“I ran. It was the only thing I could think to do to break this hold on me. I turned and ran back toward the film set. And even though it seemed that every person I passed on the road wore the beggar woman’s face or was clutching a dead infant to their chest or was in some way sick or damaged, I felt…elated. I know that must sound crazier than a soup sandwich, but I knew all of these people, with their lips that muttered mercy and their tears that never ceased, were walking toward the cemetery where the pain and sadness would be lifted from their eyes, and that I was being watched over by a child of wonder who would always be waiting at the entrance to my secret world.

“And all of them said the same thing to me as they passed by. ‘Kichar admi.’”

“Did you ever find out what that meant?”

He nodded, then strummed the guitar once again. “’Mudman.’”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah.” He began playing the opening to “Kiss of the Mudman,” that almost-traditional 12-bar blues riff where you can tell something is just a bit off but can’t put your finger on it.

“What is the Mudman supposed to be?” I asked him.

“I always figured it was just another name for Kshetrapala, but later, when I woke up in the middle of the night after me and Veronique had practically went through the floor with our fucking, I thought…man, what better way to describe what it feels like after you wake up from a night of excess. The taste of booze in your mouth, maybe a little puke-burp rolling around in the back of your throat, your body aching, your head splitting, your face feeling like a glazed donut from going down on wet pussy…excess. You wake feeling like you got kissed by the Mudman.”

He stopped playing. “I was still hearing that song they had been singing, so I picked up my guitar and started fooling around with it, and I realized that what they’d been singing was…I don’t know if this’ll make sense…but they’d been singing something like an inverted traditional blues riff.”

He played it again, and this time I heard it, the off-thing, a single note in the middle of the riff that didn’t seem to fit.

“The progression seemed so logical,” said Knight. “Leave the G string alone—tuned to G, of course—so the high and low E strings go down a half step to E flat. The B string goes down a half step to B flat, the A and D go up a half step, to B flat and E flat. The result was an open E flat major chord, which made easy work of the central riff. For the intro, I started on the 12th fret, pressing the 1st and 3rd strings down, dropped down to the 7th and 8th fret on those same strings for the next chord, and continued down the neck...as the progression moved to the 4th string, more and more notes were left out and it became a disguised version of a typical blues riff. The idea was to have a rush of notes to sort of clear the palette, not open the back door to Hell...but that’s a road paved with good intentions, isn’t it?”