It was a moonlit midsummer night, as the church bells clanged to the toll of midnight & the owls hooted spotting their prey. Homeward, he quietly slipped down the listless streets, when he was suddenly met by an apparition so grotesquely strange, he was both transfixed & horrified. There stood a young lady in a flowing white saree, her skin deathly pale, her lips of cherry wine & her long hair was velvet black. She looked like death’s bride. But her eyes. Those scared him the most. For they were white orbs of nothingness that gleamed in the menacing moonlight. She pointed one long skeletal finger at the man & commenced chanting a spell in dialects no mortal had ever lived long enough to learn.
That’s how most ghost stories begin, but not this one.
For mine finds its origins in a true story, one passed on through generations, like a precious heirloom of gold or a treasured secret of olde. The story begins in a tiny Indian village during the wee hours of the morning when dawn has yet to break & most are in blissful worldly slumber. A boy slowly awakens from his little cot on the verandah, where he sleeps to escape the summer night heat. The cause of his disturbed slumber, a little black cat with eyes of emerald green, pawing at his hair, urging him to awaken. The cat jumps off the cot & saunters away into the darkness, towards the sugarcane fields that surround the village. The animal looks back at the boy, its eyes glittering, reflecting the pale moonlight like magical fairy lights. It inclines its feline head & beckons.
Follow.
Follow.
The boy was spellbound. His limbs move of their own volition & he begins following the cat into the eerie blackness. His eyes adjust to the semi-darkness as he marks the outline of his beastly escort.
He pauses.
His small feet sink into wet mud, as he wonders, where am I being led to?
He pauses again.
I should turn back, he says to himself. Papa will be worried.
As if sensing the boy’s hesitation, the animal looks back again. Its hypnotic eyes now glitter in light shades of blue, like the waters of a pristine lagoon.
Follow.
Follow.
The boy was bewitched once more.
Blindly following the creature, to its an unearthly destination, when the cat quickened its slow pace & broke into a run.
Wait!
Wait!
The boy thought as he ran after the being.
He had almost caught up with it when he heard a blood-curdling howl that ripped through the stillness of the night. Where the cat once stood, there now was an old crippled man, dressed in a crumpled white dhoti. His back was bent & he leaned heavily on a twisted walking stick.
“Go home, boy”, he whispered in an ancient broken voice & disappeared as quickly as he had appeared.
The boy was befuddled by all he had seen & retraced his steps to his cot on the verandah, deciding to investigate the puzzling occurrences the following morning.
In the bright light of day, the boy revisited the field he had been led to. And to his utter dread, he glimpsed a gaping open well, not five steps from where he had followed the apparition the previous night. He refused to consider what might have happened if the old man had not intervened, for he had heard many ghastly tales of villagers being drowned in the same well.
He then fled the field in rapid haste.
He never slept on the verandah again.
*The End*
Copyright Ⓒ Megan Pereira 2021
Comentarios