An Excerpt from That Night: Four Friends. Twenty Years. One Haunting Secret by Nidhi Upadhyay

That Night by Nidhi Upadhyay: What happens when an innocent prank goes horribly wrong? An Excerpt from That Night: Four Friends. Twenty Years. One Haunting Secret by Nidhi Upadhyay.

December 19, 1997 Girls’ Hostel

Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India

Silence fell across the room like an elongated shadow. I felt a presence draw near, raising bumps on my skin. My sense of reality teetered between the real and the surreal. But before my logical mind could take over, the coin started to move again. It stopped and moved, following a rhythm that was significantly visible, even under the candle’s dim light.

Katherine’s shaky hand jotted down the words, letter by letter, as indicated by the coin. She read it aloud for us with a tremble in her voice, ‘Revenge. And I am here to get it. Look outside your window.’

‘Open the curtain,’ Anjali said. Her voice had a slur; fear and alcohol both were to be blamed.

Katherine pulled the pale jacquard curtain to one side and moved closer to the window, holding the candle in her hand. The droplets of mist on the windowpane gleamed in the candlelight shining on it. Something scribbled in red caught my attention, and Katherine’s unblinking gaze confirmed my suspicion. She moved the candle closer to the glass. The word ‘HELP’, written with a red lipstick, made me cringe in disbelief.

The sceptical frown on Katherine’s face meant that we were on the same page. She walked to the window, touched the glass, and rubbed her thumb against her index finger. Nothing. The words were scribbled on the outside of the window, and it was a recent scrawl. Else, the stark temperature difference on either side of the glass would have coated the lipstick mark with layers of damp, making it run like a syrup.

I stared at the windowpane; the letters began to dance. I blamed the droplets in my eyes for this little dance. But no, it was the flame in Katherine’s hand that was flickering. She used her free hand to guard the flame and moved it closer to the red scribble on the glass, illuminating the word ‘HELP’. The ‘H’ had started to bleed, making a red trajectory, adding a more sinister feel to the already eerie scribble.

Katherine placed the candle on the windowsill and cupped her hands to peep outside the window. She had clearly underestimated the utter blackness of night-time in the woods.

Our college campus was situated miles away from the never-ending lights of the city, and the girls’ hostel was further away from the rest of the campus. The building was practically perched upon a piece of land at the cusp of the woods. Even if it were a full moon, its silvery    rays would not have penetrated the dense fog. The few streetlights installed sparsely were not enough to tame   the wilderness of the forest around us.

‘I can’t see a thing,’ Katherine said, trying to stem the tide of fear.

A shiver ran down my spine too, causing a tremble.

‘You can’t break contact, or it will haunt us all!’ Riya warned and pointed to my hand. My finger had lost the grip on the coin. Anjali’s, Natasha’s, and Riya’s pointers were still resting at the edge of the coin. I got a handle on my nerves and placed my pointer firmly on the coin. It started to move. The coin jumped from one letter to another and made me reel in disbelief.

Was one of them moving the coin or was the tug in the coin bound by some unseen force?

But the movement was too swift for any of them to pull through without getting caught, especially, with that level of alcohol running in their veins. They weren’t moving the coin.

Then who was?

My question was answered in Katherine’s faint voice. She was reading the sentence that was carefully constructed by stringing the letters indicated by the coin, ‘I want to talk. Can I come inside?’

Katherine looked at all of us with shock in her eyes, as if one of us had the answer to the turn of events that her logical mind could not comprehend. My suspicion that it was all a prank evaporated after reading Katherine’s troubled expression. I hastily swallowed the tears stinging the back of my eyes, but the growing fear soon made itself felt in every part of my body, blurring the boundaries of the real and the surreal.

‘Are you here?’ Anjali asked.

Her controlled demeanour again raised the alarm in my head.

They are fooling you.

But before I could jump to any conclusion, the coin moved and spelt out the word ‘Yes’.

‘Where are you?’ Anjali asked, throwing a furtive glance at the window.

The room was cloaked in silence. Yet, I heard a thud, a loud continuous thud. It was my heart beating in my ears. Boisterous and erratic. I stared at the coin. It was still, as the air around us. Everyone was holding their breath, waiting for the coin to move, until Riya’s husky, deep-throated growl shattered the silence.

‘I am here, inside her,’ Riya said in a voice that wasn’t hers.

Excerpted with Permission from That Night: Four Friends. Twenty Years. One Haunting Secret by Nidhi Upadhyay published by Penguin India.

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