Valley of Death Read online

  Abhay’s legs were shaking and he was sweating all over, as he ran up panickingly with a renewed purpose and urgency. He feared that the stairs would end in a while and he would be cornered by the horrifying canine. His heart almost sank, when turning around his head, Abhay saw how close the hoping dog, with its sharp teeth projecting outwards and its tongue hanging outside its mouth, had reached him.

  All of a sudden and quite unexpectedly the dog leapt at him and made a jibe for his leg. Abhay could feel its hot breath, wet tongue, as it tore and jibed a piece of his trouser, missing his skin by only a whisker. In a split of a second, he turned around and kicked the dog as he half fell on the stairs. The sharp heel of his heavy boot hit the nose of the canine, as it gave a shriek of pain and rage and momentarily fell away. The door of the flat in front of which he lay was opened by a girl; petrified by his encounter with the creature from hell, Abhay got up and was inside the flat in a flash. He closed the door moments before the canine made the second go for him and hit its face with the closing door and growled angrily.

  “Mister Batra! Are you all right? What happened?” asked a familiar voice.

  When he looked back he saw Mrs. Aparna Sharma, his colleague looking at him with astonishment. “I…I,” he tried to speak but his throat had dried up and was still shaken by the terrifying encounter and he half-fell on the sofa in the drawing room.

  “Beta; get some water, quick,” said Mrs. Sharma to the girl who had opened the door of the flat upon hearing the commotion outside and had become Abhay’s saviour. While he thirstily gulped down the water with his shaking hands and the dog barked and scowled angrily outside, Mrs. Sharma said, “This is the flat of Mrs. Nayyar, our good neighbours and this is Mr. Batra, my senior at the office. “

  “That...that mad dog nearly bit me!” Abhay said in an agitated voice.

  “This is entirely the fault of our building watchman; he goes to eat paan or buy bidi and leaves the main gate unattended, because of which stray dogs enter the driveway and sometimes climb up the stairs,” Mrs. Sharma said in a complaining voice.

  “Why blame him alone?” asked Mrs. Nayyar, “Some people of this building treat him as their domestic servant and make him do their household chores and bring them things from the nearby market, instead of letting him do his duty It is as if we don’t give our monthly contribution and they alone pay him out of their own pockets.”

  “Your handbag Mrs. Sharma,” Abhay said handing her the bag he was clutching in his hand and his coming to return which had unexpectedly landed him in a soup.

  “Thank you Mr. Batra; I feel so embarrassed. Oh my God! Did it bite you?” She asked with her eyes widening when she looked at the bottom of his trousers.

  “No; I had a narrow escape,” Abhay said with a forced smile as he followed her glance to his trouser. Lifting it he saw red scratches, where the teeth of the dog had touched the skin of his leg.

  “I will call the doctor, who lives nearby to take a look at it and give you dressing or injection, as the case maybe,” said Mrs. Sharma.

  “There is no need for that, I assure you,” Abhay said hurriedly.

  “You men are all so careless, my husband is also like that,” she said and tried to convince her male colleague, but to no avail. Letting go of a sigh of resignation she said, “At least go to the bathroom and wash your leg,” and made him follow him. While he took off his shoe and sock and vigorously washed his ankle and leg with the soap and water, she turned to her ten year old daughter and said, “Nishi beta; go and bring the tube of ointment form the first-aid box, it is in the lower drawer of the dressing table and the keys of the flat is in my handbag on the sofa in auntie’s drawing room.”

  Her daughter hurriedly went and came back with the tube and handed it to Mrs. Sharma. “Mum; I saw that dog; it is hiding in the stairs, near the bottom.”

  “Call the watchman Mrs. Nayyar,” she said as she made her male colleague put his leg on the glass centre table and put ointment on his ankle and leg, ignoring his embarrassment and protest. After Mrs. Sharma had completed the task to her satisfaction, she let Abhay put down his leg and wear his sock and shoe.Taking the phone with intercom facility from her neighbour she scolded the watchman severely and told him to come toMrs. Nayyar’s flat at once and get rid of the dog that was hiding in the stairs.

