Figuratively speaking, their appearance was more than a little evocative of a vulture’s talons; yet there was also a more than passing literal resemblance too, so I thought. Obviously also sensing something unnerving and alarming about this customer, the poor waiter became wide-eyed with panic upon being touched unexpectedly, but nodded his affirmation to the man’s request before hurriedly scampering off—clearly eager to get way from our table as soon as possible, it seemed—to place our order.

“Dhan’yabāda …” I hesitated, not knowing quite what I might be getting into by taking a seat at this table, which had the only empty seat available in the entire joint, so far as I could see. My ever-mounting hunger combined with my unquenchable zeal for things weird and out-of-the-ordinary were what had drawn me, like a magnet, to sit down here. The strange man sitting opposite me remained emotionlessly motionless —his face as unmoving as the rest of him—as he regarded me for some moments after I’d seated myself.

At last, after what seemed like minutes but was probably only around thirty seconds or so, unable to stand his stillness and silence any longer, I made an effort to speak.

“Please, young Sahib, speak English,” he chuckled dryly while watching me fumbling to find something to say. Then, again in perfect English himself, he added with a slightly louder chuckle, “Your Bengali is truly atrocious!” His wire-framed sunshades only had small lenses, but they were of a totally opaque black that completely hid his eyes—or even the slightest hint that even had any at all!—from me.

A minute or so later, the waiter brought us over two mugs of steaming chai and a plate of the house’s puchka panipuri. The aroma of chili, chaat masala, potato, onion and chickpeas set my mouth to watering again, and the welcome familiar normalcy of this reaction momentarily relieved my as-yet-only-faint sense of unease in the presence of the man in impenetrable shades.

In hopes of camouflaging my uneasiness, I ate quickly, focusing on the contents of my plate rather than on him. The meal was, as I knew it would be, delicious.

“My name is Mr. Roy,” he said quietly while delicately sipping at his chai, watching me wolf down my food, “and I welcome you to Paschim Banga, my young traveler.”

In between eager bites of my meal, trying not to talk with my mouth full, I said in reply, “My name’s Christopher Blaisdell. Oh, and I’m not all that ‘young,’ by the way. I’m nearly sixty, as a matter of fact. And thank you for suggesting the panipuri. It really is delightful!”

“My pleasure,” Mr. Roy replied with a thin if sincere-seeming smile.

Six decades is but a drop of water in the well of time.

Again, that voice, all of a sudden! I’d forgotten it in the meantime, assuming that perhaps my advanced state of hunger had simply been playing tricks with my head. But after starting to feel more at ease—finally getting some food in my stomach had helped immensely with that—I was once again beginning to get a bad feeling about the situation. Nothing too pronounced, just this nagging sense that something wasn’t quite right about my dinner companion…

After glancing around the room for a second, I noticed how most of the tables that had been packed when I first entered were starting to thin-out as the other guests gradually left. As each customer rose to leave, they stopped and bowed slightly in our direction. Despite this token formal show of politesse, there was an unmistakable look of fear—verging on all-out terror, so it seemed—in their eyes. Rather like the look of a deer caught in the headlights, only something with much more profound roots than the ‘mere’ fear of imminent mundane danger. Something strangely intangible, yet at the same time virtually palpable in its intensity. Believe me when I say I know that look well!

Snapping me out of my momentary mental aside, Mr. Roy chuckled again, and I was now worried that my decision to make an impromptu detour for a bite to eat at his table was not a wise one. After just a few minutes more, the entire dining room was cleared except for my host and a few other brave souls nursing drinks at the bar. They nibbled at their boiled peanuts slowly and disinterestedly while keeping a semi-watchful if weary eye on our table.

I ordered the others to leave. Some have stayed, but they will not bother us. We will be alone.

“You are different…it has been ages since I sensed someone like you, Christopher,” said Mr. Roy with a grin. His teeth were small, but numerous and very sharp in appearance.

Slowly at first it had dawned on me that I might not be politely having dinner with anything human. I now knew for sure that my initial suspicions were spot-on.

“No disrespect, Mr. Roy,” I said matter-of-factly at a normal speaking volume, “but what are you…?”

