Warlock

by Vickram E Diwan

  “Hey, hey, Payal! It’s just me,” Rudolf Schönherr said cheerfully. “What happened? You are shaking like a leaf; your face is all white!”

  “This, this!” Payal said hiding behind Rudolf Schönherr and pointing to the stranger standing in front of them.

  “Oh, him? Don’t be scared of him; he’s not going to hurt you, he’s completely harmless.”

  “Who is he?” Payal asked, still hiding behind Rudolf Schönherr.

  “Bittoo, that’s his name. Come, I have got the keys, let’s go inside.”

  Payal saw the man named Bittoo walk away, talking to himself, looking preoccupied with his own weird thoughts. “Come,” Rudolf Schönherr called her from the courtyard in front of the door, which could be reached after climbing four or five stairs from the porch.

  She walked up to the door and went inside; Rudolf Schönherr came in behind her, opening the switches of light on the wall beside the door. Payal found herself in a lobby; Rudolf Schönherr led her to the spacious drawing room, decorated with heads of many animals hung on the wall.

  “Who is he?” Payal repeated her question, sitting on the sofa offered to her by Rudolf Schönherr.

  “Who, Bittoo? He’s a madman.”

  “That much I have gathered myself; but where did you find him and what is he doing here?”

  “I picked him up from the road, where he was wandering aimlessly.”

  “Just like that; you pick up a madman and bring him home!”

  “Don’t make it all sound so outrageously stupid. Mean the boy looked so helpless; he had no place to go, so I brought him here. Besides, he seemed to be a good fit for the Circus, so I thought-”

  “In where?” Payal asked interrupting him.

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you about the Circus; come let me give you a guided tour of this place before night falls. It’s the most amazing and fantastic place; nothing like it in this entire city.”

  “What does this mad-man Bittoo of yours do?” Payal asked as she walked out of the front door, which Rudolf Schönherr had opened for her.

  “You seem to have taken quite a fancy for him, haven’t you? Well, he’s loitering in the ruins most of the time and-”

  “What ruins?” Payal asked interrupting him yet again.

  “Have patience my beautiful lady, you are soon going to see it all yourself. Do you know what else this Bittoo does besides it?” Rudolf Schönherr asked in a naughty voice.

  “What?”

  “Son of a bitch hides in my Prado when I go to my dance Institute in South Extension. And thinks I don’t know about it.”

  “What for? I mean what does he do there?”

  “You won’t believe it the little bastard sneaks in the cupboard in the changing room and peeps at the young women changing their clothes.”

  “What!” Payal said astonished as she stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Just kidding!” Rudolf Schönherr said laughing, “Got you, didn’t I? Come, let me show you the place before the light of the day is gone,” he said holding her by her left elbow.

  Payal walked with him confused, knowing not what to believe and what not anymore. “Does he really do that?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “Enough of Bittoo!”He said walking briskly.

  After walking some distance both of them came before a ‘toy-train’: the kind of train for children that one finds in amusement parks. Its ‘nose’ was pointing towards the outstretched estate that lay beyond; the farmhouse was built in the very beginning of the estate, spread far beyond from that point. The tracks of the toy-train were ‘U’ shaped at that point; the unbroken tracks helped the toy-train to travel again in the direction of the vast land of the estate after it had reached the nearest point behind the farmhouse.

  “What on earth is this?”

  “A toy-train,” Rudolf Schönherr said with unmistakable pride in his voice, “You would find it nowhere else except here, in my estate.”

  “Don’t tell me that this thing actually works!”

  “Why don’t I give you a ride? You would see for yourself.”

  “You mean that this thing actually moves on these tracks!” Payal said in a surprised voice.

  “Absolutely,” Rudolf Schönherr said opening the door of the second carriage for Payal. “I hope you don’t mind sitting on the second, I have to control the levers from the first carriage and two of us together would get congested in the small carriage.”

  “You’re sure it’s safe?” Payal asked sitting on the seat of the second carriage of the toy-train.

