Amballore House (33 page)

This would repeat day after day, week after week, month after — well, you get the idea.

On one particular night, Judas and Elsa got busy serving toddy and refreshments, the usual story. It was while Judas was walking carrying toddy and fried chicken that it happened.

Everyone thought it was thunder and lightning, because there was a thunderous sound and a brilliant flash. But it was something more sinister. A volcano erupted in the Amballore House complex, followed by an earthquake. The natural forces simultaneously showed up in Amballore on that night, shaking the pub and everyone inside.

Judas involuntarily dropped his tray. The patrons ran outside and up
to the second-floor balcony to get a good view of the night’s display. The second-floor balcony offered a good view of Amballore House. Judas Toddy Club was located not far from the mansion. It was located by the side of Hell’s Highway just a stone’s throw from the mansion—or to put it in the toddy drinkers’ language, a toddy-spit away from it.

The midnight show started with water spewing out sky high, caused by the upward thrust of the earthquake and volcano. The water sprayed high and it resembled a gigantic sprinkler system that was just turned on. The water came from the well, the swimming pool, and a pond in the complex.

The volcano spilled out multicolored lava. Bright, colorful plumes of ash jettisoned out of the mansion grounds. It was like fireworks at Trichur Pooram. The fiery lava lit up the sky with brilliant pyrotechnics. The water spray was illuminated by fireworks, creating numerous colorful bubbles.

The earthquake rattled the Judas Toddy Club building and other buildings along Hell’s Highway. The earthquake had a small, focused epicenter at Amballore House, and therefore the impact was mostly confined to the mansion grounds and the immediate neighborhood.

The lava spread in the compound, and its froth covered the well, pool, and parts of the mansion itself. It was as if some gigantic night creature was taking a long-needed bath with shampoo froth filling the mansion grounds. The smoldering fire lingered for some more time, glowing like a large glowworm. The glimmer finally subsided. Silence followed.

Not for long. The eerie silence was suddenly disrupted by deafeningly loud wailing sounds from the young couple who disappeared few years ago. Their sad sobbing rose in the night sky, and then there was deep silence again.

This gripping show took place on the anniversary night of the Honeymooners’ Disappearance.

The toddy shop patrons hypothesized based upon the show that unraveled in front of them that the honeymoon couple had not
jumped into the well on the night of their disappearance. Their heartbreaking wailing was arresting enough to give the impression that someone was behind their tragic disappearance, and that it could not have happened voluntarily.

This show was immediately followed by a cluster of young voices—a chorus of terrified voices over the backdrop of the sounds of waves beating against a swimming pool wall. The patrons’ attention was drawn to the swimming pool. Big waves started rising from the pool, as if hit by a tsunami. The water became reddish bit by bit, wave by wave, until the entire pool became crimson red, at which point the waves spilled out of the pool. The waves in the pool, arrayed in a sinusoidal standing-wave pattern, emerged out of the pool, intact in shape, as if they were made of solid material, refusing to uncoil and spread over the ground—an amazing sight. This scene was followed by an even more arresting sight of the wave pattern moving forward like a marching band of boy scouts. The giant water-made snake spread longitudinally and laterally as if it was alive. The reddish water animal looked like a live red carpet, like a magical flying carpet of an
Arabian Nights
story. It proceeded to the well, wrapped itself around it, and collapsed amid horrifying screams.

The chorus gradually subsided, a single scream leaving the chorus at one time, followed by another, and so on until nineteen voices died down. A single horrifying scream remained, sending chills through the spectators’ spines. That too died down, and then there was silence again—an unsettling silence.

The chorus of young voices belonged to the teenage crowd massacred in the mansion grounds. The pool was their watery grave, and so it was unsurprising that the terror-struck screams originated in the pool. The screams could not have come from a group of happily swimming youngsters. Their end was marked by panic and desperate calls for help. Death came to them individually, judging from the slowly diminishing number of wailings as time progressed. The end of the last unforgettable cry marked the merciful culmination of a frightening swimming party.

