THE MASKED DEVIL

Author's POV:

(Somewhere in Mumbai)

He became a killer when his mother died during childbirth. She'd been in labour for over nineteen hours. The many attempts to spit him out into the world tortured her body. But he'd resisted, refusing to make that crucial journey out of her womb, almost as if he knew the world would be cruel to him.

When he finally emerged from his mother's womb, everyone warned his father that he was a bad omen. Regardless, his father adored him. They both were the perfect father-son duo until his father surprised him with a new mother for his fifth birthday. His father married another woman, thinking that his son would now get some motherly love from the kind woman.

At home, however, the boy was experiencing the polar opposite: when his father was away on business, the little boy saw his new mother with her various lovers. When she realised the boy was silently watching everything, the cunning woman played it smart. She began lying about the boy stealing money and calling her names. She complained to his father about how the boy insulted her in front of others, which was never true.

His father believed the new young wife because he couldn't fathom the thought that his adult wife would be lying to him and began beating the little boy to tame him. The little boy would cry and plead, but his father wouldn't show any mercy to him.

Four terribly long years passed. The torture went from occasional to routine. But there came a point where he couldn't take the pain any longer. So, he decided to escape. He took the little money his father had in a small case in their house and went to the nearby railway station.

From Solapur, he reached Mumbai, the city of stumbling people. The new city and its culture amazed him to a great extent. He would often stare at families that passed by him and wonder to himself. Some of them had children who threw tantrums when they didn't get what they wanted. The boy wrinkled his nose in disgust. It was funny how people took their parents for granted; there were children in the world with no parents.

He roamed around, enjoying his newfound freedom. What he didn't know was the city of dreams had only nightmares in store for him.

He was ten years old when he met the devil for the first time. An old beggar kidnapped him. He molested him and left him to die on a lonely street at night. Miraculously, the boy survived. He didn't realise what had happened to him until he grew up. At that point, all he remembered was the blinding pain that had surrounded his abdominal region. He didn't realise that the pages of his fate had worse things written for him.

He grew up in the streets, collecting plastic and garbage, and ate whatever he could get his hands on. He did not know what he was going to do with his life until he ran into the devil again on a lonely night. He had his first sexual experience at fifteen, when he was strangling the old beggar as revenge for taking away his innocence.

The old beggar had struggled, attempting to break free from his unyielding grip. Seeing the old man's struggle, he felt a strange but pleasant sensation. As he sank deeper and deeper into the throes of ecstasy, his mind shut down. The fact that the old man's body had no life left in it didn't matter to him; he was too busy enjoying the unfamiliar sensation. It wasn't until he was completely spent that he realised the old beggar's eyes had turned within his skull and all he could see were the whites. He knew what he had done, but when he searched for guilt or pain inside of him, all he felt was satisfaction. He wasn't ready to let go of the feeling, so he decided to make the best of it.

The young boy boarded the next train to Solapur to meet his lovely stepmother. The next morning, he arrived at his destination and waited until the sky turned dark.

The much-awaited night fell and he made his way to the building that had once been his home. But now that he thought of it, the home was a foreign thing to him. He didn't even know what he could call home. His home had once been his father, but now? Nothing.

He sneaked in and overheard his stepmother moaning out a name that wasn't his father's. 'She is still the same,' he thought bitterly. It triggered him even more. She ruined his life.

He waited for her lover to leave, and when he was sure that his path was clear, he tiptoed to her room. Using a cable wire, he grabbed her throat from behind. His eyes red with fury. He chocked her until her eyes were devoid of any soul.

The pleasure he felt was a lot more than what he was expecting. He unzipped himself and released the growing bulge in his pants. Within seconds, he was running his hands over himself while looking at his dead stepmother's terrified eyes. Soon, he was done and this orgasm was unlike the one he had the day before.

Before leaving, he set fire to the house to destroy all the evidence. Despite having spent most his life in slums, he was intelligent. He didn't bother waiting to see his father's reaction because he knew his father was still a fool. He would sit and weep over the death of his unfaithful second wife.

While going back to Mumbai he thought about his mother. There didn't go a day when he didn't think about his mother, the one who others claimed was killed by him. If she had been alive, his life would have been completely different. He knew she wouldn't be pleased if she knew about his nature, so he put a full-stop on his desires. Little did he know it was just the start of something much bigger that would affect many people's lives.

He was twenty-one when he began working as a salesman for a low-cost clothing company. He smoothly controlled his rage and strange urges to go straight, to leave his past behind and began a new life in the city. But Mumbai was hard; as hard as a diamond. And like a diamond, it could shine brightly upon you, or cut through you to the bone if you allowed it to. The young man, in his naïve attempt to step away from his past, let his guard down and allowed one of Mumbai's sharp tentacles to sting him. Bewildered, the young man then reacted in a manner that a scorpion would when challenged to battle, that was to sting his adversary back with equal, venomous fury.

The afternoon was the time when salesmen would visit housing societies and try to sell their wares to ordinary housewives. On a Saturday afternoon, he, like others, made his way to a housing colony but the housewife he met was not like the others. She She tried to get him to bed, which reminded him of his stepmother who used to cheat on his father, and it triggered his repressed urges. He couldn't stop himself from killing the slutty housewife with his bare hands. While performing his skilled work, he had another earth-shattering orgasm.

After murdering her, he removed all traces of evidence and stuffed her body into a plastic bag. He had the housewife vanish rather than make it look like a botched robbery. As a result, he stole all the house's valuables. He was fortunate to discover two lakh rupees in cash and some gold bangles tucked away in the cupboard's corner. He waited until late at night till the night-duty watchman had gone to sleep and then walked out of the building unnoticed, carrying the heavy plastic bag over his shoulder.

He disposed of the body and walked away with the plastic bag, which still contained something. Something which would remind him about his first prey.

The next morning, a rag picker noticed someone floating in the dirty drainage river. When he looked at it closely, his breathing became ragged, and he let out a terrified scream. It was the headless body of a woman dressed in a household gown.

The missing woman's husband returned home after two days after his business trip. He was worried to death because his wife had not been returning his calls and no one knew where she was. He broke open the front door with the help of the local police and discovered that everything else was in order, except for the cash and jewellery in the cupboard, which had gone missing along with his wife.

The police investigated and, much to the husband's surprise, discovered that the wife had a reputation for sleeping around. The finger of suspicion was now pointed at the husband, but because he had a solid alibi and there didn't appear to be any sign of struggle or wrongdoing, the overburdening investigating officers quickly concluded that the housewife had fled the city with one of her many lovers. The bereaved husband accepted this conclusion and moved on with his life.

The body of the headless woman was never identified, and it became one of the many unsolved cases.

Only to be solved later when Mumbai was shaking in fear.

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