Six steps up the foyer, down the hallway, third room to the right– the middle seat in the last row, cigarette butts from Karma’s clove mix tease the flammable 35mm reels. The reels themselves have no value; obsolete, more trash than history. There are enough of them hoarded in the projector room to burn down the library.
Karma had gambled away his youth to the promise of stardom as a filmmaker. He spent the past decade as a projectionist at cinema houses, making him unemployable at his age. But that was a lifetime ago. He remains the last sign of life in this desolate expanse of the city museum and public library, created to commemorate an era no one wishes to remember. It is under debate for reconstruction, vibrating to the rhythm of the night trains, unwilling to go.
Karma sits on his bench, studying the old footage. Not that the film is of any particular interest to him. He attentively studies the Raman Raghav tapes, minus the sound. The woods of his bench have exhausted the murmurs and mischief soaked in from the few hobbyists that had ever justified the existence of such a property. Karma is counting the last of his nights, every waking moment dreading the day. He has never been truly alone. He hasn’t the brightest mind, but what he understands once stays. He knows how living alone changes a man. He longs for a human voice. As long as he could hear their voices, he could remain human– a spirit bound to flesh, holding onto its sanity.
His favorite kind was the screams. A nice scream would be audible through the building, and loud to keep him up through to the morning. Karma used to fancy that it would keep trespassers away. Catching life and movement in the night would not do his nerves much good. Whatever draught was shifting through the pipes at least shifts alone without noise as Karma stitches together his collage of screams.
It begins to get dark and Karma zips up his jacket that he got from the decommissioned guard uniforms and walks down to the gates. The mid-winter night reeks of piss. Kids from the pubs down the road have desecrated the place with vulgar graffiti, cigarette boxes, and used-up rubber. Karma was never bothered by the litter. He was to patrol the grounds every three hours after dark. He carries a flashlight that he never uses. Over the years, he’s gotten accustomed to navigating the dark. He feels an unpleasantness grow in his stomach thinking about crawling the interior and decides to avoid thinking about it.
The carpeted floors are warm to his feet when he walks a certain way. They understand where this ageing night guard needs to be.
The two lawns parting at the entryway are deserted. Once shaped like elephants, the shrubs look like a snuggled-up beast, asleep but alert, ready to pounce. Karma strolls down to the parking lot, hitting the ground with his stick as he moves. Those in stay in; those out stay out, he chants. The small canteen is deserted. He recalls there used to be crows feeding on the rotting food, then the rotting rats before leaving forever mid-summer.
Karma looks around and lets out a low whistle as he arrives at the security cabins. He checks to find the loosened board behind the ticket window. Guards always know how the trespassers get in.
Karma lights up another smoke, pleased with himself, looming at the counter and smiling at nothing in particular. A flash of light breaks Karma’s haze, and he jogs up to the gate at once. It is the fisherman from the shop down the road. As is routine, the two exchange nods. The fisherman seems to be in a hurry, handing over supplies to Karma with a frown on his face. Karma mentally rates the frown an eight.
Come in for a beer, Karma says, like he has said every day since his employment. The fisherman has maintained that he doesn’t drink, but today, he just crosses himself in silence, looking at nothing in particular, and makes a move. Karma looks to the sky; a solitary cloud hints at the moon with a silver lining. Karma despises superstitions. The moon, he says, is always full.
Inside the black plastic bag is a single serving of fried fish and rice, a bottle of rum, and some shady magazines. Karma walks back in with a vile emotion, leaving the door open.
Inside, the colors of night reveal themselves to him as he walks the corridors from door to door. There’s a biology lab he goes to when he needs to punish himself for what he’d done to his life. All sorts of weird bodies spared from rotting in favor of a chemical burial. There is an odd chart of the food chain, with each level of the chain portrayed inside the belly of the upper level.
A stray cat once broke a jar that remains to be cleaned. Karma shudders at the thought of being unrotten and whole, the final permanence of his biological stance. He goes back to the projector room and gets to work, diligently working the reel to make his collage of screams.
As midnight approaches, he climbs the clock tower overlooking the entrance and lights up a smoke. The floor bloats under his feet, and his brain feels like layers of greasy fat. He imagines formalin spraying from the sprinklers, preserving all the meat this establishment has swallowed.
He takes his iPod out, a young man’s gadget. It is loaded with piano pieces. There’s a spyglass he’s kept in his sleeping bag. He gets it out of his jacket and slips in, looking down at the ticket counter.
He listens to the classical piano with villainous intent, and his most sinister thought is to skip the midnight patrol. He stretches his legs, takes out his meal, and starts to eat, chewing each bite with deliberation and patience, with bones pricking out from his raw gums. The teeth that weren’t gnashed in came loose as age kicked in. Having had his dinner, he downs about a quarter of the rum. There is movement at the grounds, quick— someone’s coming.
A sudden breeze slips through the boarded-up windows. The fish has taken the bait. The hook is set. All he has to do now is pull the thread. Karma climbs down to the second-floor lobby, putting his jacket on. There is a worn-out armchair where he keeps his thread.
He ties it up in knots, making a catcher, and slips down the hallway, the stairs, and the foyer. He goes behind the stairs, where he’d kept a couch for lovers in the broom cupboard. The prey is shooting up and doesn’t realize as the door closes behind him.
*
It is possible to make chloroform with chemicals available at any community laboratory. The prey comes to his senses with a clouded head, hesitant to open his eyes. He can smell clove and smoke. He thought he heard laughter. Then there is the sensation of something crawling under his skin as if a parasite was making room in his veins. He tries to move, and to his relief, there aren’t any restraints tying him down. It was just the trip, he thinks, and then he opens his eyes.
He is behind a glass partition. In front of him is an aging face with a body that seems to have imploded inside a guard’s jacket, tied up meticulously to be dissected. He rubs his eyes. The face is smiling. When he inspects further, he realizes the body is reduced to threads beaded with blood. The entire room is covered in shreds of what constituted a man; he thinks he heard something. The face is laughing. The laugh was subtle at first, but it grew more frantic with every turn. The final laugh, as the last of the threads eat the face away from the inside,
was so loud that he could almost hear it through the heavy glass— nearly a scream. The skull finally pops. A solid nine on ten.
He feels nauseated and coughs up threads, momentarily scared that he will reach the same fate. But he’s okay for now. Some breeze in his hair and whatever he had shot up will fade. He could use a nice ride, he thought, and a smoke.
He notices a box of clove mix cigarettes on the windowsill and lights one up. Somehow, he feels he has all he needs right here. He exits through the partition glass and examines the corpse. The threads of its veins drop into the darkness and stretch back to the wall. He flicks on the torch.
What seemed to be a shadow is now clearly a spill of blood, to which some threads are stuck, creating a hammock from which blood drips, meeting the carpets that soak it in. He ought to stay, he feels, as he feels echoes of screams reverberate through the walls. The sun might come out, and his eyes dialed to 10, would need rest. This hell was in no way a restful place. But he chose the thrills. He decided to host this thirst for a day and guard it by the night. He muses in the shadows of his fantasies that someone might break in. As long as he could hear their screams, he would stay human— a man not afraid of the dark— a man to be feared.