“The work is finished. Hopefully I could leave for home soon,” thought Jim.
“I will head straight towards the restroom and I will immerse myself in the comfortable smoke-cloud of my favorite Marlboro cigarette.”
Jim finished smoking the first cigarette and lit the second. He watched his head slowly reappearing amidst the cloudy smoke in the reflection on the wall-mounted mirror. He took another quick drag and quenched the cigarette’s fire on the side of the sink and put it in the trashcan, then immersed himself in deep thought.
He opened the restroom’s door in a hurry and stepped out into the portico and walked toward his motorbike, which was parked under the ornamental tree with small red blooms. He almost started his bike when Bejoy came around almost running, clutching something which looked like tickets.
“Look what I have got here,” he exclaimed breathlessly.
“What?” Jim inquired rather indifferently.
“Two tickets for the weekend’s costume party at the Callisto.”
Callisto was the city’s most expensive nightclub, a place known for luxury in its purest form. A safe haven for the city’s finest who wanted some color in their evenings. The weekend costume party was their highlight event of the week. Admission was only for the pre-reserved. Even people with high ties found it rather hard to secure a ticket for this event. Jim had never been into parties or the club itself for that matter.
“How the hell did you even manage this?”
Jim was at the peak of his curiosity.
“Let’s say a lady who owed me a favor returned it. The question is whether you are coming or not.”
Jim liked Nolan’s Dark Knight. Especially the Joker played by Heath Ledger. But that didn’t mean he liked being stared at by a trio in the Joker costume. Or the way he felt sitting on the uncomfortable chair, sipping a rather silly-looking cocktail. The cocktail wasn’t soft—it hit hard—but he was disturbingly aware of stares from the Joker trio sitting between the vampire and the desi bhootham. He noticed their shoes—they were polished to a mirror-like quality.
“Who polishes their shoes like that for a casual party?” he thought.
“Weirdos,” he muttered.
Bejoy was nowhere in sight, probably with his lady contact. Now, wasn’t the girl in the Angel costume eying him? He winked at her; she winked back. “Now the party’s beginning to be interesting,” thought Jim as he approached the girl.
Jim awoke startled; he was being dragged away. He tried to open his eyes with effort. “God, I can’t keep them open. What did I drink?”
He observed that he was being dragged across a not-so-smooth surface. The last thing he noticed was that his captors had extremely well-polished shoes. Jim blacked out.
The sound of a meat cleaver hitting wood through flesh and cartilage is a curious thing. Or a fearful thing, depending on the scenario you’re in. For Jim, it was the latter. He listened to the sound fearfully, lying face down on the cold metal floor of the cage. There was not enough light in the cage to provide any sort of comfort, but there was enough light from the incandescent bulb in the corner to generate fear. A high-pitched scream shook Jim into reality.
“This time it’s nearer—probably from the cage at the row’s end.”
Jim’s heart began to beat faster. Not that it could possibly beat any faster. The sound of the cleaver cutting through meat and bone alike came again—crunching. He pictured the victim dying slowly and painfully at the hands of the Joker trio. Bones snapping, blood dripping. Now the noise from the other cage ended. Jim listened to the sound of the approaching executioners’ shoes with a certain air of grim numbness. A black arm reached out from the darkness and grabbed his hand, and then—darkness.
“There are no fans in hell,” Jim told himself as he woke up to the brightly lit room with a rather slow-moving, noisy fan. He looked throughout the room in a panic, last night’s events flashing through his mind, but not chronologically. To his comfort, he found Bejoy lying a little away on the same bed, staring at the laptop screen. Bejoy soon noticed that Jim was awake.
“What kind of a sleep was that, mate?”
He stared at the clock. It said 6 o’clock. Obviously not 6:00 a.m. The question was which day.
“You slept through the better part of the day. It’s Sunday evening,” Bejoy supplied. Well, that wasn’t bad considering he’d had a near-death experience. It was a terrible experience, despite the fact that it happened in a dream. “Or did it?” Jim wondered.
“Man, I had the most bizarre dream last night,” began Jim. He told Bejoy about the rather realistic dream he’d had the previous night. Toward the end of the narration, Jim felt ashamed of himself for being afraid, so he smiled to himself.
“A pity that you blacked out toward the end. Otherwise, we would have been able to find out what this all really was about,” said Bejoy.
“Man, it was just a dream.”
“Dreams have factual basis—according to Freud. Besides, I know what that was.”
“What?” asked Bejoy.
“A cannibal group among the elite,” exclaimed Jim.
“What an idea,” chimed Bejoy.
They both laughed at the silliness of the idea. Even then, Jim recoiled at the apparent realness of the dream. Jim noted that Bejoy did recoil at the mention of cannibals, though he recovered in a fraction of a second. Jim steadied himself and took a look at Bejoy as he folded his laptop. He was using the Tor network. Now, what on earth had Bejoy done that was so private?
“I will be back in a moment,” Bejoy said, and he retired to the bathroom.
Jim waited for this moment. He opened the laptop and checked which sites Bejoy had been browsing. He pressed Enter on the first URL: http://www.hummeat.org. The page opened to Jim’s shock—images and descriptions of how to prepare tasty dishes with human flesh. Engrossed in the details, he didn’t hear the bathroom door opening. But he sure did hear when the metal flower vase hit his head with a metallic ring.
“Sorry, I can’t let anybody know my secret,” said Bejoy to the back of the falling Jim.
Jim’s head emerged from the smoky cloud of his favorite cigarette. He took another puff and looked at his reflection in the mirror with fascination. He quenched the fiery tip of the cigarette on the side of the sink and put the stump in the trash can. As he stepped out of the restroom and into the parking lot under the tree, Bejoy arrived with two tickets. Soon he would ask Jim whether he would be going with him or not. Jim would definitely decline the offer this time. Probably. Though somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already wondering what costume he’d wear.