Chapter 1, Page 4
noticed the bathroom opposite to the cupboard and took a peak, to find it large enough to be a bedroom unto itself; it was a bit old though, but retained a certain royal magnificence nonetheless. The desk itself faced a window through which one could see parts of the garden down below and this window was the only source of natural light in the room. Satisfied that all was in order with the room, I now turned back to find my wife, still staring at the picture of the inverted human pyramid with an oddly lost expression on her face. She saw me, eyes slightly glazed, pointed at the picture and said softly, “while we were driving here on the expressway, this image of an inverted human pyramid flashed across my mind’s eye. I didn’t think much of it then. But..” she stammered and continued to point at the picture, “it’s exactly this picture”. I looked at my wife, and then at the picture to which she pointed, it looked more like a drawing from an architecture textbook, but instead of furniture or buildings, this was a structure composed entirely of humans. I did think it odd that my wife had a flash of this very picture, and my first thought was that this was probably a picture that a quick google search might reveal and perhaps having seen it before this was all just pure coincidence, and there was nothing to worry about. Although, this did nothing to calm my growing fear; to throw some context here, the building structure, the ancient setting and this new discovery weren’t the only things that compounded my fear.
A few hours before we started our trip back at our home in Bangalore, I received a message from the hotel saying that the room we booked didn’t have an attached bathroom, and asked if I wanted to upgrade to a room that did. I responded by requesting an upgrade but I distinctly remember thinking to myself at the time, that it was strange, a room in a hotel wouldn’t have a bathroom attached; it’s a hotel after all and not a dormitory. Fast forward to the present, and I couldn’t shake this feeling that there were greater powers at play here that were leading us to this place. I forced myself to get back to the present and kept my fear at bay by trying to find rational explanations for all these things, perhaps all this was just a coincidence and the collective set of horror films that I’ve seen has set my thought process along a specific path. I firmly resolved that I would not let this affect our stay. I helped my wife, who was quite unwell now and had started running a fever again, take a dolo and let her rest a while before we ventured out for dinner. It was half past six in the evening and I sat down to do my evening ablutions while my wife rested. The sun had just set and through the grills of the narrow window on the writing desk, I watched as the faint orange light of the fast disappearing sun slowly merged into the darkness of the night.
Having completed my ablutions, I woke my wife up and left to use the bathroom. When I came back, I found her sitting up and staring at the reflection on the mirror behind the bed. I called out to her “Yb, Yb, are you alright?”. She took her time to respond and turned her head slowly in my direction; and with the same glazed look in her eye, she nodded “yes. I’m fine.”; in a voice that seemed oddly different; I mean, it was the same voice but the finer inflexions, intonations and even the accent seemed to be different. I dismissed this at the time as a function of the illness that seemed to have befallen her, but deep down I felt dread and couldn’t quite put my finger on it.