Whispers in the Dark

by Ruskin Bond

  The caretaker-cum-cook-cum-chowkidar came up with quite a decent meal—a vegetable curry, dal and lots of hot chapatis—and watched them as they tore into the food.

  ‘And where is your journey taking you?’ he asked. ‘It is not yet the trekking season.’

  ‘To the top of the Witch Mountain,’ said Rusty.

  ‘Ah, but no one goes there any more. There are only a few ruins there now. No one lives on the mountain, although many years ago it was the home of kings and queens. Sometimes people wander up there and don’t come back. They go looking for a treasure that doesn’t exist.’

  ‘We’ll come back,’ said Popat. ‘We have to! I have an exam to take!’

  ‘And there’s a wrestling tournament coming up,’ said Pitamber. ‘Five thousand rupees if I win all my bouts.’

  They went to bed early. Pitamber took over one of the beds, while Rusty and Popat shared the other. They had barely settled down when they felt a slight tremor. Then all the lights went out.

  ‘Did you feel that?’ asked Popat.

  ‘The bed shook a little,’ said Rusty. ‘Could it be an earthquake?’

  ‘Maybe it’s just Pitamber moving around,’ Popat chortled.

  But soon there was another tremor, more distinct than the first, and all the windowpanes began rattling. Rusty and Popat jumped out of bed.

  ‘It is an earthquake!’ exclaimed Rusty. But there were no further tremors, and presently, Rusty and Popat returned to their bed. Pitamber was still fast asleep; the mild earthquake had not bothered him. They lived in a region that was prone to such tremors and there were tales of an extinct volcano that sometimes showed signs of activity.

  Rusty slept soundly till about midnight, when he was woken by someone or something scratching on the windowpanes. The window was locked, and at first he assumed that the scratching was caused by the cat he had seen earlier that evening. But the sound continued, scratch scratch scratch, and finally, Rusty got up and reached for the light switch. Only to find that all the lights had gone, probably because of the earthquake. So he went to the window and peered through the glass. At first he saw nothing. Then he made out the shape of the black cat he had seen earlier. Feeling sorry for it, he opened the window and it darted into the room, purring softly.

  Rusty returned to his bed and the cat followed him, curling up near his feet. He was not particularly fond of cats and his first impulse was to push it off the bed. And then he thought, it’s probably used to sleeping in this room. I’ll let it be, as long as it doesn’t trouble Popat or start chasing rats! But all it did was come a little closer, advancing from Rusty’s feet to his knees, and purr loudly, as though quite satisfied with the situation.

  Lulled by the purring of the cat, Rusty fell asleep. He slept for a couple of hours, before he was awakened by a feeling of wetness under his right armpit. His vest was wet and something was sucking away at his flesh.

  It was with a feeling of horror that he discovered that the cat was now stretched out beside him and that it was licking away at his bleeding armpit with a certain amount of relish. And the purring was louder than ever.

  A bloodsucking cat!

  Rusty sat up on the bed, flung the cat away from him, sent Popat rolling to the floor and made a dash for the light switch.

  As the lights came on, Rusty saw the cat standing at the foot of the bed, tail erect and hair on end. It looked very angry.

  And then, for the space of five seconds at the most, its appearance changed. Its face was that of a human—a girl’s face, beautiful but anguished, with full, red lips that were drenched with blood . . .

  The moment passed and it was a cat’s face again. It let out a weird mewing, leapt on to the windowsill and disappeared through the open window.

  Quickly, Rusty shut the window and examined himself in the mirror. His vest was soaked with blood. For over an hour the cat had been licking and sucking at his fragile skin, wearing it away until the blood oozed out.

  ‘What happened to you, Rusty?’ asked Popat, now wide awake. ‘Why are you bleeding?’ He followed Rusty into the bathroom and helped him wash the blood away.

  ‘It was a cat,’ exclaimed Rusty, ‘or a vampire!’ But he had not been bitten. There were no teeth marks, no scratches. The tongue and the constant licking had done the damage.

