Around 2007, I started writing a novel about Jackson Elias. Elias originated in Chaosium’s legendary Call of Cthulhu TRPG campaign Masks of Nyarlathotep, where his murder is the inciting incident of the whole story. I thought Elias was an intriguing character and I wanted to explore the decade or so of his life prior to the start of Masks.
I didn’t get all that far, and what I did write jumped around in time quite a bit. But it’s been sitting on my hard drive for almost twenty years, I’m never going to write the rest, and I thought I might as well post it here for fun.
The Transition of Jackson Elias
©2007 John Tynes
“It is good you are here now, and fitting you are an American,” Georges Sorel said in the study of his apartment in Paris. It was the summer of 1914. “The old world is dying. The Black Hand have killed it, as surely as they killed Ferdinand. Now all is convulsion and apocalypse. You Americans at least understand the power of myth.”
Jackson Elias finished rolling a cigarette using some of Sorel’s superb tobacco and leaned back in the armchair. He pocketed the typing paper on which he’d rolled the cigarette, hoping Sorel didn’t notice that he’d left a sizable clot of tobacco on the paper when he folded it and tucked it into his pocket. It wasn’t stealing as such, Elias thought. It was more like an excessive appreciation of hospitality. He struck a match, lit up, and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs. The aroma mingled on his tongue with the warm flavors of the cognac he was enjoying.
“Myth is my business,” he told Sorel. “Hocus pocus and harum scarum. You know, the Jivaro tribe of the Amazon believe the soul lives in the head. That’s why they shrink them. The heads of their enemies. They want the souls.”
Sorel shook his head. “The soul is a myth. But so is ideology. A necessary myth. Who cares who murdered Ferdinand, why the Black Hand did it? Eh? No one! It is merely a pretext, a false rallying cry, so that the clash of nations can begin and the old world can be destroyed. It is inevitable. Your country has its own myth. The revolution, Washington, Jefferson, all of that. Who is that fellow that rides the horse? To a church at night?”
“Paul Revere.”
“Yes, Paul Revere. The midnight ride. What nonsense. But what necessary nonsense. First the myth, then the ideology, finally the society. That is the order it comes into being. It starts with the myth.”
“You believe in the war, then? It’s real? It’s going to happen?”
“Of course it’s real! We have hours, days, before it starts. You should leave Paris, leave Europe. What is your next book? Where?”
“Mexico and parts south. Death cults. Should be fun. And far from here.”
“Good. Though if you want to see true death cults, the governments here provide ample demonstration.” Sorel sighed, as if tired from carrying the future of the world on his back. “What is needed, what we really need, is direct action by the proletariat. They will — they must — rise up and throw down these monstrous gods of inbred lineage and fictitious birthright who squat upon the thrones of Europe. But first they need a myth to believe in, to hope for. You cannot achieve order without a pattern for it to form in. Like plaster in a mold, you see? Or metal cast into bullets.”
Elias managed a self-effacing grin, the one he used to charm attractive women and stingy publishers. He wondered idly if he could also pocket Sorel’s cognac but decided that was both impractical and rude. “I’m not interested in politics.”
“You aren’t European. You don’t have to be. But you should. Yes, you should.” Sorel leaned forward, intense now. “Your book, The Way of Terror. It could be the blueprint for a revolution! It’s not an ideology but it is a methodology, and that’s halfway there. If you really want to write about cults, put the shrunken heads on the shelf. Cults of ideology, cults of personality, these are the future. You have a gift for seeing the machine behind the god, the drum behind the thunder. When the people awaken, when they embrace the myth, you could see that change firsthand. You could be the prime witness to the birth of the new world!”
Sorel’s face was flush now with the heat of rhetoric. He was old and impatient for the vaguely Marxist revolution he had been predicting for years. Elias thought Sorel looked like the ringleader at a circus, with his accent and his pointy beard and his grandiose statements. He was getting bored.
“Governments don’t change because of myths. If there’s going to be one of these revolutions you keep on about, it’ll be because people are hungry, because their children are sick.”
“You are wrong. Because people are hungry they complain. Because their children are sick they beat their chests. But for a man, an ordinary man, to take the rifle down from the mantle and walk out into the night and shoot a policeman, there has to be a myth. He has to believe that he is a participant in something important, that he matters. And if you are someone who wants that to happen, who wants those husbands and fathers to walk out of their homes and rise up against the oppressors, you must offer them a myth to believe in. Once a man believes a myth, he will do anything the myth tells him.”
