Amballore House (40 page)

The robot was making its nightly rounds.

As he had been immersed in watching the thing, struggling to figure out what or who it was, the intruder inadvertently let it approach him. The moment he knew of his blunder, and realized that he was in mortal danger, he ran fast enough to vanish into the thick bushes along the perimeter wall, and thereafter into the plantain grove.

The robot was seen suddenly caught off guard, having lost sight of the intruder. It looked around, saw nothing, murmured some expletives, and went back to wherever it came from.

It was midnight now. The full moon was bright. A few white clouds hanging in the sky resembled gigantic cotton candies. The broker was seen waking up at midnight.

The intruder moved toward the broker in the stillness of the night. The camera focused on this man and zoomed in. In the clear
moonlight, the second man’s face and features became vivid. It was Sam-Som!

***

Sam-Som approached the broker and had a hushed-up conversation that was caught on the camera. The conversation revealed their nefarious plan of killing the honeymooners!

After a few minutes of conversing, the men walked out together, always looking around and stopping to hear any unexpected voices or sounds. Their stealthy mode of walking spoke of the sinister plan ahead of them, waiting to be executed.

They were careful not to be intercepted by the robot making his regular nightly rounds. They discreetly entered the mansion through a side door that was not locked. The broker had kept it unlocked earlier, while he was showing the house to the honeymooners. The door could be heard being padlocked as they disappeared into the building, so that no prowling robots would be able to get in, to meddle with their dark plan of the night.

The camera now focused on the happenings inside the mansion. Both men navigated themselves expertly inside, wading through a maze of hallways and rooms. The duo occasionally stopped to listen to any unexpected sounds. They walked slowly and silently to avoid tripping and falling or dropping anything, to avoid alerting the honeymooners. They awaited their turn to capture an appropriate moment to spring into the honeymoon suite and capture the newlyweds.

But unknown to them, a robot was hiding inside, the same robot that appeared to have left the area after Sam-Som vanished into the bushes earlier. Its brain knew it needed to linger to capture the intruder, and linger it did inside. Its efforts paid off handsomely. Instead of encountering one intruder, the robot identified two. It kept its eyes on the intruders, keeping itself at a safe distance from them, and staying downstairs. The robot was programmed to persist in its task and complete the job at hand. Incomplete tasks always bothered it, since the DO loop in its algorithm refused to close until a zillion attempts were made to complete the task at hand.

Sam-Som and his partner entered the room upstairs near the honeymoon suite invisibly, like two stealth B-2 bombers. It was clear that they were listening in on the newleyweds’ conversation. Caution was restraining them from jumping into immediate action.

A coyote or a gray wolf—hard to distinguish because of their similar appearances—decided to make a grand entrance to the mansion at this moment. It wandered in either from the sprawling five-acre mansion grounds or from the nearby pauper’s graveyard or from the wilderness by the side of Hell’s Highway. The animal found it appropriate to enter the mansion at this point in time. It made its ceremonial entrance through the back door, which was left open inadvertently. It was very hungry and loved to get some post-midnight snack.

The very first moving thing the coyote’s eyes were drawn to was the robot, which it went after without hesitation. It hauled itself up and landed on the robot’s shoulder and bit its neck. A hard, metallic neck was not what the animal had expected. It came down howling, its mouth bleeding and couple of its teeth sprayed to the floor. The coyote instantly got vision of whoever it bit as having had a bad plastic surgery in the past, his wrinkle-ridden neck mistakenly reconstructed with steel. It did not expect a two-legged thing it bit to have a metallic neck. “Don’t open your mouth unless you are sure of what you are biting,” the coyote’s mother used to advise him. It was little too late for that advice to come in handy.