  Popat found a roll of cotton wool in his backpack, and used some of it to stop the trickle of blood from Rusty’s armpit. Then he dabbed boric powder on the wound and made a rough bandage out of a couple of large handkerchiefs.

  ‘I didn’t know you were a doctor,’ said Rusty, appreciating Popat’s efforts.

  ‘I’ll get some proper bandages when I’m in the bazaar,’ said Popat, ‘but how did the cat get in?’

  ‘It was all part of a dream, I think,’ said Rusty. A nice dream at first, but then it had changed—and dreams and reality were all mixed up now.

  Rusty returned to his bed, uncertain about what he had seen. How had the cat’s face changed just for a few moments? Had it been a vision, a dream or the embodiment of a spirit?

  ‘A bad dream,’ professed Popat. ‘Let’s just go home tomorrow.’

  ‘If you like,’ agreed Rusty.

  * * *

  After many adventures on the Magic Mountain, the boys returned to Dehra and their everyday activities. Rusty wonders if their strange experience was all a dream, but when he examines himself in the mirror, he finds the imprint of the cat’s tongue under his armpit. And it’s still there today!

  SOME HILL-STATION GHOSTS

  Simla has its phantom rickshaw and Lansdowne, its headless horseman. Mussoorie has its woman in white. Late at night, she can be seen sitting on the parapet wall on the winding road up to the hill station. Don’t stop to offer her a lift. She will fix you with the evil eye and ruin your holiday.

  The Mussoorie taxi drivers and other locals call her Bhoot Aunty. Everyone has seen her at some time or the other. To give her a lift is to court disaster. Many accidents have been attributed to her baleful presence. And when people pick themselves up from the road (or are picked up by concerned citizens), Bhoot Aunty is nowhere to be seen, although survivors swear that she was in the car with them.

  Ganesh Saili, Abha and I were coming back from Dehradun late one night, when we saw this woman in white sitting on the parapet by the side of the road. As our headlights fell on her, she turned her face away. Ganesh, being a thorough gentleman, slowed down and offered her a lift. She turned towards us then, and smiled a wicked smile. She seemed quite attractive, except that her canines protruded slightly in vampire fashion.

  ‘Don’t stop!’ screamed Abha. ‘Don’t even look at her! It’s Bhoot Aunty!’

  Ganesh pressed down on the accelerator and sped past her. Next day we heard that a tourist’s car had gone off the road and the occupants had been severely injured. The accident took place shortly after they had stopped to pick up a woman in white who wanted a lift. But she was not among the injured.

  * * *

  Miss Ripley-Bean, an old English lady who was my neighbour when I lived near Wynberg-Allen School, told me that her family was haunted by a malignant phantom head that always appeared before the death of one of her relatives.

  She said her brother saw this apparition the night before her mother died, and both she and her sister saw it before the death of their father. The sister slept in the same room. They were both awakened one night by a curious noise in the cupboard facing their beds. One of them began getting out of bed to see if their cat was in the room, when the cupboard door suddenly opened and a luminous head appeared. It was covered with matted hair and appeared to be in an advanced stage of decomposition. Its fleshless mouth grinned at the terrified sisters. And then as they crossed themselves, it vanished.

  The next day, they learnt that their father, who was in Lucknow, had died suddenly, at about the same time that they had seen the death’s head.

  * * *

  Everyone likes to hear stories about haunted houses; even scepti
cs will listen to a ghost story, while casting doubts on its veracity.

  Rudyard Kipling wrote a number of memorable ghost stories set in India—‘The Return of Imray’, ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, ‘At the End of the Passage’—his favourite milieu being the haunted dak bungalow. But it was only after his return to England that he found himself actually having to live in a haunted house. He writes about it in his autobiography, Something of Myself:

  The spring of ’96 saw us in Torquay, where we found a house for our heads that seemed almost too good to be true. It was large and bright, with big rooms each and all open to the sun, the ground embellished with great trees and the warm land dipping southerly to the clean sea under the Mary Church cliffs. It had been inhabited for thirty years by three old maids.

