The burial

The burial or inhumation of a corpse is the act of placing a person or object into the ground and this grave is the last place where all the secrets are buried and so is the deepest rooted fear within …

Switching off the lights I went to bed after a very tiring day. There was a torrential downpour outside with thunder bolts not allowing me to sleep. I slowly reached to the window still drooling under sleep and looked across.

Far across the hill top I could see that there is no rain over there, but with the moon as the background I saw the shadow of a dog. No, it’s a wolf, and it’s howling. It is said that the howl of a wolf brings disaster to the person who sees or hears it. Already the milieu is damn frightening, and to add to my worst woes, this wolf’s howl. I was squirming under funk and passed my fingers over the cross which I wear and tried to get back to sleep.

For one final time I looked out of the window. In one lightning strike, I saw a giant silhouette with its huge claws which seemed to dawn upon me. For a minute I stood motionless, and then heaved a sigh of relief. It was the shadow of a dead tree with its branches spread like claws.

‘Fear, deep rooted within, is the ghost, responsible for my multitudinous delusions’ I told myself and went back to bed. I was able to sleep for some time but suddenly woke up when I heard a soft whispering.

‘Someone called me, I knew someone called me’. And I heard the voice once again. I slowly reached to the window and looked out of it again. For a minute I clung to the window and was looking around like a kid. When I tried to turn back, I distinctly heard a whispering, ’Noddy…’ and I looked out once again.

It was the most tremulous moment of my life. I saw a woman, no… a girl, clad in a white gown. She must be in her twenties and with her hair falling over her head under the weight of water droplets trickling down those strands, the sight was indeed jittery. I could see her outline. For a while I thought it was some one stuck in the rain but I saw her long nails, I was panic-stricken.

She slowly raised her hand and pulled her dripping wet hair back and I saw her face. Half rotten and with two or three scratches of knife on her face, she looked scary, but more than this the last thing I could see in her face, scared the shit out of me.

‘Her eyes, they are so beautiful’ I thought and in the next twinkling the black balls just rolled behind and I could only see the white sclera of her eyes, and she looked at me and smiled. It was like a demon, no… a ghoul and I jumped back onto my bed holding the cross in my hand.

Suddenly I felt a chill run down my spine. The room has become so cold and my fingers numb. I was not only shivering under the cold, but also under fright. I opened my eyes and looked around. And that girl clad in white dress was standing at one corner still with her head down. With her hands crossed over her chest, she suddenly opened them and spread them like the wings of an eagle and was moving towards me. She then looked at me and gave a wolfish laugh and I could see her canines sharp and hungry for blood.

I reached for a baseball bat and heaved it heavily onto her. The bat hit her face and it turned her face and disfigured the skull and she fell onto the ground. And I tried to run out of the room when she caught hold of my feet and I tripped over. She slowly crawled on her body pulling me down with her claw like nails digging into my body, and in the next moment she was lying right on the top of me.

I saw the blankness in her eyes and her appetite for blood in her canines dripping some sticky fluid even as she slowly dug them into my shoulder and gripped them. Then she pulled her mouth out with a great force and tearing it apart.
I tried to push her off my body and was crawling back under great pain with blood pouring out from the torn shoulder part. She was strong enough to pull me back and dug her claws into my chest and thrust them into it. A tear dropped onto the ground and a few more ensued.

As I cried in vain before meekly submitted myself under the great pain, for one last time I saw her eyes and my eye lids slowly dropped down never to see light again. I could feel her dragging my body slowly.

‘Exhume the body carefully men’ said Sergeant Thomas looking at the stone on the grave which read ‘Noddy James, 1978 - 2008’. Three days later, Thomas and his men were at the graveyard. They slowly removed the coffin and undid the nails and opened the lid of the coffin.

‘Oh my gosh’ screamed in terror, ‘Sergeant you got to look at this’, when he rushed to see the opened coffin.

Later in his report, the sergeant incorporated this piece, which was never made public.

‘… There was lot of blood on the velvet cloth on which Noddy was lying. There were a few marks on his chest as if some nails have been dug into it. A portion of his shoulder part was missing as if it has been eaten. And his teeth had the stains of blood, his fingers and nails also contained the blood marks. And there were nail scratch marks along the inner sides of the coffin. Apparently he was buried alive. He desperately tried to come out but of no avail. Either out of starvation or in a frantic move to kill himself he bit the shoulder part and dug the nails into his chest….’

‘… But the thing that baffled me is his eyes. They dint contain the black pupil nor the iris. They were hauntingly blank …’