Chapter 10

As Lord Balah made his way out of Helen Joseph Hospital, he wondered to himself about the nature of love and relationships.  What he had seen between Trudie and Fernando had disturbed him deeply, but as the idealist he was, Lord Balah continued to hold onto his romantic notion of love as being the perfect union of two perfectly complementary souls.  Perhaps Trudie and Johnny had fit perfectly at the time, he wondered, and maybe Trudie and Fernando did now too.  Whilst Lord Balah walked and pondered these ideas, he decided that, should the day come that he was to meet his complementary soul mate, that he would make sure he never fell into the trap of co-dependency he had just witnessed. 

It wasn’t long before Lord Balah had left the hospital that he saw a short Chinese man sitting on the side of the road.  As if by chance, Lord Balah inquired whether the little Chinese person had heard of or seen the two young twins, to which the young man nodded his head vigorously.

Notorious already at this stage, it seemed that the twins’ reputation preceded them.  The short little Chinese man explained to Lord Balah how the twins had been captured by the Chinese Secret Service just hours before, and were being held captive in a secret location before being sent back to their homeland of China to be imprisoned for “Lewd and unpatriotic behavior”.  At the time of their capture, the rest of the Rough Rider gang had been sleeping off the bloatedness and swelling caused by their surgical procedures the previous day and were high as kites on painkillers.  As soon as they had woken to the realization that their leaders had been captured, however, they had sent out urgent high-priority emails to every gang in the area to find them.  Lost without their leaders and determined to find them, the Rough Rider gang had offered a reward of R10 000 and a really cool Apple MacBook Pro laptop to whoever found them.

Lord Balah stood startled by this unexpected news, but immediately knew that he had to find the twins.  Unlike the uncertainty he used to feel, however, this time Lord Balah could feel himself being lead- as if being pulled by an invisible rope tied to his solar plexus- to the place where the twins were being kept.  Although Godfrey had never explained to him the changes which would occur, Lord Balah nevertheless knew that he was developing powerful abilities that would one day make him the legendary healer he was destined to become.

The invisible rope tied to Lord Balah’s solar plexus lead him to a small house in a quiet street in Melville.  In the house lived an elderly couple (whom, suspiciously, no-one had seen for months) and two young tenants who were both students at the nearby University of Johannesburg.  The one tenant, a 22-year-old woman named Elmarie, had been beset by a crippling social phobia as a child, and so very seldomly ever left the house.  The other tenant- a 24-year-old male named Wayne- was from a small rural town in Mpumalanga, and suffered from an equally crippling Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which caused him to wash his hands hundreds of times a day, and perform strange rituals which would serve to quieten the disruptive voices he would constantly hear in his head.  Despite their handicaps, however, these two young tenants nevertheless had a lust for blood and a hunger for murder, which would cause them to leave the house every evening in search of victims to violently torture and kill.  It was in this way that they had met the Chinese Secret Service agent (codename Hudson Hawk), who had blackmailed them into letting him keep the twins in their basement torture chamber.  And so with the help of Wayne and Elmarie, special agent Hudson Hawk had captured the twins and now kept them locked and chained in a small medi-evil looking basement torture chamber.

Lord Balah quickly found the house and made his way to the basement.  The twins’ captors had gone to the restaurant Koi in 7^th street to get something to eat, and so the twins sat alone in their dungeon cell.  As Lord Balah walked in, he was frightened by what he saw:  the twins’ faces and most of their bodies were covered by thick layers of bandages, giving them the appearance of embalmed mummies.  Seeing his shock, Fei-Yang quickly spoke and told Lord Balah that the bandages were covering the surgeries they had undergone the previous day, and assured him that their captors had not (yet) harmed them. 

As Lord Balah was unlocking the shackles tying the twins to the metal bench on which they sat with a hairclip (he had learnt the trick from a Chuck Norris movie), the tenants and the Secret Service agent appeared at the dungeon door.  Never before being in such a deadly and threatening position (the Secret Service agent had a gun pointed at them and- Lord Balah was certain- the tenants were bearing prefrontal molars which looked remarkably like fangs) in his life.  Sure, he could open up another can of whip ass, but that would go against his pacifist ideals.  No, he decided, this situation he would handle the right way.

As if by magic, the second Lord Balah had decided not to use violence as a solution, his attackers disappeared as if into thin air.  Surprised as much as the twins were by this, Lord Balah nevertheless casually unlocked the remainder of their shackles and they made their way out of the house.  Unbeknownst to the twins (but which Lord Balah knew), they had just been spared from becoming one of the hundreds of rotting corpses which lay buried beneath the house.