by Rahul Sharma
Once all of them had climbed on, the copter spun around, towards the countryside. Blue flames erupted from the barrel like thrusters on its sides, and it shot off at amazing speed, towards base.
Once aboard the helicopter, 6 finally relaxed. He sat on one of the assorted chairs in the main cabin, watching Antony tend to Jerry’s arm. With a moan of relief, 6 pulled off the red wig, shaking his black hair loose. He cautiously removed the horn rimmed glasses and, after folding them, he put them into a case. With a quick swipe, he pulled of the fake extension on his nose. Finally, he pulled off the scar sticker stuck to his cheek. He then went into the cockpit and clapped the Indian pilot on his back.
“All went well?” asked Pilot Singh, looking up at 6.
“Perfect,” said 6. “Drop me off at the garage, I need to go home.”
Pilot nodded, and continued to fly the copter under the noonday sun.
**********
One week had elapsed since the dreadful events at the Gates plaza. Far far away from the busy city of Goodane, in the countryside, a large farmhouse was perched upon a green hill. The air was quiet and calm. In the distance, one could hear the crashing of the waves onto the shore, eventually pierced by a cry from an animal in the surrounding woods.
In the living room of the farmhouse, an oldish woman, in her lower fifties, paced tensely. Every time she reached the window she paused and took a vigilant look outside. Her eyes lit as she heard the sound of wheels on tarmac and the slamming of a car door. She quickly darted to the front door just as a young man turned the key and walked in. on seeing the young man, the woman let out a squeal and hugged him.
“Oh, Alfred! Are you alright? I saw the news of the Gates plaza and I was TERRIFIED!” she looked up at her nephew, who was as good as a son to her, “You’re fine aren’t you?” she asked lovingly. The young man gave a smile and nodded.
“I’m perfectly all right aunt Mabel,” he told the anxious woman in a calming voice. “I was nowhere near the place when it happened.”
The young man brushed his long black hair out of his eyes, walked over to the table and seated himself. “Jerry says hi, by the way.” He said as he busied himself with his large backpack. “Guy’s wearing a cast for a few days, got hit by a vehicle in the arm.” Alfred continued digging his bag as his aunt tutted sympathetically, “I don’t know what you boys do in the city to get such injuries…” she muttered as she poured cereal and milk into a bowl and kept it in front of her nephew.
“Here,” said Alfred, lifting a black case out of his bag, “I got your new spectacles. As per your latest report. Try not to break them” he smiled. Aunt Mabel took the case from Alfred and opened it. She pulled out the horn rimmed spectacles and placed them on her nose.
“How do I look?” she asked, peering at the mantelpiece mirror.
“Tired” replied Alfred, “Have you been doing extra work around the farm? The doctor told you specifically NOT to exert yourself.” He said, sternly gazing at his aunt. Aunt Mabel shook her head, “After the farm employment law we’ve been very short staffed. Annie had to go, Jessie had to leave, Burton works only part time. I’ve been doing a lot of work Al.”
Alfred shook his head sadly. “Curse those people. They have no experience of agriculture and they make laws about it. Damn tycoons. And by the way, your wish came true didn’t it?” he said.
On seeing his aunt’s quizzical glance he continued, “Didn’t you wish all those tycoons went to hell?” He grinned as his aunt looked exasperated, “Come on Aunt Mabel! You suffered so many losses because of that! So some guy must’ve heard you and killed them for us! You’ll have to thank the murderer!”
“Oh Alfred,” said Aunt Mabel, as she bustled around the kitchen preparing lunch, “I will never understand you.”
~~~
Moonlight
The moon slowly floated over the night sky like a pockmarked pearl. It bathed the earth below in eerie silver light. Thin wispy clouds drifted carelessly across the night sky, allowing the millions of stars to be exposed. A cool breeze tickled the trees of the wood, making them rustle and shake their leaves with quiet ecstasy. The creatures of the wood had retired to their homes, and most of them were fast asleep. Even the omnipresent cicadas had stopped their high pitch chirping, creating an almost deathly silence in the wood.
