The Case of the Vicious Vampires

by Ketaki Karnik

  Notion Press

  Old No. 38, New No. 6

  McNichols Road, Chetpet

  Chennai - 600 031

  First Published by Notion Press 2017

  Copyright © Ketaki Karnik 2017

  All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-947949-00-3

  This book has been published with all reasonable efforts taken to make the material error-free after the consent of the author. No part of this book shall be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The Author of this book is solely responsible and liable for its content including but not limited to the views, representations, descriptions, statements, information, opinions and references [“Content”]. The Content of this book shall not constitute or be construed or deemed to reflect the opinion or expression of the Publisher or Editor. Neither the Publisher nor Editor endorse or approve the Content of this book or guarantee the reliability, accuracy or completeness of the Content published herein and do not make any representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose. The Publisher and Editor shall not be liable whatsoever for any errors, omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause or claims for loss or damages of any kind, including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage arising out of use, inability to use, or about the reliability, accuracy or sufficiency of the information contained in this book.

  To my dearest Aai and Baba, for letting me go adventuring…

  Contents

  1. MY MENTOR SHOOTS ME

  2. A DEVIL IN OUR MIDST

  3. THE PREY IN THE GLADIATOR’S ARENA: ME

  4. I ESCAPE FROM ALLIGATOR’S HOLLOW

  5. I AM ABDUCTED BY VAMPIRES

  6. I ENTER THE PIRATES’ DEN

  7. I BOMB THE LAB

  8. I LEARN THE DIRTY SECRET OF THE NIZAM’S JEWELS

  9. I TURN BURGLAR

  10. I FIND MYSELF IN A CONCLAVE OF ROGUES

  11. RAIMA IS ATTACKED

  12. I MAKE ONE WRONG MOVE AND THE OTHERS WILL DIE

  13. I AM CONTROLLED BY A DEADLY PUPPET-MASTER

  14. I TRY TIGHT-ROPE WALKING - WITHOUT A SAFETY NET

  15. GAMBLING WITH OUR LIVES

  16. I BATTLE THE MASSIVE ARMY OF THE WAR LORD

  17. WE ARE GOING TO DIE

  18. I AM TRAPPED IN HELL

  19. I AM GASSED AND DYING

  20. THE DEVIL PROMISES TO RESURRECT

  Chapter One

  My mentor shoots me

  Ducking behind a pillar, I ruffled a rack of jackets. Did she see me? Surely, she couldn’t have missed the frantic flurry of agitated clothes.

  Why was I so clumsy? Instead of stealthily hurrying behind a pillar, I was acting like a spaced-out rhino. One, two, three… I counted to ten, forcing myself to go slowly. I gingerly peeped around the pillar. Damn. She strode towards me. Casually and deliberately. Closer and closer. I furtively looked around. Solid, nine-foot-high brown walls loomed a few feet from me. On all three sides. I had trapped myself in a dead-end. A department store of this size and I picked the worst place to hide in. Incredible how insanely brilliant I can be!

  I peered again. She continued to head towards me, glancing distractedly at the clothes racks to her left. She picked up a pair of mauve trousers, inspected them, looked ahead and to her right. It was obvious what she was really searching for - me. She set down the pair of trousers. Abruptly, she turned to her right and exited the store through the doors leading into the mall.

  I heaved a sigh of relief and rushed straight ahead, towards the main road exit. As I stepped out of the mutely lit, air-conditioned store, I felt as if I’d stepped into a tiny room with a zillion suns competing to show off their brightness. My ears echoed with the jarring honking of autos and the roar of engines. The stench of polluted fumes filled me and the heavy humidity in the air stifled me. The midday sun blinded me. I couldn’t see a thing. I squinted to make sense of my surroundings. Hazy outlines of cars, people, objects started to appear.

  A figure in jeans and a T-shirt, at the far end of the parking lot, caught my attention. Her back was to me. Weird, how your brain picks up totally random things to focus on. I needed to figure out an alternate entrance back into the mall, not… But wait, that lady in jeans, didn’t she look like… She swung around. Yes, it was her. Despite my blurred sight, I was certain. I would recognise Sarla anywhere. “Sa!” I started to yell.

