by Ruskin Bond
Mrs Khanna sank to the floor and passed out. She had no need of the sleeping tablet that night.
For the next couple of days Mrs Khanna was quite hysterical and spoke wildly of a wolf-man or rakshas who was pursuing her. But no one—not even Negi—attributed the apparition to Markham, who had always avoided the guests’ rooms.
The daylight hours he passed in his cellar room, which received only a dapple of late afternoon sunlight through a narrow aperture that passed for a window. For about ten minutes the sun rested on a framed picture of Markham’s mother, a severe-looking but handsome woman who must have been in her forties when the picture was taken. His father, an army captain, had been killed in the trenches at Mons during the First World War. His picture stood there, too; a dashing figure in uniform. Sometimes Markham wished that he, too, had died from his wounds; but he had been kept alive, and then he had stayed dead-alive all these years, a punishment maybe for sins and excesses committed in some former existence. Perhaps there was something in the theory or belief in karma, although he wished that things would even out a little more in this life—why did we have to wait for the next time around? Markham had read Emerson’s essay on the law of compensation, but that didn’t seem to work either. He had often thought of suicide as a way of cheating the fates that had made him, the child of handsome parents, no better than a hideous gargoyle; but he had thrust the thought aside, hoping (as most of us do) that things would change for the better.
His room was tidy—it had the bare necessities—and those pictures were the only mementoes of a past he couldn’t forget. He had his books, too, for he considered them necessities—the Greek philosophers, Epicurus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca. When Seneca had nothing left to live for, he had cut his wrists in his bathtub and bled slowly to death. Not a bad way to go, thought Markham; except that he didn’t have a bathtub, only a rusty iron bucket.
Food was left outside his door, as per instructions; sometimes fresh fruit and vegetables, sometimes a cooked meal. If there was a wedding banquet in the hotel, Negi would remember to send Markham some roast chicken or pilaf. Markham looked forward to the marriage season with its lavish wedding parties. He was a permanent though unknown wedding guest.
After discovering the freedom of the Empire’s roof, Markham’s nocturnal excursions seldom went beyond the hotel’s sprawling estate. As sure-footed as when he was a soldier, he had no difficulty in scrambling over the decaying rooftops, moving along narrow window ledges, and leaping from one landing or balcony to another. It was late summer, and guests often left their windows open to enjoy the pine-scented breeze that drifted over the hillside. Markham was no voyeur, he was really too insular and subjective a person for that form of indulgence; nevertheless, he found it fascinating to observe people in their unguarded moments: how they preened in front of mirrors, or talked to themselves, or attended to their little vanities, or sang or scratched or made love (or tried to), or drank themselves into a stupor. There were many men (and a few women) who preferred drinking in their rooms to drinking in the bar—it was cheaper, and they could get drunk and stupid without making fools of themselves in public.
One of those who enjoyed a quiet tipple in her room was Mrs Khanna. A vodka with tomato juice was her favourite drink. Markham was watching her soak up her third Bloody Mary when the room telephone rang and Mrs Khanna, receiving some urgent message, left her room and went swaying down the corridor like a battleship of yore.
On an impulse, Markham slipped in through the open window and crossed the room to the table where the bottles were arranged. He felt like having a Bloody Mary himself. It was years since he’d had one; not since that evening at New Delhi’s Imperial, when he was on his first leave. Now a little rum during the winter months was his only indulgence.
Taking a clean glass, he poured himself three fingers of vodka and drank it neat. He was about to pour himself another drink when Mrs Khanna entered the room. She stood frozen in her tracks. For there stood the creature of her previous nightmare, the half-face wolf-demon, helping himself to her vodka!
Mrs Khanna screamed. And screamed again.
Markham made a quick exit through the window and vanished into the night. But Mrs Khanna would not stop screaming—not until Negi, half the staff and several guests had entered the room to try and calm her down.
Commotion reigned for a couple of days. Doctors came and went. Policemen came and went. So did Mrs Khanna’s palpitations. She insisted that the hotel be searched for the maniac who was in hiding somewhere, only emerging from his lair to single her out for attention. Negi kept the searchers away from the cellar, but he went down himself and confronted Markham.
‘Mr Markham, sir, you must keep away from the rooms and the main hotel. Mrs Khanna is very upset. She’s called in the police and she’s having the hotel searched.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Negi, I did not mean to frighten anyone. It’s just that I get restless down here.’
‘If she finds out you’re living here, you’ll have to go. She gives the orders when Mr Khanna is away.’
‘This is my only home. Where would I go?’
‘I know, Mr Markham, I know. I understand. But do others? It unnerves them, coming upon you without any warning. Stories are going around … Business is bad enough without the hotel getting a reputation for strange goings-on. If you must go out at night, use the rear gate and stick to the forest path. Avoid the Mall road. Times have changed, Mr Markham. There are no private places any more. If you have to leave, you will be in the public eye—and I know you don’t want that …’
‘No, I can’t leave this place. I’ll stick to my room. You’ve been good to me, Mr Negi.’