There was a loud crunch as a small foot stepped on a dried leaf. The sound echoed through the quaint little clearing, waking up the birds sleeping on the nearby trees. The child looked around him, desperately trying to find a way to detect the way out of the forest. He sniffed loudly, tears welling up in his eyes, and started walking away from the clearing, down what seemed to be a previously trodden trail. An owl hooted somewhere above him. In the distance, a jackal howled. Or at least, he thought it was a jackal.
The child walked slowly, his large eyes taking in every detail of the forest around him. He took care to avoid stepping in the pools of bright silver moonlight, as he didn’t want to lose the game he had been playing with himself all evening. He was still not sure when he lost the group, but he was determined to find them before the morning. He was only eight years old, but he had been in the forest so many times that he was quite confident that he could find his way around and out of it.
Unfortunately, he had never stayed in the forest beyond sunset.
The child suppressed a little gasp as he heard something moving behind him. He turned around. Nothing. He was hearing things. He shook his head and continued down the path, wondering how he could be so tense in his own backyard.
A soft chuckling could be heard from somewhere up ahead. A soft, fast, inhumane chuckling. The child had never heard that sound in the forest before. He began to shiver. He was about to start crying when he remembered his parents’ advice: when you’re feeling lonely and scared, sing. And so he began to sing his favourite song.
“In the town where I was born,
Lived a man who sailed to sea,
And he told us of his life,
In the land of submarines”
His voice sounded squeaky and high pitched in the echoing silence of the forest. But he continued singing to keep his courage burning. He could no longer hear the chuckling, but he was pretty sure he could hear the bushes on his right rustling. He pretended to ignore it and went on to the next verse.
“So we sailed on to the sun,
Till we found the sea of green,
And we lived beneath the waves,
In our Yellow Submarine”
And then he realized that he had left his toy submarine in the garden. The sun had set hours ago and his favourite toy submarine had probably been chewed up by Fluffy. That broke him.
And then, the lost explorer in the woods turned into the eight year old child that he truly was, and began to cry. Tears rolled down the child’s plump cheeks as he opened the floodgates of his mental dam. Pent up emotions poured down the child’s cheeks as he began to sob profusely. He stumbled over a fallen branch and fell on the soft forest litter. But he made no effort to get up. He lay on the ground, sobbing, the pain from the new cut on his knee only adding to his tears.
Another long, eerie howl echoed through the woods, causing more jittering and chuckling from the creatures in the bushes. The child held his breath, his small ears listening sharply for indications as to where the howling creature was, but he found none.
Silence. Deathly silence. The sound of his breathing was the only indication that the child had not gone deaf. Slowly, he hoisted himself up on his tiny feet, looking around him cautiously. He was pretty sure something was moving on his left, but he couldn’t see anything despite the silver light of the full moon, so he decided that he was just hearing things again.
He continued down his path, still humming under his breath, still avoiding the splashes of moonlight on the forest floor, when he suddenly remembered the stories his big brother used to tell him about the wood. A shiver ran down his spine as he recalled the stories of werewolves and demons t
hat his brother used to tell him in the dead of the night: Stories about thieves and murders and brutal killings that happened in the forest on moonlit nights.
As though on cue, a low snarl tore through the quiet atmosphere of the wood. The sound was so guttural and deep that the child could feel the ground beneath him resonate. And this time, he could not pass it off as his imagination as he could sense, through some unknown gut feeling, the presence of a large creature somewhere in the bushes around him. He heard the panicked chattering of the birds in the trees as they took wing and fled into the silver black skies.
He broke into a trot, down the path that lead to nowhere, the moment he heard the muted thuds of padded feet. He knew that something was stalking him, and he didn’t like it one bit.
