I must be insane.
It's a hot afternoon in Bangsar and here I am sitting in a mamak coffee shop with my fellow classmates from the writing class. And we're seated right at the back of the restaurant, right in front of the sizzling grill, frying wok and the areawhere they cook. The fumes from the area are really killing me.
There are three youths standing right in front the kitchen area. One is frying some Indian rice-cakes called vadei and another is frying some noodles. The other chap is just standing dispensing food for the waiters to distribute.
I am drawn to the guy frying the noodles. The scraping, screeching and banging from his cooking is very distracting and I look at him. He's tall, I have to arch my head back to have a look at him. Bony thin, I can see his fingers and it looks like he's just bones covered with a thin layer of skin. He has a red cap on his head and it's turned the other way, he's got a long sleeve denim shirt on and a pair light blue jeans which looks almost white in color and a blue apron draped upon his belly or crotch if you like.
Let's call him Sam. Sam has a moustache and a beard. He kinda reminds me of Osama bin Laden. He works furiously on the wok dishing out fried noodles. He's so thin. I think his ribs would stick out like guitar strings if you ripped out his shirt and took a peek at him. He has on a silver ring? Is he married or does he belong to some secret society that's about to bomb the place down? I don't know and I don't care.
Sam is a very alert person. Every now and then, he looks up and around from just frying his noodles as if he doesn't want to miss a thing. He seems hyperactive. He looks like he is in a hurry to finish his work. Perhaps he has a hot date waiting for him somewhere. Or perhaps he's planning to detonate a bomb somewhere in KLCC.
Who the hell knows?
It is hot here. This kinda weather would just drive normal people nuts. I am going nuts with the fumes from the cooking. The fans whirring above me is not cooling at all. It is dispersing the hot air all over my ears.
I am going bonkers.
Stuck here, I look again at Sam. He has that potentially violent look on his face. His big eyes stick out like lamps out of his bony mustached face. He looks sullen, scrappy and kinda like someone who woke up from sleeping in the gutter last night. His shirt is open, a few buttons at the top and I can see his chest hair sticking out of his shirt. He reminds me of a hairy gorilla but a malnourished hairy gorilla.
He is totally absorbed with his work. Now Sam is working on some egg rolls, then he goes about again frying another plate of noodles. On and off, he turns around and looks here and there. He seems cool in this busy and chaotic place. He doesn't seem like he belongs here.
Sam is too thin. He doesn't look like one of those nerdy guys who lack experience. Sam looks like he's a street-smart guy. I think Sam is on drugs. I think there's more to him than just being one of the cooks hanging around this restaurant. His eyes. They are too alert for a cook. I'll have a plate of his noodles. The smell of it, the fumes floating around the place; it's making me hungry and I think I'll have to eat or go mad here.
Sam is handling the steel spatula, which he uses for cooking in a unusual manner. The way he twirls it around is like holding a knife and stabbing someone with it. It would not be difficult to imagine that he is a killer who just last night slashed some unfortunate person and cut up the body into eighteen parts and disposed of it in the Klang river.
No, that wouldn't be likely.
The noodles taste delicious. The curry served with it is creamy and the color is very appetizing. I can smell the meat in it. Could that be human meat? I have heard on the National Geographic channel on TV that human meat tastes very sweet, somewhat like pork.
Perhaps Sam killed someone and he cut up the pieces and cooked curry with the pieces. Slashing the body into minute parts and cooking the parts until the flesh falls apart from the long hours of boiling and cooking.
The kitchen had just been cleaned recently. The floor just isn't as dirty as it was normally. I could just imagine the victim screaming in terror and agony as Sam decapitated her arms, then her legs and finally her head. The screaming stopped when her head rolled onto the floor. Her blank eyes just staring out and her bloated tongue stuck out from her mouth. I could see the blood flowing and just gushing out on the floor, spreading in a dark red unholy carpet all over the kitchen floor.
Finally, it hit me. I suddenly realized that Sam's look and the way he behaved strangely reminded me of a satanic cult in which I had once been involved in. And the ring, the unmistakable silver with a the glistening silver tree engraved on it - it was the mark of Culthas satanic cult, a long established satanic cult that specialized in human sacrifice.
No wonder he wore that denim long sleeve shirt. From what I know of the Culthas sect, all members have a black tattoo of a snake encircling a nude woman on the inner part of their forehand. And the expression of the woman in the tattoo is one of indescribable agony as if all the tortures of the damned were being experienced by her.
In one of the satanic rituals of the Culthas, is the very act of consuming the victims' blood as she is being decapitated. The effect of such an atrocious evil is the karmic deterioration of one's health in which the body becomes ghostly thin and the bones of a person appear to stick out like a morbid corpse which has been exhumed from the grave after a year. All covered with a thin layer of skin, just like Sam.
Another unmistakable trait is that the eyes are red, red like blood. Something very common with drug addicts in which the veins are swollen and they bleed over the whites of his eyes. Like a film of red, dashed across a screen of virgin-whitecloth. A terrifying aura of madness exuded from Sam as I looked at him.
It is not the first time my psychic powers have revealed to me the dangers that surround me. I must leave this place. They have been hunting for me and they have found me again. Yet, I must not lose my calm. I will escape again and I will be free of them. I will be free of their enchantments and their madness.
I am the Mad Monk.
