He woke up sweaty; again it was the same dream, reaching for the cigarette packet he found it empty. Damn that nurse, what kind of a sick joke was it? Wasn’t he paying good money? He got out of bed and walked bare foot to the chest of drawers. As he inhaled deeply he felt a bit relaxed. He was lucky the nurse didn’t find his other secret stash. He poured himself a drink of orange juice from the fridge and sat down on the divan. Yes he was 33 and dying from cancer. It was spreading fast and eating away his body. Why couldn’t he have normal dreams, of hot women fawning all over him, and worst of all the dreams felt so real, it must be the drugs that they pump into his system in the name of science. As he had nothing to lose and no one to go back to he had volunteered for an experimental treatment. He was rich, single and had no one waiting for him back home. The money his family had left him was enough to lead a comfortable life. He sold some of the properties and stocks left to him and shifted to a high rise. There he waited for the inspiration to hit him. He wasn’t exactly spoilt, he considered himself to be a philanthropist. He invested heavily in the business of his friends and let them do all the hard work while he reaped the benefits. For generations his family had been traders, surely some of it had rubbed off on him. Then one day he saw blood in his urine and the next thing he knew, he was hearing those dreaded words coming from the mouth of an overly serious doctor. Cancer, was the bane of his family. They asked him to quit drinking and smoking, but what had he too lose? He was going to die anyway, didn’t he deserve to live the way he wanted to at least? He fell into a deep depression and went down a destructive path, till one morning he found himself sleeping in a puddle of his own puke and blood. He was finally shocked into coming to terms with his reality. He was dying, and he needed help. A friend of his suggested he should go for an experimental medical treatment being offered by a private clinic. What had he to lose? Yes, most of the days, he couldn’t get out of bed, he felt nauseated most of the times and his skin had rashes which looked like sun burns, but the doctors were confident he was recovering. He doggedly fought on, he needed to live, he wanted to find his one true inspiration and go forward with it. These nightmares were just a minor hiccup. He was thinking too much- that was all. He popped a pain killer he had stolen on the sly and hoped for a dreamless world.
When he opened his eyes he was sitting in a train, he could see the passing country side speeding past, he pulled down the window to let some fresh air come in, it was a private coupe, he could have a smoke and drink here. No one would bother him. He lit a cigarette and felt like a million dollars. There was a knock on the door and when he opened it he saw a lady standing there, he politely asked her to come in. his lucky day, he was sharing a first class cabin with a beautiful lady. Then things start to go horribly wrong; he realised he shouldn’t be able to open the window because this was a first class compartment which should be air-conditioned, his cigarette is unfiltered and as he looks himself in the mirror on the wall and sees his hair is back brushed and he is sporting a moustache, his clothes were fashionable in the 30’s and the lady. The lady slowly started to rot in front of his very eyes. As large chunks of flesh fell off her she got of the seat and grabbed hold of his hand. She was imploring him, but he couldn’t hear anything over the whistle of the train. It was the same nightmare over and over again. He simply dismissed it as morbid thoughts plaguing him but over time the lady was joined by a gentleman, a nurse, a doctor and a soldier. He blamed it all on the medicines he was taking. He had never even seen them, maybe some old horror movie, but he couldn’t remember which one. Slowly but steadily, he started to see things he didn’t want to see, things he had buried in his past.
