When she arrived, the whole house smelled like spoiled meat, and Doctor Avni Natarajan knew what that meant. She wondered yet again what she could have done to deserve this fate. Why had things all gone so wrong so fast? Karma?
Avni was not religious, had never been. Raised to value Science and Education by parents who revered the same, Avni found little room in her mind for the gods of her people. Conceptual symbols, nothing more, with no need for prayer or praise. Avni did not believe in Karma, but she wondered. Was there some sin, committed in a previous life, for which she was now being made to suffer? If so, it must have been a doozy.
Avni closed the door behind her. A short beep told her that the security system had reengaged. From the outside, the door, like the rest of the house, presented a facade of flaking paint over weathered wood. A pauper’s home, if it were inhabited at all. A fitting place for them to live now, Avni and her son. A symbol of their fallen state, this once grand Victorian home complete with its Doric columns and double chimneys now reduced to a heap of rotting clapboard walls and plywood-covered windows, all sackcloth and ashes, shaped into a two-story refuge for mother and child from the evils of the world. Scant protection. At least from the outside.
In reality the door was two inches of solid steel and the structure contained the finest security system that money could procure. No passerby noticing the overgrown yard, its weeds and thorns and the cracked, unswept sidewalk, would suspect the motion sensors buried beneath them, or look for the video cameras hidden along the eaves of the rusty gutter. Just an old, falling down, needs-to-be-torn-down eyesore. Which is just what Avni intended for people to see.
No one could find them here. She had purchased the house through a dummy corporation. No one would come here to trouble them, and if they did no one could gain entrance without her approval. A fortress dressed down to the garb of an old haunted house, or a crack house. No one could get in.
And no one, Avni said to herself, is getting out.
Avni made her way down the main hallway. The lights turned themselves on at her approach, dimmed as she passed, faded back to darkness in her wake. Behind the moldy sheetrock walls, sensors registered the sound of her footsteps on the dirty carpet, her body heat as it disturbed the air. But the house recognized its mistress and made no sound.
Everything stank of soured meat.
Amman had been playing again.
