The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R. Read online

  THE TENACITY OF DARKNESS

  A Thorn for Miss R., Book # 2

  By Sakiv M. Koch

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2021 by Vikas Mohan Kochhar

  Published by Immersive Stories

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author/publisher.

  The author/publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the author/publisher.

  Cover Art: GetCovers

  Contents

  THE TENACITY OF DARKNESS

  COPYRIGHT

  Chapter 1: An Averted Sting

  Chapter 2: Painful Exclusions and Strange Intrusions

  Chapter 3: Intolerable Ideas

  Chapter 4: Seeds of Deception

  Chapter 5: Tears of Monsters

  Chapter 6: Embryos of Truth

  Chapter 7: The Hues of Blood

  Chapter 8: Exquisitely Fragile and Magnetically Beautiful

  Chapter 9: The Tenacity of Darkness

  Chapter 10: A Missed Train

  Chapter 11: The Fury of Worms

  Chapter 12: Crime and Punishment

  Chapter 13: The Reincarnation of the Mother Night

  Chapter 14: Malaises Without Cure

  Chapter 15: A Monstrous Tenant

  Chapter 16: The Small Big

  Chapter 17: The Mysterious Island

  Chapter 18: The Hangman and The Escape Artist

  Thanking a Superstar

  Chapter 1: An Averted Sting

  M y pen is a dagger today. It stabs and tears through the skin of the paper I write upon. The surface of my desk is getting scratched with the force of my hatred. What I am writing for you, with so much love and care, is coming out as misshapen smears and blots. Yes, here are love and hatred bundled together in the same breath.

  The former, love, is like the universe. Already infinite, boundless, but still expanding. Only a fraction of it is for you, but a fraction of infinite is also infinite.

  The latter, hatred, is a black hole. It doesn’t allow anything to escape it. Except for love. No matter how massive a black hole becomes, it remains a microscopic part of the universe. Besides, today's black hole was a shining star once. This hatred was once love, too.

  ***

  The motorcar was a Phantom. Long, black, magical. Two Ghosts ran ahead of us, and two more followed behind. Though its length was impressive, the royal convoy could have been a much longer one. King Sanjay owned a total of thirty-six Rolls Royce cars, besides other equally stunning motorized marvels (like Bentleys), each costing a considerable fortune.

  The escort was small, but it packed a lot of firepower. The security policy in Surajgarh had undergone a sea change after that horrible night several years ago. Back then, the men-in-charge had considered ‘volume’ as the most important factor: have so many men guard the king and his heir that their sheer numbers would act as a deterrent for any potential troublemaker.

  The recruitment process focused more upon physical attributes than pretty much anything else. It had been easy for the enemy to buy out several of the king’s mercenary guards as a result.

  The policy that came into effect after Sanjay’s father’s assassination focused rigorously on quality: an elite force of exceptionally skilled fighters with impeccable antecedents. The recruits came exclusively from respectable families within Surajgarh.

  This had the dual advantages of:

  a) ensuring a certain degree of ethical makeup (loyalty, responsibility, etc.) that 'good' families supposedly carry in their gene pools,

  b) keeping the recruit aware that his family would have to answer for his act of treachery or treason.

  The motto of Surajgarh’s security force was Duty unto Death. Each one of the dozen personnel I had seen (and bossed around a bit, experimentally) appeared sufficiently massive, grim, and fierce to be able to dole out a lot of death without much ado.

  I had been dancing, partying, celebrating my good fortune in my imagination ever since the said good fortune had grabbed me by the neck and started dragging me away from my home. But seeing and evaluating the royal security officers gave me a pause: I don't seem good enough to be at the lowliest peg of these guys' hierarchy, I assessed myself honestly (for a change). Why would anyone place me at the very top?

  However, the thought was a mere blip in my dazzled mind-scape. It formed and disintegrated in the same moment, leaving me even more stubbornly cocky than I had been before, convinced, like Ma, that I deserved to be what I had become, that it was King Sanjay's good fortune that I had accepted his offer!

  A sub-script under the motto read:

  Watertight Security

  For the King, for the Kingdom!

  Watertight. But bullets and knives have a way of getting into places which water can't breach.

  Surajgarh was about twenty hours away, necessitating a layover on the way. We camped for the night in a mini-palace of tents (taken out of the Ghosts' trunks and erected with a professional crew’s speed) that outdid most hotels in the departments of comfort and grandeur.

  King Sanjay had remained in a sullen mood during the entire journey—scowling, drumming his fingers to some phantom tune in the Phantom. The last time I had seen him smile was when Rachna had come to see me at the Trumpet Hill house. And even then, his smile had turned into a grimace pretty soon.

  He now waved away the sumptuous dinner that the retinue of his chefs cooked so painstakingly for him. I relished every morsel, just as I had enjoyed every moment of the ride in the world's most luxurious motorcar, sitting in the front passenger seat while the king brooded in the backseat.

  I had remained as excited as a little boy setting out on his maiden journey, except for the first five minutes, that is, when it was all I could do not to mirror Ma's tears. Drops of her sorrow-water had fallen in quick succession on my shoulder as she stood embracing me for several long minutes, during which the Royces idled gracefully at the curb.