Elias finished his cigarette and had a last sip of the cognac. He had heard just about enough. “You know, when my publisher in France sent me your review of my book, I had no idea who you were. A buddy of mine had to explain it to me. I couldn’t figure out why a guy like you would like it so much.”
Sorel was calmer now. Elias wondered if his boredom was showing. But Sorel wasn’t done with the lecture. “You write of myth, of the power cults derive from it and how they use it to control the minds of men. What I am tellling you is that religion, the occult, all of this is the past. The future belongs to your cults, yes, but they are political, not metaphysical. Those who shape the mold, who make the myth, they are the ones who will rule the world. You have the mind to see it but you grasp in darkness. Maybe one day you will see.”
“Well.” Elias rose from his chair. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Sorel. And thank you again for the review. If there is a war in Europe, I hope you see the other side of it.”
“So do I. Leave, Mr. Elias. Leave at once. Being an American will not stop a bullet.”
“That’s good advice.”
They shook hands and Elias threw his jacket over his arm instead of putting it on. It was warm outside, the first day of August, and the stifling dim of the philosopher’s study did not fully suppress the sunshine beyond the windowshades. Sorel opened the front door.
“Farewell, Mr. Elias.”
The heat of Paris struck Elias as if he were walking into the sun. He thought of Mexico and approached the street to find a cab.
* * *
Jackson Elias had come to Europe to meet with a publisher and to rekindle a romance. The publisher turned out to be a hardscrabble little fellow of few resources and middling enthusiasm for Elias’s work — it was his secretary, the only one in the office who knew English well, who loved Elias’s books and had typed the publisher’s letters to him with embellished passion. The meeting went nowhere. European sales of The Way of Terror, his book about death cults and how they are organized and led, had been poor.
Countess Hella von Westarp, on the other hand, had ample enthusiasm for the young, well-traveled American author she had met in New York the year before. When in her boudoir Elias finally ran short of tales of his heroics among the sinister tribes of the Amazon, he just made up more on the spot. The countess had a voracious appetite for tales of adventure, among other things.
The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo, however, put her aristocratic family into a frenzy. She bade Elias farewell and joined her parents in a hurried trip to Africa, where they hoped to weather the storm that was brewing in Europe. Elias packed his bags and decided to satisfy his curiousity about the review that the philosopher Georges Sorel had written of his latest book. That duty dully discharged, Elias left the continent for Southampton to await a steamship.
By the time he crossed the Channel, Germany was at war with Russia and France. While the ship that would bear him to New York approached England’s shores, Britain declared war on Germany. As he packed his bags the morning of his departure, Germany invaded France by way of Belgium, incidentally declaring war there along the way.
He’d liked Europe, what little he’d seen of it. He wondered idly, standing on the deck of the ship and looking to the west, what would be left of it when next he came.
* * *
[Something happens here, something unpleasant, that prefigures the worms in his stomach. Many years go by.]
The beles was on the road from Golganda to Nathdwara and it was much loved by the Thuggee. In his time with this gang, Jackson Elias had buried eight of their victims on the lonely plateau nearby their favorite killing place. This beles was a clearing by a stream that babbled down from the green foothills of the Aravalli Range, at a point about a hundred yards off the trail but well screened by the thick foliage. There they could lure the pilgrims they had befriended, lead them to the stream, and strangle them quietly where no one could see them.
Not even Elias. He had still not seen the Thuggee kill anyone. His jamaadaar Mardeva, the leader of the gang, said he wasn’t worthy of that honor yet. He’d spent two months as a bykureea, a scout and omen-seeker, before Mardeva decided he wasn’t much of a scout and put him to work on the graves instead.
The plateau overlooked the lower hills and was covered in lush grass. Elias’s job was to clear the grass from a section of the plateau and bring up dry wood for a fire. He wasn’t actually allowed to dig. That honor went to Rafey, the senior lughas, who was allowed to wield the gang’s sacred pickaxe. Rafey told Elias the pickaxe was the tooth of Kali.
The rest of the gang would bring the victims’ bodies up to the plateau, drop them in the pit, and then sit around dividing the money while Elias filled in the grave with his hands until the ground was smooth. Then he would build a campfire over the site to disguise the disturbed earth and scatter the remaining dirt elsewhere. After all that, Mardeva would give him his cut of the take.