  Bang.

  Shards of glass shattered around me. Instinctively, I bent and raised both my arms to protect my face. A bullet had hit the glass door of the shop. As the chiming from the broken glass pouring around me died down, I uncovered my face. A split second later, I saw Sarla standing by a car, with a gun aimed at me. I ran into the store. A second bullet whizzed past, decimating another pane. I turned in time to see two men bundle Sarla into a car and race away.

  Chaos and commotion raged around me. Shouting, screaming, scrambling, shoving. But amidst all this, I stood frozen, barely breathing. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, filled only with an icy emptiness.

  Sarla – my mentor, my guardian angel, my idol – had just attempted to murder me.

  15:27:48:32 Bangalore, 23 June 2017 - Today

  11:57:48:32 Barcelona, 23 June 2017 - Today

  From Varun’s challenge-you-to-name-one-missing-function wrist gizmo that told you the altitude, the depth below or above sea level, the pressure you were at, and, hold your breath, there’s lots more to come – number of steps you’ve walked, the phase of the moon, in which direction North North West lies and basically every useless nugget of data you could think up. Varun would pop up from time to time with “Hey guys, we’re 933.5 metres above sea level.” Really? Whatever. Basically, stuff only brainless boys get kicked about. Oh and yes, it also told you the time (up to a micro-second) and date in two locations.

  Are you surprised by Varun’s choice of second location? Anyone within a kilometre of him is drowning in the knowledge that Varun is the ultimate FCB fan. He’s totally psycho about FCB (Barcelona Football Club or Barça, if you want to sound cool).

  “Impossible. Totally, completely, utterly impossible,” persisted Raima for the thousandth time.

  “Kavya, you’ve lost it. Listen to yourself,” bellowed Varun, pounding his fist repeatedly.

  “I am not insane. I saw it. I was there. You’ve got to believe me,” I insisted yet again.

  “Guys, guys, silence. If I leave in the next five minutes, there is a tiny chance my boss will not sack me. So can you try a little coherence please and tell me what on earth is going on?” said an exasperated Anna, my absolutely favourite-est cousin (despite being nine years older than me). We sort of looked similar too: athletic build (Anna’s description; I would have simply called us ‘bony’) and the same light caramel complexion, though mine was darker because of the tan I had picked up while playing basketball and swimming. At 5 foot 5,” she towered over me by four inches.

  A deep breath later, I put on my sensible persona – after all, Raima, my best friend, is the hyper one while I’m the normal 14-year-old. “The thing is Anna, we know about your promotion and also that you wanted to surprise us with the news over a fancy dinner. But you know how Aai is. She can’t keep a thing to herself. So she blurted out the entire plan.”

  Varun – Raima’s 15-year-old cousin – Raima and I decided it would be wicked cool to plonk a reverse surprise on Anna. We’d give her a congratulations present. Great idea, we were super excited. We
were bubbling with gift options and even how to pack it (Raima wanted beautiful ribbon flowers, Varun said we should pack it in multiple, horrible looking cartons, each larger than the last, and I wanted to pack it in a box where you had to press a hidden notch to open it).

  Except, the three of us were imprisoned in the drive-till-infinity-and-beyond Indian Science Institute and Centre (ISIC) campus, which claimed to be on the outskirts of Bangalore. ‘Outskirts’ being a humungous understatement! To make matters worse, we weren’t allowed to leave our Summer Science camp without a guardian’s permission, even though the camp ended two days ago and the three of us were the only ones left. Varun’s father – Ravi uncle – was coming to ISIC next week and we would be travelling back with him, which was fab because we got to fool around together, without parents breathing down our necks to finish holiday homework.

  “In short, stuck as we are on Pluto, the only gift we could get for you were clumps of wildflowers.”