  Father beamed and smiled broadly the entire time, even though he was clearly getting impatient with the open exhibition of Mother's motherliness. I, too, felt a bit embarrassed under the gaze of so many stern and strong men. Father finally had to wrench me away from Mother’s arms. He simply couldn't have had the King waiting anymore.

  I was new to my job (providing watertight security, unto death), and the glamour, the richness of my new surroundings engrossed me completely. Alertness, the foundation upon which the edifice of any security-cover is erected, was as far from my mind as the petty accouterments (my once-beloved lathi, whistle, and torch) of my old job.

  We camped in a private estate that the late King Pratap, Sanjay's father, had purchased soon after Rani Meena Devi’s marriage so that the royal entourage could have a place to stop at on the way to and from Jalgarh. A permanent structure comprising barracks, a kitchen, and a row of bathrooms also stood on the ten-acre lot.

  The size of the plot, at least twenty times larger than what would have excellently sufficed for the intended purpose, was a marker of royal excesses (but these extravagances proved to be smart investments in cases of land parcels). This estate was situated in a forest that ran on for miles on either side of the road.

  Dusk was falling by the time we reached the est
ate. Kerosene lamps lit the tented palace’s interior. Just as I had been granted the privilege of traveling with the King in his car, I now found (to my great pleasure and greater pride) that my room was within this palace, connected to the King's larger, grander suite through a doorway. I started to feel as though I were a prince myself, and that sense of duty, which I had not appreciated and nurtured sufficiently in the first place, receded even further.

  Herein lay a small paradox: I had been extremely meticulous and conscientious as a night watchman, never leaving home for my beat a minute later than the scheduled time, never returning home a minute earlier, never missing a single step of my circuit, no matter how dark the night and how merciless the weather. And that, too, when there was no one to supervise over me.

  I lounged in a lounge chair placed at a prudential distance from one of the bonfires blazing in the estate's garden, listening to a transistor radio and devouring platter after platter of assorted snacks that the poor cooks were frying, roasting, grilling or steaming for me. The king, who had drunk a bit of orange juice and eaten nothing, was pacing inside his living room, his bowed-head shadow marching restlessly on the walls of his tent.

  Of the twelve men under my command (two commissioned officers and ten enlisted men), six were on duty until 2 A.M., at which hour the other six would relieve them. The off-duty personnel (one commissioned officer and five enlisted men) sat eating a simpler fare, cooked by another set of cooks, around another of the bonfires. The officer, a young man 6'5" in height and built like a man-shaped boulder, was looking at me askance from time to time.

  I knew from day one that my appointment as their ‘Commanding Officer’ had not gone down well with any of the men in the King's personal guard. Every one of them resented and disdained me. But this officer, Lt. Shakti, looked and behaved as though I had done him a great personal injury by becoming what my fate had made me.

  He opened and clenched his enormous fists whenever he looked at me, as if he were raring to get my throat between those freakish hands. I understood his resentment and had a healthy tolerance for it In the beginning. A bit later, I being me, I started enjoying his boiling-below-the-surface rage. I fanned it deliberately by forcing him to salute me more than once a day or by ordering him to personally carry out tasks more suited to the men under his command. His anger, for all its overt display, was impotent, as he couldn't indulge in open insubordination without incurring the king's fearsome wrath.

  The sheer, animalistic malevolence in his gaze attracted my attention at one point during the course of the evening. I turned to look at him just when he was whispering an obviously derogatory remark about me to one of his men. The man sniggered, saw me seeing him, and stopped abruptly, his face reddening. Lt. Shakti stared back at me insolently.

  "Come here," I called out to him in the tone of a man calling an unruly dog. Shakti's face darkened with fury. He was still eating. Interrupting his meal without any pressing emergency was equivalent to a slap in the face in terms of the insult quotient it carried. He didn't rise from his seat, but he stopped eating, even stopped chewing the morsel he already had in his mouth.

  "You heard me, Lieutenant," I said, beckoning him with a hooked finger.

  Corded muscles spasmed under the skin of his arms as he pushed himself away from his trestle table and rose ponderously to his feet. He hunched his shoulders and started clenching, unclenching his fists in that by-now-familiar manner. He looked ready to pounce upon me.

  "Turn around and bend down," I commanded once he had reached my table, covering the distance of about ten feet as if he were walking toward a hangman’s platform (yes, I know what that walk feels like!)

  He looked down incredulously at me (I had remained seated, eating an apple), unable to process my extremely odd order. The hatred dripping from his eyes was second only to the pure malice that I had seen in Vijender Singh's eyes as he had lain on top of Sohan Singh's corpse at the Trumpet Hill house all those years ago.

  Shakti remained still, his face contorted with the effort to keep his (clenching, unclenching) hands from choking me.

  "The little bastard won't keep waiting," I said cryptically, sighed theatrically, laid down my apple, and stood up. I stepped behind him and swiped away the scorpion that I had seen scurrying up the back of his shirt when I had turned to look at him a few moments ago.

