Chapter 3

"Catch you!!" said the handsome cop who caught her when she was trying to reach the back window of Dam's clinic. Dam's clinic had been closed for a while now and she had a pinching suspiscion that something bad was about to happen to Dam and she had to help him. " What were you trying to do miss?", asked the officer tracing her fluent curves. " Sorry sir, my mistake I was just trying to spot my room keys, my room mate usually leaves the keys on the window pane......"."How careless !!!! what will you do if somebody spots you taking the keys like this and do the same tomorrow loot your room !"."Sorry sir this is only a temporary arrangement since we lost the duplicate set of keys", she lied blandly. "Oh! ok then I better not find you in this position again,have a good day", the officer continued his patrol sensing no lies in the lady's voice. Ebullient at accomplishing a succesful mission of conning a cop, she waited for sometime until the coast became clear.
She then climbed on the window pane and lifted the glass which came free. It seemed Dam did not care any more about the security of his belongings. She went in and tip toed towards the desk. She then checked the different drawers of the desk but her search proved futile. She could not find any proof for Dam's disappearance or his whereabouts. She then checked the phone for any unattended phone calls, she noted down the numbers and checked with the directory, the owners of the connection. Most of the numbers were residential except two. One of which belonged to a Pizza hotline and another a tourist operator. Instinctively she called upon the tourist operator on phone and said,
"Hello there! Sir I would like to know what the man who talked from this number talked to you about?? ", the man on the other end replied "Sorry mam, its highly confidential we are getting paid for that secrecy!!"
The lady earnestly said "Its not like that, the man is my husband!! I want to know where he went ! Please help us keep the marriage alive !! He is not a bad man but he is really forgetful! So sir can you please tell me what his last enquiry was?!"
The man pondered on the situation. He did not wan to be the cause for another marriage-split in an already divorce-ridden nation. The human spirit took over the codes and laws he was supposed to follow. He replied "He asked me about the hErE archipelago in the Indian ocean but, he did not get back to me, that miser!! , we had great offers this month.....", she put down the receiver and terminated the call. "Yes!!", she exclaimed. Mission two accomplished, she atleast knew where Dam was supposed to be. She then checked the whole room again and found a wall hanging world-map. She saw a small ink mark on a printed dot. It was the hErE islands as she had suspected. She jumped on the balls of her feet and ran to the window pane extolling herself on confirming the place. Prudent enough, she checked the area, it was deserted but for two beggars. She jumped like a cat out and closed the glass window in one clean movement. Mission three was to pack. She had to go there soon. She better not be late.
The beggars morphed into their two tone red-black macintosh and followed the lady. Their red eyes were sparkling with joy.

Chapter 1 and 1/2

“Just a part of the experiment!” with those words still ringing in her ears she woke up from a restless sleep. Now that she was awake, she knew right away what was troubling her sleep. The unearthly moan that had been sounding like a background score in her dream, the moan which was as irritating as a splinter in her brain, that was what had woken her up. She had been hearing these moans pretty frequently these days and they are not menacing all the time. Sometimes they sound like a cry of anguish, sometimes a cry of desperation, a cry of exultation at times but the dominant one was that of a predator. There were two types of predatory cries, a famished and a satiated one.

She began wondering whether the quality of her dreams bore a direct connection to the cries, that her emotions, her feelings were some how feeding the monster, that the monster fed off the other hapless otherworldly creatures that she dreamt about, she wondered if she was stark raving mad. If there was any time that she missed her therapist, the one who went by the name ‘Dam’ these days, it was now. Contrary to public opinion she had seen the ‘saner’ side of the doctor and had seen his genius. She had witnessed first hand his slow transition to a being who believed that he could do anything just by doing it. Its always our will that drives us and he was of the belief that if you eradicate even the slightest of the doubts from your mind, if you could somehow surgically operate away the so called ‘practical’ portion of your mind there is nothing that a man cannot do.

Like Dam, she had her own theories as well. She had theories about how the signals are always red when its your turn to take a left, how its always the person before you who gets an untagged product at the supermarket, about how its always the thing that you want to happen the most that fails miserably, how in a competition you so want to win you are not even a runner up and so on and so forth.