  Anna caught on fast. “So, that’s why you called me and cribbed to death about wanting to eat at Pizza Hut,” she said with a wry smile. “You know, I actually felt terrible for you having to eat the same mess food for every meal. How much you moaned on the phone – you should be awarded an Oscar! When, actually, you merely wanted an excuse to visit the mall. Do you have any idea how much I had to plead with my boss to take a few hours off as soon as I landed in Bangalore? Kavya, really!” But her tone said it all; I think she was hugely touched.

  “I was trying to avoid bumping into you at the store, otherwise you would know I was up to something.”

  “And instead you got caught in the shooting,” said Anna.

  “Not any shooting, shooting at me,” I said emphatically. The last part, about me being Sarla’s target, I hadn’t told even my parents, otherwise they’d totally, totally freak. As it is, they freaked when Anna and I called them, during the drive back to ISIC to let them know that we were safe after the incident at the mall.

  “Suddenly, horrible things are happening around us,” said Raima. “Yesterday and now today.”

  Anna gripped my shoulders. “What happened yesterday?” she asked, concern in her voice.

  Chapter Two

  A devil in our midst

  17:04:27:12 Bangalore, 22 June 2017 - Yesterday

  13:34:27:12 Barcelona, 22 June 2017 - Yesterday

  “Srini, I asked you to call the police, not the Institute security,” barked Venky sir. “What is wrong with you?” Red-faced, narrow-eyed, thumping his fist on the wall and quivering all over – I had never seen Venky sir like this.

  Raima clutched my arm and Varun stood stone-faced and statue-like. The three of us huddled together in a corner. For God’s sake, this was ISIC – the Olympus of Physics and Maths and everything geeky. Not a 16th century pirate island. People here don’t even mistakenly step onto the grass when a sign says ‘Do not walk on the lawn.’

  Now this?

  The Nizam’s jewels had been stolen. From Reddy sir’s room, in broad daylight, some time between

  8:00 a.m. and now. He had left for a conference right after breakfast, going straight from the Institute’s dining hall and returning to his room only at 4:30 p.m., a little before tea time.

  Anywhere and any time else, the bright sunlight gushing through the wide windows, with orange coloured curtains tightly clasped by the sides, would have been comforting. Like a shield against evil. But here, where there were a zillion trees for every one human being, where the sound of a single leaf rustling carried till infinity, where no one ever wanted to step out of their lab or look up from their research, where there was no normal civilization for light years – only one word echoed in my mind.

  Eerie.

  Not the ‘eerie’ you feel when you’re watching spikey, green-bodied serpent-tongued monsters in a horror movie. That’s nothing. This is the real thing. Imagine a hundred stun darts hitting you while a gigantic anaconda is flexing inside you.

  I kicked myself out of my zombie state. Get your act together, I chided myself. Stop behaving like a seven-year-old. I remembered that in one of the mystery books I read, the detective forces herself to describe the surroundings to overcome her fears. I tried the same.

  This was the first time I was inside the Institute’s VIP guest-house room. Did I say room? Actually, more a sprawling suite; easily double the size of our rooms. Though, right now, that wasn’t enough. It seemed as if everyone who had not gone off for vacation had squeezed into Reddy sir’s room. I had seen a few of them drifting around the campus, so engrossed in whatever it was they were thinking about that the Hulk could have been in their way and they wouldn’t notice him. Seriously! As for the rest, I don’t know why ISIC even bothered to give them guest rooms. They slipped out of their research labs once a year, if that.

  But, right now, they all wore a dazed, helpless expression and stared intently at the jewel box lying on the writing table. As if even a half glance elsewhere would unleash the warriors of the underworld. Missing the fact that the empty jewel box proved that those warriors were already here.

  I had never seen such an unusual and strange jewellery box. Reddy sir claimed it was an exact replica of the original. To me, it appeared as though two boxes had been stuck together, one below the other. The upper half was a glass box – basically, the ‘show off’ section so that everyone could admire your jewels through the glass case. The lower half, made of solid wood, was used to store the jewels during travel or for safekeeping. Between the two halves was a wooden collapsible panel, so the jewels could be kept in either half of the box – to make others jealous or to hide the jewels in a solid wooden box.