‘That’s all right. I’ll see that you get what you need. Just keep out of sight.’
So Markham confined himself to his room for a week, two weeks, three, while the monsoon rains swept across the hills, and a clinging mist gave everything a musty, rotting smell. By mid-August, life in a hill station can become quite depressing for its residents. The absence of sunshine has something to do with it, Even strolling along the Mall is not much fun when a thin, cloying drizzle is drifting into your face. No wonder some take to drink. The hotel bar had a few more customers than usual, although the carpet stank of mildew and rats’ urine.
Markham made friends with a shrew that used to visit his room. Shrews have poor eyesight and are easily caught and killed. But as they are supposed to bring good fortune, they were left alone by the hotel staff. Markham was grateful for a little company, and fed his shrew biscuits and dry bread. It moved about his room quite freely and slept in the bottom drawer of his dressing table. Unlike the cat, it had no objection to Markham’s face or lack of it.
Towards the end of August, when there was still no relief from the endless rain and cloying mist, Markham grew restless again. He made one brief, nocturnal visit to the park behind the hotel, and came back soaked to the skin. It seemed a pointless exercise, tramping through the long, leech-infested grass. What he really longed for was to touch that piano again. Bits of old music ran through his head. He wanted to pick out a few tunes on that cracked old instrument in the deserted ballroom.
The rain was thundering down on the corrugated tin roofs. There had been a power failure—common enough on nights like this—and most of the town, including the hotel, had been plunged into darkness. There was no need of mask or cape. No need for his false nose, either. Only in the occasional flashes of lightning could you see his torn and ravaged countenance.
Markham slipped out of his room and made his way through the cellars beneath the ballroom. It was a veritable jungle down there. No longer used as a wine cellar, the complex was really a storeroom for old and rotting furniture, rusty old boilers from another age, broken garden urns, even a chipped and mutilated statue of Cupid. It had stood in the garden in former times; but recently the town municipal committee had objected to it as being un-Indian and obscene, and so it had been banished to the cellar.
Th
at had been several years ago, and since then no one had been down into the cellars. It was Markham’s short cut to the living world above.
It had stopped raining, and a sliver of moon shone through the clouds. There were still no lights in the hotel. But Markham was used to darkness. He slipped into the ballroom and approached the old piano.
He sat there for half an hour, strumming out old tunes.
There was one old favourite that kept coming back to him, and he played it again and again, recalling the words as he went along.
Oh, pale dispenser of my joys and pains,
Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,
How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins
Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell.
The words of Laurence Hope’s Kashmiri love song took him back to happier times when life seemed full of possibilities. And when he came to the end of the song, he felt his loss even more passionately:
Pale bands, pink-tipped, like lotus buds that float
On these cool waters where we used to dwell,
I would rather have felt you round my throat
Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!
He had loved and been loved once. But that had been a long, long time ago. Pale hands he’d loved, beside the Shalimar …
He stopped playing. All was still.
Should he return to his room now, and keep his promise to Negi? But then again, no one was likely to be around on a night like this, reasoned Markham; and he had no intention of entering any of the rooms. Through the glass doors at the other end of the ballroom he could see a faint glow, as of a firefly in the darkness. He moved towards the light, as a moth to a flame. It was the chowkidar’s lantern. He lay asleep on an old sofa, from which the stuffing was protruding.
Markham’s was a normal mind handicapped by a physical abnormality. But how long can a mind remain normal in such circumstances?
Markham took the chowkidar’s lamp and advanced into the lobby. Moth-eaten stag heads stared down at him from the walls. They had been shot about a hundred years ago, when the hunting of animals had been in fashion. The taxidermist’s art had given them a semblance of their former nobility; but time had taken its toll. A mounted panther’s head had lost its glass eyes. Even so, thought Markham wryly, its head is in better shape than mine!
The door of the barroom opened to a gentle pressure. The bartender had been tippling on the quiet and had neglected to close the door properly. Markham placed the lamp on a table and looked up at the bottles arrayed in front of him. Some foreign wines, sherries and vermouth. Rum, gin and vodka. He’d never been much of a drinker; drink went to his head rather too quickly, he’d always know that. But the bottles certainly looked attractive and he felt in need of some sustenance, so he poured himself a generous peg of whisky and drank it neat. A warm glow spread through his body. He felt a little better about himself. Life could be made tolerable if he had more frequent access to the bar!
Pacing about in her room on the floor above, Mrs Khanna heard a noise downstairs. She had always suspected the bartender, Ram Lal, of helping himself to liquor on the quiet. After ten o’clock, his gait was unsteady, and in the mornings he often turned up rather groggy and unshaven. Well, she was going to catch him red-handed tonight!
Markham sat on a bar stool with his back to the swing doors. Mrs Khanna, entering on tiptoe, could only make out the outline of a man’s figure pouring himself a drink.
