The Mysterious Case of The Goddess Jeans
[Disclaimer : All names, characters and incidents in this story are completely imaginary occurring in a fictional locale. Any resemblance to any real-life incident(s) and/or character(s) is purely accidental.]
Suddenly her body gives a violent jerk, and she is sitting bolt upright. Her face devoid of expression, seems carved out of marble. She stares straight ahead into space, but she is listening for something. A second later her phone beeps. She picks it up from the table with a trembling hand and sure enough an address pops up on the screen. She looks at it for a moment and then springs up from the sofa, grabs her handbag and dashes towards the door of the café.
Also Read: The Mysterious Case of The Goddess Jeans: Part 1
“HEYY! Wait up… I’m coming with you… Goddammit! WAIT…!” Vivant opens his wallet and throws down some cash on the table and rushes after her. The waiters, the manager, and the rest of the customers in the café stare after them. He runs out of the front door just in time to see her getting into a cab.
“HEY! Wait for me!”
She reluctantly holds the door open; he jumps in and slams it shut. “I really should not involve you in this. Looks like you have a thing for playing with fire too.” She shakes her head in resignation.
“Too late for that!” he quips. “Besides, now that I know, I can’t let you go alone, can I?”
“Go!” she issues a peremptory order to the driver and off they go.
She is sitting rigidly staring straight ahead. Her face is inscrutable. The slightly unhinged expression from a few minutes ago has vanished.
“Care to share where we are headed?” he asks very quietly. She hands him her phone. The address indicates a factory area, a couple of kilometres or so beyond the city limits, a favourite haunt of gangsters, local thugs, and other shady characters.
“Holy crap.” Vivant breathes inaudibly, or so he thinks. “But I am with a goddess, aren’t I?!”
Also Read: The Mysterious Case of The Goddess Jeans: Part 2
“A goddess?? Hardly! A demon, more likely. A killer? Definitely. I don’t know what I am, I don’t understand what this abhorrent force is, that is possessing me! So don’t put me on a pedestal, please,” she says in a flat voice. “But I tell you, this time I will rather die than…” her voice cracks, but she bites her lower lip so hard she can taste her own blood.
Vivant takes her hand in his and holds it tight. A quick sideways glance at her face reveals a frozen mask of grief, horror, and self-loathing.
“A potent cocktail,” he thinks, hoping to God that she can’t hear. “Surefire recipe for disaster!”
But obviously her mind is occupied with the problem at hand.
“Faster!” she urges the cabby. The driver senses a note of hysteria in her voice and expertly manoeuvres the cab through traffic, takes judicious shortcuts, and finally clears the city limits within fifteen minutes. Once in the outskirts, it takes them another five to ten minutes on bumpy, broken-down roads and potholes to reach the spot. It is a vast deserted area with a single huge derelict building and a few seedy shanties and dilapidated tool sheds dotting the landscape. The large building is obviously a former factory, probably a rice mill, long abandoned by its owners. A large yard, dusty, overrun by weeds and rotting vegetation sprawls in front of it.
“There.” She points to the entrance of the factory on the western side.
“Sure y’ wanna go in there, just the two of ya?” the cabby says, his voice doubtful.
“What’s your plan? Let’s do a quick recon, OK?” begins Vivant, “I will go first, creep up behind those bushes close to the entrance and try to get a peek into what’s going on inside….”
Sanaya is already striding towards the building. “I know what’s going on inside,” is all she says, her voice dull. With a sigh of resignation Vivant follows, requesting the cabby to hang around, just in case.
“Dunna worry, Sir! I got yer backs! Y’all go on ahead. I’ll be right behind ya!” The cabby is tall and brawny, and despite his earlier apprehension, is obviously up for an adventure. He quickly takes a car jack handle and ratchet wrench from the trunk of his cab. “These here’ll come in handy, I dare say!” he mutters under his breath as he brings up the rear.
She has already reached the entrance and pushed the heavy door open. Dark, musty interior. Dripping, dank black walls. Pigeons cooing high up on the rafters near the ceiling. Rusty, broken-down equipment lying around here and there. Using these as cover they creep farther along towards the far end of the building. From behind a large old sifting machine, they see about forty feet away in a clear spot near the eastern wall, a dirty, ragged young girl barely ten years old, in tattered clothes.
