Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

leading to the altar. Each one mimed having intercourse with the corpse, then rubbed their genitalia against the bloody stump of its neck before dancing away, blood and ochre dripping down the insides of their thighs.
    “There’s sort of a theme developing here,” I said.
    “I think I’m going to be sick,” Joshua said.
    “Mindful breath,” I said, using one of the phrases that Gaspar was always barking at us when we were learning meditation. I knew that if Joshua could stay with the yeti for days at a time without freezing to death, he could certainly conjure up the bodily control to keep from throwing up. The sheer magnitude of the carnage was all that was keeping me from vomiting. It was as if the atrocity of the whole scene couldn’t fit in my mind all at once, so I could only see just enough for my sanity and my stomach to remain intact.
    A shout went up in the crowd now and I could see a torch-lit sedan chair being carried above the heads of the worshipers. On it reclined a half-naked man with a tiger skin wrapped around his hips, his skin painted light gray with ashes. His hair was plaited with grease and he wore the bones of a human hand as a skullcap. Around his neck hung a necklace of human skulls.
    “High priest,” I said.
    “They aren’t even going to notice you, Biff. How can you even get their attention after they’ve seen all this?”
    “They haven’t seen what I’m going to show them.”
    As the sedan chair emerged from the crowd in front of the altar, we could see a procession following it: tied to the back of the sedan chair was a line of naked children, most of them not more than five or six, their hands tied together, a less ornately dressed priest on either side of them to steady them. The priests began to untie the children and take them to the great wooden elephants lining the boulevard. Here and there in the crowd I could see people beginning to brandish edged weapons: short swords, axes, and the long-bladed spears Joshua and I had seen over the elephant grass. The high priest was sitting on the headless corpse, shouting a poem about the divine release of Kali’s destruction or something.
    “Here we go,” I said, pulling the black glass dagger from under my sari. “Take this.”
    Joshua looked at the blade shimmering in the torchlight. “I won’t kill anyone,” he said. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, drawing long red lines through the black and if anything making him look more fierce.
    “That’s fine, but you’ll need to cut them loose.”
    “Right.” He took the knife from me.
    “Josh, you know what’s coming. You’ve seen it before. Nobody else here has, especially those kids. You can’t carry all of them, so they have to have enough of their wits about them to follow you. I know you can keep them from being afraid. Put your teeth in.”
    Joshua nodded and slipped the row of crocodile teeth attached to a piece of rawhide under his upper lip, leaving the teeth to protrude like fangs. I put in my own false fangs, then ran into the dark to circle the crowd.
    As I approached the rear of the altar I pulled the special torch I’d made from under my girdle of human hands. (Actually my girdle of human hands was made of dried goat’s udders stuffed with straw, but the Untouchable women had done a pretty good job as long as no one bothered to count fingers.) Through Kali’s stone legs I could see the priests tying each of the children on the trunk of a wooden elephant. As soon as the bonds were tight, each priest drew a bronze blade and held it aloft, ready to strike off a finger as soon as the high priest gave the signal.
    I struck the tip of my torch on the edge of the altar, screamed for all I was worth, then threw my sari off and ran up the steps as the torch burst into dazzling blue flame that trailed sparks behind me as I ran. I hopped across the array of goat heads and stood between the legs of the statue of Kali, my torch held aloft in one hand, one of my severed heads swinging by the hair in the other.
    “I am Kali,” I screamed. “Fear me!” It came out sort of mumbled through my fake teeth.
    Some of the drums stopped and the high priest turned around and looked at me, more because of the bright light of the torch than my fierce proclamation.
    “I am Kali,” I shouted again. “Goddess of destruction and all this disgusting crap you have here!” They weren’t getting it. The priest signaled for the other priests to come around me from the