by Neil D'Silva
Maya proceeded to investigate the cans.
As soon as she lifted one of the cans, there was a flurry of movement. She almost fell backwards in shock—a volley of rats shot out of the little space behind the can and tried to escape in whichever direction they could find. That corner was apparently the resting place for the rats, and the moment their surroundings were disturbed, the rats went into a nervous state of panic, clambering on top of each other, squeaking in piercing tones. Maya didn’t understand whether their frenzied reaction was in offense or in defense, but she certainly didn’t want to wait and find out. She quickly retreated into the opposite side of the shed, in the farthest corner from this recess, and that is when her horrors began.
~ 24 ~
Or Something
Maya sat down, soaked in sweat and speechless, her heart thumping with stereophonic alacrity. She was afraid her heart would beat out of her chest at any instant. The sudden romp of the rats had given her a terrible fright and now she needed to gather her wits before moving ahead.
The door with the light hadn’t stirred. It calmed her to know the racket hadn’t alerted whatever or whoever was in the room.
She fell back comfortably, using the support of a wall, slowly finding her wind again. She wasn’t at peace—that was inconceivable in a place such as this—but she began breathing more easily. She thought of getting up, moving again towards the door, because that was where she thought her answers lay. Gradually, she began to prop herself back on her feet.
But she immediately recoiled her hand.
It had touched something soft and squishy. She thought she might have touched a dead rat or something.
However, it was not a dead rat.
It was the ‘or something’.
It was deep purple and decaying. Streaks of a sick green pallor ran all around it, telltale signs of a fungal infestation. Smell of rotten flesh lingered over it. It wasn’t whole, but then she was a Biology teacher.
She didn’t need to be told what it was.
She was up to her feet like a giant spring had propelled her into action. The breath of fear had returned into her, but even in that clouded fear, she knew she had to take herself away from the human spleen as soon as she could.
A spleen!
Maya felt the bile rising in her esophagus, threatening to shoot out of her mouth and she expended some effort to throttle that sensation. She couldn’t do it for long however because soon her eyes focused to the other spoils that lay behind the decomposing spleen.
She had to only lift her eyes from the spleen and she saw it—the unmistakable remains of the human body that had once contained the spleen.
The lower half of the body was missing, and rats were fearlessly gnawing at the stub of an arm that remained. The torso was brutally split open, the viscera exposed, and remnants of organs hung out from the body as far as their anatomical ducts could carry them.
And the stink that emanated from the body was unbearable.
Maya tried to breathe easily, keeping one hand over her nose, slowly coming back to a conscious state of mind. I am a Biology teacher, she told herself. A half-eaten decomposing human body should not scare me.
But the fear wouldn’t go away.
Whose body was it?
It was a male body.
She looked closely at whatever remained of the face. One eye had already been eaten, a yellow slushy substance oozing out of the sockets, while the other eye was open and stared at her. One cheek had been torn, exposing the grotesque arrangement of the mandibles and teeth underneath. A rat was still gnawing at the pharynx, slowly nibbling at it, trying to pull it away from the throat of the unfortunate person.
She heaved a sigh of relief. This wasn’t anyone she knew. She touched her hand to her forehead in a bid to pray for the poor departed soul and looked around.
Padma.
In what state would she find Padma?
The brutal choking sensation rose in her gullet again.
***
When she found the courage and strength to move on, she backed away from the door. The discovery of one horror had made her curious about the place.
So, she walked along the walls, one step at a time, adjusting her vision to see whatever she could in the darkness. And every few feet she walked, she stumbled upon various manifestations of unspeakable horrors.
There was a corpse with its scalp torn off, exposing the skull midway on the head.
Another lay on its back, the skin torn, the spine broken and jutting out of it. A rotting spinal cord played peekaboo from the twisted vertebrae.
One more had its foot torn off at the ankle. The ankle was cut so deep that it formed a kind of a mouth, but only, this was at the foot.
Who had done this?
This was worse than a railway morgue after a train accident. At least there, the corpses are fresh and are disposed of as soon as possible. Here, they were just strewn around, left at the mercy of biological decomposition and mutilation by rats.
And the stench. This was how hell must smell like.
She heard the door open a creak. Just a creak.
Swiftly, she moved herself to a corner and sat down. It was only after she sat did she realize how close she was to the corpse with the torn foot.
She waited for someone to come out. Her instincts told her who it might be. Try as she did, she could not stifle that thought. The longer she waited, the more she became convinced that the man behind the door was her new husband.
Then a thought came to her mind. Akram. In the light of her horrific discoveries she had quite forgotten about him. Then, again, another thought. Padma.
She held on for a few moments more.
Silence. Except for the squeaking of the rats.
Her gaze fell on the corpse she sat next to—the one with the missing foot. She saw the thigh. Portions of it had been cut off. Filleted out. She could see a part of the femur.