Five times now Elias had cleared the grass and gathered the wood and five times he scooped dirt up with his hands and tossed it onto the limp bodies below, the bodies of people on their way to a Krishna shrine in Nathdwara. Now as he watched Rafey dig the sixth hole, the lughas cursed. “We cannot come here again,” he said, breathing heavily from his work. “Too many graves. Later we must find a new place to dig for the next time we come to this killing place.”
Still, the road to Nathdwara had been good to the gang. The Shrinathji shrine drew many pilgrims who wished to see the statue of Krishna as a boy. It was said the statue itself had chosen this place to reside and so it was a place of particular potency. All those pilgrims had to carry their traveling money with them, and so they fell under the shadow of the Thuggee.
Elias left Rafey on the plateau in the hopes of finding more dry wood for the fire. He climbed down the steep slope and found the faint trail that led to the beles. He turned to go the other way so as not to disturb what was happening — and then he heard the cry.
From the killing place a man screamed for help. Elias turned, a cold wave of fear passing over him. There was a thrashing in the brush and more yelling, closer now. Elias backed up slowly, looking for a place to hide.
Then a man burst out of the humid green growth. He wasn’t one of the gang. His eyes were wild and there were scratches on his face from fighting off his attackers. He saw Elias and stopped suddenly. Seeing a white man here in the jungle, he assumed Elias was British. A colonial. Someone in authority.
Someone who could save him.
“Please!” he cried. “Help me!” He rushed Elias and clapped his hands on his shoulders. “They are after me!”
Elias was startled and confused. He mumbled something about calming down.
“Are there more of you? Where are your soldiers? Please!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Elias said, his heart beating fast. He felt he should do something, help this man, even though a minute ago he was willing to stand by while the gang did their cruel work out of sight. But this wasn’t a corpse for him to throw dirt on. It was a man in fear for his life begging for help. Elias looked around, hoping for an escape route, somewhere he could shove or hide this man.
Then Mardeva appeared. He didn’t come charging in. He was cool and quick and quiet. He caught Elias’s glance and held it as he approached the pleading man from behind. Mardeva uncoiled his ruhmal and held it between his hands.
Elias realized. Mardeva was counting on him to keep the man’s attention. To keep him pleading, keep him from turning around and seeing the thug’s approach.
“Please, where are the soldiers? Help me!”
The man still grasped Elias by the shoulders. Elias placed his hands on the man’s wrists and gripped them reassuringly.
“Pray with me,” he said. “Krishna is very near. He will hear us.”
The man looked confused, then alarmed, and then Mardeva swung the ruhmal over his head and pulled it taut and the man tried to get his hands free. But Elias held them, tightly, his brow furrowed with intent, and he kept looking into the man’s eyes, hoping to see a glimpse of Kali reflected in the pupils as the man choked to death.
It felt like it took hours for him to die. Elias kept his grip, watched, and remembered everything for later. For his book.
The man went slack. Mardeva tightened the cloth even more and waited, just to be sure. Then he released him.
The man fell to the ground. Elias released his wrists as he fell.
Mardeva coiled the ruhmal and placed a hand on Elias’s shoulder where the dead man’s hand had just been.
“Good,” the jamaadaar said. “You are Thuggee. One day you may even be a strangler.”
Elias forced a smile and nodded humbly.
Mardeva knelt and felt through the man’s clothes. He found a pouch and poured the coins inside out into his hands. Then he gave a few to Elias, who considered them there against his palm, reliving how he’d earned them.
“Help me carry him to the grave,” Mardeva said. “The others are cleaning up the rest.”
Hours later at their camp far from the trail to Nathdwara, the gang ate and talked quietly. Mardeva said a few kind words about Elias’s help that day and the others looked at him with mild respect. Except for Rafey, who scowled and looked away, jealous at Elias sharing in the kill.
Elias chewed his food slowly. He kept seeing the dead man’s face, reliving that moment, marveling that he had not acted differently. Could he have saved his life? Could he have killed Mardeva instead?
But these were crocodile tears, he told himself. When he’d confirmed that Thuggee gangs were still operating and decided to infiltrate one, he’d known this could happen. Just because he’d been a bykureea and a lughas didn’t mean there wasn’t already blood on his hands. Those pilgrims he’d buried could still be alive, had he gone to the police with what he knew as soon as he knew it.
And yet there had been so much more to learn. This hunger for knowing was a beast in him and it would tolerate most any outrage if it meant a morsel of knowledge, an obscurity that suddenly became profound in the learning, the recognition that he now knew something no outsider had ever known before.
