The soft, warm exhalation as someone crouched behind him, out of sight, out of reach.
"Who"s there? Cheech? Jazz? Is that you? C"mon, Christ, I"m hurt and-"
Another breath exhaled against the side of his face. G.o.d, it stank. Like meat left out in the sun.
Was it an animal? Something living in this f.u.c.king cave?
"Get away!" yelled Finn.
But with the next breath he heard a voice.
Soft. So soft, like sands blowing over the desert in the deep of night. A whisper of a woman"s voice.
"You come to my town speaking a foreign tongue. Are you a heretic and defiler?"
The woman seemed to speak in a language he didn"t know or recognize, and yet he understood every word.
I"m really losing my s.h.i.t here. Oh G.o.d . . .
It was so strange a question under the circ.u.mstances that it took Finn a moment to organize an answer.Was this one of the Taliban, lost in the dark? If so, then the question was framed in an awkward and old-fashioned way.
In Pashto, Finn said,"No . . . I"m a friend."
"You are no friend of mine," spat the woman."No friend of ours.You are a foreigner.You come to my town and take what is mine.You take what is sacred-"
"No," Finn said quickly, defensively.
"I want back what was stolen," whispered the woman."You d.a.m.n yourself by taking it."
That"s when he felt her presence. Actually felt it. Not a touch, not the breath. A presence.
It was aware, intelligent; somehow Finn knew that. Sensed it. Finn"s mind resisted as he tried to define what this was. Even though he knew this was a person, somehow it didn"t feel like that. Not anything like that. Even if he could have seen who spoke to him, even if everything had looked totally normal, he knew that it wasn"t.That it couldn"t be.With everything Finn was, he was certain of that.This was-different. In the way that blood is different from paint, even if not to the eye. In the way a dead child is different from a sleeping one, even at a glance through the open bedroom door.This was that kind of difference. Not really human. Something else.This was like-sickness. As if the woman who crouched breathing at his ear was sickness. Not a sick person, but a person who was sickness itself. It was the worst thing Finn had ever felt.
"You can have the opium," Finn said quickly."We don"t want it."
In the darkness, the woman spat and Finn felt a searing pain on his cheek.
"You have taken what is mine."
"No, we haven"t," Finn said insistently, desperate now to make some kind of deal, a bargain that might give him a lifeline."Look . . . all I want is to get my guys and get out of here.We don"t want anything. Nothing, okay? I just want to get my guys and then the four of us are gone.We"ll leave you alone and you can do what you want with the-"
"There are four of you?"
"Yes . . ."
The next sound he heard was so strange that it took him a long time to make any kind of sense of it. A series of soft, abrupt moist sounds.
Was this woman . . . sniffing him?
Yes.
The sniffing stopped and there was silence for a while.
Then he heard a small and ugly laugh. He had never heard a woman utter a laugh like that before. It was the way an animal might laugh.
"You are telling me the truth," said the woman."You have not defiled the shrines of the lilitu?"
"The what . . . ?"
Another pause, more chuckling.
"Then we are at a place," said the voice, and suddenly it sounded less alien and more human. Even the feel of it changed. Now it seemed as if it truly was a person squatting over him.The nightmarish delusion that it was a monster began to recede. Not all the way, but enough to keep the terror just beyond reach."It seems I have taken something from you."
Soft laughter. Mocking and ironic.