“No offense taken,” Roy said back. “And you are very astute. I am what the locals would call a raktapishacha.”

Damn! A vampire of sorts. And here was I casually chatting with it! Not unlike Ann Rice’s famed novel, which momentarily sprang to mind. I was going to have to keep things nice and breezy, just in case I might need to scram in a hurry. My casual veneer belied my troubled inner self, so I thought, as I was pretty certain this self-confessed raktapishacha eyeing me from across the tabletop could see right into the very depths of me and knew precisely how I was feeling. Then—double damn!!—it suddenly occurred to me that I’d left my protective juju bag in my backpack in the cab. Same goes for that pepper-and-lemon charm I mentioned above, which might not have been much use in conclusively dealing with the creature, should need arise, but might at least have bought me sufficient time to reach the cab and get as far away from it as possible in the meantime.

The raktapishacha did indeed sense my mounting unease, but calmly motioned for the waiter to return. Looking as though he might up and bolt at any moment, the frightened man took another order for panipuri and chai, then left our table in a hurry once more, retreating even faster this time than he had the first time.

I am not going to eat you, assured the voice in my head.

“Our kind is not dissimilar to other Bengalis,” the creature continued, placidly maintaining his assumed façade of Mr. Roy as though he’d never revealed to me what he really was. “How can I explain something you may not be able to understand? Like our tribal dēbatāras, for countless centuries we have been gramadevatas for villages, and nowadays for city neighborhoods, too.”

“Regional gods and goddesses,” I butted-in, being as unobtrusive as I could, in deference to my decidedly unusual dinner companion, who was undoubtedly many centuries—possibly even multiple millennia—old. “Traditional guardian spirits, and folk shaktis… ”

“A-ha! So you do know something about us,” replied the raktapishacha with a toothy grin, then took another sip of his steaming chai, sighing contentedly after doing so. Although he drank his tea with exceeding slowness, he genuinely did seem to be enjoying it.

As for myself, my new cupful was still much too hot for me to even think of sipping yet, lest I scald my lips, but Roy didn’t seem a bit bothered by the heat of his, I noticed.

For some reason, I’d felt a flush of pride after his last comment. Why, here was a parahuman—a being of the other world—actually complimenting me, a mere mortal; and not only that, but a foreigner, yet! This got me to thinking that maybe the night might not turn out so bad after all…

I ended up having a rather fascinating conversation with Mr. Roy, the raktapishacha. I explained to him my interest and background in the paranormal, to which he seemed genuinely interested. He chatted about the history of West Bengal, and didn’t once mention any of his “cousins.” We even discussed cinema, and I was amused to learn that Satyajit Ray’s 1969 comedic fantasy classic GOOPY GYNE BAGHA BYNE (“The Adventures of Goopy and Bagha”) was one of Mr. Roy’s film favorites. Apparently, then, even monsters—or at least this particular one—love movies as much as we humans do!

Intermittently over the course of our conversation, I took pause to scrutinize the creature sitting opposite me, if only inwardly, rather than simply sit and stare at him. Yet, for all intents and purposes and to all outward appearances, this ancient ‘monster’—for the time being, anyhow—was simply another human being with whom I was enjoying some after-dinner chai and a chat. Like we were nothing more than old friends catching-up on lost time after a long separation. There was now a pleasantly relaxed air to our verbal interaction, with no longer any anxiety felt on my part. Indeed, despite Mr. Roy’s, um, ‘offbeat’ appearance, physical peculiarities and inscrutable dark glasses, I no longer viewed him in any kind of sinister light, and it pleased me to know––or at least strongly suspect––that he knew this. I found myself telling this enigmatic entity things about myself I hadn’t even revealed to Meg over beers the previous night, even when I was at my most pie-eyed and sappy state. I was completely in Roy’s thrall, mesmerized, hanging on his every utterance. This must have been something that came naturally to the monster, I could tell. Although, gracious as he/it was, this deference—reverence, even—on my part didn’t seem to be taken for granted by him/it at all.

