Amballore House (42 page)

It was, however, true that the ETs could keep on living at the mansion peacefully because of Sam-Som, because there was no buyer able to occupy the mansion for an extended period.

It was a marriage of convenience for both of them; a marriage that Sam-Som deviously planned and consummated—just a marriage of convenience, nothing more, as they hardly loved each other.

Sam-Som was wielding a sword with many edges: he was not suspected of the crimes because of the smart cover he used, he was making truckloads of money, and he was giving the impression that he was looking after alien’s interests by offering them extended uninterrupted stay at the mansion, thereby hoping to curry favor with aliens. If anything disastrous was to transpire, he left room for the aliens to be arrested.

Sam-Som was an extraordinarily devious and cunning man.

12
MURDER IN THE GRAVEYARD

Vareed fast-forwarded the movie and came to the day September 12, 1958. He started playing the events of that day. Sam-Som knew this date by heart and prepared to see what he already knew and what he did not know. Some of the events of the night were quite foggy in his mind, because of the instance of a violent meeting between his head and a concrete wall. He hoped to see what exactly happened that night.

That night was without a full moon, unlike during the previous incident’s night; in fact the night had no moon at all. There was no moonlight guiding any criminals to their victims’ rooms.

Amballore House was shown after dusk. The picture of the estate did not look crisp like during the first tragedy. The ceremony of the key transfer to the new owners took place very late in the evening, and so there was no scene of a setting sun. There was no twilight hue of the evening sun that acted as a backdrop to the previous movie. The night looked more ominous.

The movie began with another broker (another drug criminal masquerading as real estate agent) walking through the gates of Amballore House, heading toward the mansion. Behind him walked a middle-aged couple and their teenage son of nineteen years, looking probably like a man of twenty-three years. The foursome stopped by the well and poked their heads in to check it out. Nothing out of the ordinary, they agreed among themselves.

Then they walked across the yard and took a look at the swimming pool. “Ideal pool for a housewarming party,” the broker announced to the new owners.

The pool was large enough for a teenage party, the boy calculated in his mind. The broker did not show them other parts of the property, since they had previously seen them. Also, it was getting late and the middle-aged couple was eager to retire for the night.

They then headed to the mansion. The interior was well lit with multiple chandeliers hanging from a tall ceiling. The family room at
front of the house hosted a sofa set and TV. Behind it was kitchen where Eli cooked many dinners for Vareed. There was a large dinner table where the agent and the trio settled. The contract was signed.

That was it; the property exchanged hands. The broker looked like he was in a hurry. He handed over the key to buyers, bid good luck and goodbye, and disappeared. He gave an air of a busy professional.

The boy had previously arranged the night’s teenage party. The guests started arriving promptly. The house was alive with teenage group taking over. The heated discussions, singing, and games of the teenage crowd transformed the dead house into a thrilling place one would want to come at end of the day and spend the whole night and thereafter to welcome the following morning with a reenergized body and refreshed heart. The guests congratulated the boy of the house on being privileged enough to occupy such a magnificent mansion.

Soon the crowd dispersed. The group consisting of twenty split into small groups of three or four and they scattered all over the house, light coming on in all the rooms. From afar, the house looked like a sprawling Christmas tree, lit as it was by the innumerable lights scattered throughout.

The elderly couple retired to their bedroom after dinner.

The youth strolled around the grounds in small groups, some of them staying indoors to watch TV, play games, listen to music, you name it. An ideal first night to be followed by many, many more happy nights and days, as everyone thought. Eventually, the teenagers moved to a dancing hall at the farthest end of the house. A band played music, and the young crowd danced to its beats.

While all these activities were going on, the broker left the house and come back at midnight with two other accomplices. The audience watching the movie saw who they were. They saw one of the would-be killers was Sam-Som. The drug lord had more crooks with him than at the Honeymoon Massacre night. It was clear that he anticipated trouble and resistance.

“The task at hand is not going to be easy,” Sam-Som was heard telling his gang.