With a single leap Sanaya is at least twenty-five feet up in the air, two huge fiery wings unfurling on her back, just below her shoulder blades, flying towards the two men. The wings are approximately fifteen feet across, aglow with flames shooting out of every feather. Her entire body is burning like a red-hot furnace, and the diamond stud on her waistband is blinking, coming alive. In the next second, a beam of blinding white light blasts out of the diamond.
She is thrashing helplessly around on the ground, gagged, and bound. From where he is standing, Vivant can see her huge, terrified eyes staring out of a thin, starved face. Two guys, obviously strong-arm men for some local political bigwig, are standing over her menacingly, with their backs to both of them.
Vivant notices, to their advantage, another door on the eastern wall about ten feet behind the girl.
The intentions of the two men are obvious. One of them is already unzipping his trousers. Both of them are giggling like two hyenas closing in on their prey.
“I’ll go first,” one ruffian says. “Then we can take turns…. Hehehehe!”
Sanaya and Vivant exchange glances. “I will tackle the two hooligans. You carry the girl out through the door on the other side. On count of three. One. Two…”
Vivant looks at her incredulously. He can hear her voice clearly in his head, but she has not moved her lips once. “That’s not creepy at all! How the heck does she do that… ?” He mutters under his breath.
As soon as they come out of cover, the girl on the floor stops struggling and looks directly at them. Alerted, the two men start turning around. Out of the corner of his eye, Vivant spots some jerry cans in the far corner to his left. They seem to contain some sort of liquid combustible. He is about to warn Sanaya when –
“And go.”
With superhuman strength he scoops her up in his arms, his shirt and hair already on fire, rushes to the exit and bursts out through the door. He staggers as far as his legs could carry him from the building and collapses on the ground along with his frail burden.
A sudden whooshing sound and a bloodcurdling yell shock everyone out of their wits.
With a single leap Sanaya is at least twenty-five feet up in the air, two huge fiery wings unfurling on her back, just below her shoulder blades, flying towards the two men. The wings are approximately fifteen feet across, aglow with flames shooting out of every feather. Her entire body is burning like a red-hot furnace, and the diamond stud on her waistband is blinking, coming alive. In the next second, a beam of blinding white light blasts out of the diamond.
The two miscreants are scurrying for cover and howling in terror as the laser beam approaches them.
“The GIRL! Get her out of here!!! NOW!!!” Sanaya screams. Her voice is no longer human.
Vivant, galvanized out of his stupor, springs into action. Just at that moment a burning rafter crashes down from the ceiling in front of him and blocks his way. Without a second’s hesitation he leaps forward right through the raging flames and reaches the girl, who is writhing frantically on the ground. With superhuman strength he scoops her up in his arms, his shirt and hair already on fire, rushes to the exit and bursts out through the door. He staggers as far as his legs could carry him from the building and collapses on the ground along with his frail burden.
The cab driver who has taken a detour around the building from the other side sees them and rushes forward. In the next instant the entire eastern wall, and half the building blows up with a deafening explosion.
With the conflagration roaring behind him, the air filled with thick smoke, burnt engine oil and the metallic stench of blood, the last words that Vivant remembers saying are “Sanaya, you… did…good…”
Then everything goes black.
EPILOGUE
Dolly, a thirty-eight-year-old software engineer heading the Ebony City Department of Cyber Security, simply cannot stop staring at the girl sitting opposite her in the AC Volvo bus. She looks like a typical Gen Z college sophomore, in a black tank top and ripped blue jeans, totally immersed in the smartphone in her hand, but there is something positively uncanny about her.
“And what’s with that huge fake blue sapphire on her waistband?” Dolly muses.
Her eyes travel up towards her co-passenger’s face in cool appraisal, studies her firm chin, dimpled cheeks, heart shaped face, the headphones, her arched eyebrows and finally stops at the middle of her forehead. It is a nice forehead. Bright, proud. And then she gasps in disbelief, her head spinning, the air around her shimmering like the ripples on the surface of a lake when a pebble is dropped into it…
Bang in the middle of the forehead between the young girl’s eyebrows, a soft glow is pulsating around something… what is it? Oh My God! Is that… a… third eye…?!?
Photos Are Generated by AI
Prateeti is an English Lierature major from Presidency University Kolkata who took up the technology challenge without an Engineering degree in 1993 and embarked on a full-fledged technical career, becoming a RDBMS expert. She worked as the CoE Manager for Sybase products, platforms and technologies at SAP Labs India Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore. She is a great admirer of Augusta Ada King and Marie Curie.
She is also the author of ‘Green Rose Wild Earth’ a collection of poems published by StoryMirror Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
