Dave Zeltserman - Bad Karma

“Because I won’t. She is nothing to me anymore. My reason for being now is Vishna. My only purpose is Vishna. Not her!”

“Kamal, she cares about you deeply…” Shannon stopped himself in mid-sentence. The fight or flight look that had formed over her features stopped him. Muscles along her jaw and mouth had become rigid, and her eyes changed into something that made Shannon think of a feral animal. He considered her for a long moment before taking a deep breath and trying again.

“Kamal, please,” he said, his tone as soft and nonthreatening as he could manage, “your mother does love you and only wants to know that you are safe and happy. If you’d like I could call her now.”

Her face became deathly white, her eyes wide as she stared at him. He moved slowly to get his cell phone, and when he had it out of his pocket something in her snapped.

“No! No! I will not leave Vishna!” she burst out, veins streaking her neck like thin cords of rope. “Nothing will make me leave Vishna!” Then she started screaming ‘No!’ over and over again, her voice rising to a hysterical pitch.

Curly opened the door to peer in. Melissa, at that moment, scrambled to her feet and ran from the room. He watched her leave, then turned to smirk at Shannon. “Vishna wants to speak to you,” he said, a gleeful maliciousness shining in his eyes.

Shannon knew it had been hopeless with Melissa the moment he saw how she reacted with Paveeth. Unless he had thrown her over his shoulder and made a run for it, he would’ve had no chance of getting her to see her mother. Still, he couldn’t help feeling lousy about how things turned out. When he was brought back to Paveeth’s sanctuary and saw the smug smile on the cult leader’s face, it took every bit of restraint he had to keep his hands at his side.

“Are you satisfied now, Mr. Shannon?” Paveeth asked.

“One girl,” Shannon said. “You can’t let one girl go.”

“That is not my choice to make. As you have witnessed, Kamal is here of her own free desire.” He paused as he fingered his chin. “I see that you are smiling. Did something I say amuse you?”

“Not really. I was only wondering why you couldn’t have let me see her the other day.”

“And why must I bow to the whims of a bully?” Paveeth asked, his dark eyes staring intently at Shannon. His voice had shifted to the same lyrical sing-song he had used over the intercom. “When you came here you were told that Kamal had no desire to speak to you, but you persisted in forcing your way in. And yes, Mr. Shannon, you are a bully. Spiritually, you are a deeply broken individual. One of the many gifts the gods have breathed into me is the ability to see into a person’s soul. What I see in yours is ugliness.” He paused for a moment to smile patronizingly. “I can also see that it is not entirely your fault. It is clear that much violence has been brought early into your life and it has left you spiritually crippled. You can not help what you have become, but if you were willing to put yourself in my hands I could bring you into the lightness that you seek.”

Shannon applauded. “Not a bad performance. I particularly liked the pitch of your voice. Very hypnotic. Almost put me into a trance. And bravo on using the Internet and doing a background check on me. I guess that’s the least I should expect given your background as a chemical engineer. I’ve got a question for you. Where’d you get the money to pay for all this? I know parrots don’t come cheap, and this is quite a temple of narcissism you’ve built for yourself.”

A film fell over Paveeth’s eyes. He looked Shannon up and down slowly, then shook his head. “I see that I’m wasting my time with you,” he said, his tone flat, dismissive.

Shannon applauded some more. “You could look into my soul and see that, huh? Yet another of the gifts the gods have bestowed upon you. Another question. What’s a vessel of the gods doing employing Russian thugs?”

Paveeth looked away then and clapped his hands sharply. The door flung open and both of his cult-member stooges stormed in, violence flushing their faces as they scanned the room for trouble.

“He is leaving now,” Paveeth told them. His two followers stepped forward. “Do you want us to throw him out?” the smaller, angrier-looking one asked, his voice a high-pitched squeal.

Shannon couldn’t help smiling a hard smile. He gestured towards this stooge who looked a bit like a bald Shemp. “A regular ray of sunshine, huh?” Paveeth ignored him and told his two followers, “That is up to him.”

Shannon’s hard smile turned harder. “Don’t worry, boys. I’m leaving on my own. No reason to get your heads banged up again. Just make sure you keep your paws off me, okay?”

He walked past them and out of the room. He didn’t bother turning around-he could hear their breathing behind him as they kept pace. “Quite an arrangement you have here,” Shannon said. “Just the two of you, plus the great all-powerful Vishna, and all these nice-looking girls. Is that how he pays you? He lets you spend quality time with them?”

“Shut up!” the Curly look-alike barked.

Shannon passed Paveeth’s marble statue, gave it a short salute, and turned down the hallway of Hindu gods. “Not that I could blame the two of you,” he said. “In the real world neither of you would have a shot with girls like these. But I guess having them brainwashed levels the odds, huh?”

“I said shut up!”

“Hey, come on, don’t be so touchy. I’m only trying to figure this out. Of course, it’s not just you two and the almighty Oz. Those Russians who were here the other day, they’re allowed to sample the goods also, right? Let me guess, sometimes they bring friends along?”

Shannon had walked through the marble foyer and stood waiting for Shemp to unlock the door. Neither cult member bothered to answer him. After he stepped outside, both of them pushed past him in a rush to the gate. Curly’s face was a mask of fury as he unlocked it and swung it open. Shannon was barely past the gate when Curly slammed it shut.

Shannon turned to face him through the metal posts. “Whatever’s going on in there will come out, and when it does, the situation is going to be flipped around. The boys in prison are going to have the same sort of fun with both of you that you’re having with these girls. Call it karma.”

The smaller one was nearly epileptic. His hands and face shook visibly and it looked as if it took every ounce of willpower he had to keep from swallowing his tongue. A dark storm brooded over Curly’s round angry face. “We will live our lives in bliss,” he spat out. “Bliss! Under the warm guiding light of the one true source. You, though, will suffer in blind ignorance forever!”

With that, the two of them hurried back to the house and disappeared within it.

Shannon stood quietly as he considered Anil Paveeth and the True Light cult. The place was worse than wrong. There was no doubt in his mind that Paveeth was nothing but a narcissistic fraud, and Shannon was convinced that he was using the girls there for something more than just his personal harem. He wondered whether the place could be operating as some sort of exclusive whorehouse. These girls would be different than the typical prostitute, blindly following whatever orders Paveeth gave them. There would be a clientele for that type of slave-like subservience, and maybe that clientele would be well-heeled enough to pay for Paveeth’s temple and all of his excesses. Shannon decided he’d have to watch the place, see who came and went. As remote as the compound was, he’d have to camp out in the open. Paveeth would most likely end up sending his Russian thugs after him to dissuade him. Shannon smiled thinly as he thought about that, the muscles tightening along his jaw. Maybe that would give him a chance to kill two birds with one stone.