The trio split three ways and each went his way to scrutinize the estate both inside and outside. They planned to have a rendezvous in half an hour and report their findings.

“Watch out for robots; also for coyotes,” Sam-Som instructed gang members.

It helped them having new moon night to easily blend into darkness and make themselves invisible to probing eyes.

They did their promised rendezvous in half an hour. Sam-Som reported the couple was still awake, watching TV. The other two reported that the teenage party would last the whole night. They expected the visitors to leave not earlier than 2:00 a.m., or perhaps the next morning after a sleepover at the mansion.

This created a problem for Sam-Som. According to his original plan, he had to deal with only three people—the middle-aged couple and their son. Suddenly nineteen additional lives appeared on the list. The odds were stacked against him for this task to be tackled successfully. This was a tall order. The logistics involved in completing the tough undertaking were too challenging. Sam-Som’s limited workforce of three lent no hand in concluding the imposing task overnight. But the trio was prepared to move heaven and earth to accomplish what they came for. The night was still young, according to them, even though it was midnight.

Sam-Som’s predicament of finishing off a large number of lives in a single night did not originate on moralistic grounds; he did not even know how to spell moral, even though he had been an English professor once upon a time.

Sam-Som instructed that the couple be finished off first and the teen crowd afterward. The order of execution was chosen to avoid having any adult presence when the teens were massacred.

As per their plan, Sam-Som stayed behind to search for any unexpected activities or the unwelcome appearance of anything, including a UFO, while the two thugs went upstairs to fetch the
middle-aged couple.

The lady screamed loudly when she saw the broker and another man storming into their bedroom. Her screams fell on the deaf ears of the teenage group, because they were at the far end of the house partying. The loud music drowned her pleas for help.

The two thugs muffled her screaming instantly. They shut down her mouth and her husband’s with duct tape, a prelude to more horrendous things yet to come in the following hours of a sinister night.

They then carried the couple downstairs on their shoulders. The couple, especially the lady, frantically kicked them and scratched them. These activities were minor mosquito bites for the heavily built thugs.

“Put us down, you dirt bags,” woman screamed at their carriers. None could hear her distinctly, since her words were muffled by duct tape.

The dirt bags carried the couple outside the estate through open gates under the watchful eyes of Sam-Som. Their destination was the pauper’s graveyard. The moonless night made the activities invisible, except to infrared cameras.

After one hour of patient waiting at the mansion during which he mercifully came across no UFOs intent on thwarting his clandestine operation, Sam-Som saw his colleagues returning, hopefully after finishing off the job in the protected grounds of the graveyard. He took a big sigh of relief and patiently waited for them.

When he was able to see them closely—that is, at the moment of them crossing the gates of the mansion—his heart stopped. The pair coming back to the estate was the middle-aged couple!

The thugs were not with them. Sam-Som continued to hide in the dark. When the couple walked past him and into the mansion, as if they were returning from a midnight walk, he hurried out of estate grounds to the pauper’s graveyard to see what happened to his comrades.

Vareed paused the movie at this point.

He addressed Sam-Som: “What happened to the criminals?”

Vareed did not mince words while speaking his mind. Once a criminal, always a criminal, and they should be addressed that way. No polishing.

Sam-Som told Vareed what he and the rest guessed.

Sam-Som said, “The old hags buried my friends in the pauper’s graveyard.”

The roles were reversed. The elderly couple managed to bury two healthy, young thugs. Unbelievable! But that is exactly what happened. Sam-Som relayed the message, quoting from a letter the couple wrote after the graveyard murder, addressed to their lawyer with instructions to hand over the letter to the police if they happened to die that night. The couple had some kind of premonition that they would eventually die that night, and they took steps to let the world know what happened to them.

This is what happened:

The thugs set them on the ground as soon as they reached the grave they had already prepared for an unceremonial midnight burial. The grave was a deep pit big enough to hold two people, probably eight feet deep. A heap of dirt lay by the side of the grave; a shovel was resting lazily on the dirt.