Mr. Roy did most of the talking, weaving tales of how his kind would frustrate the hated British during the colonial period, which initially wreaked so much havoc and destruction in India. Throughout a lengthy section of our discussion, the raktapishacha-man’s demeanor remained dour, and he seemed lost in melancholy. This gave me time to have a closer look at the creature. In the low light of the café, the skin of its face and hands, which was taut and finely-wrinkled all over resembled well-tanned leather, ochre in color, much like the mellow-brown light that bathed much of the Taki Golpata Forest I had seen while being driven into Tiki. Despite his generally gaunt appearance, Roy’s lips were thick and full, and barely covered his mouthful of feral teeth, which were of a faintly-yellowish ivory white that stood out in sharp contrast to the duskiness of his leathery hide. A jagged line of russet-colored fibrous scarring, somewhat subtle and superficial rather than deep and pronounced, ran up one side of his face, radiating upward from under his chin and culminating just under his left eye, whose outermost corner was drawn slightly downward by the ‘pull’ of the scar tissue’s tighter skin. I must have become so lost in my visual examination of him by this point that I’d failed to notice he’d stopped talking. Peering over the rim of his glasses, Mr. Roy was now regarding me in turn, albeit with a lot less intense scrutiny.

“I do not frighten you too much, do I?” the raktapishacha asked with some gentle amusement. He then waved once more to the waiter who, with subdued reluctance, brought us over two more cups of chai. Mr. Roy thereafter muttered something to the man, who backed away from the table, quickly bowed, then made haste back to the kitchen again. Getting right back to our convo without watching the waiter leave, Roy the raktapishacha-man then proceeded to inquire of Yours Truly, “Are there not my kind where you come from, young Blaisdell…?”

This time I ignored his reference to my age. After all, to a creature that might be X number of millenniums old, a man of merely sixty years of age is nothing but a young’un!

“No, not really. Not like you,” I replied, abruptly turning away from his unwavering gaze to fiddle with my napkin on the table top, as though it were suddenly of vital importance that I do so. His unexpected question had made me feel momentarily awkward, for some reason. “Well, to be honest I’ve never encountered any of your kind prior to my trips abroad,” I continued. “There are different kinds of parahumans in the U.S., though.”

“What was that word you said just then?” interrupted Mr. Roy gently, leaning forward to look directly at me through his opaque shades. At least I assumed he had eyes behind them. Although possibly he might not actually be seeing me in the ‘normal’ way at all, for all I knew.

“Parahumans?” asked I in return, rightly assuming it was the word he was referring to. As I recalled, I’d used the term once before a little earlier, but perhaps Roy had either misheard me or else hadn’t wished to spoil the flow of our conversation by asking about it till now. In continuance, I added, with some mild sheepishness, “Oh, that. Well, you see, it’s what my brother and I like to call supernatural creatures.” (It is such a harmless conceit, after all.) “We came up with it back in our teens, so we’ve rather gotten used to using it by now. A rather inane term, I must admit, but it makes sense to me. I should mention how Brooks—that’s my brother—has made a hobby of tracking-down parahumans in other countries around the world. Basically, how we use it, the word is short for ‘paranormal entities.’ Well, it’s also nicer and more flattering, in our opinions, than what we usually refer to anything that isn’t human as. Like ‘spooks,’ ‘goblins,’ ‘monstrosities,’ ‘demons,’ or what-have-you.”

Mr. Roy grimaced playfully at my use of these to-him-vulgar terms, then said, simultaneously being both facetious and dead-serious in roughly equal parts, “We are all monsters to you men, no matter how much you coat our names in sugar with your euphemisms! Speaking of which…”

The waiter, who had grudgingly returned to our booth for the third or fourth time, politely placed a banana leaf apiece on the tablecloth in front of us, then set down a plate piled high with various sweet after-dinner treats between them in the center of the table. Mr. Roy examined our dessert options: there was mohan bhog, lobongo latika, malai chom chom, chanar jeelapi, and two medium-sized copper bowls of what I assumed must be mishti doi. With a nervousness that must have been so much more obvious to Mr. Roy than it was to me, the waiter quietly placed a bowl in front him, then swiftly and equally-as-quietly placed a second one before me. While I’d noticed repeatedly how the man went to great lengths from ever looking my companion in the eyes, the waiter always made eye-contact with me, as though relieved and grateful that I was as human as he was. Now as before, his eyes were wide and wild with barely-suppressed terror, like those of a trapped animal desperate to get free. Without being unduly brusque about it, the raktapishacha shooed him away.

