man with the cut in his ribs opened his mouth, but if he said something, the surgeon could not hear it. The woman fell quiet and, probably realizing the effect her injuries were having, raised her odhni and let it drape back around her neck, removing her wound from view.
The surgeon’s eyes darted around the room. Could he use his pen as a weapon, was it sharp enough, solid enough? It lay on the floor, its nib snapped off. A spray of ink stretched across the tiles. What else? He had scissors in his drawer somewhere, he was sure, but he’d have to dig for them.
He gripped the table’s edge tighter, leaned against it. “What is this? What’s going on?”
The visitors stood like effigies. The woman and the boy turned to the man, who was opening and closing his mouth like a fish thrown to land. The girl he held captive had stopped her struggle and now just hung against him, breathing heavily with her eyes squeezed shut. He, too, closed his eyes and heaved, as though gathering his breath for some feat.
“I’m a teacher, Doctor Saheb. This is my family. We’ve never harmed anyone. We just want to live our lives in peace.”
“WE’D GONE TO A fair near our village,” said the man who called himself a teacher. “It was sunset by the time we left it. The street was dark. The bulbs in the lampposts had burned out. I didn’t think much of it then, didn’t turn back. God knows how much I’ve repented that.”
The pharmacist started squirming again in the man’s grip. His words spilled out faster.
“Four men were hiding there. They jumped out, took our money and jewelry. And then they stabbed us, Doctor Saheb, stabbed us and left us on the roadside. Like sacks of garbage. They just left us there and disappeared.”
The visitors were pale. There was a sickly tone to their skin, that was true. But how—
“When did this happen?” the surgeon asked.
“This evening.”
“But, but there was no fair here. I didn’t hear of any—”
“It didn’t happen here, Saheb. We’re from another district.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. How did you get here? The sun just set, not even an hour ago. And how did you stop your bleeding?”
“We didn’t.”
The surgeon felt his toes curl in his shoes, press hard against the leather. “But then how did you survive?”
“We didn’t.”
This was unacceptable. One could string letters together to say anything, anything at all, no matter how outrageous. The surgeon wished his thoughts would connect, one to the next, turn the man’s words into something that made sense.
He took a step toward the family. The teacher’s wife, as if she’d read his mind, lowered the odhni and tilted her neck away, letting her wound gape. The sight was suffocating, and the surgeon staggered back and collapsed into a chair as his legs gave under him. How was one to shake off such a hallucination? Perhaps he ought to bash his head against something—the desk, the wall . . . fracture his skull if need be. Would that do it?
The silence felt like an awful pressure on his eardrums. His eyes kept flitting to the drawer, the one that supposedly had scissors in it. At one point, he heard a sob, and it took him some time to realize it was the pharmacist. She was hanging limp in the teacher’s hold.
The surgeon sat up in his chair. “Let her go.”
“I—I can’t, Doctor Saheb. She’ll wake up the villagers. I can’t let that happen.”
“She’ll be quiet. Let her go.”
The teacher turned to his wife with an anxious look, then pinched shut his eyes and loosened his grip. The girl tore away from him and flung herself into the farthest corner of the room. There she whimpered, high and soft, but did not scream.
The surgeon leaned forward, pressed his thumbs hard into his eyelids. Webs and vortices danced in the darkness.
“We need you, Doctor Saheb. There’s no one else.”
“What are you saying? What are you—”
“Without your help we will remain dead.”
“The dead do not walk,” said the surgeon, his head reeling with vertigo. “The dead do not speak. The dead have no choice but to remain dead. You are lying to me.”
“I understand what you’re feeling, Saheb, believe me. If I were in your place, I would have found this as impossible as you do. When I was alive, I never believed stories of ghosts and possessions and haunted houses—the tales that old men told their grandchildren to scare them. All nonsense, I knew. I always taught my students to reject superstition. You have no reason to trust my words, Doctor Saheb, I understand that. But trust our wounds. Examine them, and then tell me. Who could stay alive with injuries like ours?”
The surgeon released the pressure on his eyes. The vortices spun away and vanished, but the family remained, shrouded by a haze as though their bodies were fraying at the edges, unraveling. He couldn’t will them out of existence. Every blink of his eyes brought the family more into focus, made them more solid.
“Look, are you a thief of some kind? Just say so if you are. I have money in my safe. Take it and go. You don’t need to do this elaborate—”
“Please, Doctor Saheb, please listen. At dawn, we will live again.”
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. “Why have you come to me? Go find a priest, a sorcerer. Leave me alone.”
“We need you to fix our wounds. At sunrise, our bodies will fill with blood again, and we’ll no longer be walking corpses.”
“How? Why? How is that possible?”
“The answer is long and complicated, Saheb, and I don’t understand everything myself. I can only tell you now that an angel took mercy on us. I’ll explain everything else later. We have so little time. I know nothing about surgeries, but I’m sure that injuries as severe as ours will take you all night to stitch up.”
The surgeon’s chest felt cold, tight. “Are you mad? You want me to operate on you here? In this clinic? I don’t even have instruments to set a fracture, let alone repair torn blood vessels and whatever internal injuries you have. Whatever this is, this insanity, it can’t be done here. You must go to the city. Go.”
“But, Doctor Saheb—”
“There’s a train that leaves every hour. It will take you there.”
“Saheb—”
“Maybe the train isn’t a good idea. You can drive there. Here, take my car. I don’t care, you don’t even have to bring it back. Can you drive? No? Okay, then, I’ll drive you. I’ll drop you off at a proper hospital. You can explain everything to the
