5

Jack heard Kolabati cry out in the other room. Not a cry of fear or pain—more like a wail of despair. He found her kneeling on the floor of the bedroom, rocking back and forth, cradling a mottled, football-sized object in her arms. Tears were streaming down her face.

“What happened?”

“It’s empty!” she said through a sob.

“What was in it?” Jack had seen an ostrich egg once. That had been white; this was about the same size but its shell was swirled with gray.

“A female rakosh.”

Rakosh. This was the second time Jack had heard her say that word. The first had been Friday night when the rotten odor had seeped into his apartment. He didn’t need any further explanation to know what had hatched from that egg: It had dark skin, a lean body with long arms and legs, a fanged mouth, taloned hands, and bright yellow eyes.

Moved by her anguish, he knelt opposite Kolabati. Gently he pulled the empty egg from her grasp and he took her two hands in his.

“Tell me about it.”

“I can’t.”

“You must.”

“You wouldn’t believe…”

“I’ve already seen them. I believe. Now I’ve got to understand. What are they?”

“They are rakoshi.”

“I gathered that. But the name means nothing.”

“They are demons. They people the folk tales of Bengal. They’re used to spice up stories told at night to frighten children or to make them behave—’The rakoshi will get you!’ Only a select few through the ages have known that they are more than mere superstition.”

“And you and Kusum are two of those select few, I take it.”

“We are the only ones left. We come from a long line of high priests and priestesses. We are the last of the Keepers of the Rakoshi. Through the ages the members of our family have been charged with the care of the rakoshi—to breed them, control them, and use them according to the laws set down in the old days. And until the middle of the last century we discharged that duty faithfully.”

She paused, seemingly lost in thought. Jack impatiently urged her on.

“What happened then?”

“British soldiers sacked the temple of Kali where our ancestors worshipped. They killed everyone they could find, looted what they could, poured burning oil into the rakoshi cave, and set the temple afire. Only one child of the priest and priestess survived.” She glanced at the empty shell. “And only one intact rakosh egg was found in the fire-blasted caves. A female egg. Without a male egg, it meant the end of the rakoshi. They were instinct.”

Jack touched the shell gingerly. So this was where those horrors came from. Hard to believe. He lifted the shell and held it so the light from the lamp shown through the hole into the interior. Whatever had been in here was long gone.

“I can tell you for sure, Kolabati: They aren’t extinct. There were a good fifty of them in that ship tonight.” Fifty of them… he tried to blank out the memory. Poor Nellie!

“Kusum must have found a male egg. He hatched them both and started a nest.”

Kolabati baffled him. Could it be true that she hadn’t known until now? He hoped so. He hated to think she could fool him so completely.

“That’s all well and fine, but I still don’t know what they are. What do they do?”

“They’re demons—”

“Demons, shmemons! Demons are supernatural! There was nothing supernatural about those things. They were flesh and blood!”

“No flesh like you have ever seen before, Jack. And their blood is almost black.”

“Black, red—blood is blood.”

“No, Jack!” She rose up on her knees and gripped his shoulders with painful intensity. “You must never underestimate them! Never! They appear slow-witted but they are cunning. And they are almost impossible to kill.”

“The British did a good job, it seems.”

Her face twisted. “Only by sheer luck! They chanced upon the only thing that will kill rakoshi—fire! Iron weakens them, fire destroys them.”

“Fire and iron…” Jack suddenly understood the two jets of flame Kusum had stood between, and the reason for housing the monsters in a steel-hulled ship. Fire and iron: the two age-old protections against night and the dangers it held. “But where did they come from?”

“They have always been.”

Jack stood up and pulled her to her feet. Gently. She seemed so fragile right now.

“I can’t believe that. They’re built like humans but I can’t see that we ever had a common ancestor. They’re too—” He remembered the instinctive animosity that had surged to life within him as he had watched them “… different.”

“Tradition has it that before the Vedic gods, and even before the pre-Vedic gods, there were other gods, the Old Ones, who hated mankind and wanted to usurp our place on earth. To do this they created blasphemous parodies of humans embodying the opposite of everything good in humans, and called them rakoshi. They are us, stripped of love and decency and everything good we are capable of. They are hate, lust, greed, and violence incarnate. The Old Ones made them far stronger than humans, and planted in them an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The plan was to have rakoshi take humankind’s place on earth.”

“Do you believe that?” It amazed him to hear Kolabati talking like a child who believed in fairy tales.

She shrugged. “I think so. At least it will do for me until a better explanation comes along. But as the story goes, it turned out that humans were smarter than the rakoshi and learned how to control them. Eventually, all rakoshi were banished to the Realm of Death.”

“Not all.”

“No, not all. My ancestors penned the last nest in a series of caves in northern Bengal and built their temple above. They learned ways to bend the rakoshi to their will and they passed those ways on, generation after generation. When our parents died, our grandmother passed the egg and the necklaces on to Kusum and me.”

“I knew the necklaces came in somewhere.”

Kolabati’s voice was sharp as her hand flew to her throat. “What do you know of the necklace?”

“I know those two stones up front there look an awful lot like rakoshi eyes. I figured it was some sort of membership badge.”

“It’s more than that,” she said in a calmer voice. “For want of a better term, I’ll say it’s magic.”

As Jack walked back to the living room, he laughed softly.

“You find this amusing?” Kolabati said from behind him.

“No.” He dropped into a chair and laughed again, briefly. The laughter disturbed him—he seemed to have no control over it. “It’s just that I’ve been listening to what you’ve been telling me and accepting every word without question. That’s what’s funny—I believe you! It’s the most ridiculous, fantastic, far-fetched, implausible, impossible story I’ve ever heard, and I believe every word of it!”

