Ravish pushed the key into the lock and rotated it clockwise, to no avail. The stubborn Godrej lock, covered with cobwebs refused to budge.
“Damn, this must have been locked for over a decade!” Ravish said grudgingly to this best friend.
“How will it open if you use the wrong key? Try the other one.” Ram, standing patiently beside him advised.
5 permutations of keys and 10 minutes later, the lock finally relented and the two of them stepped into an old, rickety, cobweb-filled house. How do they call this a HOUSE!? Ravish thought.
After spending a year of the training period in their new organization in a plush 5-star guest house, the fall to this individual apartment provided by their company was a steep one.
“An entire 2 BHK house allotted to one person? Where’s the logic to that!?” Ravish continued with his ranting. He was not especially happy regarding this whole affair of shifting accommodations.
“Well, it’s either this or resignation from the company. You choose!” Ram offered, tongue in cheek.
Over the next hour, they inspected their individual houses, came up with a list of tasks to be completed by the estate department before they could move in, and left, putting the Godrej lock back in its place.
What they didn’t notice was the small bulb in the balcony glowing, even though the switch to it was off.
The 2 of them moved into adjacent houses in the company’s township 15 days later. In contrast to what they had seen a fortnight ago, the house was completely transformed now. With furniture in place, freshly painted walls, and proper housekeeping, the house was definitely habitable and the positive change in the house’s condition did manage to lift up Ravish’s spirit. As he stood there, supervising the work of packers and movers he noticed an old woman, wearing a white saree and thin-rimmed spectacles, standing in a far corner looking intently at the proceedings. Just as their eyes met, the woman started walking towards him at a labored pace.
Midway through the short walk towards him, she screamed, “WHY THIS HOUSE!! THERE’S AN ENTIRE TOWNSHIP TO CHOOSE FROM AND YOU CHOSE THIS HOUSE! GO BACK AT ONCE!”
Flustered and scared, Ravish went inside the house, away from the screaming old woman. One of the guys from the packers and movers’ crew, a local, came and sat beside him.
“Saheb, the woman who just screamed at you isn’t mad. The house that you are moving into has a long and unpleasant history. No one has stayed in this house for more than a few weeks recently. Whoever comes here leaves the place even before they are fully unpacked.”
“But why? Surely we don’t believe in ghosts and spirits now, in the twenty-first century!” Ravish asked.
“Saheb, I am
no one to question your beliefs. I am just telling you what I have heard about this house. In fact, I even asked the supervisor to assign me some other job for the day. No one around here likes anything to do with this house.”
Over the dinner, that evening, Ravish narrated his conversation with the local boy earlier during the day to Ram.
“I think I might have some difficulty sleeping tonight after that episode with the old woman,” Ravish confessed.
“Stop being such a sissy Ravish! These guys will make up stories better than Bollywood scriptwriters to scare off new people like us from their areas!”
“Right, maybe I am just overthinking.” Ravish dismissed the topic and they didn’t talk about it throughout the evening.
After dinner, Ravish made his way back to the room. Even if he had dismissed his fears in front of Ram, the whole episode in the morning had left him worried. And although he didn’t admit it even to himself, a little scared too. Nevertheless, the entire day’s work had left him so tired that he slipped into a deep sleep as soon as he lay in his bed. The next morning everything was fine, as per routine, except for a small anomaly, which Ravish, caught up in his daily chores was too busy to notice. He had slept in his bedroom, and woken up on the living room sofa…
Next evening after an exhausting day at work, all Ravish wanted to do was to put up his feet and enjoy the Indian Premier League game of his favorite team. He finished making all the required connections to the TV, bought a bottle of cola and a pack of Doritos, and arranged his sofa in such a way that it provided the maximum viewing comfort. After everything was good to go, he switched on the television, only to be greeted by a loud noise of static, which wouldn’t go away even when put on mute. After 2 full minutes of agonizing static on the TV, it stopped abruptly and a video started playing.
The video was evidently shot by a cameraman with an excessively unstable hand. It had a vintage feel to it. A few seconds later the shaking stopped, and the film moved in such a way that it felt as if it had been recorded by a drone camera. The film suddenly panned to show the main gate of his work premises: Government Fertilizer Factory. The display board at the main gate displayed in bold letters: January 13, 1989.
What in the bloody hell is happening...
All this was quite inexplicable to Ravish. This is the stuff horror movies are made of, and it’s happening in my living room! Terrified out of his wits, he called out loudly for Ram. Ram, sensing something terribly wrong reached Ravish’s living room in a flash. It took him a moment to comprehend what was going on and then he saw it.
Ravish’s face was pale white in terror and his eyes were locked on the TV showing the gate of the company he goes through every day while reporting for work.
“This video is playing on its own. I can’t switch it off” Ravish whispered.