Weeks from now, when he wrote of this day, he would write of what he’d seen in the pilgrim’s eyes. But in the text he would be transformed, standing across a clearing and seeing the murder happen at a distance. The ink of the typewriter would wash away his sins and he would be blameless, and no one would ever know that he’d held the dying man’s wrists, feeling the pulse quicken and then ebb, that he had helped kill an innocent man for the sake of his book.
But now it was late, and dark, and he wanted very badly to go to sleep. Some part of him wished he would never wake up.
* * *
Elias returned to his hotel room in Bombay around four o’clock. It was June of 1918, three months since the murder on the road to Nathdwara. A carbon copy of the manuscript for his latest, book, Sons of Death, was now in the hands of the Royal Mail, bound for a friend of his in London who would keep it safe until he returned on his way home.
He had altered his routine to make the delivery. Every day a white man waited across the street from the hotel and when Elias emerged, the man would signal to one of a variety of native confederates who would then follow him wherever he went. Elias believed the surveillance started immediately on his return from the wilderness, which suggested that whoever was behind it had spotted him on the train, or maybe even sooner. Today, nervous about the safety of the carbons, Elias dressed like a native and went out the servant’s entrance.
His nine months among the Thuggee had left him with useful skills. He was neither detected nor followed.
Whoever was behind it, they were British, or at the very least of the colonial authority. The Thuggee wouldn’t be following him like this. They would simply kill him.
With his manuscript now safe, Elias changed into his normal clothes. He walked downstairs, strolled through the lobby, crossed the street, and smiled at the man who was intently studying a newspaper.
“I’m Jackson Elias,” he said. “I believe you’re spying on me.”
The man glared at Elias. He was about forty, wearing a light gray suit and a straw hat with a stiff bearing that suggested military service. He folded his paper up and looked down the street, where one of his minions was anxiously watching this unexpected confrontation. He gestured to him and the man huried away.
“Come on, you cheeky devil,” he told Elias. “You’ve got business with your betters.”
Ten minutes’ brisk walk brought them to the office of the Governor of Bombay. They exchanged no conversation en route, Elias enjoying the man’s obvious discomfort at the situation. Once they entered the man waved at a chair and walked away.
Elias waited alone in the lobby. He’d had some meetings with colonial officials last fall when he first arrived in India, but they’d led nowhere. So far as the government was concerned, the last of the Thuggee were arrested, killed, or fled almost thirty years ago, driven out of existence by decades of professional police work. With their collapse, the Thuggee and Dacoity Department was obsolete and became the Central Criminal Intelligence Department. The few officials Elias had interviewed all thought his suspicions of a resurgent Thuggee cult were nonsense. But Elias had the scribbled eyewitness testimony of a crippled British deserter and that had been enough to set him on the trail.
A young Indian man in glasses and a turban approached. “Come with me,” he said politely. “The governor will see you now.”
Elias didn’t rise immediately because he was shocked. Lord Willingdon, the governor of the province, had brought him here?
“Please,” the man said. Elias rose and followed him.
The governor’s office was a large space on the second floor with doors opened onto a balcony to circulate the afternoon breeze. Hunting trophies, statues, and native curios decorated the space, as did a portrait of King George V.
Lord Willingdon rose from behind his massive desk and frowned. He was of middle age, very slender, with jug ears and a long face. “Elias? Have a seat.”
Elias sat before the desk in a rather short chair. He wondered if God had a bigger desk than Lord Willingdon. It seemed unlikely.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on you,” Willingdon began.
“I’ve noticed.”
“Of course you have. Since you’ve returned, the Thuggee have been hunting you. It was just a precaution but it proved out. My men have fought off two of the bastards who were attempting to hunt you down in the streets.”
He’s lying, Elias thought. If the Thuggee knew what he’d done, he’d be dead by now.
“We received the letter you sent, and many thanks for the information. Our boys at the CCID are looking into the names and places and I don’t doubt arrests are imminent. Though God knows they’ll probably put up a fight and save us the costs of incarceration, eh?” The governor chuckled.
“I’m glad to hear it,” Elias said warily. “The gang of Thuggee I lived among killed ten people while I was with them, and I heard tell of ten times as many more. You have a problem, governor.”
“Yes. Quite.” Willingdon seemed annoyed, though whether because of his Thuggee problem or the fact that Elias had brought it to his attention was unclear.
“Look here, Elias. You’re an American. But you’re still a white man. I’m sure you understand how important it is that we maintain order here. If the natives start thinking we can’t protect them, that the Thuggee are back, then the rabble rousers will really have something to work with.”
“Rabble rousers?”