Speculation was that the teenage crowd in the second tragedy died
by drowning, but prior to drowning, they struggled to get out of there and run for their lives. Some evil presence was there for sure, which held the struggling bodies forcefully underwater, suffocating them to death. The fear that marked the wailings was almost palpable, and it was a telltale story in itself.

There was meaning attached to the wave traveling to the nearby well and wrapping itself around it and collapsing. It probably meant that the teenagers’ bodies were dumped in the well. However, no bodies were found in the well after the tragedy. This contradiction puzzled everyone.

***

The two tragedies that transpired at the famous Amballore House as described above—one of a young couple vanishing on their honeymoon night and the second, of a teenage crowd meeting their watery end—did not go unnoticed by the law enforcement agency. Amballore police investigators were entrusted to resolve the mystery through their investigational branch called Amballore Investigation Bureau.

The mystery surrounding Amballore House, the inaccessibility of the estate to the public, and the tragic end of the home buyers were national news, not merely local news that could be shoved under a rug. The bureau attracted national attention, and there was widespread expectation that they would come up with some evidence to explain away the apparently unsolvable mysteries.

The bureau was systematically collecting evidence and painstakingly working in the background, biding their time. They were confident that one day they would be able to come up with some solid, untarnished evidence that would resolve the mysteries once and for all.

Vareed and Eli, because they were residents of Amballore House, were the natural suspects of the swimming pool massacre that took place in 1958. They became Amballore House residents in 1958. The mansion was occupied by Vareed’s parents in 1956, the year when the honeymooner’s disappearance took place. They were the natural suspects of the disappearance.

Can septuagenarians commit crimes of such shockingly vicious nature? The bureau members played out in their own minds how the honeymoon tragedy could have unraveled. Their imagination came up with this little episode of the tragic night:

The honeymoon couple was met by an elderly couple in their midseventies who looked friendly (Vareed’s parents). They claimed that they were their distant relatives in need of a night’s stay in such an unfriendly territory as Amballore House and its surroundings. The young couple took pity on them and offered them accommodation.

Both the couples had their bedrooms upstairs connected by a common balcony overlooking the well just underneath and a swimming pool in a distance. As midnight approached, the elderly couple got up and tiptoed into young couple’s bedroom, breaking the door open using some blunt instrument, such as an ax.

The terrified honeymooners jumped out of bed, thinking they were being attacked by midnight robbers. No sooner did they call out for their elderly relatives to wake up and rescue them than they realized that the elders were the robbers! But by then it was too late. They were captured by old couple, who carried them to the pauper’s graveyard and buried them alive.

Judas Toddy Club’s patrons speculated that extraterrestrials (including Vareed and Eli) used the futuristic mansion, Amballore House, to perpetrate crimes. All theories put forward were pure figments of imagination, without the benefit of evidence to boot. Amballore
Times
readers were of the opinion, judging from letters to the editor, that these hyperkinetic theories were the aftermath of a high dose of kallu’s alcohol content that took over the Judas Toddy Club patrons’ reasoning faculties. But some granted them the benefit of the doubt. They argued that the drunkards might be blindsided by an overdose of imagination, but some truth might be lurking somewhere in their argument.

Unlike in the case of the honeymoon tragedy, the second tragedy
that wiped out the teenage group had live witnesses. The parents of the teenage boy, who bought the property, were reported to be still alive, even though the trauma of the incident drove them insane, and consequently, they were consigned to the madhouse along Hell’s Highway.

Psychologists have claimed that a mental disorder, at times, was a clever ploy of the mind to stave off suicide induced by unbearable sorrow. The big healer, time, over a course of time, releases one from pangs of sorrow, and then the afflicted will come out of the cocoon of mental disorder, enabling that person to courageously face the painful memories. The investigators found some hope in this scenario.

The investigators maintained that if and when middle-aged couple would come out of the self-imposed isolation, it would have a dramatic effect on the investigation, offering the bureau live witnesses to testify to what happened on the night of the teenagers’ massacre.