  The revelation came in the shape of a growing depression which enveloped us both—a gathering blackness of mind and the sorrow of the heart, that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other, fought against for long weeks. It was the Feng-shui—the spirit of the house itself—that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips . . . We paid forfeit and fled. More than thirty years later we returned down the steep little road to that house, and found, quite unchanged, the same brooding spirit of deep despondency within the rooms.

  Again, thirty years later, he returned to this house in his short story, ‘The House Surgeon,’ in which two sisters cannot come to terms with the suicide of a third sister, and brood upon the tragedy day and night, until their thoughts saturate every room of the house.

  Many years ago, I had a similar experience in a house in Dehradun, in which an elderly English couple had died from neglect and starvation. In 1947, when many European residents were leaving the town and emigrating to the UK, this poverty-stricken old couple, sick and friendless, had been forgotten. Too ill to go out for food and medicine, they had died in their beds, where they were discovered several days later by the landlord’s munshi.

  The house stood empty for several years. No one wanted to live in it. As a young man, I would sometimes roam about the neglected grounds or explore the cold, bare rooms, now stripped of furniture, doorless and windowless, and I would be assailed by a feeling of deep gloom and depression. Of course, I knew what had happened there, and that may have contributed to the effect the place had on me. But when I took a friend, Jai Shankar, through the house, he told me he felt quite sick with apprehension and fear. ‘Ruskin, why have you brought me to this awful house?’ he said. ‘I’m sure it’s haunted.’ And only then did I tell him about the tragedy that had taken place within its walls.

  Today, the house is used as a government office. No one lives in it at night except for a Gurkha chowkidar, a man of strong nerves, who sleeps in the back veranda. The atmosphere of the place doesn’t bother him, but he does hear strange sounds in the night. ‘Like someone crawling about on the floor above,’ he tells me. ‘And someone groaning. These old houses are noisy places . . .’

  * * *

  A morgue is not a noisy place, as a rule. And for a morgue attendant, corpses are silent companions.

  Old Mr Jacob, who lives just behind the cottage, was once a morgue attendant for the local mission hospital. In those days, it was situated at Sunny Bank, about a hundred metres up the hill from here. One of the outhouses served as the morgue; Mr Jacob begs me not to identify it.

  He tells me of a terrifying experience he went through when he was doing night duty at the morgue.

  ‘The body of a young man was found floating in the Aglar river, behind Landour, and was brought to the morgue while I was on night duty. It was placed on the table and covered with a sheet.

  ‘I was quite accustomed to seeing corpses of various kinds and did not mind sharing the same room with them, even after dark. On this occasion, a friend had promised to join me, and to pass the time, I strolled around the room, whistling a popular tune. I think it was “Danny Boy”, if I remember right. My friend was a long time coming, and I soon got tired of whistling and sat down on the bench beside the table. The night was very still, and I began to feel uneasy. My thoughts went to the boy who had drowned, and I wondered what he had been like when he was alive. Dead bodies are so impersonal . . .

  ‘The morgue had no electricity, just a kerosene lamp, and after some time I noticed that the flame was very low. As I was about to turn it up, it suddenly went out. I lit the lamp again, after extending the wick. I returned to the bench, but I had not been sitting there for long when the lamp again went out, and something moved very softly and quietly past me.

  ‘I felt quite sick and faint, and could hear my heart pounding away. The strength had gone out of my legs, otherwise I would have fled from the room. I felt quite weak and helpless, unable even to call out . . .

  ‘Presently the footsteps came nearer and nearer. Something cold and icy touched one of my hands and felt its way up towards my neck and throat. It was behind me, then it was before me. Then it was over me. I was in the arms of the corpse!

  ‘I must have fainted, because when I woke up, I was on the floor and my friend was trying to revive me. The corpse was back on the table.’

  ‘It may have been a nightmare,’ I suggested ‘Or you allowed your imagination to run riot.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Jacobs. ‘There were wet, slimy marks on my clothes. And the feet of the corpse matched the wet footprints on the floor.’

