Killers, A Cottage Boy, and Death

The Death-

The Boy who lived in the little cottage by the huge old Oak at the end of the road was dead. He’d been dead for a while, and nobody knew. Him, least of all..He’d been butchered -ruthlessly taken apart, sliced into innumerable little pieces, all unevenly shaped. There was no blood. There never was. It was a deliberate move. Just to instill fear in people. The Boy had been slowly frozen over the last few days - locked into the Deep Freeze with the temperature set beyond ‘bearable’. Initially he had just felt a little cold, and had anticipated that he would soon be pulled out. They were definitely just trying to scare him. And it worked. He was petrified, and had resolved to make all kinds of amends when he got out of the freezer. He had started shivering a long time ago, and with good reason - he was dressed in a pair of navy blue shorts and a light grey cotton T-shirt. Fit that into a surrounding temperature of minus 2 degrees celsius, and the result cannot be pleasant. His breath was coming out in puffs, and the teeth were chattering incessantly. He started breathing sporadically - in short, quick bursts with a tightening of the stomach to try and keep himself warm. His arms were covered with goosebumps. A couple of hours later, his finger-tips started turning blue. He wondered what was taking them so long. Their plan had worked. He was petrified, and he repented. At the same time, he also wondered what it was he had done that made him deserve it.

Miraculously, he managed to stay conscious through the entire length of the first day and night in the freezer. He had given up thumping on the freezer door long ago, and had long since become too weak. He battled the cold from within, resisting the external forces that were changing him continuously, trying to overpower him; telling him that he had lost. Very soon, he lost control over his fingers. They would not respond to his will. He tried clenching his fist, but all he managed was a slight twitch near his thumb. He tried waving his arms around to keep the blood circulation going. Slowly, but surely, his arms started feeling like they were filled with lead, and eventually they sank down next to his body. He couldn’t scream any more. His throat was raw with the cold. He could hear his breath. It sounded like his throat had been slit. The thought of sleep tempted him. He fought it. He tried killing it. Then inevitability arrived. The Boy gave in. There wasn’t much he could do. And there was nobody around to help him out of the situation. He realised that everything was going to end. Hoping for a miracle was futile. His body shut down.

Now, two days later, he was dead.

No-one would ever see him again. No-one would miss him. It would be as if he had never existed. Waves had washed away a grain of sand from the beach, and none was the wiser.

Through a one-way glass in the next room, a scarred face broke into a smile. A smile of satisfaction. This was how opposition ought to be dealt with. It was a job well done.

The Boy-

The Boy was like many others around him. He was, so to speak, ‘Normal’. He was average looking, lived a regular life - went to school, played all kinds of sports, hardly studied, watched TV, shyly checked out girls his age, and kept his fantasies supressed in his head. He was 16 years old. He had recently developed an active interest in a certain sport which never used to appeal to him earlier. “Sport”, he used to think, “is limited to Cricket. It’s about SO much more than just getting exercise.” This particular sport that had grabbed his attention involved ten lunatics running around a rectangular piece of ground, wearing ridiculously loose clothing, showing off their sexy-chicken-legs with one ball being circulated among them. The aim, as far as he could make out, was to elbow the opponent in the ribs, pull down his shorts while the ball was elsewhere on court, step on his toes with your heels as hard and discreetly as possible; and knee him in the crotch. But he also noticed, strangely enough, that occasionally someone would attempt to throw the ball into this funny contraption that people called a ‘hoop’. Sounded like a real challenge. Sounded like fun. It was a beginning for him, since he was new in th Big City.
The Boy was Simple. This meant that he did not have too many hang-ups (like most people his age did); sure he did HAVE hangups, but nothing major. Well, assuming that spending an hour everyday doing up his hair (which was approximate the length of a week-old stubble) with half a tub of gel, wearing six strings of beads around his neck, an earring on his upper ear, black shoes that had streaks of red, and a grey T-Shirt under his school uniform (all of which were banned by the school!), is nothing major. He liked exercise, did 2 sets of approximately 5 push-ups each, every evening, flexed his 11 inch biceps in the mirror, tried to make them look bigger by flattening them against his chest, and gave a grunt of appreciation to himself. He was going to be famous, popular, and super cool. No wonder then, that he was, by and large, content.