  I thought he was plain stupid and even Venky sir rolled his eyes when Reddy sir mentioned that he had left the jewels in the glass case, on the study table, while leaving his room this morning. These jewels were worth a zillion dollars; they were the Nizam’s jewels, not Raima’s glitzy but fake diamond earrings. Why wouldn’t you triple lock them before leaving your room? I sighed. Reddy sir was one of those genius professor types, daft in every other respect.

  The jewellery case opened with the most bizarre key I had ever seen: a long thin barrel with spikes – and I mean, proper full-on torture type spikes – popping out in all directions. Definitely more a weapon than key. Perhaps, during ancient times, it actually did double up as a dagger of sorts. Apparently, the unusual shape of the key made it nearly impossible to copy or to pick the lock.

  The lock hadn’t been tampered with and the only key had been with Reddy sir all day. A perfect theft.

  “This is most unfortunate Dr. Reddy. I really don’t know what to say, except that on behalf of the Institute, we are extremely sorry for the theft. This is completely unprecedented. I can assure you, we will do whatever it takes to find the burglar. I have already called the police.” Venky sir looked like he was going to burst into a flood of tears. I guess as director of the Institute, he felt responsible for the theft.

  “What’s happened has happened, Dr. Venkataraman. Nothing we do now will change that. I don’t want to turn this into a big issue. Don’t call the police.” Reddy sir’s tone was surprisingly calm, actually, shockingly calm.

  Okay, so I’m not as hysterical as Raima (and, yes, somehow we’re best friends despite being galaxies apart in character), but even I would throw a fit if I owned a few of the Nizam’s jewels and someone stole them. Good sport, this Reddy sir, I thought admiringly.

  “No police?” Venky sir’s jaw plummeted in utter disbelief and a lightness crept back into his voice. “Are you…” Deep frown lines wriggled back on his face as he understood. “Oh, you want me to call in the CBI?” His voice dropped to a whisper. Venky sir’s shoulders drooped further, if that’s possible.

  Even the three of us knew that calling in the CBI would shred ISIC’s reputation. The police were bad enough, but CBI detectives prowling around would be total disaster.

  “No, Dr. Venkataraman, that would permanently ruin the reputation of ISIC. We both
know that the chances of either the police or the CBI recovering the jewels are zero. They aren’t the brightest of blokes. I have the highest regard for this Institute. You do absolutely fantastic work here – pity, very few people know about it – and I don’t want to be the cause of its downfall. Money isn’t everything, you know. Scientific research – now that is something worth fighting for.”

  Venky sir gaped at Reddy sir, speechless. Unbelievable. Venky sir’s eyes glistened as if he were in the presence of God. I was certain he wanted to hug Reddy sir. The most gigantic hug in the world, ever. “Srini, get rid of the police. Say whatever you have to. Tell them we think someone stole two mangoes from our trees or something ridiculous like that. They’ll quietly run away.”

  Srini, the office boy, scurried away to deal with the police. “The painting…” said Venky sir tentatively, pointing to the left of the writing desk. A painting had been crudely ripped off from its frame. Bits of canvas were still stuck onto the frame. Obviously, we weren’t looking at an expert art burglar here.

  “That, I expect, was one of the cleaners. Everyone knows the painting was a Raja Ravi Varma reprint. Even my leather briefcase is more valuable. Besides, it is the Institute’s property, so unless you feel the need to…”

  “Absolutely not. I’ll handle this internally,” Venky sir beamed at how his luck had held up. Although, I suspect he didn’t like the insinuation that one of the cleaners had been responsible. ISIC staff had been around for centuries, as far as I could tell. But I had to admit, Reddy sir was right – who else would knowingly steal such a worthless painting.

  “I’ll get the lock changed immediately, Dr. Reddy. On the other hand, if you would like to shift rooms, I can arrange that as well.”

  “I’ll stay on here. I’ve got used to this room. Been here so long that I’ve started thinking of it as my home. The burglar has completely broken the lock, but once that’s fixed, I’ll be fine.”

  “Yes, of course, whatever you’re comfortable with. I cannot thank you enough, Dr. Reddy, for agreeing to keep the police out of this. Once again, please accept my sincerest apologies.”