“The country is lousy with them! Nationalists, home rule leaguers, it’s endless. We haven’t had an Easter Rising here of late but it’s only a matter of time — and back home they’re seriously talking about giving the Paddies a parliament, for God’s sake, after all those shenanigans. We have to keep a grip on things, Elias. Surely you can see that.”
“These are trying times.”
“Exactly. Exactly.” Willingdon leaned forward. “Now what would you say if I told you we have a Thuggee in custody? Not just a common killer but a mastermind, a man who is working covertly to bring back the cult and use it to spur a nationalist uprising?”
“Fascinating,” Elias said. Here, he thought, is the bait. But what is the trap?
“I think you should interview him. For your book. He’s the missing link, Elias, between the Thuggee and these nationalist wogs that are stirring up such trouble. We’re holding him in a prison in Ahmedabad. There’s a train tonight. Will you go?
“Of course. He’ll talk to me?”
Willingdon slammed his fist on his desk. “If not then by God, we’ll make him!”
“What’s his name?”
“His name? Oh, let’s see.” Willingdon shuffled papers on his desk and then inspected one. It was, Elias thought, a clumsy show of feigned ignorance.
“Ah yes, here it is. The devil’s name is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.”
* * *
The train ride from Bombay to Ahmedabad on the BB&CI railway lasted through the night, interrupted by frequent stops and delays. Elias did not travel alone: the British man who’d been watching him came along as an escort. He gave his name as Harris and spoke very little except for the occasional snarling insult to a baggage handler. Instead of making conversation he read very dreary-looking government and economic journals, occasionally underlining and circling items with a pencil and making notations on the back covers to list the pages he’d marked. Elias found him both boring and slightly cruel.
They spent enough time on the train that Elias eventually realized Harris wasn’t his only escort. A couple of furtive Indian men, likely the same ones who assisted Harris in his watch, were on board but traveling separately. They occasionally drifted by making a show of pretending not to know him.
Elias was glad a copy of his book was already, secretly, making its slow way to London. His friend and colleague Montague Summers would undoubtedly open and read it immediately, which was annoying, but he would also keep it safe. Elias suspected that Willingdon’s men had an unhealthy interest in what he was writing — unhealthy for him, that is.
The last leg of the train ride brought Elias to Ahmedabad in the morning. For the previous two hours, the train had completely filled up with workers heading north to the textile mills on the banks of the Sabarmati river, with the rural poor jammed into the aisle, jostling each other and the seated travelers. Harris had quite a few sharp words to say, most of which Elias even understood.
A police rickshaw was waiting for them at the train station. Harris and Elias got on board and twenty minutes later arrived at Ahmedabad Central Prison, where the Thuggee mastermind was being detained at His Majesty’s pleasure.
“What charges are you holding this man on?” Elias asked Harris as they passed through the guardhouse.
“It’ll turn out to be sedition and conspiracy, I expect.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well unless you catch him in the act, the thing to do with a shifty wog like this one is arrest him first and then make him tell you why. There’s no point in guesswork.”
The Sabarmati river was mostly dried up this time of year. The city was hot and dusty; inside the prison it was sweltering. Harris wiped his brow with a cotton handkerchief. Elias noticed that neither of the initials sewn into the cloth were an H.
The meeting room was small and spare and stank of sweat, fear, and sour old blood. The slim Indian man sat in a chair looking at him guardedly through his wire-rim spectacles. Elias sat down. Harris and two guards leaned against the wall, bored.
“So,” Elias said. “My name is Jackson Elias. I’m a writer. What’s your name?”
The man licked his lips. “I am Mohandas Gandhi. I am a Thuggee.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I am a Thuggee. I order my men to kill people and bring me their money.”
Elias picked up the pencil and twirled it a bit in his fingers.
“Mm hm. How did you come to join the Thuggee?”
Gandhi glanced at Harris for a moment. “When I was in school, I needed money. So I joined them. I made good money.”
“What was your first job with the Thuggee? What did they ask you to do?”
“I had to kill a man. I used my rope and I choked him to death then I took his money.”
Harris took a step forward. “Mr. Elias knows all about that stuff. Tell him what you’re doing now.”
Elias could tell the man was afraid of Harris and the guards. His eyes were red and sunken, as if he’d gotten little sleep, and Elias noticed that he winced now and then when moving his arms. He wondered if the guards had flogged him.
“Now I work to force the British out of my country. I am leading all the Thuggee to make an uprising. We will make them leave or we will kill them.”
