"Nalini you just made up the story isn't it?" enquired Harsh.

Nalini replied with a strained cheerfulness, scratching her head,
" No...no..not at all...I..I heard it from somewhere."

"Okay, let me share with you my own experience," said Vikash with characteristic arrogance.

"I once visited a village on a ridge, in Dima Hasao district in Assam, some 330 kilometers south of Guwahati. I was 15 years old at that time.

There were mostly tribal people in the village and it was just around the end of monsoons, mid-September.

It was moonless and foggy around 7p.m. in the evening.

My parents and I had gone to Guwahati to meet some of our relatives and two of my elder cousin brothers took me to 'Jatinga' village.

At first I was irritated on being taken to a village and that too in the evening .

Suddenly from nowhere we saw hundreds of birds circling the sky in the darkness, as we stood near the parked car at some distance from the village. The village however, did not rely on lanterns and candles but had electricity. The street lights shone brightly. The houses had small electric bulbs on to evade the darkness on the outside and bar lights were lit inside the small village houses.

It..it was mind-boggling, most of these birds -kingfishers, pigeons, emarald dove were diurnal and there was no explanation....

WHY THEY WOULD BE FLYING AT NIGHT ??

Unanticipatedly, the birds plummeted from the sky and crashed into trees.

It was a bizzare phenomenon.

The birds were either killed or injured as they hit the trees or bamboo poles or the small village house walls."

"The birds might have been drawn towards the lights as a refuge,"Harsh said thoughtfully. "But why would they crash into....."

"It's still a mystery for me,"replied Vikash solemnly. " I still feel weird and get goosebumps remembering that sight."

Anika felt a chill down her spine as she heard the rustling of leaves,wind blew gently. She felt as if someone was staring at her, a shadowy shillhouette watching her from far....

She gently brushed her thoughts aside feeling it had to be her hyperactive imagination.

However, she slowly shifted towards Nalini and grabbed her hand.

Nalini looked at her with curiosity and moved even closer, placing an arm around her shoulders, she held her close lightly comforting her.

************************************

The mysterious lady

They all sat quietly for a few minutes and then Harsh began his story.

" This is not something I experienced, I have never felt or experienced anything paranormal yet in life.

When I was young, I stayed near a hospital in the quarters as my father is a doctor, but now we have shifted to a new one.

I have heard many stories related to a woman who was left in the hospital and never taken back home by either her parents or her husband. Her family even refused to pay for her treatment.

She was pregnant when she was admitted to the hospital, but soon after delivery, she dropped her child from the bed.

Though the little boy was absolutely fine, she had suffered a severe trauma and completely lost her mental balance. She thought her child was dead.

Her husband took the child away but never bothered to again acknowledge his wife.

The hospital authority treated her without being paid, only for the sake of humanity and let her occupy a bed for as long as she survived.

The nurses treated her badly while they changed her clothes, fed her, gave her medicines but she even failed to realize where she was or what she had been doing?

She had survived for 10 long years and then succumbed to death.

Even now the doctors and nurses claim that they can hear her voice and listen to the sound of her anklets in the corridors of the trauma centre, especially between 2-3 a.m. where she had been kept for 10 long years.

Some people even claim to have seen her roam about."

" How can her own parents do this to her?" Nalini enquired heatedly.

"This world surely is a strange place," sighed Rohit.

Rohit was not sitting anymore but he stood straight like a broom left in a corner with crossed arms.

He was preparing himself to relive the moments, he had wanted to subdue forever.

Then he took a deep breath and narrated his story.

" I feel as if it was only yesterday, we shifted to that HAUNTED house.

When we first visited the house, I was overwhelmed with fascination. It was a lovely place to stay. There was a huge peepal tree behind the house and a lot of place to play and run around.

My little sister would always stay ill after we shifted to that house.

There was a huge unused well in the front yard. Most of the times I found her near the well sitting calmly and speaking with someone other than her little dolls.

At first I thought she might have just made an imaginative friend.

But than one day I overheard, a neighbor Bindu aunty tell my mother.. that a young and beautiful girl Priyal, aged 20 had committed suicide in that well long ago and since then it had been left unused.

A chill went down my spine as I again asked her the name of that girl....Ria..my sister had told me about her new friend Priyal di.

It was possible that she had imagined someone as her friend but...
the description she had given me about the girl was exactly similar to the narrative provided by Bindu aunty.

Long thick shiny black hair up to her waist, beautiful almond shaped eyes, she was slender and beautiful.

The most perplexing thing about that house was that though there was always abundance of sunshine, the atmosphere in the house was always gloomy and depressive.

The four of us had forgotten to smile let go laughter or having fun. Something was really amiss. There seemed to be nothing wrong but nothing was right either.

At first I felt may be we just needed time to get used to this house but drastically things changed and new miseries unfolded in a tandem.

My father made huge losses in business, my mother was fired from her job and Ria suffered from high fever most of the time, but the doctors could not find the exact reason behind it."

" And what about you?" Anika asked concerned with a slight frown on her face.

" I did not want to stay in that house. It was fun to stay at school, as soon as I entered the house I felt like something was sapping all of my energy. I did not feel like doing anything at all.

I was only 10 years old back then but it felt strange, I did not want to paint or draw, or play video games, or even watch the television.

It is kind of hard to explain.....but I felt Ria was a completely different person now.

She looked at me with hostility and always was rude and annoyed.
" Don't you dare touch my things,"she incised one day with much brutality and I just shivered with fear, as she snatched her crayons from me.

With much difficulty I somehow persuaded my mother to look for a different place to stay, away from this evil house.

I was extremely delighted, actually a lot more than the day we shifted our belongings to this house when we finally left it after almost a year.

That house still gives me nightmares. I sometimes even today wake up with cold sweat, dreading of having stayed in that house as the old memories tangled somewhere in my brain start playing again and again.

Ria doesn't remember much of those days. My parents too have forgotten a lot of things and they never felt the place was haunted even in the first place."

A/N:I am highly indebted and grateful to you for reading.

Kindly vote for my book if you like the stories and feel free to comment.