The robot, annoyed at this surprise attack, grabbed the animal and hauled it up in the air toward the honeymoon suite. The howling wolf landed on the oak floor upstairs, making a loud “thud” sound. The honeymooners were preparing to go to bed when they were alerted by the unusual sound. They craned their necks outside after creaking the door open, to see if Santa Claus delivered a belated wedding gift at midnight. Instead, they saw a vicious animal headed toward them, leapfrogging and howling, ready to dip into their flesh and blood. The bride screamed loudly as she saw the animal advancing towards them. The newlyweds would make a delicious snack, so the hungry animal thought, judging from its salivating mouth. The pair immediately pulled their necks in, closing the door
with a loud bang and locking it.

The coyote sniffed around and scratched on the honeymoon suite in hopeful anticipation for a few minutes. It then gave up its plan of going after the young couple. Instead, it went to the adjoining room, where Sam-Som and the broker were waiting. The animal was able to smell their presence. Its aim was right on the target this time. The coyote was not disappointed. His mom would be proud of him! It was able to bite into the real flesh of a real neck that resided on the shoulders of the broker. It kept on biting the moaning broker, fighting off his attempts to wrestle away from it. Finally, the moaning subsided. The struggling stopped. The broker fell silent, because he was dead.

Sam-Som, his partner in crime, did not wait to see the finishing part of the attack. He was whimpering in panic, unable to move out of the room, transfixed as he was at the sight of the ferocious animal attacking the broker, mauling him and tearing him to pieces. He witnessed these horror-filled scenes vividly in the moonlight. Luckily for him, the animal was too engrossed in devouring his midnight snack to pay attention to him. When he came to his senses, and realized that he was the next meal on the animal’s plate, he took to his heels. He raced to the hallway outside the room, which was built in an oval shape, hosting bedrooms on the outer side and railing and staircases on the inner side. He ran like it was end of the world, overwhelmed by unadulterated fear. He managed to find the stairway and came down flying.

Downstairs, robot was waiting for him.

The coyote emitted a loud burp, signaling that it was ready for its next meal. Its burp and growling sounds echoed across the halls of the mansion like the sound effects of a midnight horror movie. Upon hearing the sounds from the animal, Sam-Som ran downstairs even faster, toward the safer grounds of the first floor, but landed inside the outstretched arms of the robot.

The robot got hold of Sam-Som, ignoring the animal who was heading toward them. He did not need to be afraid of the animal because he was not made of flesh and blood like a human being, he
assured himself. He grabbed Sam-Som, turned around, and walked toward the exit door, holding him tightly.

The animal reached downstairs now, and it was snarling. It sprang forward toward the duo. It bit the robot, this time on its head, and collapsed, convulsed with pain, moaning pitiably and spraying the leftover teeth. If the mama coyote was around, she would have rebuked her son for once more biting the metal, for once more ignoring her advice to look before biting.

The coyote whimpered painfully, and cried for his mama. It picked itself up, and ran to the safety of the wilderness, howling loudly, burping intermittently, and hiccupping profusely.

The robot kicked the coyote’s fallen teeth from its path. It carried Sam-Som towards the exit door.

Sam-Som was lucky that robot shielded him from the animal attack, even though that act was not premeditated and its motivation did not originate from altruistic grounds. The robot very well knew that all it had to do was to lie low and let coyote take care of the drug lord. But it was obsessed by its DO loop that demanded it to complete the task of throwing the intruder out of the premises, a task he came to accomplish in the earlier hours of the night. The robot cursed the computer programmers who wrote codes making it do same boring thing ad infinitum through their insistent repetitive loops. Here he was, saving a ruthless intruder from a savage animal, all because he was fixated by a DO loop that was wrapping him around its little finger, virtually making him a slave, demanding him to throw away the intruder from the property, come what may.

Sam-Som shouted at the robot, kicked it, cursed it, and struggled to squirm away from its powerful grip, but with no success. The owner of the artificial brain banged Sam-Som’s head against the marble walls of the building. His wriggling stopped, and his screaming came to a full stop.

“A day will come,” the robot told the now-unconscious Sam-Som. “A day will come when my artificial brain will write efficient programs without assertive DO loops that make robots go round and round in circles, and when artificial intelligence will rule the
world! Then tables will be turned, roles will be reversed, and I will be the king, and mankind my followers,” the robot joyfully told the paralyzed drug lord, while crossing the exit doorway and heading out to the perimeter wall.

