The Shadows Of Unknown

"You are whispering some prayers but the god never listened to you, why would he listen now?"

It is 11:57 in the night and the demons have started crawling in your veins like terrorists making their way through a secret tunnel in the dark; one by one, slowly poisoning your blood. Your shadows seem more real than your face. Your face melts like ripe apple melts on being kept in an acid.

Your mother warned you there are no ghosts but no, the journey from your room to bathroom feels like it has been ambushed by the bombs that could shatter your atoms to all the dimensions possible. Your friend had told you how his friends saw something on the dark alley burning at the middle of a night. Your chemistry teacher taught you it is phosphorus that burns at night but, it does not take a genius to see something outside burning so bright that hurts the pupils. You try to close your eyes but the light is approaching you and amazingly you who used to get scared of dark finds yourself getting scared of light. You try to run but the trembling bones, they don't support the motion. The ligaments under your skin have given up the hopes like they are waiting to be crushed by an unknown force which you are sure is stronger than a thousand suns. You think you hear someone laughing, you think you hear someone crying. Your senses like a pendulum clock are dangling from bad to worse. You tell them to stop but they are traitors, they don't listen to you any longer. You are whispering some prayers but the god never listened to you, why would he listen now?

The light outside your window is coming closer. You are sweating every ounce of water you had drank in your life, you might not have tears to cry if the evil could be manipulated with sentiments. You try to stop them, but your skin, your skin feels like an inflated balloon penetrated with a thousand speeding bullets, any attempt to stop the spill would be absurd. The light comes closer. You see he is wearing a hat. It must be a human. But all the murderers in the movies wear hat. Now you wonder if you want that hat figure to be a murderer or a ghost.

All your problems suddenly disappear now. Jasmine has been ignoring you for like a month and you think she likes the new guy from another section more than you. It does not matter. Your father has been drinking a lot and talking loudly. It does not matter. Your teacher today insulted you on your face and everybody laughed. It does not matter. You failed the last test and your family does not even know about it. It does not matter.

The hat figure is three footsteps away from where you can identify him from your window. And now your lungs are giving up. You are hoping this is a hallucination but the clock earlier showed 11:57 and now it is 11:59. It can't be a hallucination. Two steps left. It could be a watchman. Yes, definitely watchman. But he went to his house in village after his mother died. No, not the watchman. Now you are disintegrating in pieces and your brain is ready for one last guess. No name strikes your mind. You call it quits. You inhale wondering if this set of air reaching your lungs would ever make its way back to your throat. You still want it to be a dream.

Final step. You can identify him now. You never liked your friends playing pranks but right now you desperately hope it is them or it is a dream. But it is neither. You see him. And the first thing that hits your mind is that it is over. His head looks like that of a lizard with a hat on. His tongue is rather long and seems to be soaked in glue, his saliva is mixed with blood. He has a broad chest with scales. His feet are stout and large and his soles are gigantic with many toes. You tried to count the toes but lost the count after thirteen.

He looks at you straight in the eyes and says, "You just scrolled and did not hit "like" on your newsfeed on the post on September 13 about me in your facebook. Remember?" Would you laugh?