  “Trust me; I have moved it hundreds of times,” Rudolf Schönherr said starting the engine of the toy-train. he moved a lever in forwarding action and the toy train began to move on its tracks.

  Payal looked behind her and found that the fifth and the last carriage of the toy-train were full of big plastic containers filled with some liquid. “What’s in those containers?” she asked Rudolf Schönherr.

  “Gasoline; you see these tracks are laid out till very far; practically the entire length of this huge estate,” Rudolf Schönherr answered as the toy-train moved at a fast pace on the tracks. “The tank of this train cannot hold too much fuel, so I have to carry extra gasoline on the train. Else if it stopped far away from the farm-house, I would have to walk all the distance back.”

  “But why should you have a toy-train, to begin with?”

  “You see, as far as I have been able to gather, this land was first occupied by Gypsies, who made many small houses of brick and mud here. a terrible mishap occurred, an air-force plane fell here -I’m talking of the time when India was still under the British rule – and all the burning debris of the plane fell here.”

  “You mean on the Gypsies?”

  “Unfortunately yes; but it gets worse, the jet plane was carrying explosives. You can imagine what havoc it must have caused when it crashed here.”

  “And all of the Gypsies were killed?”

  “Not all, lucky for them that only a few elderly women and children were present here on that particular day. All the rest had gone for either street-side shows or to pick up wood to cook food. But the tragedy broke their spirit and their leader decided that the tribe would leave this evil place.”

  “What happened?” Payal asked curiously.

  Wild bushes and trees covered that empty grassland as far as the eye could see. It was a curious ride on that toy-train, the unending tracks of which seemed to have been spread all across that wide estate. Rudolf Schönherr used the lever to check the speed of the toy-train and direct it whenever the tracks split into two, leading to different directions. The ground of the estate was completely uneven, made up of small grass-covered mounds and ditches filled with dirty water or wild bushes. At places, the tracks of the toy-train were laid on small bridges across such ditches.

  “After that incident and Gypsy’s sad departure, this place came to be occupied by a large Circus. This toy-train that we are traveling on is one of their memorabilia.”

  “Look, this is where they lived,” Rudolf Schönherr said pointing to the torn rags of tents, between which the tracks had been laid, on which the train was moving.

  All kind of artifacts: from the full body outfits of clowns hanging on ropes, empty and rusted cages, probably at some time used for captivity of wild beasts, large tin boxes of the rectangular shape, with all kind of conceivable and unconceivable junk showed on the journey of the toy-train inside the ‘Circus’.

  “What is that building in the distance?” Payal asked.

  Rudolf Schönherr followed her gaze and replied, “That’s the empty stable; the earlier ownder was an Englishman who used to keep an army of horses that were trained here.

  Once again the train resumed its journey to the farthest area of the estate. “Where are those ruins you mentioned earlier?” Payal inquired.

  “There, there they are,” answered Rudolf Schönherr pointing at a distance.

  Payal followed his gaze and saw at some distance the ruins: o
ld, shattered and burned houses. Those houses were little more than modern huts, made of mud, bricks, and wood; of which all that was left were broken walls, shattered wooden doorways, and fallen ceilings. There were about 20-25 of those, making a cluster of dwellings of a now forgotten people. Time had certainly taken its toll on those dwellings of the past.

  As a people, Gypsies had been eternal wanderers; their race spread from the farthest reaches of central China and Mongolia to the south and central Asia, to Eastern Europe. They had traditionally never built a permanent place to live in and had invariably been involved in unconventional forms of occupation, from fortune telling to making crass iron knives, hammers etc. The foray of some of their tribes into criminal activities such as bootlegging, prostitution, robbery and dacoity was also well documented. They had also not followed any religion of benevolent God and there is also a school of thought that their blood had been defiled over the ages and they were followers of a cult of darkness, a form of Satanism, dabbling into Occult and black magic.