As a kid he had a love hate relationship with the regular visits to his maternal grandmother’s house. Many wings of the house had fallen to decay, but what he loved most about the house was the fabled “storage room”. His grand-uncles had been rich spoilt kids. Out of the original five he had only seen one. Two things interested them, fast cars and the occult. Special plan Chet tables with a pencil holder, Ouija boards, dousing rods, hundreds of books about the occult and even a shrunken head was part of the morbid collection the five brothers once possessed. They fancied themselves to be occultists, followers of a path not tread by many. In those days mediums were still in vogue and cheap penny novels had thrilling stories about exploits of beings from the other side. Maybe that is what got them interested. After three of them died young and from the same disease, their mother made the other two store their toys away. Clearly there is a very thin line between fun and ruin, or at least that is what their mother thought. The fourth brother died in a car accident, he had survived and had even managed to get out of the car. The people who rushed to help him found him in a delirious state. He kept repeating that “IT” had come to get him, but the man was clearly delirious. He died on his way to the hospital. His maternal grand mother walled up the room where the artefacts were kept and even did some several purifying ceremonies to cleanse the house from the evil eye. The neighbours spoke in hushed tones about the family curse; the rumours got so out of hand that if anyone in the vicinity got ill or died under “mysterious circumstances” the deaths were attributed to the cursed house. There were even claims that whoever tried to remove the artefacts fell ill and died under mysterious circumstances. Even as a young boy, the house had a strange allure for him, and it is there he had his first brushes from the other side. Though no one believed him, he did see shadows floating on the walls, and hear voices creeping down long dark hallways. So sure was of a boy, his age, asking him to come and play with him, that when it was challenged by everyone around him he didn’t eat for a day. The nights were always scary, as he lay huddled close to his grandma he could hear strange noises, whispers tempting him to get out of the bed and screams muffled by the noise of the howling wind- even though not a leaf moved outside the window. And he remembered how his grand uncle always had a smile on his face and listened to him, he was his only confidant in that house, and he always told the best stories. With him he felt safe, and he didn’t have to fear. Slowly and steadily over the years he had forgotten about his experiences as a kid, and anyway kids do have an overactive imagination. Most of those memories were lost to him until he started the experimental treatment for the disease which had killed most of his granduncles.
As the days went by he started to hear whispers, and see things. The doctors had warned him that he must tell them if he suffered from hallucinations. It would mean the treatment was not working, the disease having spread to his brain stem; but he was getting better. There was regression of the disease in some places. This was a battle for his life, and foolish hallucinations won’t stop him from getting better. Though his sprit was high; his body was slowly getting tired. He had become dependent on the pain meds to get some sleep but even they didn’t help anymore, his nightmare became extended, he suffered from night frights, his entire body would seize up and even though he willed it, he couldn’t wake up. Slowly he was becoming trapped in a hellish world. He tried the meditation classes offered by the clinic to prevent his dream world from going haywire. He attributed the whispers he heard and the shadows he saw moving about to the lack of sleep and the pain medication. He had stopped shaving and began to lose his grip on reality. He dreaded the darkness; he slept with his room’s light switched on, and even kept an icon on his bed side table- it is funny how people rediscover religion in moments of dire despair. Human beings are hypocritical by their very nature. One really couldn’t blame him, events around him escalating at an alarming pace. At night he would sometimes have to hide his head under the pillow to escape the gazes of the apparitions which filled up his room. He was sure he was losing his mind, but he was scared to report, they might take him off the treatment. His health began to fail and he went into a relapse. And the escalation of his hallucinations didn’t help. Soon, he could smell weird fragrances and sometimes putrid, pungent smells assaulted his senses. A red stain appeared on his carpet, and reappeared on the one which was sent up as its replacement. The nurses were scared of him and only came in to administer his medication. The violent tendencies he began to show didn’t go well with them. An in house psychiatrist was asked to intervene; it was common that cancer patients needed counselling. It was he who suggested that he should go and sit down at the garden and not lock himself up in his room all the time.
The apparitions followed him into the garden, and this time their numbers simply grew. A soldier, an old woman, a small girl with a bad cough, a man in his late 20s with rashes on his face, the apparitions just kept adding to their numbers. He didn’t know what they wanted from him. He tried to shut them out, ignore them, even threw books and the bedside lamp at them; but nothing seemed to work. They all just milled around him and stood there with a vacant look in their glazed eyes. The voices inside his head kept growing, there were so many of them that he couldn’t make out what they were saying, he begged them to stop tormenting him. Nothing seemed to work. He finally gave up and let them torment him. He was trapped in his own personal hell, all he wanted was to get better, but it all backfired; now he wasn’t just dying but losing his mind as well. The suffocation he felt was palpable, there was no escape. He tried to bang his head on the wall to get the voices to stop; the nurses simply tied him to the bed. He kept screaming because he wanted the intruders to leave while the nurses would put him to sleep. Whatever he did he simply made his situation worse.