  After this experience, Mr Jacobs refused to do any more night duty at the morgue.

  * * *

  A Chakrata Haunting

  From Herbertpur, near Paonta, you can go up to Kalsi, and then up the hill road to Chakrata.

  Chakrata is in a security zone, most of it off limits to tourists, which is one reason why it has remained unchanged in the 150 years of its existence. This small town’s population of 1500 is the same today as it was in 1947—probably the only town in India that hasn’t shown a population increase.

  Courtesy a government official, I was fortunate enough to be able to stay in the forest rest house on the outskirts of the town. This is a new building, the old rest house—a little way downhill—having fallen into disuse. The chowkidar told me the old rest house was haunted, and that this was the real reason for its having been abandoned. I was a bit sceptical about this, and asked him what kind of haunting took place in it. He told me that he had himself gone through a frightening experience in the old house, when he had gone there to light a fire for some forest officers who were expected that night. After lighting the fire, he had looked round and seen a large animal, like a wild cat, sitting on the wooden floor and gazing into the fire. ‘I called out to it, thinking that it was someone’s pet. The creature turned and looked full at me with eyes that were human, and a face which was the face of an ugly woman! The creature snarled at me, and the snarl became an angry howl. Then it vanished!’

  ‘And what did you do?’ I asked.

  ‘I vanished too,’ said the chowkidar. ‘I haven’t been down to that house again.’

  I did not volunteer to sleep in the old house but made myself comfortable in the new one, where I hoped I would not be troubled by any phantom. However, a large rat kept me company, gnawing away at the woodwork of a chest of drawers. Whenever I switched on the light it would be silent, but as soon as the light was off, it would start gnawing away again.

  This reminded me of a story old Miss Kellner (of my Dehra childhood) told me, of a young man who was desperately in love with a girl who did not care for him. One day, when he was following her in the street, she turned on him and, pointing to a rat which some boys had just killed, said, ‘I’d as soon marry that rat as marry you.’ He took her cruel words so much to heart that he pined away and died. After his death, the girl was haunted at night by a rat and occasionally she would be bitten. When the family decided to emigrate, they travelled down to Bombay in order to embark on a ship sailing for London. The ship had just left the quay, when shouts and
screams were heard from the pier. The crowd scattered, and a huge rat with fiery eyes ran down to the end of the quay. It sat there, screaming with rage, then jumped into the water and disappeared. After that (according to Miss Kellner), the girl was not haunted again.

  * * *

  Old dak bungalows and forest rest houses have a reputation for being haunted. And most hill stations have their resident ghosts—and ghostwriters! But I will not extend this catalogue of ghostly hauntings and visitations, as I do not want to discourage tourists from visiting Landour and Mussoorie. In some countries, ghosts are an added attraction for tourists. Britain boasts of hundreds of haunted castles and stately homes, and visitors to Romania seek out Transylvania and Dracula’s castle. So do we promote Bhoot Aunty as a tourist attraction? Only if she reforms and stops sending vehicles off those hairpin bends that lead to Mussoorie.

  Note: This piece first appeared in the Statesman in 1961. There is no dearth of prets, churels and pisaches around us. You will encounter many as you turn the pages.

  Note: This is an excerpt from Rusty and the Magic Mountain, Puffin Books India, 2015.

  Read more in Puffin by Ruskin Bond

  Rusty and the Magic Mountain

  ‘Adventure is for the adventurous’

  Rusty and his friends, Pitamber and Popat, find adventure in no small measure when they set out to climb a mysterious mountain steeped in legend and superstition. On the way they shelter in a haunted rest house, encounter a tiger and experience a hilarious mule ride which takes them to the palace of a mad rani.

  Ruskin Bond returns with a brand new Rusty adventure after more than a decade. A rollicking tale of humour and enchantment, Rusty and the Magic Mountain will win the much-loved character of Rusty a whole new band of followers.