very tired and in pain. He wanted to sleep. All the running and falling in the forest was now beginning to ache and burn. He made his way towards the stairs and slowly climbed them in the dark. The stairs creaked as his feet touched them.
“They are made of wood!!” he said to himself. ”That is rare. Normally it is all cement and stone. This house is old.”
He reached the upper floor. There was a big hall there as well. The room led to a balcony from where he could see for miles around. The house was empty.
“Is there anyone in this house?” Vijay said to confirm his doubts. His voice echoed in the dark. Surprisingly he did not feel scared now. After the adventure at the haunted house he was now ready for anything. He carefully went over his options. He could walk back up the road and make his way back to civilization or spend the night here in this empty house.
“To hell with everyone, I am going to sleep here. He walked towards a corner, swept the floor with his feet and then sat down. It felt really good to sit after a long-long time.
“I wish I had a sheet to cover myself,” he said. Not finding anything he opened a few buttons of his shirt and pulled it over his head. He rolled himself up like a ball and went to sleep.
It was not a peaceful sleep. He started dreaming. He dreamt that some people were coming at him from different corners. Soon they had surrounded him on all sides. There were small children in the group. The faces of the people in the group were pale, very pale in appearance. They did not speak but kept staring at him as he lay there inside that circle. They all had cuts on their heads. Cuts from which blood was flowing. The blood was flowing like stream down their pale faces and covered their clothes. There was blood all around him on the floor. They just stood there watching him. They stood in a circle,surrounding Vijay. Their eyes remained fixed on him, the circle got smaller and smaller and then Vijay felt as if he was floating. He could feel thin, bony hands all over his body. Vijay opened his eyes. It was dark all around and there was no one there. He smiled to himself in his sleep.
‘I am dreaming,’ he thought, and went back to sleep.
A drop of water falling on his face woke him up. As his eyes adjusted to the light he could see dry leaves lying close to his face. He raised his head and found he was lying on the ground. There were tall trees all around. He sat up. His clothes were in tatters. There was scratch marks all over his body. Blood was flowing through some of the scratches while in some other places it had dried off.
“Where am I?” he asked looking around. “Looks like I am in the middle of the forest. How the hell did I reach here?”
Vijay stood up. His feet, heels, and bones everything hurt.
“I was sleeping in that house. How did I reach here?” he asked himself puzzled. He was sure he had not walked after reaching the second house. The last he remembered was falling asleep.
“That dream… it felt so real,” he said. “I need to reach the road.”
He started walking. He had no idea which way to go so kept walking straight.
Luckily for him the driver of the reality show was an expert and braked at the right time. Instead of helping him they had jumped out and started filming him as he stood there in his tattered clothes with blood flowing from the gashes on his body. Vijay just stood there staring at nothing in particular. Then they wrapped a blanket around him and bundled him in the jeep and speed away from there. Sometime during the drive, Vijay fell asleep only this time no one disturbed him.
One week later, thee hospital discharged Vijay. The reality show organizers paid all expenses for his treatment. They could afford to. The show with Vijay had notched highest viewership records and advertisements had just poured in.
“So Mr. Vijay please can you explain to the audience how it felt to have spent one night in a haunted house?” the program announcer asked Vijay. The interview was a sequel to the show, which had already been telecast multiple times on various channels.
“What haunted house? I am sorry, I cannot lie any more. I have to confess, too scared to spend time there, I ran out within minutes.” Vijay said. He had done a lot of thinking about it over the week in the hospital. He needed money but he was not going to get it by lying. He decided he would tell the truth.
“I have a confession to make,” Vijay continued. “I just spent about ten minutes in the haunted house and then got scared and had run out. I am sorry. I failed the test. I don’t want the money. I don’t deserve it.”
“Vijay are you saying that you did not spend a night in the haunted house?” asked the hostess.
“Yes that is what I am saying. I am sorry.”
“Ok. Then how do you explain this,” the host said dramatically pointing at a screen behind them.
The screen began showing pictures of Vijay walking with the back pack. It was the shot taken the previous evening when the crew had left him on the street. The screen then showed Vijay reaching the cross roads. Then it showed him walking down the road on the right. The screen paused at this point.
“This is where you made the mistake Mister Vijay. And yes, I admit we also made a mistake in that we did not tell you which road to take. You took the wrong road,” said the host.
“Wrong road? What do you mean, ‘wrong road’? The house is there at the end of this road,” he said.
“No Mister Vijay. There is only a children’s school there on that road, a school abandoned some years back. No one lives there, but believe me when I tell you that it is not haunted!”
“No, that is not true! Ghosts and monsters chased me. I had to escape late at night from there,” Vijay said.
The host started laughing.
“Mister Vijay, we are certain there is no ghost there. You must have imagined all that.”
“Another thing, you were there in the school for only about two hours, you can see the video on this,” continued the hostess.
The images on the screen behind him started moving. The voice of the hostess continued,” Here we lost you as you went down the wrong road. Please note the time, it is about seven-thirty here. The next shot where we see you reappearing is at nine. You can see the time stamp on the camera footage. “
The video did show the time of recording and the screen showed a figure running out of the forest and coming on to the road. Vijay could hardly recognize himself. His clothes were all disheveled and he appeared disoriented. The cameras were doing a good job of shooting in the dark. The images then showed him walk down the road on the left.
“It is from here that you walk straight towards the haunted house, Mister Vijay.”
“The what?”
“The haunted house. The house where you had to spend one night alone. You can see it now in the video.”
Vijay looked at the screen and there he was walking in the dark towards the rusted iron gate, pushing it open and going up the stairs.
“As we had mentioned, our motion detection cameras placed during the day and they have captured all the action that unfolded. You entered the house at about ten in the night. Can you describe to the audience what happened after you entered the house?”
“You mean to say, that second house is haunted? But I went upstairs and even slept inside it!” Vijay said shocked.
“That is what our viewers would want to know from you Mister Vijay. How did you find the courage to sleep in that house?”
“What courage? I did not know it is haunted.”
“So you went to sleep inside the haunted house. What happened next?”
“I…I was asleep. I remember sleeping inside the hall on the first floor.”
“Then Mister Vijay can you explain this,” said the hostess and pointed at the screen.” There are no images of you leaving the house. Our technicians say that the cameras were working perfectly all the time and they were not switched of at any point of time. So the question is how did you come out of the building?”
Vijay sat there watching the images on the screen. That was a question he would also have liked an answer to.
&
nbsp; The Dark Staircase
I was an orphan. No one ever told me who my parents were. My oldest memories were of growing up in a dirty little orphanage in a small village. I left the place as soon as I got a job in a distant city. The first job I got was washing dishes at a roadside hotel. From there, I worked my way up to a decent paying job in a small company. My time was entirely devoted to the office during weekdays and friends on the weekends. In all this running around, I forgot all about my old village. The only link I still had with my past was the quarterly check for a thousand rupees that I sent out from my bank account. This went to the orphanage. It was my way of saying; thank you and please do not expect anything more from me.
This was my life until the day I received a call from an old-school friend. Krishnan was my best friend at our village school. He was getting married. He wanted the old gang to get together and swap stories. Find out who had become important and who was still struggling to make both ends meet.
Office was hectic that week. The financial year-end auditing was underway. The auditors were everywhere, digging up numbers that did not tally, asking for files and receipts that had vanished. That was their job; they earned their bread doing just that. That was why we had hired them in the first place. By the time they had corrected all the numbers, accounted all the receipts and bills, I needed a break. The call from my friend came through at the right time.