Tuesday 29 April 2014

Mystery Men

Jacob looked outside at the rays of the sun which played on the puddles surfaced. The rain had died down to a drizzle and he supposed he would be able to leave the house in about fifteen minutes. He took off his clothes without even bothering to close his curtains and put his towel around his waist. It was not that Jacob was one of those people who hated getting wet. It was just that as of late, every time he went out in the rain, he would break out into hives. It was a strange phenomenon indeed, one, which had recently caused him a lot of inconvenience when it came to being sociable... it was the rainy season you see.

He walked out of the house and into the corridor. His house was laid out in such a way that his room was at one end of the corridor and the main bathroom at the other. His parents and sister's rooms faced each other in the middle and everything else, the kitchen and so forth, was downstairs. So when he stepped out of his room, he was directly facing the toilet door, with nothing in between. He stopped after his third step and looked at the door and blinked, not believing what he saw. On the door, emblazoned with sharp lines was his sister's silhouette in a shadow form. Now Jacob, aged thirteen, had spent a good deal of time with his fifteen years old sister because till three days before, he had stayed in the same room with her all his life. It was only now that his parents could afford a bigger house that he stayed in a separate room. He looked at the shadow and its long flowing hair. There was nothing in between him and the door that could have been playing this wicked game of light. It did not only matter that he saw the shadow on the wall. It was also that his sister was away for the weekend. And that fact burnt in his head. A sensation of fear shook him, and his palms shivered.

Not wanting to go to shower anymore, he was not sure what to do. It was while he was pondering that the shadow began to move. It did not pop out of the wall or anything like that; it was not a being,just a shadow. It began to scroll down the wall like a computer prompt and disappeared below the door as if there was a slit in the floor, which enable it to. Can you imagine a creature that can slide alongside the wall? And something else was scrolling down above it. It was attached to the head of the first shadow and only when the first one had scrolled down all the way did he realize that it was an identical one. A third one soon came down, followed by a fourth and  fifth. This was all very frightening, if that's how you would put it. What was he supposed to do? He wanted to scream, but fear made him silent. He wanted to run away, but his fear transfixed him transfixed. He began feeling nauseous with the intense fear she was feeling, but could not express. Jacob was beginning to feel sick in the stomach. It was as if this trick of physics was a perversion of nature. The feeling got worse as the shadows came down faster and at one point, he thought he was going to throw up.

Faster and faster and faster... the images of his sister were just a blur of black and white rushing before his eyes. Who was doing this? What did it want from him? He collapsed from dizziness and from fear. Wanting either his father to come home from work or his mother to come home from her friend's house, he dropped to the floor and curled up into a ball. Shutting his eyes as tight as he possibly could, he tried to forget where he was and what he was doing. Till today no one believes him and he makes it a point never to be alone in the house. As he went to college, he stayed far away from the home.

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