By Abhinav Saimadhav Yenamandra
If you face the sunlight, your shadow must fall behind you; but if that is the case, where is her shadow?
2 weeks ago
I was walking through the fields by my house around twilight, when I heard someone call for help. But then again, I was in the middle of nowhere. I looked around, just to find a dilapidated house behind the thicket. “HELPPPP!’
I heard the call again. I couldn’t just wait to fall the police when someone was calling with such urgency, so in I went.
It was a 2 story house with a wooden build, which was rare for where we live. The house looked like something right out of Stephen king. The very essence of the house was downright creepy, but I had no choice. The sound seemed to have come from upstairs and leading to it was a set of stairs whose floorboard creaked and crumbled with my every step.
The person continued to call out for help as I worked my way across the corridor, just to find empty rooms. And then I saw it. In the corner of the room I was in, was a young woman, seemingly in her early 20s, chained and the marks on her body speaking for themselves. I was shocked with what I was seeing , her ashen face visibly pleading for salvation. I happened to have my Swiss Army knife in my pocket which I used to pick the lock of the hand cuffs.
“Get up’ I said to her. To which she tried to move her legs, but all she succeeded was to turn a total of 10 degrees. I looked at her legs, aghast with what I found. Her tendons were cut off, to prevent her from running away I presumed.“don’t worry’ I said. “I’ll get you out of here. With this I picked her up as I ran out of the house as fast as my legs would take me. Just as we passed the thicket, I heard someone muttering from about where I assumed the house stood. As I peeked through the leaves, I saw men in suits who were visibly frustrated with whoever broke into the house. I realised that if I stayed too long I would get caught, and I decided to run away.
As we passed through the fields, I tilted my head in her direction. “What’s your name?’ I asked. “Mary’ she replied. It was an unusual name in the area we lived in. “Thank you so much for having saved me from those men. If not for you I would have been dead within the fortnight’. “But why did they hold you prisoner?’ I asked. “They planned on sacrificing me for their plans as they believed my blood had supernatural powers’ she said. Things started to get more and more suspicious. The men back at the house did not seem like a superstitious bunch. I just shrugged it off as there wasn’t any visible reason for her to lie. But I still couldn’t take this lightly. “Would you be fine staying at my place till you get better’ I asked her. “I would be eternally grateful to you for that’ she said. She seemed just a few words away from bursting into tears.
As we reached my place, I kept thinking to myself the real motivation behind her capture, and as I knew that I wouldn’t get the truth from her anytime soon, I decided to do the digging for myself. For the next two weeks, as I was nursing her to health, along the sidelines I was also trying to find out what exactly happened that night. This is when I asked Mary if she would like to go out for a walk, but she refused vehemently. “You need this” I said as I took her out forcefully, to see the outside world for the first time since that fateful encounter. I asked her if there was someplace she wanted to go. “There is one place” she replied. “Where?” I asked. “ I want you to close your eyes so that it’s a surprise when we get there” she said with subtle excitement. I complied with her as she blindfolded me.
What felt like an eternity later, she opened my blindfold. I was shocked to see that the sun almost set, making me wonder how far she had brought me. What seemed like a grove, I turned to her to ask her why she chose this place, when I found a couple of skeletons under the tree behind her. When I looked at her face, it was a smile I had seen only in sociopathic movies. It was then that I noticed that she had no shadow.
By Abhinav Saimadhav Yenamandra
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