“I’m not certain now. I was frightened, and they were so sick, and I had no money to feed them. They were always crying, you see, even though they were terribly weak . . .” She trailed off. She was down to only a few eyes still showing. “I tried everything, really I did. I sold myself to men, but I could never make enough, and the woman who watched them for me when I was out, well, she didn’t . . . she didn’t take very good care . . .” The creature named Deva curled her fingers and tugged at her tendrils so hard I thought she might break them off. “She drank too much toddy, that one, and one day she let my youngest one wander, and my little girl fell from the window down to the courtyard and died. I came home with the smell of a man still on me and found her there on the stones. The bitch taking care of her had not even known she was gone!” The damned woman shook her head, or the lump near the top that I assumed was a head. “I knew then that I would be going to Hell. And the others were still sick, still crying, getting thinner and thinner.” After a long, long silence that nobody interrupted, she said, “So one night, I took them out when everyone else was asleep, took them outside the village and drowned them in the river. It was so sad, because even as I took them down to the bank I was looking for crocodiles. I was going to drown them, but I was still worried that a crocodile might get them!”

She broke down at this point, and it was a while until she could talk again. The strange thing was that the other damned, and even the demon members of the congregation, all waited for her to continue. In a place where nobody even bothered to look twice at a badly injured person writhing on the ground, or a child being beaten or sexually assaulted, these Hell-creatures were waiting patiently, even kindly, for one of their own to find her way back to herself.