The Tomb (Repairman Jack)

' 'Pollutes.' '

'That's the word.'

'Do you worry that much about your karma?'

'Not as much as I should. Certainly not as much as Kusum does.' Her eyes clouded. 'He's become obsessed with his karma...his karma and Kali.'

That struck a dissonant chord in Jack. 'Kali? Wasn't she worshipped by a bunch of stranglers?' His unimpeachable source was Gunga Din.

Kolabati's eyes cleared and flashed as she dug her fingernails into his palm, turning pleasure to pain.

'That wasn't Kali but a diminished avatar of her called Bhavani who was worshipped by Thugges—low-caste criminals! Kali is the Supreme Goddess!'

'Whoops! Sorry.'

She smiled. 'Where do you live?'

'Not far.'

'Take me there.'

Jack hesitated, knowing it was his firm personal rule never to let people know where he lived unless he’d known them for a good long while. But she was stroking his palm again.

'Now?'

'Yes.'

'Okay.'

6

For certain is death for the born

And certain is birth for the dead;

Therefore over the inevitable

Thou shouldst not grieve.

Kusum lifted his head from his study of the Bhagavad Gita. There it was again. That sound from below. It came to him over the dull roar of the city beyond the dock, the city that never slept, over the nocturnal harbor sounds, and the creaks and rattles of the ship as the tide caressed its iron hull and stretched the ropes and cables that moored it.

Kusum closed the Gita and went to his cabin door. It was too soon. The Mother could not have caught the Scent yet.

He went out and stood on the small deck that ran around the aft superstructure. The officers' and crew's quarters, galley, wheelhouse and funnel were all clustered here at the stern. He looked forward along the entire length of the main deck, a flat surface broken only by the two hatches to the main cargo holds and the four cranes leaning out from the kingpost set between them.

His ship. A good ship, but an old one. Small as freighters go—2,500 tons, running 200 feet prow to stem, 30 feet across her main deck. Rusted and dented, but she rode high and true in the water. Her registry was Liberian.

Kusum had had her sailed here six months ago. No cargo at that time, only a sixty-foot enclosed barge towed 300 feet behind the ship as it made its way across the Atlantic from London. The cable securing the barge came loose the night the ship entered New York Harbor. The next morning the barge was found drifting two miles off shore. Empty. Kusum sold it to a garbage-hauling outfit. US.

Customs inspected the two empty cargo holds and allowed the ship to dock. Kusum had secured a slip for it in the barren area above Pier 97 on the West Side where there was little dock activity. It was moored nose first into the bulkhead. A rotting pier ran along its starboard flank. The crew had been paid and discharged. Kusum had been the only human aboard since.

The rasping sound came again. More insistent.

Kusum went below. The sound grew in volume as he neared the lower decks. Opposite the engine room, he came to a watertight hatch and stopped.

The Mother wanted to get out. She had begun scraping her talons along the inner surface of the hatch and would keep it up until she was released. Kusum stood and listened for a while, puzzled. He knew the sound well: long, grinding, irregular rasps in a steady, insistent rhythm. She showed all the signs of having caught the Scent. She was ready to hunt.

That puzzled him. It was too soon. The chocolates couldn't have arrived yet. He knew precisely when they had been posted from London—a telegram had confirmed it—and knew they'd be delivered tomorrow at the very earliest.

Could it possibly be one of those specially treated bottles of cheap wine he had been handing out to the homeless downtown for the past six months? The derelicts had served as a food supply and good training fodder for the nest as it matured. He doubted there could be any of the treated wine left—those untouchables usually finished off the bottle within hours of receiving it.

But there was no fooling the Mother. She had caught the Scent and wanted to follow it.

Although he had planned to continue training the brighter ones as crew for the ship-in the six months since their arrival in New York they had learned to handle the ropes and follow commands in the engine room-the hunt took priority.

Kusum spun the wheel that retracted the lugs, then stood behind the hatch as it swung open. The Mother stepped out, an eight-foot, humanoid shadow, lithe and massive in the dimness. One of the younglings, a foot shorter but almost as massive, followed on her heels. And then another.

Without warning she spun and hissed and raked her talons through the air a bare inch from the second