A Spiritual Encounter

Charu was informed her grandmother was seriously ill. It has been six months since Charu started her studies at NYU Law School, which she had joined amidst many refusals and objections.

She took the immediate next flight from New York to her native place, Fort Kochi, and landed at Cochin International Airport.

Charu never liked her life at Fort Kochi. The old home, the ancient traditions and the old lifestyle. She lost her mother when she was 12 and it was her grandmother who raised her. Her father, Mr. Mani Oomen, was a carpet exporter. He has two stores at Fort Kochi and one at Ernakulam. When Charu disclosed her interest to study law, he refused her decision outright. And now she was going back to the same place. Her mind was full of thoughts and she was in no mood to think about anything else except her return date from India.

From the airport, she took a self-driven taxi and drove to Fort Kochi, 20 k.m. away from the airport. It was 7 p.m. and the lights were all lit. She directly went to her grandmother's room to see her and there were many machines attached to her. There was a nurse beside grandmother's bed. Charu went to her room and slept soon, as she was exhausted.

The next morning, she took a stroll to David Hall Road. The weather was breezy and the birds were chirping. On David Hall Road, she saw the library open. There was a bookstore attached to the library.

'Old books for sale. Rs. 250 per kg,’ aboard declared before the gate. She grinned. An avid reader that she was and since had nothing to do, she went inside the store. She picked seven books, paid for them at the counter and headed home.

The maid gave her a cup of coffee. Sipping her coffee, she started checking the books. The fifth book's cover intrigued her. It was a beautiful abstract painting of a woman with no eyes but had tears, nose and lips.

She skimmed through the pages. At page 67 there was a polaroid photograph of an old villa. She took out the photo and examined it. On its backside there was an alpha-numeric code written with a small map that showed directions to the villa. The code read: MV02FK09. The map had a starting point at 'Hotel AB*** and extended till the villa. The end point was a drawing of the villa that read ‘Home.’

The photograph created a bug in Charu's mind. She was thrilled.

Well, of course she recognised the villa. It was in New York. She had lived in an apartment beside it for two years and had had a feeling that the villa was haunted; she had never seen anyone in it and yet had heard the creepiest moans, screeches and hollers coming from the house at the darkest hours of the night.

She had had enough of this spooky villa and thus decided to shift out. She found a flat in a nice apartment and rented the flat immediately after she had had one look at its beautiful interior.

Looking at the photograph of the villa, her curiosity grew and she was eager to find out about this mysterious woman. Who was this weird lady? What connection did she have with the house? And more importantly, what was the book about?

To try and find the answers to these questions, Charu started reading the book.

To be frank, the book was bizarre. It was nothing like what she had ever read. It was narrated by a woman who talked about how she was bullied when she was a child. She then talked about death and how dead people were connected to the world they knew. Supposedly, when a person dies, they just get rid of their body but their soul lives invisibly. The common misconception about people being reborn with their memory erased was somewhat of a laughing point for the author.

Charu felt a growing sense of uneasiness throughout her body. She turned to the cover page to look for the name of the author but, by mistake or by fate, it was smudged. Charu felt something was wrong but paid no attention to this feeling and continued reading the book.

The book said that dead people are actually beings who have higher knowledge of how the world works as they can see all the ten dimensions of space. We, as humans, can see only three dimensions. They, as spirits, know the past, present and future with multiple possibilities. Alternate universes, about which we know only as theories, they know as facts as they can travel to them and dilate time at their will. They could visit a hundred future possibilities in a matter of a few milliseconds.

The book further illustrated how the author knew that when a person dies, they experience pain for a maximum of half an hour, and some people don’t even experience pain. They then lose all sense of their body and travel around the world or travel through time as spirits.

The author gave three plausible explanations of any house being haunted. When someone dies and the spirit lingers on, when a spirit wants to make the inhabitant’s life miserable or when a spirit wants human company in a place it had wished to visit when alive. The wails and moans of a haunted house heard by humans at night aren’t just hallucinations. They could be an attempt to scare a person, or a spirit experiencing tragic loss or a spirit searching for a friend.