The bushes began rustling wildly as the child scrambled down the path, panting desperately, in an attempt to outrun the hidden beast that was pursuing him. He stuck to the side of the trail, STILL avoiding the moonlight for a reason only he could understand. The beast now took no care to silence its footfalls, and its thudding gallops seemed to shake the trees of the forest themselves. The child began to cry as he ran, fear and adrenaline making him run faster than ever before. Plants brushed against him like clawed hands trying to hold him back. But he rushed on through them, ignorant of the scratches they created on his face and hands.
After several minutes of running, the trail ended. In front of him was nothing but more savage undergrowth. He was cornered. Trapped. Dinner. With a loud wail of sorrow, the child threw himself into the bushes, flailing desperately trying to move forwards. The rustling of the leaves around him and his own grunts of effort were the only things he could hear. He didn’t know where the beast was, and at this point, he did not care. He wanted to go home. He wanted to fall asleep in his mother’s lap and never enter the forest ever again.
All of a sudden, the bush opened out in front of him as he collapsed into yet another clearing. He wiped the mixture of sweat, tears and blood from his face with his sleeve and continued running through the forest, determined to get out alive. The galloping beast was still somewhere near him, he wasn’t quite sure where it was. It seemed as though the creature was merely toying with its eight year old prey.
And then it showed itself.
An enormous black shadow heaved itself onto thee path in front of the boy. With a low growl, it began taking slow, deliberate steps towards the shivering child. It stepped into a pool of moonlight, and the little boy finally saw what he was up against.
It was tall- The size of a horse, or maybe even bigger-Standing on four slender yet muscular legs, each ending with razor sharp claws. Two shiny red eyes peered sinisterly at the child from behind a long canine snout. It was completely covered in shaggy brown hair.
The werewolf threw its head back, looked at the full moon, and let out another piercing howl. He looked back down at his victim, who was now paralysed with fear and was incapable of motion, and began advancing, smiling in a sinister, vicious way.
After what seemed like all of eternity, the child found his feet and began backing away from the fiendish werewolf. In his hurry to escape from his pursuer, he forgot about his little game to avoid the moonlight, and stepped directly into the silver light from the full moon above.
The moment the moon illuminated the child’s dirty skin with its pearly rays, he froze. Calm came over his entire body and he relaxed, looking at his foe with a slight smile on his face. He took another step into the puddle of moonlight. And another. The werewolf watched with curious eyes as its tiny meal gave it a sly smile. It noticed the change in colour of its victim’s eyes from light green to blood red, but it still didn’t panic. After all, one swipe of its claws and the child would be dead.
He smirked at the werewolf. He could feel the power flowing into him from the moon. He threw back his head, and howled- an eerie, inhumane, werewolf howl.
~~~
The Laboratory
JJ Labs was located in the industrial sector of town. Surrounded by dilapidated warehouses, it looked quite forlorn from the outside. The street rarely saw traffic, only trucks at the most. Most of the warehouses around the lab had shut down or been abandoned, so one can safely say that JJ Labs was the most active establishment on that street.
In today’s world of science, computers and other such technology, one would rarely expect to see a chemist’s lab. Laboratories were now large sectors of private or public companies. Be it pharmaceutical or for testing purposes, labs almost always belonged to a company. But in this case it was different. JJ Labs belonged to one Mr Jacob Jackson, an elderly chemist. He was the founder, chairman, R&D head, marketing head, accounting department and lab personnel of JJ Labs. In other words, he was its only employee.
But Jacob didn’t mind his solitary life. He had developed the habit of talking to himself, so things didn’t seem too lonely anymore. The small, excited man would earnestly carry on with his own experiments day after day, without caring for the rest of the world. Once in a while he would leave the haven of his Lab (for he slept there as well) in order to purchase groceries and chemicals. In his early seventies, Jacob had no family. His brother and sister were long dead. His wife had abandoned him because he had shown more interest in his experiments than in her. But he didn’t really fret about his past troubles, for every day was a new adventure for him.
You must be wondering at this point of time, as to how such a small scale laboratory is financed. It is a queer matter, so to speak. Jacob Jackson got his income through assorted means.