“It’s so tiresome how the locals react to me!” exclaimed Mr. Roy after our waiter was well out of both sight and earshot. “Always so ruddy skittish and in a hurry to get away!” As if plucking a berry from a bush, he picked up one of the round mohan bhog balls with his thumb and forefinger, piercing it slightly with those long, sharp nails of his, then offered it to me across the table.

Evidently noticing my hesitation, he plopped the sweet offering onto my banana leaf with a little sniff.

“Don’t worry, my dear Christopher, you can’t catch anything from me, I assure you,” he said primly, slurping vestigial mohan bhog crumbs off his impeccably-manicured nail-tips. I noticed—for the first time, oddly enough—how his hands appeared remarkably clean. As an aside, he added with a light laugh that exposed his spikey teeth, “Not unless I bite you, that is!”

I took a bite of the semolina-based sweet he had handed me. Sugary deliciousness filled my mouth, and I savored it. Was it just my imagination, or did the beverages and foodstuffs I’d been consuming taste all the yummier due to the raktapishacha-man’s presence? Possibly it might have something to do with the fact that he/it was of supernatural origin that seemingly greatly enhanced my taste-buds’ response, or feasibly my sense of taste was accentuated by my physiology’s own current heightened state of awareness? Who knows, but it does provide fascinating food for thought; then again, maybe the Kali Maa Guest House just had a really exceptional cook? Having finished-off my mohan bhog ball, I reached for a malai chom chom and, after dipping it in my mishti doi, I eagerly popped this new dollop of gooey yumminess into my gob. Mmmmmmmmm…such bliss!

Mr. Roy must’ve been amused by my reaction, as I heard him chuckle and mutter something under his breath in Bengali.

We partook of our sweets in virtual utter silence, but for the occasional appreciative smacking of our chops. When the serving plate and bowls were empty and all the chai had been drunk, Mr. Roy rapped his claws authoritatively upon the tabletop, whereupon our attendant cleared the table, then returned with still more chai, which was going down like the nectar of the gods, hence my readiness for more.

“By the by,” said Mr. Roy after sipping from his new cup of chai, “I cannot help you with your investigation into those killings.”

“I mentioned nothing about those,” I replied with a bit of a startled stammer. Might I have told him something about them and not remembered? But no, I had purposely made a point of not bringing-up the subject yet. Now all my suspicions that he could read my mind as easily as I could read Meg’s body language (or so I thought!) were confirmed. He’d gleaned the motivations I’d been trying to keep stored-away in the back of mind via some form of telepathic method, quite possibly with very little effort, despite all my conscious efforts not to think about the murders until I felt the time was right to broach the topic with him.

Mr. Roy waved one of his claws slightly, then continued: “I have not heard anything about them from any of my…people. Most of our kind would not hunt so boldly in Tiki. Too many krisna satkarma exorcists and tantriks roaming the city looking for jobs to do! Many years ago it was much easier to prey upon your kind anywhere in this great land. Not now. We are a persecuted race. Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Muslims and even Parsis seek us out for extermination, if there is even the slightest chance that my kind is involved.”

Taking me aback, the raktapishacha suddenly removed his dark glasses, revealing his eyes—I was relieved to finally find out that he did have some after all!—which bored deep into mine, as if staring into my very soul itself. I immediately noticed that his pale green irises were flecked with gold speckles and his pupils were extremely large. His voice now took on an even more deadly-serious tone: “Our numbers are all-too-few enough these days as it is for us to risk drawing more attention to ourselves. These women with their spawn sucked from their bodies. This is not something we do! We are as worried about the killings as you are, for they might well result in our kind being culled more-so than we have been already, in retribution.”

Silence settled over our table, as I sat there with a monster staring back at me. Mr. Roy was probably hundreds of years—quite likely even a thousand or more—old, so if he said there was no modus operandi for any known Bengali critters that matched that of the killings, then I was inclined to believe him.