  “I am sorry that you had to go through so much trouble because of me,” Abhay said in a regretful voice.

  “Nonsense; on the contrary, Mister Batra, I am the one who should apologize to you. Nishi,” she said turning to her daughter, “You take your bhai to the flat and I’ll take uncle to his car.”

  “Please Ms. Aparna!” Abhay protested vigorously. “I am not a small child that you have to accompany me downstairs, please don’t blow a small incident out of all proportions.”

  After much haggling, she agreed but insisted that Abhay waited till the watchman arrived. “There he is,” she said when they heard the blowing of the whistle and beating of the stairs with a lathi (wooden stick). Before Abhay could stop her, Ms. Aparna had opened the door and gave the watchman a dressing down. He tried to offer an explanation at first but seeing how livid the former was, heard the scolding with his head down.

  “Come Sa’ab,” he said after Ms. Sharma was finished with her outburst.

  Abhay greeted his colleague and her neighbour for their help and assistance and then followed the watchman down the semi-darkened stairs. He had hardly walked down one floor when he realized to his utter astonishment that the feet of the watchman was not touching the stairs; and that he was instead floating a few inches above it! As he watched, the feet turned green with black spots and swelled, as if they were of a beast and not human and he abruptly stopped in the stairs.

  Abhay’s throat became dry and his heart pounded against his chest as the mysterious watchman’s body slowly began to turn in the air. He shivered with mortal terror and yet again felt he was experiencing a nightmare, standing by himself in an unknown stairway, faced with a spine-chilling entity; he involuntarily stepped back and felt the wall behind him. When the watchman fully turned in the air, Abhay saw that before him stood not a man, but a ghost!

  Half of the flesh on the face of the ghost was missing, along with one eyeball and its sticky tongue was hanging outside its jaw, it appeared to be a creature straight from hell. Abhay wanted to scream, but his tongue seemed to have stuck with his palate; without any warning or prelude, the ghost plunged at him and passed through him. Abhay felt as if a cloud of chilly air had hit him, and a strange, hideous and revolting taste came in his mouth and throat causing nausea.

  He looked back terrified and saw the ghost preparing to have a second go at him with the arms of its skeleton outstretched. He screamed with terror and ran down the flight of stairs in a flash. More than twice, he felt that the ghost had missed him only by a whisker; and he was unable to believe that he had escaped alive even after he had stood next to his car at the end of the driveway with his arms resting on its bonnet. A young boy and girl passed him with a strange expression on their faces, when they saw the way Abhay stood heaving and with his mouth hung open and shaking like the branch of a tree caught in a whirlwind.

  After what seemed to him a lifetime, Abhay got hold of him somehow and unlocking the door of the car sat inside. Switching on the ignition he backed the car and was about to drive away when the watchman holding the lathi came in front of him all of a sudden; his first instinct was not to stop and drive over him, but then he applied brakes. The watchman walked up to the driver’s side and examined Abhay’s face closely; while the latter sat motionless, paralyzed with fright, his hands seemed welded to the steeringwheel and he half expected the watchman to turn into the scary ghost and have another go at him.

  “Are you Mr. Batra, who had gone to Mrs. Nayyar’s flat?” he inquired.

  “Yes,” Abhay managed to say with great difficulty.

  “Are you all right Sa’ab?” Abhay sat drenched in his own sweat and his hands shivere
d; his throat was dry and his body was burning; still, he nodded his head in the affirmative to the query. “Mrs. Sharma had called to inquire about your well-being, and she was asking me whether I had walked you properly to your car? I said how could I have done that? As I had reached the gate only moments earlier. I don’t understand how it is possible, but she said that I had gone up to Mrs. Nayyar’s flat and that she had scolded me there.”

  “Maybe she was talking about the other watchman,” Abhay said in a low voice.

  “But Sa’ab; I am the only watchman here!”