This might lead to the discovery of the culprits behind honeymooners’ disappearance.

The bureau’s lawyers refused to rely upon supernatural events to build a case against the perpetrators. The legal argument was to disengage extraterrestrials from the homicide case. If not, they worried that the judge would throw out the case on the very first day. The judge would very well warn the prosecution to neither waste its time nor make a mockery of the legal process by dragging aliens to his court room. The defense would not have it easy either, because of the gruesome nature of the multiple homicides.

Maybe the only hope for prosecution was circumstantial evidence, because of the serious absence of hard-core evidence. Circumstantial evidence would lead to a process of elimination, meaning it could throw out many a conjecture and scenario, choosing the most plausible of many probable events that could explain the mysteries. The force of circumstantial evidence could be so strong that it could filter down to one and only one possible scenario that was a defense in itself. It could also warrant the
existence of extraterrestrials, if need be.

This would be the prosecution’s argument if the judge taunted them and prohibited them from bringing fairy tales to the court of law.

On the other hand, one could look for tangible evidence. Seeking this was like looking for needle in the haystack, or looking for the Holy Grail—next to impossible, because of the grave dangers involved. It probably required a military unit to storm Amballore House and overcome its security veil, fortified as it was by futuristic technologies.

Amballore House was a high-tech mansion with all the advanced technology put into its construction. Its underground world of science and technology was far superior to mankind’s similar institutions. Everything in Amballore House was suspected as wired. The Internet of Things (IoT) was widely applied, and intelligent systems were believed to run amok there. Robotic technology was so advanced that the facility was suspected to be managed by robots without need for any human intervention. The IoT in itself was sufficient to relay information on trespasses to the main computer, irrespective of where the intrusion took place. The army of robots would be mobilized.

“What if” scenarios surfaced, pointed out by different factions of the bureau. “What if the crime was committed by a computer?” was a question thrown around, begging for an answer. There might have been no involvement by a human being, after all. The computers of the futuristic mansion could have conspired with robots and perpetrated the crime. Maybe robots were deployed to carry the honeymoon couple and take them to the pauper’s graveyard and bury them with no last rites administered.

If robots perpetrated the crime in collusion with underground computers, then the law enforcement agency would have hard time arresting a tangible culprit, such as a human being. They would have to throw in the towel, because they were damned if the perpetrator was technology, and they were damned if it was alien. Clearly, a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation.

Then there was mystery surrounding the real estate agents. Where
were they? They probably should be able to shed some light on the murder mystery. The bureau did not have any lead on who they were or whether it was one and the same agent who sold the property to two different buyers. They could not trace any newspaper ads leading to the sales and therefore assumed that the advertisement was done only by word of mouth.

Police officials and bureau lawyers cursed the day when this case was entrusted to their arbitration. They had come across nothing as bizarre as this before. At the same time, this was not a case to be hushed up, because of the serious nature of crimes, and because of the widespread attention that the crimes attracted. The bureau was forced to plunge into troubled waters to resolve the mystery.

3
A RELIC OF THE BRITISH RAJ

When the British spread their empire to India, one of their favorite destinations was Kerala, which drew visitors because of its supernatural beauty. The tropical paradise, poles apart from what the British were used to back at their home, was alluring to them.

In those days of the British rule, Kerala was fragmented into pieces, including Travancore-Cochin, Malabar, and Kasargod. It was in 1956, well after the empire folded in 1947, that Kerala was formed by integrating these small kingdoms under one umbrella.

The British owned a large number of properties in Kerala, both official and residential. When they left, these properties were mostly claimed by local governments. There was no universal law that applied to how these properties could be claimed within the framework of the law. The existing laws, many of them, were carved by the British. However, these laws were sidestepped by some regional authorities because of their aversion to the invading British and the laws they brought with them. The laws were spurned on the grounds of the authenticity of the jurisdiction, because the British were no more the ruling class.