LYRICAL UNDERGROUND

      Kensington Publishing Corp.

       www.kensingtonbooks.com

      Lyrical Underground books are published by

      Kensington Publishing Corp. 119 West 40th Street New York, NY 10018

      Copyright © 2018 by Richard Jeffries

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      First Electronic Edition: March 2018

      eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0501-4

      eISBN-10: 1-5161-0501-X

      First Print Edition: March 2018

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0503-8

      ISBN-10: 1-5161-0503-6

      Printed in the United States of America

      Dedication

      For Travis, without whom there would be no point.

      Or dinner.

      Prologue

      Craven knew his master was serious. He knew it in the most abhorrent way conceivable.

      Craven had moved to Veranesi to become an acolyte, and had been serving the master for years. He had become this slum’s taaboot in order to best perform this function. When someone died in this warren of fetid stones, it was Craven who came to take the corpse away—often leaving the site filthier than when he entered.

      In truth, he could have only become a “caretaker of corpses” in these bowels of the village, since the rest of Veranesi would not have allowed him anywhere near their deceased. Veranesi was a place that studied, embraced, and even venerated death, and anyone who did not have to beg Craven’s services prayed he did not exist.

      His name was not Craven, but he did not remember, or even know, his birth name. Craven was his death name—the name his mother gave him as she died of dysentery in his arms, telling him feverish stories of his past and future lives on the Night of Demons.

      Craven could not remember how old he had been then. He might have just become a teenager, but he doubted it. He could only judge by his memories of being strong enough to hold his mother on a muddy bank of the Ganges, keeping her torso above the water line as she clutched and screeched at him.

      He could have been as young as five, he decided, since, by then, his mother was little more than a skeleton covered in parched, paper-thin flesh. As she contorted and writhed in his spasming arms—pumping blood, mucous, water, and feces into the blessedly dirty river from her submerged lower half—she vomited out her hysterical demands and dire warnings.

      His father was Mahasona, she swore—the most feared demon, the one whose very name meant vileness.

      “That is your fate, that is your destiny, that is your calling,” she babbled at him. “You cannot escape it, you cannot avoid it, you cannot deny it.”

      When she had finally become very quiet, still clutching at him with claws that seemed sculpted by the gods upon him, he simply loosened his muscles until the Ganges’s mighty current pulled her away. The scratches her broken nails left in his flesh festered for what seemed like months.

      The woman had been right. For a pitifully short time, Craven had tried to find a way out of his doom, but each time it seemed as if he might make a human connection, the internal and external disease his parents had infected him with made him a source of revulsion at best, shame at worst. All too soon, he embraced his fate and went in search of his father.

      To his surprise, and then quickly his fear, it did not take long. In the cramped recesses of every town and village he was forced to hide in, the name of the “Great Demon” could be heard. To Craven’s addled mind, it was as if he was following whispers that floated in the fusty air like stinging nettles.

      By the time he had reached Veranesi, their meeting seemed preordained. Even before then, Craven accepted that he was seeking his master, not his father. And his master was the first man he set eyes upon once he stepped onto the stones of the rocky graveyard on the outskirts of the city. As the legends said, his master was a fierce giant with the head of a bear and the eyes of a tiger. From deep within his cowled robe, Craven heard him say but a single instruction.

      “Serve me well.”

      Then he walked away, deep into Veranesi, bringing the souls, skins, and skulls of his victims behind him like the folds of a draping cape.

      Every year since then, Craven brought his master an offering on the Night of the Demon. At first it was the freshest corpse he had collected. Initially, he had tried sneaking into the hovels of the recently deceased and stealing the bodies, but the family members who caught him—rather than have him beaten or arrested—had begged him to complete his task, with their repulsed consent.

      Eventually, emboldened by his master’s acceptance of his offerings, Craven dared make one request: “Free me.”

      It seemed as if his master ignored him, but Craven knew he did not. Each year, on the Night of the Demon, he gave his offering and made his request. But, as the years wore on, his master grew bored.

      “Fresher, stronger, younger,” Craven had heard him say. Or maybe he heard the master think it—he was never sure.

      Soon, Craven began experimenting in preservation, trying to keep the youngest bodies fresher longer, littering his abattoir with his experiments in different stages