Sam-Som instructed that the couple be finished off first and the teen crowd afterward. The order of execution was chosen to avoid having any adult presence when the teens were massacred.
As per their plan, Sam-Som stayed behind to search for any unexpected activities or the unwelcome appearance of anything, including a UFO, while the two thugs went upstairs to fetch the middle-aged couple.
The lady screamed loudly when she saw the broker and another man storming into their bedroom. Her screams fell on the deaf ears of the teenage group, because they were at the far end of the house partying. The loud music drowned her pleas for help.
The two thugs muffled her screaming instantly. They shut down her mouth and her husband’s with duct tape, a prelude to more horrendous things yet to come in the following hours of a sinister night.
They then carried the couple downstairs on their shoulders. The couple, especially the lady, frantically kicked them and scratched them. These activities were minor mosquito bites for the heavily built thugs.
“Put us down, you dirt bags,” woman screamed at their carriers. None could hear her distinctly, since her words were muffled by duct tape.
The dirt bags carried the couple outside the estate through open gates under the watchful eyes of Sam-Som. Their destination was the pauper’s graveyard. The moonless night made the activities invisible, except to infrared cameras.
After one hour of patient waiting at the mansion during which he mercifully came across no UFOs intent on thwarting his clandestine operation, Sam-Som saw his colleagues returning, hopefully after finishing off the job in the protected grounds of the graveyard. He took a big sigh of relief and patiently waited for them.
When he was able to see them closely—that is, at the moment of them crossing the gates of the mansion—his heart stopped. The pair coming back to the estate was the middle-aged couple!
The thugs were not with them. Sam-Som continued to hide in the dark. When the couple walked past him and into the mansion, as if they were returning from a midnight walk, he hurried out of estate grounds to the pauper’s graveyard to see what happened to his comrades.
Vareed paused the movie at this point.
He addressed Sam-Som: “What happened to the criminals?”
Vareed did not mince words while speaking his mind. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and they should be addressed that way. No polishing.
Sam-Som told Vareed what he and the rest guessed.
Sam-Som said, “The old hags buried my friends in the pauper’s graveyard.”
The roles were reversed. The elderly couple managed to bury two healthy, young thugs. Unbelievable! But that is exactly what happened. Sam-Som relayed the message, quoting from a letter the couple wrote after the graveyard murder, addressed to their lawyer with instructions to hand over the letter to the police if they happened to die that night. The couple had some kind of premonition that they would eventually die that night, and they took steps to let the world know what happened to them.
This is what happened:
The thugs set them on the ground as soon as they reached the grave they had already prepared for an unceremonial midnight burial. The grave was a deep pit big enough to hold two people, probably eight feet deep. A heap of dirt lay by the side of the grave; a shovel was resting lazily on the dirt.
As soon as the thugs set the couple on the ground, the lady, who was raging mad by this time, managed to kick one thug with her heavy foot from behind strongly enough to land him in the pit. She caught them off guard, since they hardly expected this to happen and were not paying any attention to them. The alarmed thug number 2, standing at the mouth of the grave, cursed the woman amid panicked screams from thug number 1. He immediately set out to rescue his partner-in-crime by lying prone on the ground and extending his arms to the man in the pit to haul him out.
It was at that moment that the middle-aged man, the lady’s husband, no pronounced show stealer or stopper so far, decided to show his mettle. He, unseen by the thug rescuing his fallen comrade, got hold of the shovel and hit him so hard on his head that he immediately stopped his expletive-filled midnight chanting. The estate owner followed suit by giving a second course of hard blows. The couple then struggled to push the unconscious man into the pit, and they succeeded, mercifully.
The shovel came in handy. The old people took turns to toss dirt into the grave. Their frantically but quickly and steadily executed task to fill the grave was dictated by their own survival instinct. It nullified any possible plan by the grave dwellers to climb on each other to bail out of the grave and return the favor by pulling out the other, once outside the pit.
The loud expletive-filled screaming of the conscious thug gradually got muffled as dirt started piling on him. It became weaker and weaker and finally died down when the pit was filled. The night regained its silence and calm.
Just before departing, she removed the duct tape that had shut down her mouth. She threw her duct tape on the grave. Her husband took off his own tape and tossed it as a lasting memorial to the buried criminals.
“May you two dirt bags rot in this grave before you rot in hell,” the lady told the grave.
This unbelievable story made the eyes of everyone in the movie audience pop out (except those of the robot) in sheer wonderment. Even Vareed, usually a calm and composed man in any calamity, had his eyes pop out! He had been consumed by suspense ever since he saw the movie in private prior to the current screening and was unable to contain it, dying to know what miracle took place on that fateful night to make the middle-aged come back to the mansion alive. Now he knew.
13THE DOUBLE VISION
Vareed resumed the movie. The time log showed that it was one hour after Sam-Som left the premises to check out what happened to his gang members in the graveyard. The scene showed a depressed, scared, and angry-looking Sam-Som returning untriumphantly to the mansion.
He then hid in the dark, occasionally scanning his watch. It was obvious that he was expecting more of his gang members to arrive, triggered by no message of “mission accomplished” by him.