  Shakti instinctively turned and lashed out at me, obviously thinking that I was slapping him on the back of his head, when, in reality, I was saving the back of his neck from a considerable amount of pain. I blocked his roundhouse blow with my left arm and squashed the escaping scorpion with my right foot.

  "Look before you hit," I told the bewildered lieutenant in a patronizing tone, pointing to the half-mashed animal on the ground, one of its pincers opening and closing, opening and closing, much like the habitual gesture of Shakti's own pincers.

  "Now thank me for saving you from that little bastard, beg my pardon for hitting out at me, and go finish your meal," I told him.

  "I-I am sorry, sir," he mumbled. "Thank you. I beg your pardon. Please don't–."

  I cut him off mid-sentence with a wave of my hand, dismissed him, ended the scorpion’s suffering with another twist of my foot, and left the scene drunk on my petty triumph.

  King Sanjay was no longer pacing when I returned to our tent. He had changed into his hunting clothes. I cursed under my breath and suppressed a yawn. My belly was full to bursting, my heart was no less full, and I was so ready for my bed that the thought of venturing out into the dark, dank jungles at that hour cut the legs out from under my high spirits and turned them into embittered cripples crawling low on the ground.

  King Sanjay had been extremely tall even as a boy; he now towered over everyone, except for Lt. Shakti. But whereas Shakti looked like (and probably was) a wrestler, Sanjay was a lean man. He had a longish, stern, but somewhat good-looking face, which grew strikingly handsome whenever he smiled (an event as rare as a total eclipse of the sun).

  He wore his camouflaged jacket and trousers, attired as though he were going to battle an armed enemy, not to kill harmless deer. Deepening this impression was a long knife sheathed at his waist, which he carried in addition to his pump-action shotgun. He then put a black top hat with a red band on his head and fractured the entire 'stealthy warrior' effect.

  "You don't have to come," he said to me without preamble, clearly sensing my legless spirits writhing around his Wellington boots.

  "I want to go with you," I lied, swallowing the 'your majesty' that almost every sentence addressed to the king by everyone customarily ended with. "I would love some target-practice in the dark. Need just a minute to get ready."

  I didn't change into any special hunting clothes. I just took out my Model 29 from its box along with its holster and walked out to the front garden again, where the carcass of the late scorpion was already becoming a gigantic snack for an army of black ants. The king stood staring into the flames of one bonfire while all the on-duty guards finished hasty preparations to accompany him.

  We left the estate on foot. I, warming up to my role as the person-in-charge of the king's security, led the party. Three-quarters of a moon, along with a spattering of attendant stars, illuminated the world in a romantic light more conducive to making life rather than ending it.

  A pressure-horn blared from somewhere to our right as we started crossing the road to the dark, forbidding forest on the other side. The sound was so abrupt, so loud in the stillness of the night that each of us jumped a little. The king and I did, for sure. King Sanjay, walking a few feet behind me, actually cried out as though something had struck him.

  We saw a truck parked about three-hundred meters from the entrance to the estate. At that time, in that light, it appeared to be an alien beast sleeping on the road. The beast woke up all of a sudden. Its eyes lit up at high beams, blinding us momentarily. Its engine roared to life. The truck started to move.

  And then there was another blast of a horn, a di
fferent one. It blared probably a mile away. We were on a provincial highway—not a busy one by any means, but still a highway. Moving vehicles, parked trucks, and all kinds of traffic-related sounds are as ordinary and natural on a road as blinking and breathing are for a person. You wouldn't grow suspicious of a person just because they were breathing and blinking.

  But I got excited nonetheless. I unholstered my gun, turned about, and motioned everyone back, back into the estate.

  "I am going into the forest," the king declared, raising his shotgun to shoulder-level, perhaps to compensate for his apparent cowardice a little while ago. The king wouldn't retreat. Wouldn't even budge. He continued to stand in the middle of the road, as though it, too, formed a part of his kingdom (or, more colloquially, as though he were a mule staying put there until it pleased).

  We formed a ring around him—a human fence bristling with firearms. The truck dipped its lights as it bore towards us. It swerved slightly to bypass us before speeding away toward its destination.

  Someone sniggered in the darkness. The sound of the laughter was so low, so short-lived it could have been more imagined than real, but it carried an immense payload of derision—like a small, lonely cloud bursting to flood an entire town.

  I couldn't tell who had laughed in that cutting, stabbing way, but I felt those cuts and stabs very keenly. Every single one of the men looked upon my precaution as an act of foolishness and melodrama (the melodrama bit was undoubtedly true). I was a greenhorn, an upstart, an usurper in their eyes, and they didn't care to conceal their contempt for me.

  My self-esteem (considerably inflated until a few moments ago) plummeted and my normally placid temperament flared up. I held that hulking rascal, Lt. Shakti, responsible for these men's audacity.

  "We will go hunting, your majesty," I said to King Sanjay, rendering my tone simultaneously entreating and insisting, "but I request we return to the estate for a few minutes first. We must do so."