  The presence of such people and their occult related activities had made the place, where their ruins existed and the wasteland around it, ‘charged’ with negative and dark powers, a fertile ground for the evil to thrive in. In that respect it was not different from the houses, where murders or suicides occur, the kind of places in which negative or Yin powers are the strongest and that is often associated with haunting and other such manifestations.

  “It’s getting late, it will soon be dark,” Rudolf Schönherr said handling the lever of the train, “I’ll steer the train back to the direction of the farmhouse.”

  “Tell me, what lies beyond the ruins?” Payal asked.

  “Nothing,” Rudolf Schönherr answered, “merely empty grassland, the iron fence boundary, beyond that the main road.”

  Payal had begun to actually enjoy the ride back on the train. The darkening December evening had brought a pleasant chill to the air; she felt very light, in exceptionally good spirits, as she breathed the fresh air that came through the greenery of that estate. When the train reached back the starting point, the ‘U’ shaped curve or turn of the tracks, Rudolf Schönherr brought it to a halt. He got out of his carriage and opened the door of Payal’s carriage. They both walked back silently towards the farmhouse at a little distance.

  However on turning back, Payal saw that Rudolf had vanished. She waited for him for a little while but he never returned. The creepy sounds coming from beneath the wooden floor scared her as did the howling wind outside as rain-water splashed on the window panes.

  The giggling, followed by the wailing of a girl unnerved her. Payal went through all the rooms but there was no one. The touch of an invisible hand on her back made her jump out of her skin. She heard the voice of an old woman calling out her name in a whisper. She panicked and rushed to the door; and burst out of the front door of the farmhouse, which led to the porch. She frantically looked sideways and ran blindly in the direction of the distant iron-gate. Soon she was heaving, but she did not dare to stop even for a second to catch her breath. She kept on looking behind her, to see if anyone was chasing her, but was unable to penetrate through the darkness that had descended in that wilderness.

  Suddenly she heard the ferocious barking of the dogs that approached closer and closer. In her haste, she tripped over a stone, fell down and lost consciousness and fell back on the ground covered with cold and moist grass.

  …She did not know for how long she lay there like that, completely helpless and unconscious. She regained her consciousness, albeit faintly after some time when she the brilliant lights of the Toyota Prado hit her face. The headlights fell directly upon her as the SUV stopped near her; she saw a man wearing a black hooded robe and a Golden mask jump out of it and walk towards her.

  Accompanied by his dogs, he sat on his knees near her and carefully examined her pulse; he put his finger on her left eye-lid and opened it. Payal’s eyes reacted instinctively to it, bringing a smile of deep pleasure on his lips.

  He cruelly dragged her, putting his hands under her armpits. The straps of her sandal broke and fell away, and she helplessly dragged barefoot in the grip of her tormentor.By the time the hooded man had dragged her to the SUV, Payal’s red dress was also torn. He cruelly picked her up and threw her into the rear of his car, shutting the door loudly and drove back to the porch of the farmhouse.

  Once there, he opened the rear door, put Payal on his strong shoulder and went inside. He took Payal to a glass pyramid on the terrace of the single storied farm-house and put her down on its floor. He tied his prey’s hands and her ankles with a nylon rope before walking out of the glass pyramid; leaving his captive alone in that darkened place.

  …She did not know for how long she lay like that with tied hands and ankles. Maybe it was 20 minutes or maybe it was after 2 hours when Payal finally regained control of her senses. She looked all around her and found that she was in a glass pyramid with a base of around fifteen feet in all three directions.

  In the light of thick inverted black candles placed on a shelf, she saw that the ‘walls’ of the Pyramid were not made of a single sheet of glass. It was instead made up of many triangles; the initial structure was a metal frame made of many triangles, which had been covered by glass to make it one huge glass pyramid. The place had a strong and peculiar stench to it, though she couldn’t ascertain what it could attribute to.