The wind in the passage muffled the sound of Mrs Khanna’s approach. And anyway, Markham’s mind was far away, in the distant Shalimar Bagh where hands, pink-tipped, touched his lips and cheeks, his face yet undespoiled.
‘Ram Lal!’ hissed Mrs Khanna, intent on scaring the bartender out of his wits. ‘Having a good time again?’
Markham was startled, but he did not lose his head. He did not turn immediately.
‘I’m not Ram Lal, Mrs Khanna,’ said Markham quietly. ‘Just one of your guests. An old resident, in fact. You’ve seen me around before. My face was badly injured a long time ago. I’m not very nice to look at. But there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’m quite normal, you know.’
Markham got up slowly. He held his cape up to his face and began moving slowly towards the swing doors. But Mrs Khanna was having none of it. She reached out and snatched at the cape. In the flickering lamplight she stared into that dreadful face. She opened her mouth to scream.
But Markham did not want to hear her screams again. They shattered the stillness and beauty of the night. There was nothing beautiful about a woman’s screams—especially Mrs Khanna’s.
He reached out for his tormentor and grabbed her by the throat. He wanted to stop her screaming, that was all. But he had strong hands. Struggling, the pair of them knocked over a chair and fell against the table.
‘Quite normal, Mrs Khanna,’ he said, again and again, his voice ascending. ‘I’m quite normal!’
Her legs slid down beneath a bar stool. Still he held on, squeezing, pressing. All those years of frustration were in that grip. Crushing out life and waving it farewell!
Involuntarily, she flung out an arm and knocked over the lamp. Markham released his grip; she fell heavily to the carpet. A rivulet of burning oil sped across the floor and set fire to the hem of her nightgown. But Mrs Khanna was now oblivious to what was happening. The flames took hold of a curtain and ran up towards the wooden ceiling.
Markham picked up a jug of water and threw it on the flames. It made no difference. Horrified, he dashed through the swing doors and called for help. The chowkidar stirred sluggishly and called out: ‘Khabardar! Who goes there?’ He saw a red glow in the bar, rubbed his eyes in consternation and began looking for his lamp. He did not really need one. Bright flames were leaping out of the French windows.
‘Fire!’ shouted the chowkidar, and ran for help.
The old hotel, with its timbered floors and ceilings, oaken beams and staircases, mahogany and rosewood furniture, was a veritable tinderbox. By the time the chowkidar could summon help, the fire had spread to the dining room and was licking its way up the stairs to the first-floor rooms.
Markham had already ascended the staircase and was pounding on doors, shouting, ‘Get up, get up! Fire below!’ He ran to the far end of the corridor, where Negi had his room, and pounded on the door with his fists until Negi woke up.
‘The hotel’s on fire!’ shouted Markham, and ran back the way he had come. There was little more that he could do.
Some of the hotel staff were now rushing about with buckets of water, but the stairs and landing were ablaze, and those living on the first floor had to retreat to the servants’ entrance, where a flight of stone steps led down to the tennis courts. Here they gathered, looking on in awe and consternation as the fire spread rapidly through the main building, showing itself at the windows as it went along. The small group on the tennis courts was soon joined by outsiders, for bad news spreads as fast as a good fire, and the townsfolk were not long in turning up.
Markham emerged on the roof and stood there for some time, while the fire ran through the Empire Hotel, crackling vigorously and lighting up the sky. The people below spotted him on the roof, and waved and shouted to him to come down. Smoke billowed around him, and then he disappeared from view.
It was a fire to remember. The town hadn’t seen anything like it since the Abbey School had gone up in flames forty years earlier, and only the older residents could remember that one. Negi and the hotel staff could only watch helplessly as the fire raged through the old timbered building, consuming all that stood in its way. Everyone was out of the building except Mrs Khanna, and as yet no one had any idea as to what had happened to her.
Towards morning it began raining heavily again, and this finally quenched the fire; but by then the buildings had been gutted, and the Empire Hotel, that had stood protectively over the town for over a hundred years, was no more.
Mrs Khanna’s charred body was recovered from the ruins. A teleg
ram was sent to Mr Khanna in Geneva, and phone calls were made to sundry relatives and insurance offices. Negi was very much in charge.
When the initial confusion was over, Negi remembered Markham and walked around to the rear of the gutted building and down the cellar steps. The basement and the cellar had escaped the worst of the fire, but they were still full of smoke. Negi found Markham’s door open.
Markham was stretched out on his bed. The empty bottle of sleeping tablets on the bedside table told its own story; but it was more likely that he had suffocated from the smoke.
Markham’s artificial nose lay on the dressing table. Negi picked it up and placed it on the dead man’s poor face.
The hotel had gone, and with it Negi’s livelihood. An old friend had gone too. An era had passed. But Negi was the sort who liked to tidy up afterwards.
Whistling in the Dark
The moon was almost at the full. Bright moonlight flooded the road. But I was stalked by the shadows of the trees, by the crooked oak branches reaching out towards me—some threateningly, others as though they needed companionship.
