He went to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge.
“What’s wrong?” asked the girl. She was shivering and cold and desperately wishing they’d decided to go to the cinema instead of opting to make out here.
The boy was puzzled. “I thought it was unlocked …”
“What do we do now, then?’’ said the girl.
Like all young men governed by their libido, the boy wasn’t about to give up easily. Yes, it was cold, but he’d come armed with a blanket and the garden was sufficiently overgrown to screen them from the street.
“We don’t need to go inside. Let’s just stay out here,” the boy suggested.
“But it’s so cold,” she gasped.
“We’ll soon warm each other up,” he assured her, leading her to an area close to the front of the house. The grass was damp but he covered it with the blanket from his backpack, and the foliage not only screened them but also protected them from the chill breeze. She tried to imagine that they had found themselves a secret garden, and when he produced a spliff, it sealed the deal.
They sat and spent some minutes in relaxed, agreeable silence as they smoked the spliff, listening to the muted sounds of the city drifting to them through the trees. Then they lay down and began kissing. In a few moments they were making love, cocooned in weed-induced sexual bliss.
“What’s that?” she said.
“What’s what?” he asked, irritated.
“That noise.” Then her senses sharpened. “It’s the ground. The ground is—”
She didn’t get to finish her sentence. Suddenly it was as though the grass were trying to swallow them. Subsidence. A sinkhole. Something. Either way, the earth gave way beneath them, and the two lovebirds crashed through the lawn and into a nightmare beneath.
Chapter 4
DAZED, THE GIRL pulled herself to her hands and knees, coughing and gagging at a sudden stench, a mix of caustic chemicals and something else. Something truly stomach-turning.
The floor was rough concrete. She was in a low-ceilinged basement. A gray patch of light in the ceiling indicated where they’d fallen through. Plasterboard, turf, and rotted wooden beams hung down as though in the aftermath of a storm.
And pulling himself up back through the hole was her boyfriend.
“Hey,” she called. “Where are you …?”
But he was gone.
Naked, wincing in pain, and consumed with a creeping sense of something being terribly, terribly wrong, the girl looked around, her eyesight adjusting to the gloom. She saw gas masks and coveralls hanging from pegs. A small chainsaw. Dotted around the concrete floor was a series of plastic barrels with some kind of toxic chemical fumes rising from each one. And even in her traumatized state she realized it was those fumes that had eroded the ceiling structure enough for it to collapse.
And then she saw other things too. They seemed to appear out of the darkness. A table, like a butcher’s block, with a huge meat cleaver protruding from the bloodstained wood. And from the plastic barrels protruded hands and feet, the skin bubbling and burning as though being subjected to great heat.
Bile rising, she knew what was happening here. She knew exactly what was happening here.
Chapter 5
A CHARNEL HOUSE, thought the Commissioner of Police, Rajesh Sharma, when he returned to the office the next day, with the stink of chemicals and decomposition clinging to him. Rarely had he been quite so grateful to leave a crime scene. Those poor bastards who’d had to stay.
The call had come in at around eleven o’clock the night before. A neighbor had heard screaming, looked out, and seen a terrified young woman, her clothes in disarray, running away from the house.
A short while later it was sealed off. The team had been inside for eight hours and would be there for many more days. They had determined the perp was using hydrofluoric acid to dissolve the bodies in plastic tubs. There was no way of counting how many, but say one for each barrel, that made eleven at least. Quite a death toll. What’s more, it didn’t take into account any corpses that might already have been disposed of.
But here was the bit that had really taken Sharma by surprise: the house was owned by the Delhi state government.
Mass murder. On government property. He would have to ensure the press did not get hold of this story; in fact, he’d have to make sure the news reached as few ears as possible.
Sharma had
washed his hands. He’d rubbed at his face. But he could still smell the corpses as he sat behind his desk at police headquarters and greeted his guest.