Ram quickly pulled out the power cord of the TV. But to no avail. The drone camera kept on moving. Into the gate of the company towards the biggest plant of the fertilizer complex.
“Well it looks like someone wants us to see this film no matter what, we hardly seem to have any choice on that matter” Ram, characteristically calm and composed, said.
The camera continued to float through the air, moving over well-asphalted roads with a variety of plants at their borders. It turned left and entered a gigantic process plant. It moved over pipe racks, going in between structures, chemical vessels, and tall separation columns finally reaching a group of workers huddled together working on a pipe. The pipe was at a height of about 3 meters from the ground. One of the workers appeared to be using a hacksaw to cut the pipe while two others were opening nut bolts. Suddenly a thick jet of what looked like gas started coming out from the place at which the man was making the cut.
Ram noted that the people in the video had an expression identical to that of Ravish. Pure terror and fear on their faces. All of a sudden there was a lot of activity and the men started trying of get down from the high pipe they were working on. They were almost there, on the ground, and Ram thought, just for a moment that they would escape out of the plant area safely. But just when a sense of calm appeared to have developed, there was a blinding flash of light, coupled with a deafening sound. All the three men were thrown into the air and simultaneously engulfed with fire. The camera shook vigorously putting the scene out of focus and the screen went blank.
Ravish and Ram exchanged puzzled glances. The screen came to life again and the door of Ravish’s house came into focus. This time Ram felt a chill run down his spine. This video had no vintage feel to it. It wasn’t shaky either. It was live, right here, right now.
Both of them ran out of their places towards the door to close it and keep the camera out but didn’t find anything there. Nevertheless, they closed the door shut. The video on the TV, however, kept playing. It was now showing a live feed of the room from the top.
God, please let this just be a bad dream. I am ready to wake up from it now. Ravish thought.
The camera started moving again and went to the inside of the room. Both Ram and ravish were paralyzed with terror now, none of them able to move a muscle.
The camera now moved towards the empty master bedroom. It rose from the height at which it was hovering towards an abnormally long loft. The camera started moving towards the inside of the loft until the end it reached a dead end. It stayed there for a while as the image of a blank wall floated on the screen. And then, with a sudden jerk, it swerved right.
What was now visible on the screen was the scariest thing either of Ravish and Ram had ever seen. The screen now showed a skeleton of what looked like a one year old baby.
This is real. There’s a skeleton of a dead baby in my house. And it has been there for the last 30 years!
And the screen went blank again.
Almost instantly a mind-numbing image materialized this time. A man with a badly burnt face, wearing burnt rags for clothing stood in front of them. The horror of the image multiplied as the camera started moving backward bringing to the fore, the complete anatomy of the man, or... the lack of it.
Trembling in fear now, Ravish saw that the man’s body was ripped off from below the midriff. He had only one hand and each and every inch of skin that remained was burnt black.
And then he started speaking.
“My name is immaterial now. I am the person who was working with the hacksaw in the film you just saw. I have been dead for almost 30 years now. And the skeleton that you saw next is that of my 9 month old daughter who has been dead for 1 day less than I have been.”
How? Ravish thought.
“How? That’s the question. Isn’t it?” the man said.
God, this thing can read my thoughts!
“Yes, I can.”
“We could see how all this happened to you. But what happened to your daughter?” Ram said.
“I was a widower. My wife died giving birth to our child. She was my everything. I had hired the services of a nanny to take care of my daughter while I was away at work. That day, I was called for an emergency at work. The nanny had not arrived yet but I had to reach the plant immediately. I informed the lady living next to my house about my situation and she agreed to look at the baby till the time the nanny arrived.”
“Unfortunately, the nanny never arrived. The lady that I had asked to take care of my baby waited and waited but neither I nor the nanny arrived.”
“However two high-ranking company officials did arrive. They informed the lady that they would take the baby somewhere safe. They however left the baby in my very house at the end of that godforsaken loft. They left her to die there.”
And now the picture finally cleared and the reality dawned upon Ravish and Ram.
A major accident had taken place in their plant and the management was trying its best to underreport the numbers. They understood very well that a person like the burnt man, with no one else in front or behind me, except his daughter could have been easy to hide. They buried his burnt corpse within the complex somewhere and the corpse of the baby was well hidden on its own.
They never allotted this house in the township in their tenure. However, with new recruitments happening in the housing department who were unaware of this situation, this house had been allotted to new people. And then they realized the actual terror! Ravish remembered the words of the local boy. No one has stayed in this house for more than a few weeks recently.
“So why us? Why are you showing all this to us? You want us to tell your story to the public? To get your justice?”
Just as Ram asked these questions, he knew that the burnt man could have easily made his story public. He knew exactly what the burnt man wanted from them.
Their lives. Lives of company employees. As a means to quench his thirst for revenge.