The chest. There was a large gaping wound there. Like a surgeon does when conducting a bypass. Only this wasn’t sewn back again. She squinted in the darkness to see, and she saw a breast. This was a woman.
Suddenly a chilling fear gripped her.
The woman was stone dead, unaffected by her humiliating nakedness, but there was something about the hair that rang a bell.
Maya hoped that bell hadn’t been rung.
She hadn’t seen Padma with loose hair before. Her hair was always slickly combed and tied into a bun. But, if she were to leave her hair loose, she might have looked exactly like this.
Maya inched closer to the head, which faced the floor. Rats moved closer to her, bold and dauntless, but she waved them off as if they were overlarge flies.
Holding her breath and muttering a prayer, she tugged at the shoulder of the corpse and moved it.
The corpse turned and the face stared skywards, stone-dead and immobile.
And even though she hadn’t ever seen that expression on that face before, there was no mistaking who it was.
This was Padma.
She had in her hands the dead half-eaten body of her best friend and confidante.
~ 25 ~
Fly in a Spider’s Web
She didn’t know whether she had crossed the threshold of fear or whether she was so angry that she felt no other emotion anymore; but there was something within her that snapped when she saw the face of her dead friend whose only crime was that she had wanted to tell her something important.
What could that have been?
Perhaps Padma had found out something. If that were true, there was no doubt who the subject matter of the doubt was.
When a moment of abject sorrow strikes—Maya was no stranger to such moments—the response isn’t immediate. Shock leads to a state of impassiveness. Maya sat there, with her friend’s corpse. She knew she should have lamented her death. Tears should have flowed out of her eyes, but it didn’t happen like that. Instead of tears, there was a rising surge of anger.
Why was her friend
killed?
Who did it?
Was it the one to whom all signs pointed—her husband?
There were all the signs about him right from the beginning, but she had refused to see them. She had refused to accept the counsel of her mother. But she should have known. She should have understood something was amiss right when he had started looking at her that way in school. Now, in retrospect, she realized—it wasn’t mere ogling; it was stalking. He had stalked her till she had yielded.
He had laid a meticulous plan to ensnare her, and she had fallen right into the trap. Like a fly that knowingly walks into a spider’s web. Only, this fly had apparently endangered the other flies around it too.
And yet, she still didn’t know for sure.
She would only know if she entered the door.
Courage slowly began to course back into her, and she wiped her tears and stood up.
***
Maya placed the half-eaten dead body of her friend carefully back on the floor and inched towards the door beneath which she could see the illumination and waited. She held in her hand a rod she had eased out from the storage rack in the niche.
The light still flickered beneath the door. In times such as these, human senses are on high alert. She pushed the vision of her dead friend into the recesses of her mind and tried to focus. She smelled a faint incense smell mixed with that of putrid flesh. She heard a sound that felt like a continuous buzz.
She pressed her forefinger on the rusty handle of the door and swung it back a few inches.
Emboldened by the fact that the door wasn’t locked, she stepped in. She held the rod more tightly now, and braced herself for any sudden attack.
But, whatever she had prepared herself for, she hadn’t prepared for this.
The first thing she saw was the neat artistic geometric pattern drawn on the floor. It was like a giant flower, drawn in various hues and shaded at the petals. Then her attention was drawn to the center of the floral print, the part which was in dusty yellow and glowed.
It was at this center that Akram’s body was sprawled out, naked and mutilated, with his hands and feet spread out to trace a circle. A rod jutted out of his right foot, leaving no doubt that a considerable portion of it was still wedged into the flesh. His eyes were still open, but they only stared blankly heavenwards.
There was no doubt he was dead. For, there was a single vertical cut running all the way from his neck to his groin, and the skin had been peeled off much as one removes a coat from his body, showing generous glimpses of his internal organs.
On his thigh, there was a mysterious mark—a crisscrossing pattern of four curved lines—and even in her near catatonic state of mind, Maya recalled she had just seen a portion of the same mark on her dead friend Padma’s thigh as well.
But, there was more.
The heart was missing from Akram’s corpse.
Pulled out like a beast would, after damaging the rib cage. Broken ends of the ribs poked out from the torn chest muscles, leaving behind a messy cavity where the heart should have been.
Maya felt she would faint.
This was too much, more than she could handle. More than any living person could handle.
The raw display of flesh all around her made her feel low about her own life. Why was she alive when everyone around her was dead? Dead in the most inhuman way possible?
She was zoning out, her vision blurring, preparing to collapse in a heap upon the floor. She was ready to give herself up, surrender herself to whoever the demon was who had done all this. For, this wasn’t the work of a human. Of that she didn’t have the slightest doubt.
Then she heard the buzz again.
It was louder this time, and it seemed to increase in volume, as though she were meant to hear it.
It was a hollow chant, the same indecipherable mantra being repeated over and over.
She blinked her eyes several times until she could focus. Her mind had left her though. She had to only rely on her motor skills now. Then, she saw movement in one corner of this bizarre hall.