Every week, the young paper boy of the neighbourhood used to pick up his grandfather’s “special” medication on paying about a third of his weekly income. Such medications were not sold in the market and, even if they were, they were too expensive for the paper boy. So, as long as young Max wanted his grandfather alive, he had to pay Jacob.
If one saw a silver Audi parked in front of JJ Labs, it meant that an eminent personality is going to die soon, for the assassin, who went by the name Adam Donald, was a regular at Jacob’s lab. He used to drop in every now and then, and pay a handsome sum for assorted poisons. Miraculously, JJ Labs had never been traced as the source of these poisons, probably because very few people knew of its existence.
If there was a compact car parked in front of the Lab, it meant that chef Voltaire from the local restaurant was out of his “special ingredient”. About two times a month, he would send one of the waiters to JJ Labs for a paper bag of the stuff, which only Jacob Jackson knew the composition of.
These people were the regular sources of Jacob’s income. But other than them, Jacob also had people who turned up occasionally, demanding certain compounds or chemicals. All in all, in fiscal matters, JJ Labs was fairly steady. Jacob lived a simple life at the back of the Lab, and was very satisfied with his standard of living.
The interior of JJ Labs, if one had the privilege of going inside, looked like a fusion of a medieval and modern chemist’s lab. A computer sat in one corner, showing latest chemical discoveries, or the uses of certain compounds in poison making. The main room of the lab was filled with tables, forming some sort of a maze to reach the back. On these tables stood an assortment of flasks, beakers, glasses, burners, stoves, tubes, and stands. The air was filled with fumes of different colours, emitted from different sources. The sounds of fizzling and bubbling liquids were permanently in the air.
Along the walls were several rows of shelves, with hundreds of jars. While some of these jars held things like sulphur and sodium chloride, others held more obscure substances such as eyeballs(bought from the local hospital), fingernails(all belonging to Jacob), Urine(various jars, from various animals) and various other body parts of animals and organic substances. Jacob, being an animal lover, obtained these body parts only after the animal had died.
Somewhere within this labyrinth of glass objects, you would find the tiny Jacob, twiddling with test tubes or mixing together flasks of liquids, often resulting in minor explosio
ns. Thankfully, Jacob didn’t have any neighbours. Jacob rarely injured himself grievously, and if he was too weak to work, he would take leave.
Jacob lived in a small room at the back of the lab. Fitted with a bed and a bathroom, it was enough to satisfy his needs. Every morning Jacob woke up at eight. By nine he would enter the lab, coat and all, ready to work. Throughout the day he would mix this with that, pour that into this, heat these with those, and put out a few fires. If he had a client, he would work only on their demands with determination. If not, he would continue on his own studies, trying to achieve a goal only he knew about.
One cold day, Jacob found himself devoid of any client to work for, so he set about working on his personal goal. “So close….” He muttered to himself, as he checked his enormous log book, which tracked his progress towards his discovery. Jacob had a tingling feeling in his gut that perhaps…perhaps today was the day. The day he had been labouring towards for the past thirty years.
Quickly seizing a couple of flasks, Jacob began pouring out both their contents into a beaker. The liquid in the beaker turned bright yellow. Jacob held his nose over the mouth of the beaker and sniffed, wrinkling his nose in disgust at the pungent smell. “Acid. I don’t want acid.” He muttered into the beaker. Jacob set down the beaker and ran to one of the shelves and picked up another jar. He took a measured quantity of the green, viscous liquid in a test tube and poured it into the yellow liquid, causing it to fume and hiss wildly. Muttering rapidly under his breath, Jacob set down the beaker, allowing it to fizz, as he combed the shelves for the item he needed.
“Ha!” he said triumphantly, as he picked up the jar containing a large number of minute eyeballs. Using a tiny spoon to scoop up about five of these, he dropped them into the fizzling liquid, making it lose its entire colour. The fizzling abruptly stopped as well. Jacob tittered excitedly. This could be it. He cautiously lifted the beaker up to his lips, and took a tiny sip.