Spirits cannot see each other, and thus some of them strive for company among humans.

However, some like solitude and preferred visiting countless other realities and seeing multiple futures. Spirits live forever; they can do almost anything a human can with the exception of eating and being seen by other people or spirits. They can even hold things and as long as they are in physical contact with the item, it would be invisible to all humans. When they aren’t holding the item anymore, no matter how close they are to it, it would become visible to everyone.

This concluded the book and Charu was left disturbed. She examined the book. It had dog-eared pages as though someone had read it multiple times. The pages were yellow with age and it had probably been written quite some time back.

Charu kept the book aside, rubbed her eyes and let out a long, deep sigh. There was something mysterious about that villa; she could feel it. There was a strange feeling inside her urging her to get up and do something. On impulse she went straight to her booking agent and she booked a ticket back to New York without even remembering the reason why she had come to Fort Kochi in the first place. All that mattered to her right now was figuring out what was in that villa and why a picture of the villa and a map to the villa was there in a book whose author had been smudged out.

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Charu woke up with a start as the wheels of the plane touched the ground. She sighed in relief; she had had the weirdest dream ever. In her dream, she had been travelling across time and kept re-visiting the past. With no inkling of what future awaited her, she de-boarded the plane with the other passengers at John F. Kennedy Airport and waited for a taxi.

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Goosebumps erupted on her skin as Charu stood before the towering villa; it either had a very eerie atmosphere today or Charu had just been spooked out by the book.

Charu knocked on the door but when nobody answered, she decided to go inside.

The hallways were musty, and all the rooms were filled with cobwebs. Charu swept her gaze across each room, looking for some inkling that the villa was inhabited. Finding nothing on the ground floor, she tip-toed up to the first floor.

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Sophie Isabelle gasped as she saw the first human she had in decades. Her villa had been empty since ages. She had been killed here and couldn’t leave the place; she couldn’t express why, she just felt that if she went out of the villa, she would no longer be able to function as a spirit either. She had no eyes, but she had tears, nose and lips. Her eyes had been carved out carefully, her arms had been tied together behind her, her screams muffled by the cloth in her mouth, and it had been unbearable until Jacob had finally killed her.

Sophie wanted the girl who had entered her villa to go away; she had been alone since decades and having company didn’t feel good. However, one thing she had learned after she had become a spirit was that she could turn visible as per her will. However, this was one of the one of the facts she had not published in her book as she thought there should be something you learn only after you die. Once a spirit turned visible, it could do anything a human could with the exception of eating. Sophie had started writing a book about her life but turned her story half-way through the book to life after death. She wrote the book as if she was a human writing facts, not a spirit writing about what she had learnt. Sophie later wrote about her villa and had even made a map, a decision she was now regretting. But it had helped her feel better, writing down everything. She had used her strange teleporting ability, something that she had never heard of before, to teleport the book to a bookstore that had been selling old books, thinking that no one would buy a book that had such a hideous cover; a picture of her, without eyes, crying just before she had died. She had taken this picture from the video feed from the cameras in her villa. If only she had kept the book with her!

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Charu suddenly saw something inexplicable. For a second she saw the figure of a ghostly girl with a silvery tinge in her body. The next second she felt as though she was weightless, moving while not moving, travelling through space. Everything was distorted.

The next second, she was in the exact same spot but the villa looked different. The villa was clean, the walls recently painted, the floor freshly polished and all traces of the cobwebs and dust gone.

Charu found a note in front of her, written in a neat handwriting.

I am a spirit. I didn’t want you in my house. I saw the future and it ended with me killing you to prevent you from telling others what you would have learnt. Instead, I transferred you to another reality where you read this note, leave this house and continue with your normal life. Everything will be the same so please do not get worried. I’m sorry if you face any difficulties.

After reading the note, Charu was completely flabbergasted. She was in a different reality? What? How was this possible?

Charu decided that she should go out of the villa, get some fresh air and mull things over.

Charu walked outside slowly, her pace that of a snail, deep in thought. However, once she stepped out of the villa, her memories were strangely altered, and she went back home and went to sleep as if nothing had happened.

She had no memory of the spiritual encounter!