He went to a reputed school. He missed most of his classes, conducted in the old brick building laced with broad, grey, stone corridors and winding stairways. The classes were bunked along with friends, and the time would be spent in the enormous games field. Most of the gang would slip to one end of the Basketball Court, which was furthest away from the school building, to sneak a smoke. The Boy would shoot a few hoops instead. While playing, he would dream of life above the rim - to soar, to do the impossible, to dunk, to achieve something that people around him had never been able to, and probably never would. He would become a figure of authority, commanding respect from everyone. One day he would.

But for now, another free throw.

He spent a lot of time observing people around him. He wondered why, at their age, kids would want to behave like grown-ups, flaunt money that they didn’t earn, spend their free time smoking and drinking, waste money on cards every year during Divali, be completely pretentious for the large part, and in effect, be the complete opposite of who they actually were. He blamed it on a weird phenomenon called Peer Pressure. It was invariably a matter of acceptance, he figured. The culture of the people around him was such that one had to conform to the life ‘styles’. And it affected him too. Therefore the whole ‘dressing up like a proud rooster’ thing. He started hanging out with the ‘cool’ bunch, who essentially did nothing that he could remember even a year later. He wanted to see what really made them cool. It’s not like there weren’t any added benefits - part of being that group meant that one could hang out with the cutest girls in school. Hmm..

This would have gone on indefinitely; but fate has a strange way of taking over one’s life when least expected. It possesses a rather strong power of persuasion. So one fine day, while in the process of working on the spikes on his head, the Boy happened to look in the mirror, and saw something he wasn’t prepared for. His eyes came to rest on a face which didn’t belong to the spirit within.

Click.

That’s all it took. Five seconds later, the gel was out, the beads were gone, the coolness was dead. The child had grown. His dream was back. With a resolve as firm as an Ethiopian’s buttocks, he decided he would never fall into that trap again. The Boy shuddered as he thought of who and what he might have become, had he continued down that line. This was his first true Realisation. So he went back to viewing the world with child-like innocence and a sense of being alive, experiencing everything as if for the first time. It was amazing..

He was so caught up with Living, that he never even saw them coming for him. The poor lad didn’t stand a chance.

The Killers-

The killers were restless. Of late, things had not been not going well for them. There was hardly any work, and they were getting forced into taking unnecessary risks, which was not how they normally worked. They were pressed for time, and that didn’t work well with the kind of people they were. Time was the one thing they needed, to do a good job. They prowled the streets religiously, looking for potential victims. A victim had to match up to the requirements, otherwise they couldn’t be taken. The purpose would be defeated.

They hadn’t found a match in more than a month. It would be so easy to just pick the nearest one and do him in. But the joy that went into breaking a person down slowly, steadily, and methodically from within had no comparison.

Fame -

High school had worked out easy enough for him. He had it all figured out. It was a place that was good for - Sport, bunking classes to go see movies (of course, the trademark blue shirt and trousers had to be stuffed into a backpack and regular clothes would have to be worn, otherwise people had issues admitting him in to see movies with an ‘18+’ rating), chilling at friends’ houses, pissing off various teachers, and all in all, doing nothing constructive. It came naturally to him. By the time he finished school, he was right there.. at the top.. a Prefect if you please, the Sports Captain, and, somehow, the title-holder of ‘Mr. Popular’, which he wasn’t sure if he should’ve been proud or embarassed of.

University started. As it progressed, the Boy became philosophical (or so he thought) in his mindset - to an extent. He started thinking about things he’d never thought about before. He started believing in the power of life.. The power of the human mind. He never did believe in God, for whatever reason, so he figured the next best thing was to believe in himself.. It worked for him, at least for a while.

What he did notice at this time was that a number of people around him were happy, not by his definition though..

Happiness & the Boy-

The Boy’s definition of Happiness - was when a person had grasped and understood things around him, and accepted them for what they were, after questioning why they were that way. If that made sense to him, he was Happy.

He saw that most people around him didn’t bother doing that - they just took things for the way they were, and were happy living in ignorance; a different type of happiness. And it seemed to work wonders for them.

Another thing that people tended to do naturally, was convert him. They kept trying to tell him about how God controlled everything, and created everything, and made the world a beautiful place, and blah and blah.. Initially the Boy smiled politely and nodded, and hemmed and hawed, but as time wore on, he started striking back - gently, but firmly. He tried questioning Believers about why they felt the way they did about God, and got no answers that made any sense. He tried telling them that, and as expected, almost got slaughtered a number of times. Stalemate.