As soon as the thugs set the couple on the ground, the lady, who was raging mad by this time, managed to kick one thug with her heavy foot from behind strongly enough to land him in the pit. She caught them off guard, since they hardly expected this to happen and were not paying any attention to them. The alarmed thug number 2, standing at the mouth of the grave, cursed the woman amid panicked screams from thug number 1. He immediately set out to rescue his partner-in-crime by lying prone on the ground and extending his arms to the man in the pit to haul him out.

It was at that moment that the middle-aged man, the lady’s husband, no pronounced show stealer or stopper so far, decided to show his mettle. He, unseen by the thug rescuing his fallen comrade, got hold of the shovel and hit him so hard on his head that
he immediately stopped his expletive-filled midnight chanting. The estate owner followed suit by giving a second course of hard blows. The couple then struggled to push the unconscious man into the pit, and they succeeded, mercifully.

The shovel came in handy. The old people took turns to toss dirt into the grave. Their frantically but quickly and steadily executed task to fill the grave was dictated by their own survival instinct. It nullified any possible plan by the grave dwellers to climb on each other to bail out of the grave and return the favor by pulling out the other, once outside the pit.

The loud expletive-filled screaming of the conscious thug gradually got muffled as dirt started piling on him. It became weaker and weaker and finally died down when the pit was filled. The night regained its silence and calm.

Just before departing, she removed the duct tape that had shut down her mouth. She threw her duct tape on the grave. Her husband took off his own tape and tossed it as a lasting memorial to the buried criminals.

“May you two dirt bags rot in this grave before you rot in hell,” the lady told the grave.

This unbelievable story made the eyes of everyone in the movie audience pop out (except those of the robot) in sheer wonderment. Even Vareed, usually a calm and composed man in any calamity, had his eyes pop out! He had been consumed by suspense ever since he saw the movie in private prior to the current screening and was unable to contain it, dying to know what miracle took place on that fateful night to make the middle-aged come back to the mansion alive. Now he knew.

13
THE DOUBLE VISION

Vareed resumed the movie. The time log showed that it was one hour after Sam-Som left the premises to check out what happened to his gang members in the graveyard. The scene showed a depressed, scared, and angry-looking Sam-Som returning untriumphantly to the mansion.

He then hid in the dark, occasionally scanning his watch. It was obvious that he was expecting more of his gang members to arrive, triggered by no message of “mission accomplished” by him.

Soon the back-up crew arrived, two of them. They joined Sam-Som in the dark. The threesome plotted activities for the rest of the night. They realized that finishing off a crowd of twenty was not child’s play. They probably needed reinforcements to make the attempt worthwhile. They wanted to finish off the easy task first—wiping out the couple, who were probably sleeping off the exhaustion from their unforgettable midnight stroll.

The three went upstairs and surprised the couple once more. Sam-Som tried to find out from them what happened to his thug friends who previously accompanied them out of the mansion, even though he could guess the answer. But the couple’s lips were sealed. They did not answer. They did not budge.

He would later on find a letter in their bedroom addressed to their lawyer, steal it, and know of its contents.

With Sam-Som’s counsel, the newcomers decided not to take any chances with the couple this time. They dragged the couple out of the bed, tied them up, carried them downstairs, and threw them in the old-fashioned well.

Vareed once again paused the movie. He had been baffled ever since he had seen the movie earlier. He was intrigued about the couple. He was dying for an answer.

So he asked Sam-Som, “The press reports said that the couple ended up in a mental asylum. How is that possible if they died when you threw them in the well?”

Sam-Som replied, “The fake couple that went to the asylum was my colleagues. No one knew what the real couple looked like or anything about their whereabouts, so it was easy to fake them. Their only known relative, their only son, died that night. The agent who sold the property died the same night in the pauper’s graveyard. Even if he were alive, he would not have testified against me in a court of law.”