The movement was behind a few racks of junk. Thick smoke seemed to emanate from whatever was behind the rack.
She stumbled towards the area and became acutely aware that there might be someone else in the hall. Someone alive. She still had the rod in her hand and, holding it tighter than ever, she came upon a sort of clearing within the shed.
A smell of incense instantly assailed her nostrils.
It was all smoke at first. She rubbed her eyes with her one free hand and an image became apparent. It looked like a huge chair, surrounded by several agarbattis—incense sticks—all lit up and releasing their grey fragrant fumes into the atmosphere of the room. There was a little light in the room. A small incandescent bulb bathed the interiors with its measly yellow light.
The incense odor roused Maya from her sleepy state. As her vision cleared, she saw that the chair was not vacant; there was someone seated on it. She flinched and took a step back. She stood there for a moment, carefully observing if there was any movement in the figure on the high chair. But there was none. The chair stayed put, and the figure seated on it stayed put too, as though the chair and the person were one amalgamated entity.
Maya took small steps towards the chair to get a closer look at whatever was seated on it. She couldn’t make it out clearly, though. There was a strong odor of incense now, and mixed in that she could also smell something else—sandalwood and some floral essence—and she wondered what bizarre religious ritual was being carried out here and who was doing it.
The answer came to her in the most amazing fashion.
When she was just about a foot away from the chair, she could look beyond it, and saw someone near the wall.
There was no mistaking who this person was.
Her heart leapt into her mouth as she saw him.
Bhaskar was in a form that she had never seen before in their few weeks of marriage. He had nothing on his body apart from a loincloth to hide his privates. Even that seemed to be made not of cloth but of the hide of some animal. He had several beads around his neck and bracelets made of the same beads around his upper arms. His chest was smeared with some kind of powder, the same of which was also put around his legs.
On the wall behind him were more manifestations of his artistry. Drawn in mysterious shades of purples, reds and blues, was a kind of depraved mural. In her confused state of mind, Maya could not understand what it was, but it seemed to show the sky opening up and swallowing the earth and everything that was on it.
He hadn’t seen her. He was in some kind of yogic asana. He sat froglike, his knees were pulled close to his head, and his hands went around his back, clasping each other there. His head was lifted to the sky, his eyes closed, and he was chanting something.
That explained the buzz.
Maya saw that he was in some kind of a trance. For a moment, she wondered if she should go to him or call out to him. After all, she was his wife. He would not harm her. Perhaps he would explain things to her, and she would find some reason in that explanation.
But then she saw the object that was placed on the floor, right in front of this crouching man.
It was a human heart, still apparently warm. Blood dripped from the lifeless organ onto the wooden platform that it was kept on. Next to the heart was a dagger, some kind of a ceremonial dagger, and placed on it was a slice of a cardiac muscle.
Dumbed into motionlessness, Maya stood there and saw her husband—his eyes still tightly shut—reaching out to the sliver of heart meat and taking it to his mouth, chanting something under his breath.
She could not stop the vomiting now. She let go all over the dead Akram’s foot.
***
Sitting up in the bed now, Namrata looked at the cellphone again. She had muted her phone and now hoped to find more missed calls from her sister, but there were none. “That’s odd,” she said. “Maya usually keeps trying till she gets connected.”
Hemant, now a
bit dazed after several iterations of their acts of passion, played with Namrata’s hair as she proceeded to connect the call.
She dialed the number and pressed the green button.
***
Maya debated on whether she should approach her maniacal husband or just flee the place. Perhaps, it would be better to do that. He hadn’t seen her yet. She could bring able-bodied authorities to deal with this person who was undoubtedly a serial killer of the most sadistic and cannibalistic sort.
She turned and tried to make a silent exit from the room. But when things have to go wrong, they do. Murphy’s Law. No one can circumvent that. Just as she was about to step out of the door, her phone rang.
Dang technology!
Bhaskar immediately opened his eyes. Here in these confines, the call of technology was an absolute intrusion. He took a moment to orient himself to his smoky surroundings; and then, to his utter amazement, he saw his beautiful wife standing in front of him, aghast and muting her cellphone; and at the same time looking at him querulously.
Maya had no choice now. She thought it would be best to confront him.
“What is this, Bhaskar?” she asked but the voice came out in fits and bursts. “What is all this?”
Bhaskar let go of his hands and freed himself from the spindly pose. Blood stained his lips like bad lipstick, and his eyes were clouded from the dense incense smoke.
He stood up like a gazelle, and caught Maya by her slender waist. Holding her like he were escorting her to a ballroom dance, he brought her near the chair adorned with incense and flowers.
Maya saw it clearly now. Sitting in the midst of all the fragrances and colors was a rotting corpse. It was badly mummified but Maya could understand that a considerable amount of time had passed since the person who held that body had stopped breathing.