Which led him to think, why was it that people were so closed to thinking? He wasn’t trying to make non-believers out of them. All he wanted was for them to believe in whatever they did for all the ‘right’ reasons. And that was what he didn’t find with them. Invariably, when they had no logical response (in the Boy’s view), they’d get abnormally defensive, and then aggressive, justifying their point of view as being the way it was just because that was the way it was. Brilliant.

Anyway, moving on. Post this stage, as the Boy began to ‘Mature’ (oh, how he loved that word!), he found that it wasn’t just people in college who were that way. Even at work, three years later, it was exactly the same. He would meet the ‘intellectuals’ that had infested every nook and corner of his life, and they would sit down to profound talks on fancy things the likes of which could only be defined by words longer than a hundred letters in length. Existentialism they would call it. That’s what smart people talk about. And the Boy would listen on in wonder. Wonder turned to pure Amazement, and invariably to absolute Amusement.

Clowns. That’s what he thought he was surrounded by. All the bloody time. In his time off, he would sit and wonder if he came across as the same kind of person to others - the kind that he kept making fun of inside his head. He was sure he did. He put it down to the way the world functioned. It didn’t matter if the person was his age, or ten years older. The discussions were inevitable, and he didn’t stop, because he wanted answers. He wanted, at some level, to believe in what the others believed. But he needed a reason. And he didn’t find one.

A friend told him one day, “Don’t fuck around with people and their mindset. It’ll kill you one day.”

But the Boy just laughed and replied, “I’m stronger than you know, and way wiser. I’ll change the world. It’s what I’m here for.”

The Method-

The procedure was invariable the same. The killers would get orders, or sometimes work on instinct, and set off, entering the world of the common man, looking for the right one. Once they found him, they would home in on him. The process of kidnapping had been carried out so many times that it now seemed ridiculously easy. They would magically surround the person and start a conversation. Grabbing his attention and interest of a potential victim was never a problem. They were not just professionals, they were the best. They didn’t have faces, they didn’t have names. They didn’t exist. They moved like ghosts, taking the form of a familiar face, or a best friend. They would show a person what ‘might’ be - a life of authority, respect, and fame. They could make people important, recognised, loved, and smart. Dreams of life as a celebrity were shown, and it always worked with the targets.

With such finesse was the story spun, that the web had the listener entangled without any hope of escape. Even if there was a chance, one would not want to escape. Thus the kidnapping, in effect, was almost voluntary from the victim.

Post Death-

When the owner of Cold Meats & More, Mr. Raan, returned to the store after a weekend of complete relaxation, and opened the Deep Freeze, the state in which he found the boy spoke much more powerfully than the words the boy had used long before.

Blue.

Ideally that’s not a word one would use to describe a human being.

Well…. not physically anyway.

Umm.. not while alive anyway..

Blue.

That was the word that described the Boy best.

Mr. Raan tried to pull the body out of the Deep Freeze in an attempt to save a life, but in the process ended up wrenching off the Boy’s left forearm and foot. They snapped off rather neatly. That was when he decided it would probably be wise to call for help. That was how the authorities found the Boy. Destroyed.

Warmth before the Cold -

Through his Free life, the Boy had changed many a mind, and tried to change many more. He did exactly the opposite of what he’d set out to do. Instead of understanding why others were the way they were, he converted them to match a vision of what he had in his head about how they Should be. And it worked. And he hated himself. It made him sick to the core. It drained him. Just thinking about how weak a human mind can be made him retch. How could a person allow someone else to influence his own life so greatly? How was it that a person was unable to make certain decisions about himself, in terms of how and who he should be? How was it that a person could be so confused as to allow an outsider to control his life?

This is what made the Boy go on and on, working with person after another. Hoping to find one who would retaliate. Violently. And strike him down. The thinking process was a rather strange one. In retrospect.

They had been on his trail for too long now. It had been over 6 years. The Boy had done a brilliant job of evading them, but at a cost that took its toll; which sometimes left him escaping with his mind barely intact. It was getting to him. This was not how one lived life. Life was to be experienced. Freedom was a concept he had just begun getting used to before they got onto his back. In six years, his forehead had developed lines. His face was drawn. His eyes looked haunted. The hang-dog look had become a part of who he was. Not just a part. It was completely who, or what he was.

His will to fight had been diminishing over a period of time. That day, he decided he’d had enough. “This truly is the end”, he thought. “The answer hasn’t come to me in 6 years, and I seriously doubt there’s going to be a miracle this day. Maybe I should Succumb.”

They moved in for the kill.

—————

I really don’t care any more.