“Damn, the arseholes. They crept up here as I slept and locked me inside. Didn't know they could be this smart,” Nirbhay sighed.
He didn't want to give on escaping the mansion. He started trying the windows though they were too narrow for a person of his size to pass through comfortably.
“These are jammed,” he muttered angrily under his breath after trying all the windows on the lower level. A slow tick-tock sound made him turn; he knew where it was coming from. Unable to believe his ears, he walked towards the grandfather clock. The hands were moving again. Fifteen minutes to midnight, they told him.
“This is crazy…what is happening?” Nirbhay asked himself but he had no time to search for answers. He wanted to move out of the mansion and move out fast. He remembered the window in his room, which he had latched up after feeling the cold, and immediately rushed back upstairs, hoping there would be a drainage pipe nearby to aid his descent. He jumped on the bed, throwing his bag on the opposite side and pulled the latch with all the force his body commanded. The latch would not move.
“Fuck… this window was perfectly fine till the evening,” Nirbhay tried to reason.
He pulled out a plastic bottle from his bag and took a large gulp of water to soothe his nerves. He spat it out in an instant.
The Other Side
85 “Yuck, what is this thing? Tastes salty,” he complained to no one in particular. He tried to peer inside the bottle but couldn't come to any conclusion with respect to the salinity. So he kept the bottle back in the bag and sat down on the bed with a large thump.
“I'm stuck in this stupid place till the morning,” he stated, mentally cursing himself for going to sleep. He wondered whether he should call up the rascals and ask them to come and open the door but that meant losing the bet, which he was not willing to accept. He decided he would call them to enquire on why they were playing pranks and to let them know he was not scared by their stupid acts. He could say he noticed them from the upper level window while they were playing with the main door. Yes, that sounded reasonable and moreover, he was dying to hear a human voice in this space that echoed with silence. An inexplicable feeling of loneliness was creeping up towards his chest. He fished out the cell phone and started punching in the number but nothing appeared on screen. He figured out that the instrument was switched off, so he switched it on again.
'Low battery' flashed across the dim screen before the phone went blank again. “These stupid Chinese cell phones. I had charged it just before leaving and I didn't even use it once throughout the day. What the fuck is happening?” Nirbhay wondered, placing his head in his hands.
The more he thought, the more the bizarre feeling crept up in his chest. He decided it was best to catch up on his incomplete sleep rather than ponder over the events and invite a headache. He hugged his bag and lay down on the wooden bed once again. The events of the evening kept replaying in his mind. It was simply a case of bad luck, he concluded with a sigh. He twisted and turned on the bed for a couple of minutes, the feeling of being watched became even more prominent then than the uncomfortable feeling in his chest. He then thought about the loan he had to repay and yawned.
He could tell he was not having a comfortable sleep by any standards. He felt someone running a hand over his sleeping body, caressing his hair and softly scratching his arms. Somewhere he started dreaming again. He saw his sister being chased by a huge black dog. He ran forward and collided with the dog throwing it a good distance away and then before his very eyes, the dog morphed into an ugly black beast with a skeletal face reflecting pure evil with empty black sockets where its eyes should have been. A pound of flesh on its torso hung loose, a bluish black liquid mingling with the thick cloud of hair on its skin made the hair on Nirbhay's arms crawl up. The beast growled, in pain or fury, Nibhay could not quite fathom but he could see the sharp canines in its cave-like mouth and as it bounded towards him on two legs, he could make out the two-inch long talons emerging out of its paws. It pounced on him, crushing his head with one mighty blow. Nirbhay's body shook so hard that he opened his eyes thinking it was an earthquake. His shirt clung to his body, thick beads of perspiration found their way down his face and he tried to breathe copious amounts of air.
He had no time to think about the nightmare. Downstairs a gong sounded, the grandfather clock had signaled the arrival of midnight. 'Moonless mansion' greeted midnight by extending the dark shadows from its corners far enough to reach every nook. As soon as his breathing returned to normal, he heard another sound, a softer one that ricocheted in the silence. It repeated again after a second long pause.