  Abhay was stunned and as if in a mesmeric trance, he put his car in gear and drove away. The words of the watchman rung in his ears repeatedly; if he hadn’t come up in response to the call on the intercom, who had? It was definitely a ghost that he had encountered – though he hardly needed additional evidence to prove its reality of what he had seen and experienced. The remembrance of the scary sight of the dead man’s spirit made him jittery and he escaped an accident twice. Other drivers swore and cursed him; they made rude gestures and giving him ‘I will kill you’ stares drove away.

  He was still shaking inwardly and was panickingly when he reached his house in Rajouri Garden. On Payal’s persistent inquiries, he told her about the mad dog that had nearly bit him; but his male pride came in way of his confessing regarding sighting a ghost or that terror it had caused in his psyche. His wife attributed his neurotic behaviour to the incident with the mad-canine and was none the wiser to the real cause. Unbeknownst to either one of them, the nightmare, far from being over, had only just begun.

  On the third night after the appearance of Bittoo’s ghost, Abhay’s sleep broke in his bedroom very late into the night. Feeling unusually thirsty he went to fetch water from the refrigerator in the kitchen. He abruptly stopped in the lobby; before him stood the ghost he had seen in the stairway of the building, where his colleague lived, on the previous night! He ran back to the bedroom and hurriedly closed the door and put on the latch. He lay down on the bed next to his wife shivering with fright.

  With disbelieving eyes, he saw the ghost come through the close door. He lay on the bed paralyzed with terror as the evil spirit floated across the room and opening the latch and door went into the balcony. As if mesmerized, he got down and followed it outside. He saw that it was bathed in ethereal green light and stood a few inches above the floor.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Abhay asked summoning all this courage.

  The ghost wearing a hooded cloak turned around and faced him; in an inhuman voice that sounded like the crackling of bones it said, “I have come to take you; your days are numbered, be prepared to die.”

  Like a small and terrified boy, Abhay withdrew into himself and outstretching his hands before he protested, “No! I don’t want to die!”

  The ghost laughed in a frightening manner and said, “Everyone says the same thing when KaalkeJeev (servants of the death- god) come to fetch them; but who has ever escaped death?”

  Abhay saw large snakes and hideous reptiles of varied kind crawling on the floor and as the scary ghost dashed towards him. He screamed, petrified at the sight and ran back to his room; closing the door with a bang and putting on the latch and lock.

  Payal’s sleep was broken by his loud scream; she immediately left the bed and came to the side of her husband. “What happens, Abhay?” She asked taking his hand into hers, “your face is all white and you are sweating all over.”

  “I …I saw,” Abhay had to stop himself forcibly; his male ego and pride took hold of him. How could he admit seeing a ghost to his wife, when he had always ridiculed her for believing in that? How could he, a man, admit being scared before his woman? “Nothing, nothing,” he said as he walked to the bed.

  “What are you hiding; tell me what happened?” She asked earnestly.

  “I have told you, nothing happened; why you cannot believe me for god sake!” Abhay shouted at her, less out of anger and more to hide his own fright.

  Payal was taken aback by that sudden outburst; she had never seen Abhay shouting like that. His shouting woke up Anshul, who cried loudly in her cradle; Payal took her baby in her arms and patting her back tried to make her sleep again. After half an hour when she had succeeded in that, she gently put back the baby in the cradle and switching off the tube light of the room lay down on the bed.

  Abhay, on the other side of the double bed, was still very much petrified; the image of that ghost, that dark shadow kept reappearing in his mind. Suddenly the room appeared too black, totally darkened to him; he started to fear that the dark shadow he had seen earlier would burst into the room any minute and strangulate him to death.

  He immediately got out of the bed, went to the door and locked it from inside. Still, the darkness continued to haunt him; he switched on the red zero watt bulb on his side of the bed. Its red glow showed him the dimensions of the room; bed, cradle, sofa chair and the closet, and was somehow reassuring; he felt a little safe in that light. But only a little, for the thought of the ghost bursting into the room, continued to haunt him.