“It is late, and I have other matters to attend to,” Mr. Roy said abruptly, breaking the stillness. He motioned for more chai and, as the waiter scurried back to the kitchen for the umpteenth time, he looked at me again. “But before we part, allow me to tell you the tale of Vetalas Pachisi. It is one of the oldest tales to be found in the lore of my kind, retold many, many times since time immemorial. Sometimes even I forget how it all began. Vetalas was first put to paper, in Sanskrit, in the Kathasaritsagara the better part of a millennium ago.”

The creature closed his eyes—which had suddenly seemed so much larger than before prior to this—remaining motionless and silent for what seemed to me like a small age, but was probably no more than a minute. His shoulders slumped slightly, as though an invisible external weight was pressing down on them. Then, with a shiver, Mr. Roy reopened his eyes, staring past me (or was it right through me?) as he pondered what to say next.

After taking another sip of his chai, he said in continuation: “But I tell you, the tale is based on still older tales; ones far older even than I am. It is a fascinating tale. But no, wait. Not a tale, but very much a true story. The Kathasaritsagara mentions a young prince who must match wits with Vetalas, who was a living corpse.” (Here Mr. Roy chuckled ever-so-slightly, for reasons known only to himself.) “The creature—a ‘cousin’ of mine, you might say—was, sadly, known as a vetalas or baital or betaal, depending on your cultural tradition. But he wasn’t the first of his kind. We ‘parahumans,’ as you call us, are as old as your human race is.”

“You said ‘sadly’?” I interjected. “He is no more…?”

“Immortality is almost ours, my friend, but only to a point. Like your kind, while our lives are infinitely longer, we too must eventually fade away. Our Vetalas was ended some two-hundred years ago. At the hands of your bloody Britisssssssshhh!” He ended this final word with a sustained bestial hiss, like he might be on the brink of losing all control of his more monstrous alter-ego. Then, after effortlessly regaining total control of itself and resuming its cultivated human façade once more, the creature stared into its chai, going quiet once again. Roy slowly raked his sharp nails back and forth across the textured surface of the ceramic cup, making an annoying skriiitch-skriiitch sound. The raktapishacha did this for some time, like it might be hoping to provoke some sort of reaction from me. But I merely sat drinking my tea in absolute silence, waiting for him to speak again.

Mr. Roy then came out of his several-minute-long lapse to tell me the tale of “The Prince and the Corpse.” It was a long, winding adventure full of intrigue, horror, and gallantry, and I sat spellbound without interrupting once, for the creature wove a wonderful story. Upon finishing, it/he signaled one last time for the waiter. The poor man sheepishly re-approached our table, daring not even so much as a glance at the monster, as per usual. Thinking it the polite thing to do, I settled our tab in full, leaving the cowering, super-stressed server a sizeable tip for his trouble. When Mr. Roy saw me doing this, his head bobbled jauntily and the slightest hint of a smile momentarily softened his frightful countenance (but perhaps this was only wishful thinking on my part, and I’d merely imagined that he smiled; not that the raktapishacha-man had been anything less than amiable throughout our entire impromptu ‘dinner date,’ mind you).

“Let us meet again, you and I,” Mr. Roy suggested with a sudden broad grin that took me completely off-guard. “I like you, but do not take our friendship for granted, and beware. Not all we so-called ‘parahumans’ are so—how you say?—amicable when we find one of your kind alone. For instance, I have a far-less-civilized cousin called Brahmaparusha, a creature you must avoid, at all costs.”

“How would I know one if I saw it?” I asked, leaning in closer.

“This cousin of mine I mentioned doesn’t look at all like me,” said Mr. Roy with a laugh, “They are truly horrid creatures…you will recognize a brahmaparusha at first sight, should you be unfortunate enough to encounter one. The poor fellow goes about naked except for a belt of human skulls. For some peculiar reason I can’t fathom, its belly is torn wide open, and my horrible cousin has wrapped its own intestines all about its head and shoulders. As I said, it is a horrid creature.”

“Lovely,” I muttered wryly, conclusively excusing myself from the table the raktapishacha and I had shared these past few hours. I could still hear the creature chuckling at the look of horror on my face as I turned and left the Kali Maa Guest House, leaving Mr. Roy still sitting at his corner table, as though he was permanently rooted there.

END PART TWO...