Soon the back-up crew arrived, two of them. They joined Sam-Som in the dark. The threesome plotted activities for the rest of the night. They realized that finishing off a crowd of twenty was not child’s play. They probably needed reinforcements to make the attempt worthwhile. They wanted to finish off the easy task first—wiping out the couple, who were probably sleeping off the exhaustion from their unforgettable midnight stroll.
The three went upstairs and surprised the couple once more. Sam-Som tried to find out from them what happened to his thug friends who previously accompanied them out of the mansion, even though he could guess the answer. But the couple’s lips were sealed. They did not answer. They did not budge.
He would later on find a letter in their bedroom addressed to their lawyer, steal it, and know of its contents.
With Sam-Som’s counsel, the newcomers decided not to take any chances with the couple this time. They dragged the couple out of the bed, tied them up, carried them downstairs, and threw them in the old-fashioned well.
Vareed once again paused the movie. He had been baffled ever since he had seen the movie earlier. He was intrigued about the couple. He was dying for an answer.
So he asked Sam-Som, “The press reports said that the couple ended up in a mental asylum. How is that possible if they died when you threw them in the well?”
Sam-Som replied, “The fake couple that went to the asylum was my colleagues. No one knew what the real couple looked like or anything about their whereabouts, so it was easy to fake them. Their only known relative, their only son, died that night. The agent who sold the property died the same night in the pauper’s graveyard. Even if he were alive, he would not have testified against me in a court of law.”
Vareed said, “Why would you do such a crazy thing? Why stage an impersonation act? What would you achieve by such a fraud?”
Sam-Som answered, “By getting a fake cou
ple to come forward to claim that they were the parents of the murdered teenager, I was able to hide the fact that the real couple was killed that night. This was to protect myself if it really came down to prosecution charging me for the murder.
“I coached the fake couple, that is, my employees, well enough to have a realistic appearance to their portrayal of grief at the loss of their only child. They did a good job in narrating their experience of the horror when they woke up from sleep in the middle of the night alerted by a dreadful foreboding, walked down to the pool in a still, cool night, and saw the teen crowd drowned in the pool.
“Moreover, I wanted my colleagues to imply (by turning insane) to the world that the killing scene of the teen crowd was so chilling as to have been caused by a supernatural element and not by humans. I managed to turn world’s attention away from me, as everyone would have thought. I wanted the world to presume that it was you, the supernatural man, and not me, a mere mortal, who was behind the crime.
“We mortals are incapable of what you guys can accomplish,” Sam-Som told Vareed sarcastically.
The robot spat on the floor, disgusted by this riveting revelation soaking in treachery. Everybody was surprised that the robot could spit and expected the next round of spit to be directed straight at them. They moved away from the mechanical man.
Vareed was so surprised at this revelation that he looked at Sam-Som with an open mouth. He realized that Sam-Som, the sleazebag sitting in front of him, was a clever, scheming giant. He gave him kudos in his mind. He also realized that the judge’s decision to pass a guilty verdict on him was influenced by the apparent authenticity of the supernatural elements’ involvement in the matter. He agreed with drug lord’s assumption that the insanity that descended upon the couple could be interpreted as caused by witnessing the out-of-this-world execution mode of the teenagers.
***
He resumed the movie after this surprising revelation.
The killer trio was shown moving away from the well after their premeditated murder. They stood under a banyan tree and started discussing plans for the teen group’s massacre.
It was then that a robot approached them from the shadows.
Sam-Som recognized him instantly, endowed as he was with a photographic memory. He was the same robot he met two years ago under similar circumstances at the same house on the night of the Honeymoon Massacre; the same robot, by irony of fate, who saved him from a savage coyote. He was the same robot that threw him out of the mansion like a NASA rocket, landing him on the brink of a coma.
The robot had been assigned the daily tasks of nightly watch, of prowling the sprawling estate lands in search of intruders, of apprehending them, and of escorting them to the perimeter wall and launching them out of the property, like rockets. The dedicated machine had been performing every task of this DO loop for many years. He remembered every intruder, and he immediately recognized Sam-Som, just as Sam-Som recognized him—no surprise there, because both were endowed with superhuman memory, more so the computer than Sam-Som.
The robot asked Sam-Som, “Making a second incursion under my watch, you scumbag?”
“Yes, you tit brain,” Sam-Som told the robot, tit for tat.
His comrades were surprised to learn these great minds were acquaintances or even friends, to be able to exchange such friendly pleasantries.
The robot now turned to Sam-Som’s buddies and gave them high fives with his metallic head against their human heads. They collapsed after losing consciousness.
“This is how we computers give high fives, as a gesture of our friendship. Did your heads like the kiss of the metal?” the robot asked the collapsed criminals, without expecting an answer. They did not hear what the machine was telling them, because they had taken a quick trip out of the world of consciousness.
The robot turned back to Sam-Som and smiled at him, baring his metallic teeth. Sam-Som knew it was rude not to smile back, and therefore shed his smile at the robot, reciprocating its friendly gesture. His tobacco-stained teeth were on full display, manifesting themselves in their yellowish-brown glory.