She had her prediction mechanism for potential failure almost perfected. But there was one theory of hers that she had never voiced out aloud, not even to Dam. It had been to explain the existence of genii like Dam, Einstein and Stephen Hawking to name a few. She had always believed in the existence of life beyond the boundaries of this world, this solar system, this galaxy and heck even beyond this universe! That the existence of a handful of brilliant people completely contests the existence of the rest of the human population, that there is no physiological explanation to the workings of their brains has more often than not led her to believe that they are aliens as well. If not completely, at least biologically doctored proto-hume-aliens. She finally had proof and she also realized that none of these theories were going to help her alleviate the madness that has become her life anyway if she didn’t find Dam. She had to find him and find him fast, find him before ‘they’ do.

ThErE

Angel Agent 1 : "# 2 What are the reports on the whereabouts of "Target one "?

Angel Agent 2: "He is still on the hide, #1 no further improvements.."

Angel Agent 1: "THE Weaver has already lost his very small temper, he is thinking of a
TERMINATION maneouvre".

Angel Agent 2: "That is too dangerous,..... not for us though"

Angel Agent 1: "Do you think we need a search running #2 ?"

Angel Agent 2: "The search has already begun".

Angel Agent 1: "Then lets go have some doughnuts and coffee".

Angel Agent 2: "Roger that #1"

Chapter 2 1/4

'....they do ...they do....' with these words ringing in his ears Dam woke up from his little nap. Obviously, Dam did not know they were after him.He also did not know that he had killed an innocent creature when he was trying to do a "so called" landing procedure. This creature was waiting for him at the gates of Heaven so as to teach him a lesson on how not to mess with other people's lives.Dam was now wondering in which place of earth he was standing. It was actually a small group of islands in the Indian Ocean. It was uninhabited of course ! atleast according to the maps it was, only then will it be dramatic, wouldn't it?, don't bother to answer that its rhetorical. Now coming to Dam, he could not live without music as such. He thought people's brain was fed to the brim when one hears to the music he loves for an hour at least. So he did not bother to eat also, instead he always carried an mp3 player along with him and while alone and travelling will always have it switched on. Now he got it out, and put on his ear phones.He pressed the play button and the player started singing Linkin Park's "One Step Closer". He usually had a theory that when you turn on the shuffle in an mp3 player , the current song always determined your mood and many times the situation you were at. So he was now seaching for some settlements and always thought he was one step closer to what he was searching, that magnificent surge of optimism came over him again. He started walking faster without paying attention to where he was going.
Then there it was ! Dam's heart stopped.Not with fear but with awe. It was the queerest structure he had ever seen. It was a tower, not any like Sauron's or The Dark Tower but modern. The main feature of the tower was that it was floating in thin air. It kept hovering in the air making a small fizzing sound one hears when you turn on a PC. Dam was amazed to see such a huge structure without any earthen contact. By this time the song in the mp3 player was "Eat you Alive" by Limp-Bizkit. Sure the tower did have an ominous appearance about it. So Dam went behind a bush- covering and started surveying the area. The tower had in-numerable storeys but the fact was that he was not able to see it from the island shore, now he was having a breath-taking view of the same. It was so high that certain storeys were hidden among the clouds, this was evident from the fact that the clouds kept on changing their shapes which was more artificial to spot than natural. The Tower looked as if it was a thin inverted pyramid, not like the usual one such as at Giza-inverted, but it was so red that blood seemed to be dripping from its tapering end '...or rather a new red paint' Dam sniggered.
Then there was something unusual. The air near the tower became hazy like a mirage on roads during summers. As many as ten people robed in what looked like a two-tone red and black leather mackintoshes simply appeared out of thin air. They started dusting their jackets with gloved hands while several un-earthly weapons clicked and swung about them. Dam thought 'I THINK I am in trouble'. Even in these tricky circumstances Dam maintained his optimism because generally people when facing a lot of un-earthly beings usually run, run as if hell was after them, but Dam did not. He remained calm. He knew people better than ANYBODY else. He also knew that to be near a threat is always better than running far from it because, no matter how fast you run and how long you run, in the end it definitely will catch you.