  Every ten seconds he would open his eyes fearing that the ghost had come in, but his eyes would find only his familiar room in that dim red light. He spent almost the entire night in that perplexing and paralyzing fear as tension on his mind continued to lay heavy.

  ”My God! You seem to have caught the fever,” Payal said putting her hand on the forehead of her husband early in the morning.

  “No, I am fine,” Abhay said trying to get up, but immediately fell back on the bed. Tension and dread of just one night had brought the fever and had weakened him considerably.

  “You just lie down and rest; I will call the office that you won’t be able to attend today,” she said “You get some rest, later we will together go to a doctor and get you some medicines. I will go to the kitchen and make tea for both of us.”

  Abhay nodded his head and again closed his tired eyes; thinking that he better brush his teeth before tea, he got up from the bed. One of his slippers seemed to have slipped under the bed, to get it out he had to kneel down and put his hand under the bed. Instead of the slipper, his hand came out with something else; it was a red cloth tied with a knot.

  Curiously he untied the knot and found a lemon with two small animal bones, urad lentil and some other unrecognizable and vile things with it. He hurriedly tied back the knot and running downstairs and outside the house, threw away that red cloth with its contents as far away on the road as he could. Once again the perplexing fear came over him as he came back to his room and fell down on the bed. He could feel his face burning with fever as his scared mind tried to comprehend the meaning of that strange thing, which he had accidentally unearthed.

  When Payal came back with the tea, Abhay told her about that strange thing, the red cloth, and its contents. He could not help noticing how pale she looked, “What could it have been Payal?” He asked.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she replied avoiding his glance, “but I am sure who put it there.”

  “Who?”

  “Warlock, who else?” Payal declared. When no response was forthcoming, she looked at Abhay and asked, “Do you doubt that?”

  “Not at all; I trust you fully, it’s just that …never mind,” spoke Abhay timidly.

  “No, say it, whatever is on your mind,” she insisted.

  “It is just that I find it a little hard to believe that a man, that Rudolf could come into our bedroom and put that thing underneath the bed without being detected.”

  “That’s because you don’t understand him,my dear husband. He doesn’t need to come down here himself; the ghost Harry, who he controls can do it easily for him,” explained Payal.

  “But what could Rudolf possibly want from us?”

  “It’s quite obvious that he wants to take revenge,” she replied.

  “I don’t think that is plausible; there are far better ways of taking revenge from someone, than putting lemons and animal bones under their
bed,” Abhay argued.

  “You say that because you think of Rudolf as a man; think of him as a Warlock, as a tantrik or an evil black magician. Then alone would you be able to understand his modus-operandi,” again explained Payal to him.

  “What can he achieve by using black magic on us?”

  “It could be for two reasons,” Payal said with her forehead shrunken in deep thought, “either to hurt us by using his occult powers or to scare us. Because he likes to terrorize his victims into complete surrender before killing them; that’s the way he gets pleasure out of his evil pursuits. And if my understanding of his character is correct, then this won’t be an isolated incident; we can expect more sinister deeds of his and their evil manifestation.”

  “They have occurred already,” Abhay admitted.

  “What do you mean?” Payal asked in an alarmed voice.

  “I saw a ghost twice and it tried to attack me, outside my colleague’s flat and in the balcony of our house last night!” Abhay informed her.

  Payal sat on the bed with a white face; she tried to speak but could manage to only move her lips, her voice seemed to have left her altogether. Instinctively she went towards the cradle and picking up sleeping Anshul put the head of her baby on her shoulder. She sat back on the bed beside Abhay with her face full of apprehension and worry.

  “Did I scare you?” He felt his own voice coming out of a deep well. He laughed emptily and said, “You didn’t look so scared when you were telling me about the ghost you saw in that estate or the one you saw the day before yesterday,” said Abhay.

  “That was different Abhay; after hearing your arguments, I myself had started to believe that it might have been a hallucination – that Bittoo’s ghost, the other day. But you could not have been hallucinating; you have no backlog of fearful memories of the time spent in Rudolf’s den as I have. And that magic charm you have told me about, that for one can’t be a hallucination.”