“You should. It’s true.”

“Even the part about the magic necklace?” Jack held up his hand as she opened her mouth to elaborate. “Never mind. I’ve swallowed too much already. I might choke on a magic necklace.”

“It’s true!”

“I’m far more interested in your part in all this. Certainly you must have known.”

She sat down opposite him. “Friday night in your room I knew there was a rakosh outside the window. Saturday night, too.”

Jack had figured that out by now. But he had other questions: “Why me?”

“It came to your apartment because you tasted the durba grass elixir that draws a hunting rakosh to a particular victim.”

Grace’s so-called laxative! A rakosh must have carried her off between Monday night and Tuesday morning. And Nellie last night. But Nellie—those pieces of flesh held on high in the flickering light… he swallowed the bile that surged into his throat—Nellie was dead. Jack was alive.

“Then how come I’m still around?”

“My necklace protected you.”

“Back to that again? All right—tell me.”

She lifted the front of the necklace as she spoke, holding it on either side of the pair of eye-like gems. “This has been handed down through my family for ages. The secret of making it is long gone. It has… powers. It is made of iron, which traditionally has power over rakoshi, and renders its wearer invisible to a rakosh.”

“Come on, Kolabati—” This was too much to believe.

“It’s true! The only reason you are able to sit here and doubt is because I covered you with my body on both occasions when the rakosh came in to find you! I made you disappear! As far as a rakosh was concerned, your apartment was empty. If I hadn’t, you would be dead like the others!”

The others… Grace and Nellie. Two harmless old ladies.

“But why the others? Why—?”

“To feed the nest! Rakoshi must have human flesh on a regular basis. In a city like this it must have been easy to feed a nest of fifty. You have your own caste of untouchables here— winos, derelicts, runaways, people no one would miss or bother to look for even if their absence was noticed.”

That explained all those missing winos the newspapers had been blabbering about. Jack jumped to his feet. “I’m not talking about them! I’m talking about two well-to-do old ladies who have been made victims of these things!”

“You must be mistaken.”

“I’m not.”

“Then it must have been an accident. A missing-persons search is the last thing Kusum would want. He would pick faceless people. Perhaps those women came into possession of some of the elixir by mistake.”

“Possible.” Jack was far from satisfied, but it was possible. He wandered around the room.

“Who were they?”

“Two sisters: Nellie Paton last night and Grace Westphalen last week.”

Jack thought he heard a sharp intake of breath, but when he turned to Kolabati her face was composed. “I see,” was all she said.

“He’s got to be stopped.”

“I know,” Kolabati said, clasping her hands in front of her. “But you can’t call the police.”

The thought hadn’t entered Jack’s mind. Police weren’t on his list of possible solutions for anything. But he didn’t tell Kolabati that. He wanted to know her reasons for avoiding them. Was she protecting her brother?

“Why not? Why not get the cops and the harbor patrol and have them raid that freighter, arrest Kusum, and wipe out the rakoshi?”

“Because that won’t accomplish a thing! They can’t arrest Kusum because of diplomatic immunity. And they’ll go in after the rakoshi not knowing what they’re up against. The result will be a lot of dead men; instead of being killed, the rakoshi will be scattered around the city to prey on whomever they can find, and Kusum will go free.”

She was right. She had obviously given the matter a lot of thought. Perhaps she had even considered blowing the whistle on Kusum herself. Poor girl. It was a hideous burden of responsibility to carry alone. Maybe he could lighten the load.

“Leave him to me.”

Kolabati rose from her chair and came to stand before Jack. She put her arms around his waist and laid the side of her head against his shoulder.

“No. Let me speak to him. He’ll listen to me. I can stop him.”

I doubt that very much, Jack thought. He’s crazy, and nothing short of killing’s going to stop him.

But he said: “You think so?”

“We understand each other. We’ve been through so much together. Now that I know for sure he has a nest of rakoshi, he’ll have to listen to me. He’ll have to destroy them.”

“I’ll wait with you.”

She jerked back and stared at him, terror in her eyes. “No! He mustn’t find you here! He’ll be so angry he’ll never listen to me!”

“I don’t—”

“I’m serious, Jack! I don’t know what he might do if he found you here with me and knew you had seen the rakoshi. He must never know that. Please. Leave now and let me face him alone.”

Jack didn’t like it. His instincts were against it. Yet the more he thought about it, the more reasonable it sounded. If Kolabati could convince her brother to eradicate his nest of rakoshi, the touchiest part of the problem would be solved. If she couldn’t—and he doubted very much that she could—at least she might be able to keep Kusum off balance long enough for Jack to find an opening and make his move. Nellie Paton had been a spirited little lady. The man who killed her was not going to walk away.

“All right,” he said. “But you be careful. You never know —he might turn on you.”

She smiled and touched his face. “You’re worried about me. I need to know that. But don’t worry. Kusum won’t turn on me. We’re too close.”

As he left the apartment, Jack wondered if was doing the right thing. Could Kolabati handle her brother? Could anyone? He took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out to the street.

The park stood dark and silent across Fifth Avenue. Jack knew that after tonight he would never feel the same about the dark again. Yet horse-drawn hansom cabs still carried lovers through the trees; taxis, cars, and trucks still rushed past on the street; late workers, party-goers, prowling singles walked by, all unaware that a group of monsters was devouring human flesh in a ship tied to a West Side dock.

Already the horrors he had witnessed tonight were taking on an air of unreality. Was what he had seen real?

Of course it was. It just didn’t seem so standing here amid the staid normalcy of Fifth Avenue in the upper Sixties. Maybe that was good. Maybe that seeming unreality would let him sleep at night until he took care of Kusum and his monsters.

He caught a cab and told the driver to go around the Park instead of through it.