Elias leaned back in his chair. He spoke a few words in Ramasi, the secret cant of the Thuggee. He said them casually and with a slight smile, as if quoting an obscure epigram, but what he said was a great blasphemy against the goddess Kali.
Gandhi listened, uncomprehending.
Elias stood up and approached Harris. He stood closely and whispered in his ear.
“Give me a few minutes alone with him. He’s scared of you.”
Harris looked at him sharply, then nodded. He gestured to the guards and the three of them left the room. “Shout if he tries anything,” Harris said.
When the door closed, Elias turned back to Gandhi. He walked over to him, right next to him, and crouched down. When he spoke it was softly, so that Harris couldn’t hear him through the door.
“You are not a Thuggee. Who are you? Why are they making you say these things?”
The man swallowed hard and his eyes got big. “No,” he said, “no, I am Thuggee!”
“You are not a Thuggee. Who are you? Who is Mohandas Gandhi?”
The man looked at the door nervously. He was sweating profusely.
“Who is Mohandas Gandhi?”
“Sabarmati Ashram.” It was a whisper that trembled in the telling. It sounded like truth.
“What’s that?”
“Go there. You find Mohandas Gandhi there. Ask him. Ask him why.”
“Where is it?”
The man looked at the door again. “I am Thuggee!” he said loudly. “Kill all the British!” He stood up quickly, his chair falling over with a clatter. “I am Thuggee! Thuggee!’ he cried.
The door swung open and the guards rushed in. They grabbed the man and dragged him out while he continued to yell.
Harris stood outside the door. “You get all that?”
“I got what I need.”
Actually I need two things, Elias thought. One was his traveling bag, which was in the police rickshaw that had brought them here. The other was an opportunity to escape.
On the way back to the train station, Harris handed him a packet of papers. “Here’s what we have on that guy. There’s nothing in here about his Thuggee ties — that was new to us. But he’s already caused us plenty of trouble.”
Elias thanked him and tucked the papers into his bag. He was watching for Harris’s shadows, whom he hadn’t seen since the train. There was no sign of them, which might just mean they were doing their job.
At the station he excused himself to visit the restroom. There he dug into his bag and quickly changed clothes, putting on some native garb he’d brought with him. He climbed out a window that faced onto the train yard.
A train was coming through, the big black locomotive blowing steam as it thundered along. Elias darted in front of it, a loping figure in rags, and made his way into the streets of Ahmedabad.
It took him two hours to find Sabarmati Ashram. From reading the Ramayana and other Hindu epics, Elias knew this would be a place where a guru lived — one whom Lord Willingdon apparently wanted him to believe was a Thuggee. What Elias wanted to know was why.
The ashram was comprised of a dozen or so small buildings surrounded by trees and grass. Three people worked in a garden to one side. As Elias walked up the path to the first building, the farmers looked him over but kept working.
Stepping through the open doorway, Elias found a dozen people spinning cloth. A well-built man got up and greeted him.
“I’m looking for Mohandas Gandhi,” Elias said in Hindi. The man replied in what Elias suspected was Gujarati, but he nodded and walked away as if he understood.
The spinners watched him furtively. He put on a slight smile and set his bag down, trying to look friendly. He remembered Mardeva, the Thuggee, and how charming he could be. The Thuggee had to be charming to make their targets trust them. They practiced at it, rehearsed stories and jokes with each other, all to get close enough for the kill.
The man returned, now accompanied by a slight middle-aged fellow, with thin hair and glasses. The man held out his hand.
“I am Mohandas Gandhi,” he said in perfect English. “Welcome to our ashram.”
“Thank you. My name’s Jackson Elias. I’m a writer.”
“You are American?”
“Yes. Earlier today I visited a man in the prison who said he was you.”
“The authorities are never reticent to put me in jail. Perhaps they hired someone to keep my cell warm.” The man smiled as he said this. “Please come to my office.”
He led Elias to another building. This small structure contained a desk and chairs as well as bookcases containing law books. Elias was surprised.
“I expected a spiritual guru, not a legal one,” he said as he sat down.
“You engage civilization according to its practices,” the guru said, “just as you speak to a man in his language. But yes, I am a lawyer. Why were you at the prison?”
“Lord Willingdon sent me there. To meet you.”
Gandhi leaned forward in his chair but said nothing.
“He said you were a rabble rouser. He also said you were a Thuggee.”
Gandhi’s eyes widened. Then his face broke into a smile and he laughed, quite heartily. Elias felt relieved.
“Did he now? Well that is a new tactic. Please go on.”
