Chapter 5a

I sat in the lanai that I had converted from an upstairs balcony. I sat in a large rattan papasan chair and drank gin and bitters as I looked over the four acres I had bought. The house went with the land. I was completely surrounded by old rubber and some jungle trees. The forest floor beneath the rubber and the trees was hidden by undergrowth — wild lantana, berry bushes, giant mimosa thorn, weeds, and saw-bladed lallang grass that could lacerate your skin if you rubbed against it hard enough. I didn't see the need to clear the 'jungle' that surrounded my house. A cordon sanitaire of immaculate lawn about fifty feet deep surrounded the house and separated it from the exuberant growth that covered the rest of my property. [I've consolidated the repetitive information in this paragraph and then next.] After leaving the Lopez house, I bought this old two-storey house. I got it cheap because it was out of the way and the building was a relic of the late 1950s. It was only an hour's drive from the Kuala Lumpur city centre. It had been the manager's bungalow and part of a three hundred hectare rubber estate that had been fragmented and sold piecemeal to farmers and small-time housing developers.

To keep trespassers and persistent peddlers from violating my personal space I fenced my property with a six-foot high chain-link fence that surrounded all four acres. Large signs were hung at regular intervals on the fence warning trespassers that the property was patrolled by fierce dogs. I had brought in certain 'watchdogs' to keep intruders out. The watch dogs were elementals I had summoned from the 'other side' and they were very effective. I had to insist that killing people was not an option. They couldn't understand why that wasn't allowed.

I addressed them in First Speak.

"Giving them a fright is OK. But no killing and that includes death by fright! I don't want to go round picking up dead bodies in the mornings, understand?"

"But, master, must kill bad people," they chorused in blurry mind-speak. Bad, in their context, as you can imagine, was relative to their perceptions.

"Disobey me and I'll put you in a very bad place. Maybe a few centuries in Dreadhold would be a good lesson."

I had named a condition which they feared and hated. Even these creatures had their fears and places they avoided. They whined fretfully but they swore they would obey my injunction against killing.

That was the time I discovered that whenever one delves in the occult one sends out ripples of psychic energy through the spirit plenum. I had a good collection of both ancient and recent texts on magic and I had studied all those books and parchments until I could consider myself well-versed in many forms of magic. My intimate knowledge of First Speak accelerated my acquisition of true occult knowledge. Most potent books on magic are written in First Speak.

Demons and other inimical spirits do exist and they don't like to be summoned by witches, wizards or part-time warlocks. If the summoner doesn't have the skill or the knowledge to control and contain these spirits the results are usually painfully fatal, which is one of the main reasons why amateur dabblers rarely survived a conjuration. It is a good thing Kuala Lumpur didn't have many serious practitioners of the black art. I can't say I like messing with elementals or demons. It's like playing with imaginary shit. The stuff stinks in a figurative sense and it sticks to your psychic hands.

I didn't know there was the Hindu who was the temple priest not far from my bungalow. I learned about him when my maidservants, Meenachi and Vimala, told me that the priest was making enquiries about me, who I was and what I did for a living. According to Meenachi, he practised black magic and the Hindu community for miles around feared him and paid him tribute in cash or kind. He wasn't above demanding the favours of good-looking females who were desperate enough to seek his help. He was a thoroughly nasty piece of warped humanity. When I set up my 'security system' he had felt the emanations of my 'work' and traced it to me.

Meenachi, the older of the two maids, nervously approached me one morning when I happened to be up early and asked if I knew the priest.

"What priest?" I replied, not a little startled.

Priests are usually bad news unless they are of the failed variety. Real priests, and I use the word in the sense of unswerving and genuine commitment to the faith professed by the priest, make me uncomfortable. Exorcism don't work on me nor can they burn me at the stake, but they are the ones who can recognise what I have become. And being splashed with holy water (Christians) or dusted with consecrated ash (Hindus) only serve to ruin whatever clothes I am wearing.

"Our temple priest, sir," she continued, her eyes reflecting the fear she felt. I could see that she was nervous and terrified and so I extended a tendril of assurance, not unlike the mental emanations that drew animal prey to me when I needed emergency sustenance, telling her to calm down and that she need not fear.

"Tell me more about this priest," I said gently.

"I shouldn't tell you, sir, but you have been very kind to us. He's a bad one. He has very powerful magic and he can do a lot of harm to people. Everyone is afraid of him."

I read her body language and it told me there was more to this than she had revealed. So I sent out a gentle command and her mind responded. Without knowing why, Meenachi told me what the devil priest had done to her family.

"My oldest child, Janaki," she sobbed, "fell victim to him. Now she is a spoiled woman and she won't be able to get a good husband."

Further questioning confirmed that the man was a follower of the Dark Way. He was one of the worse kind. He used his powers mainly to assuage his lust and to fulfil his greed for wealth. He was petty but not adept enough to be magnificently evil. Why he didn't own the entire district was no mystery. He was clever enough to master the easier aspects of magic but the more advanced knowledge was beyond his meagre intellect. It was also very likely that he was quite happy to perform minor exorcisms and hexes, cast horoscopes with some degree of accuracy and other petty stuff that minor wizards are capable of. He was a small fish in a very small pond and it gave him the illusion of greatness.