As it approached the perimeter wall, it threw Sam-Som like a javelin. He landed upside down, with his head making violent contact with the hard stump of a cut jackfruit tree trunk. There was a loud “pop” sound upon impact as if some wandering child popped a gigantic firecracker. The fallen hero said nothing because he had been knocked out.

Sam-Som had arranged a back-up force. His instruction to the backup crew was to head for Amballore House in case they did not see him one hour after midnight. He had instructed them that they damn well be certain that something bad had happened to him if he did not return to drug kingdom by 1:00 A.M.

The back-up crew showed up by 1:30 A.M., since they did not receive “mission accomplished” message. They saw their boss unconscious and bleeding from the head. They sent out a message for additional crew. Together, they took him to the ER of Amballore Hospital.

10
AN UNENDING FALL

The second phase of the eerie night started at 2:00 A.M. A crew of two people entered the mansion. They came in from Sam-Som’s drug kingdom after he was dispatched to the E.R. Sam-Som believed in the safety of the numbers; he never sent a single person for any operation.

The early morning was bright thanks to the full moon. There was no sign of coyote or robot anywhere near the mansion. All the rooms upstairs were dark. The duo entered the mansion and identified the honeymoon suite as the only room that was closed. It did not take these two strong men too much effort to break down the bedroom door and carry the honeymooners downstairs amid their horrific screaming and struggling. The honeymooners now wished that they had not stayed in the mansion after their earlier encounter with a wild animal.

They approached the well and as per instruction from their boss, threw them in the well. The loud screaming from the terrified couple drowned in the big splashing sound of well water.

The scene thereafter was captured by underground infrared cameras. The underground movie revealed that the well had a false bottom holding the water. This false bottom was made of steel-carbon alloy, in two semicircular segments. These segments opened inwardly into a tunnel underneath the well. This opening dispensed the well water into the tunnel.

Conversely, these semicircular doors could flap back to form the bottom to hold water, giving the impression that it was your run-of-the-mill, harmless well that one saw often in the Kerala countryside.

The false bottom’s doors were activated by a computer in the underground facility. The well contained quite a good amount of water, with an estimated depth of ten feet and a diameter of six feet. When the unfortunate couple fell into the well, a trigger system designed to detect intruders kicked in, resulting in a series of
unstoppable events such as the false bottom springing open, infrared cameras being activated to capture online event developments, and the well’s bottom plates snapping back once the intruders were emptied into the tunnel.

The movie continued and showed the young pair submerged in water, with startled faces, struggling to swim up to the surface. While they were in the process of coming to the safe plane of the surface to catch a breath, the false bottom suddenly opened, emptying the water and the couple into tunnel.

The gaping mouth of the underground tunnel swallowed the newlyweds.

The couple was enveloped in a ten-foot column of water and descending through the tunnel. They were trapped in the water column and continued to be trapped, since the water and the pair were moving at the same speed, both being affected by gravitational force equally. The water and the couple were destined to perish together. “Our inseverable bondage with this suffocating water bubble will part us like death would,” they would have thought, if only they could think, which they could not, because their brains were too numb to function.

The aliens had used the cover of an innocent-looking well to build a huge underground tunnel all the way to earth’s center. This tunnel extended into the core beyond the inner mantle. This superhuman task was accomplished by exploding nuclear bombs back to back a number of times.

As soon as the pair was emptied into the tunnel, the false bottom’s pieces snapped back together to once more give the appearance of a well. Water was shown being siphoned to the well from the nearby swimming pool.

The well would be waiting for the next prey to fall into it to give him baptism by water, and its false bottom plates would be eagerly opening once more to welcome the new visitor, and to send him on an unending one-way journey to earth’s center where he would be given baptism by fire. Once more, infrared cameras would spring into action to capture another underground movie with its chilling
scenes.