  An unexpected noise caught her by surprise; her first impulse was that of denial, maybe she was hearing things or going out of her mind. But it was unmistakable; the spine-chilling crying of a baby with hiccups. But what was a baby doing there? Payal strained her eyes to see the silhouette of a baby in the direction from where the noise of crying was coming. On an altar, near the farthest wall of the pyramid from her lay a crying baby, but she did not understand who had put it there and for what reason? Her mental queries were abruptly ended by the clanging of the glass-door of the pyramid.

  She stared with astonishment at the man who entered; he was wearing a black hooded robe and hid her face with a Golden mask that revealed only his eyes and mouth. He closed the door of the pyramid behind him and walked towards Payal. He put his hands under her armpits and made her lean against the slanting glass wall of the pyramid. He smiled contently, seeing the horror on her face, as he snorted coke with her back to Payal and went away to sit cross-legged in the middle of a strange occult or pagan drawing made on the floor of the pyramid, in front of a horrifying idol.

  In the light of the inverted candles, Payal saw many such drawings elsewhere on the floor as well. The one surrounding the robed man depicted a five-pointed star in the middle of a circle, with Latin inscriptions and figures of Angles and Demons. He was chanting continuously and moving his head rhythmically, as if in a trance. Perhaps he was invoking and inviting dark forces, before the sacrifice.

  He had burned numerous incense sticks, olibanum, and camphor and the smoke from these filled the pyramid, which brought tears to Payal’s eyes and made her cough. She also felt nausea because of the stench of blood and rotting flesh, which seemed to be embedded in the floor of the pyramid. A large spider that was spinning its web above suddenly fell on her face, making her shriek and scream, which did not have the slightest of effect on the sorcerer.

  The atmosphere of the pyramid became heavy as if evil spirits hung around in anticipation; the occultist rose up and came towards Payal. He opened her mouth and forced down animal fat and raw meat in her mouth. Expectedly, it made her vomit instantaneously; she choked and struggled to breathe.

  The sight of her suffering brought a smile to her captor’s lips. Leaving Payal – wearing a vomit covered and half-torn red dress; he went back towards the altar. The baby of a labourer that he had abducted earlier was still crying loudly. Ignoring the shrill cry completely, the man in the golden mask and picked up a sword like weapon from the altar. In the flickering light of the ablaze inverted candles from which wax was rolling down continuously, Payal saw the horrifying fig
ure of an idol behind the altar. The 10-foot high idol of Baal or Moloch was depicted as a demonic deity with the head of a calf’ that wore a royal crown and was seated on a throne. The arms of the evil-diety were extended to receive the child victims sacrificed to him. And his worshippers believed that in return for those sacrifices, Moloch gifted black magic powers, unimaginable riches, delicious foods & wines and all kind of sensual delights.

  Warlock was shaking continuously; his head was moving to and fro as he went in a mesmeric trance and brought down the pointed end of the dagger, stabbing it in the heart of the little baby. Payal screamed loudly; ignoring it completely, Warlock gathered the blood of the dead baby’s heart in a bowl and sprinkled it on the face of the Moloch.He put it on his forehead, in the shape of a straight line-which ran from above the bridge of his nose to his hair- a tilak of blood and sharply turned towards Payal.

  She again screamed at the top of her voice, seeing his bulging eyes and his face painted with evil. At that moment he looked pure Evil; he laughed madly at that moment and once again turned to the dead baby. He took hold of it by the ankles and raising it in his strong hand, brought it down forcefully on the altar. The fragile head of the dead baby hit the stone surface of the altar and the bloodstained pieces of bones and skin flung around the pyramid. He hit it again and again on the altar, mad with his obsession until the entire head was destroyed and scattered all around.

  By that time Payal had already fallen unconscious, out of shock and terror. Warlock opened a rope around his waist and got out of his robe. He raised his outstretched hands as if to the skies above and began to dance naked in a frenzied and trance-like state to the music of Peter Gundry. It was his greatest dance, the finest and the ultimate performance of Warlock - the danse macabre. The ‘dance or celebration of death’ was followed by copulating with demonic female beings succubus, who fulfilled his darkest fantasies and desires.