Ranchi Rover - Prologue

He took the rucksack out of the trunk. This is it. He did it. 

He felt sick. 

He started walking on the mud trail. A ringing shrill din pierced his ears and showed no signs of receding. His headache continued to worsen. The pulsating temples felt overwhelming. The rucksack felt heavier. His feet trembled a little as he tread forward, trying to avoid the slimy growth on the sides. He could feel a trickle of sweat run down the back of his neck near the hairline even when his windbreaker was proving to be inadequate for the unrelentingly chilly air. Did he just see something crawl in front of him? 

He squinted his eyes to spot a lone shoe and a hoodie that might or might not have moved, and adjusted the straps on his shoulders. That one time when a slithering rattlesnake had appeared in front of him, on his way to some barbecue party that Katie had thrown on the hillock behind the laboratory and he couldn’t say no because it was Katie who had asked him, had him almost piss his pants as he stood there frozen letting the fate take its course. 

He continued to make his way on the constricting trail, fidgeting with his headlamp. He had walked there almost every weekend since moving to Inverncity and stood a few inches from the edge of the cliff that overlooked the ocean. Always during daytime, however, when the view had a soothing banality and dreaminess. At that moment, the sky appeared hazy and there was a partial moon. The pale electric blue waters near the shore carried stinking filth and morosity. Maybe it was the exhaustion of having driven on windy narrow roads in darkness for more than an hour that had taken the piss out of what could be a striking panorama worthy of a Bierstadt painting, or maybe it was the occasion. 

They had stopped the night shows at the lighthouse for the season, he had checked, and figured that the odds of running into someone past midnight was nil. That did not mean it could not happen. In which case the contingent course of action was to fucking drive back the way he came, especially if he ran into that cabal of late nighters who he had seen sometimes near the gas station turning towards the bay, just after sunset a couple of times. He had long suspected they were involved in some grotesque fuckery. All of their cars had a weird symbol (nah, nah, not a pentagram or any of the immediately recognizable ones) near one of their rear tires.. But he had been in luck so far -- there had been no cars in sight since he made that right at the gas station with a sex toys store, and no cars parked up here too -- and it would be over soon. 

There could be a bunch of nightcrawling yahoos lurking in the nearby beach, swimming or kayaking. Well, what the hell, things have a tendency to work themselves out, que sera sera, like that Hitchcock film; by the end, he had gotten so sick of the repeated use of the song though, that he wanted to ask like Osho: what the phuck is going on here?

A lot of people jump off the bridges in dense cities. Somebody, time and again, was bound to  catch them in the act. What would that do to a person? Doesn’t look that rare of a possibility for a city dweller who frequents these bridges, doesn’t it? Would it be easy to brush the whole incident off? The news on the TV, after all, had its fair share of the gory and grisly, talking about terrible deaths all the time and he, like a lot of the people he knew, could brush it off without much emotional discomfort. There are worse terrors, and one gets used to them too. 

A car had come roaring out of nowhere as he had tried to make a left turn at that nasty intersection in Poky, the only time he had been in an accident, and the scene had turned bloody with screeching and screaming and that young kid who was riding shotgun in the other car had capitulated to his injuries. The shock had worn off rather quickly for him. So, maybe yes, dealing with it would not be that hard if you don’t know much about the person. And yet that abrupt throat slitting scene in Cache had unsettled him to no end. 

His shoulders were also starting to hurt. So, he decided that a few tokes, lying down gazing up at the stars, like that time with Katie in Menan Butte after that perilous hike with torn sneakers, would be like stroking the furry walls, fucking rad. So what, there was an off chance that he might puke, you gotta risk it sometimes. So what, there was an increasing risk of being spotted if he lingered, fuck that. He was almost at the end of the road anyway and it would be over soon. 

He always kept Udaan, those clovey tall dark puny cylinders of joy and despair, rolled with the choicest shit you could buy from the artisan farmhouse dispensary, handy. Nervous breakdowns are hell. Changing times had at least afforded him the luxury of not being jailed for this, or perhaps condemned him to think substance abuse is a relief. 

He spread the thin piece of cloth that he had pulled from one of the outside pockets of the rucksack, right next to where he was standing, threw the rucksack on it and sat. As he lit his cigarette, a peculiar faint smell of moist foliage now more conspicuous around him, he took his phone out almost as a reflex, preparing to expel some fumes of despondence and exhaustion and mix it with good old blues, checking his feeds at various sites for a bit. 

That rat-faced, even more rat-like than Wormtail, Chamkaar is in the Bahamas, with a woman, what on earth, and what is that tacky shiny gold jacket..  a series based on the lady of the dunes is finally here, why hadn’t he heard about this, earlier? … Bonkers isn’t it-- forget catching the killer, they did not even not know who the victim was-- and this was in nineteen seventy four, all that body exhumations and DNA things in the decades that followed, and all the hoopla about the dental records, nada, zilch .. I don’t want your darn shackles, I don’t want your darn shackles, I don’t want your darn shackles, it hurts my leg, it hurts my leg...