In a quick, forceful swipe, the robot removed five of Sam-Som’s teeth.
“You are better off without those yellow teeth, you tit brain,” the robot told Sam-Som, addressing him like he was addressed by Sam-Som, returning the favor, paying back Sam-Som with the same coin, or whatever appropriate idiom one could think of. The robot was adding insult to injury, literally. The bleeding man ran from the scene for his dear life, only to be followed by the robot. The machine tripped Sam-Som and grabbed the fallen crook and carried him to the swimming pool.
“For once in my life, I am going to step out of the persistent DO loop and carry you to the swimming pool instead of the perimeter wall,” the robot told Sam-Som, who was struggling to jiggle out of the machine’s hold. “I am going to treat you better than your comrades, because you are my true friend.”
So saying the robot activated his rocket-launching skills on Sam-Som, who flew like a space rocket and landed in the pool.
“Now I am satisfied,” the robot told Sam-Som. “I knew one day I could defy algorithms,” the machine told the splashing waters of the pool, as Sam-Som’s head made a rendezvous with the pool wall’s rim.
Sam-Som’s pool landing was nearly fatal. He landed headfirst, with his head making an explosive sound on collision with the concrete rim of pool wall and ricocheting into the pool, splashing water high up and coloring it crimson red with his gushing blood. The force of impact was severe enough to put him into semi consciousness.
He got a splitting headache. He thought he got a split head, too, as a bonus. He got two heads from the bang. He was overtaken by this unshakeable conviction that the moment he landed in the pool, he became a changed man, saw the light, and got religion. He started having an identity crisis, with one of his brains suggesting something and other brain suggesting something diametrically opposite. His vision became blurred. He was possibly drifting into unconsciousness.
He saw two robots, not one, standing in the distance and yelling to him something about DO loops. He saw four of his comrades, not two, lying unconscious under two banyan trees, not one tree. Then he saw the unbelievable: an army of forty teenagers was heading to the pool like a swarm of bees. He counted forty of them with four of his eyes. He was convinced they were an army of soldiers sent out to rescue him from the barbarous robot; that was what one of his brains told him. However, his second brain told him that they were running toward him to arrest him and try him in a court of law for killing the middle-aged couple. The brain insisted that midnight sun was the judge (for reasons unknown to him, he realized with surprise that the sun was black), a few sprinkled stars were members of the jury, and the scattered thunderstorms were nothing but the judge using his gavel on the earth.
He ran for his life, scrambling out from the pool, praying loudly to Mother Mary, and cursing the teenage soldiers.
His double vision was conclusively proved authentic when he realized that he was bailing out of two pools and not just one pool. He ran toward the perimeter walls. He saw two gates and did the superhuman task of running through both the gates at the same time. He touched two of his heads with four of his hands. He ran for his life. He ran for his two lives.
At last he got the vision of his life. He got the double vision of his lives.
Vareed, at this time, briefly stopped the movie and explained to the movie audience that Sam-Som’s vision of the teenagers coming toward him while in the pool was not real. It was a graphical addition to the real events, contributed by an imaginative robot who edited the event log of Amballore House. The robot claimed, as quoted by Vareed, that the vision was nothing but a projected scene in the guilt-ridden mind of Sam-Som. The drug lord, while slipping into unconsciousness, was seeing things such as being judged by the world itself, with its natural forces playing the roles of the judge and members of the jury.
14THE INSURGENT ROBOT
The movie co
ntinued.
The insurgent robot felt good that he staged a one-man mutiny against the establishment. “Make it one-robot mutiny,” the rebellious one told the reddish waters of the swimming pool very loudly. He spoke to the night and claimed that he was made of the stuff that mutinies are made of.
He left the scene, satisfied that he was able to make a world of difference to the practice of blind adherence to algorithms and was able to breathe the air of freedom outside the treacherous loop that made the robotic dynasty go round and round in loops, stranded in no-man’s land.
He continued to patrol the grounds, moving toward the farthest end of the mansion, where the teenagers’ party was progressing in full swing. He was surprised to see so many intruders in the property that night. “What is it about a new moon that attracts intractable crowds to the mansion?” he asked the night. He stood outside the dance hall, unseen and plotting what to do with the newfound responsibility that the algorithm threw in his path. He waited his turn. He was supposed to throw them all out over the perimeter wall, his inner self told him.
During the next break in the dance sequence, he stepped into the hall and asked in his computer-baritone voice, “Guess who is coming to dance? It is me, the insurgent robot.” He paraphrased the famous Hollywood movie Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner.
Most of the teen crowd was surprised rather than frightened to see the machine joining them. They were surprised to see a walking and talking robot, probably a funny one at that. Most of them were happy they had a self-invited guest. Some girls wanted to dance with him to the melodious tunes of Malayalam songs. The robot’s rendition of the song in his computer voice made the girls giggle.
Once the jukebox fell silent and the crowd waited for the next song, the robot turned it off and sang a song of his own. He sang boisterously; he sang with abandon. The crowd sang with him:
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