“I’m writing a book about the Thuggee. Willingdon said I should interrogate you. He said you were a mastermind, and would lead the Thuggee in an uprising against the British.”
“And what did I say? When you interrogated me?”
“The man in the prison was neither you nor a Thuggee. He had a few lines to parrot at me, but he wasn’t convincing. I got him alone and he told me to come here, to your ashram. I’m sure Willingdon’s men put him up to it.”
Gandhi sat back and thought for a moment. Finally he spoke. “The British say the Thuggee were destroyed years ago. What do you say?”
“I say they are still here. I know it. I lived among them for the last nine months and I saw them kill. They may not be as numerous, but they remain.”
“You are certainly correct. They are dust, ground down by the British.”
“I think my book will sell better if I give a somewhat more generous appraisal.”
Gandhi laughed. “Well. Why do you think Lord Willingdon put on this show for you?”
“He’s trying to smear you. He thinks I’ll write in my book that you are a Thuggee mastermind and it’ll help his authority, either here or back in England or both. But I don’t know why.”
“I do.” Gandhi looked away for a moment, thinking. When he spoke it was with strength. “India must be free. We have toiled under their yoke long enough. Now we must find our own path. I say this, and so do many others, often, in public, at conferences, in newspapers. Willingdon and the other overlords think we are conspirators, traitors. They think we should be grateful for the sting of the lash. They think we should be obedient and docile, like the dog on the phonographic records they sell us — His Master’s Voice. I have heard that voice all my life and now I only want it to be silent.”
“So you’re a revolutionary.”
“I am just a man. I do not want violence. I only want freedom.”
“I met a man once who wanted nothing but revolution. He said people need a myth to believe in, something to inspire them, before they would rise up.”
“We don’t need myths. The truth is all the inspiration we require.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Elias said, “Well, I think I understand now. Willingdon doesn’t know I’ve already finished my book and it’s on its way to London. There’s nothing in this for me to write about.”
“I am sad to hear you say this. You come all the way to my country and the only thing you write about are our murderers.”
“It’s sort of my specialty. I’ve written three books about death cults around the world.”
Gandhi shook his head. “It’s a waste of your time. The Thuggee, even at their height, were just criminals. They owned nothing, ruled nothing, led no one. Your death cults are a distraction. Today they are a shadow, useful only as propaganda by the real powers.” He leaned forward again. “This world is full of injustice. The true death cults now are governments and companies and companies that act like governments. Write about them, Mr. Elias.”
Elias chuckled. “That’s not my game. I don’t get involved in that sort of thing.”
Gandhi stared at him, almost uncomprehending. “You say you lived among the Thuggee for nine months. You say you saw them kill. You would do that, wash your hands in a river of blood, defile your soul as an accomplice to murder and terror.” His voice grew sad. “But you will not take one step on behalf of freedom.”
Elias was uncomfortable. He’d satisfied his curiousity and now he just wanted to leave. Leave the ashram, leave Ahmedabad, leave India. Most of all, he wanted to leave this conversation.
He looked at the slight man behind the desk. He imagined grasping his wrists, holding them tight, Mardeva looping the ruhmal over his neck and pulling it hard. But even then, in his mind as well as in his sight, this man continued looking at him calmly, sadly, seeing more of him than he wanted anyone to see. Even when Elias imagined this man’s death he could not make him look away. He could not escape that gaze. It wasn’t judgement or pity. It was just understanding, empathy, and that was something Jackson Elias neither wanted nor needed. His body was too full of secrets to permit anything else inside.
In the heat of the day, jumbled images threatened to overwhelm him: images of this man in his office, the man he’d help Mardeva kill, the shrunken head he’d made under the guidance of the Jivaro, the bodies he’d put into graves on behalf of the Thuggee. His adult life had been a ricochet from one hellhole to another in search of things no one else knew. He had to admit there was a price he’d paid for that knowledge and it made him sick.
He stood up abruptly, excused himself, and walked quickly outside. He kept walking, his back to the ashram, and when he got past the copse of trees at the end of the path he dropped to the ground and vomited.
He breathed heavily, lightheaded, staring down at the puddle he’d just voided onto the dirt. It included several small worms, writhing through what had been his lunch.
It was time to leave India.
* * *
“New gods arise, and antique altars fall; the ancient kingdoms totter to decay, as infant nations rewrite history.” It was March of 1919 and the reverend was entirely delighted with himself. “That’s from my first book, a decade ago. And now your President Wilson is going about remaking the world in his image. That seems entirely too presumptuous for such a young republic as yours, my friend.”