One day he was sitting on a bench looking at the void when a middle aged man came and sat beside him. He asked him was he real or just in his mind, the man simply laughed. But the man’s laughter drove him to tears. He broke down and started to cry, he blurted out his own personal hell to the man. Its always easy to talk to a stranger, they don’t affect our lives, he spoke for an entire hour and still the stranger sat there listening to him in silence, only his eyes egged the young man to speak on. When the torment had ebbed, the man spoke. There was something comforting about him, even though his body was frail and he dragged beside him an IV drip- there was something comforting about what he spoke. He didn’t call him mad, though that was what he was expecting. What he spoke made sense. He spoke from personal experience. When the man’s mother was dying he was beside her the whole day, her eyes kept darting all over the empty room, as if fixing her gaze from one person to the next. She never looked at her son kneeling beside her sick bed. He didn’t realise what was happening, not until he was diagnosed with cancer. Most people die without a prolonged illness, their transition from our world to the next is smooth. But people like him who were border lining between the realm of the living and the dead break through certain barriers. It doesn’t happen to all who are dying, but to a certain small minority. What their senses pick up depends on their sensitivity. Studies conducted by parapsychologists have deduced that the human female is more sensitive than the male. The man enquired that if any of the females in his family manifested ESP or extra sensory perception. He remembered how as a child his mom could predict things, and would always catch him when he was lying. His grandmother had what many called a healing touch. His brain had not paid much attention to all this as a child. He remembered his mother always told him to do one good deed a day; it would keep the goodness inside him from ebbing. Now he realised what she was talking about. He was sensitive, now it was very hard to determine, how he acquired the sensitivity was unto speculation. Maybe the occult practices of his granduncles had affected his bloodline in someway? Maybe that was the source of his visions? Next what he needed to realise was what were the apparitions. They were the spirits of the dead, they linger about in our realm because they have unfinished business or they don’t know that they are dead. There are certain boundaries which prevent our worlds from colliding, but certain places or certain people make the boundary between their world and ours weak, that is how they enter the living world. The place which was now a premier, private cancer clinic, used to be once upon a time a sanatorium where people with lung diseases came to ease their pain. They basically wanted to die with dignity, but many had unfinished businesses. During world War Two it was converted into a hospital for the wounded. Many died there, screaming and much before their time. Many of the previous patients who had died never left the premises. Their sprits were trapped inside the clinic. Most of them were harmless; they couldn’t cross over when they died and were looking for a way out. But some of them could want to cause harm as they were angry about their untimely deaths. Yes it was very difficult to believe in whatever was being told to him. Human beings on Earth generally reject the existence of a spiritual world because it lies beyond the capability of perception of instruments and it cannot be perceived with the help of the senses. Science is completely ineffective here. As these beings can communicate with only certain people and under certain circumstances, their very existence is denied. Even science agrees that when a body dies it becomes lighter by twenty one grams.
Lastly, the thing that needed to be figured out was why did they come to him and in such large numbers? That was something that needed to be understood. It was evident that they could not or maybe did not want to inhabit his body, maybe they wanted him to free them from their earthly chains by helping them follow through their unfinished business? After the lengthy discussion with the man he felt much better, at least he was not crazy, or even if he was, there were other crazy men like him, around. The man warned that before he tried to interact with the beings from the other world, he must protect himself adequately. He must wear silver on him. The purity of the metal somehow prevents possession by the “evil ones” amongst them. He must carry with him pieces of iron; it helps detect the source of the haunting. As the clinic was built and rebuilt, many souls were trapped within. Armed with this new found knowledge he felt much at ease. He needed to find out why did they come to him?
That night he put on a silver ring given by the man and a silver chain which belonged to his mother. He was at ease, after many, many days, he was finally at ease. He had decided to go to the root of the problem, the girl in his dream.
He took a sleeping pill and waited for sleep to come; he closed his eyes and tried to be at ease. When he opened his eyes he was sitting in the train again. This time he didn’t light a cigarette, he waited for the girl to knock on his door. But that never came….
To be continued…