Jackson Elias looked up from the desk. He was disheveled and bleary, only recently awakened from where he’d fallen asleep, here, his face pressed against the papers on the desk. He didn’t know it yet, but ink in his own handwriting was smeared across one cheek. The reverend squinted to see what the discoloration was and then smiled again. “I can read you like a book.” Elias didn’t know what his friend was on about but he thought the man looked even more pleased with himself than before, a feat that would have seemed unlikely a moment earlier. But then this reverend was Monty Summers, a man whose faith in God was assured in part because of his confidence that he was so superb only a supreme being could have created him. Deus ergo ego, as Summers would quite possibly say, and probably had.
“Good morning, Monty.” Elias yawned as Summers opened the drapes in his study. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make a bed of your desk.”
“Quite all right, quite all right. I know you are hard at work. How did the interview with Miss Firth go?”
“Well enough. She knows a lot of witches. Your country seems to be teeming with them.”
“Ah, our ancestors knew what to do with witches: burn them, drown them, or run them out of town. Of course those were true emissaries of Satan. These days, I believe the devil has better things to do with himself than corrupt the village crone. Last I saw I think he was wearing a German uniform, in fact.”
“Germany isn’t run by Satan, Monty. I think he’s too busy running Chicago.”
“I’ll defer to you on that. How is the work?”
“Well enough. It’s a relief to write something that doesn’t require either a foreign language or dysentery.”
Summers settled into, first, a chair, and second, a diatribe, both of which made him more comfortable. “Witchcraft is a perennial. Although I think today’s dilettantes and dabblers are unworthy of the practice. They’re as likely to be Theosophists as anything, and half of them act like men to boot. I frankly haven’t a clue what Miss Firth is on about, for example — first it was Atlantis, then Blavatsky, and now she’s taken up with daft old Moina Mathers. Give me the witches of old, with their potions and poultices, the black mass, the horned man, sheela-na-gig. We knew what evil was, once, and we knew how to stop it.” Summers stabbed his finger against the arm of the chair for emphasis. “We knew how to put those women in their place.”
Elias leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “By God, Monty, you haven’t even had breakfast yet and you’ve already mounted your lectern.”
“It’s my natural habitat.”
“I know your opinion of contemporary womanhood and I don’t share it. I’m perhaps too fond of women for my own good. But really, regardless of how ludicrous these dabblers may be to you, they represent a new revival of those old ways. What has sunk may rise. They stand at a vanguard of mysticism that may yet sweep the world. And are they all so completely absurd?”
“Not all, no,” Summers admitted. “In truth, from this sea of pretenders and prattlers you’re writing about there emerges one who walks the true path. She’s an adept, I tell you, a real old-time religion kind of woman. Were she not wholly outside the Judeo-Christian scope I’d burn her at the stake myself, but she belongs to an entirely different world. A throwback, a primitive, beautiful and haughty like her forebears in the ancient world. I met her last year and she’s just returned from New York. You simply must meet her.”
“Who is she?”
“M’Weru. She’s Kenyan, of the Kiruyu tribe, and she’s just marvelous. Elegant and sophisticated, at ease in the finest salons but her blood courses with atavistic powers. If she has not personally driven a dagger into the breast of a mewling babe I’ll eat my hat!”
“You sound like you approve.”
“She’s bloody, bold, and resolute, not one of these quivering mystics with visions of sunken cities who can’t see past the tea leaves in the bottoms of their cups. Really, she’s a magnificent specimen. Sir Aubrey should have her stuffed, but I daresay he’d sooner see her mounted. I imagine you would too, once you meet her, you yankee cad.”
“Now you’ve got my attention. But who’s Sir Aubrey?”
“Penhew is his name. Egyptologist. Boring as hell and more money than brains, but we do love our Egypt around here. He’s leading an expedition with her, financed by some New York playboy she must have wrapped around her ebony finger. They’ve just arrived and leave for Cairo in a week or so, but that’s long enough. You want to write a book about a real witch, you should choose her.”
“Well if you can make the introduction then I’ll do my best.”
“Of course. Penhew and I belong to the same club. Consider it done.”
* * *
Two nights later, Elias and his friend ventured to Pall Mall in the heart of London. There stood the Athenaeum Club, a neoclassical toad of a building.
[Cut to London and Summers. Writes Witch Cults, mostly an academic exercise like Masters of the Black Arts. Leads him to M’Weru.]