Endless Tales of Corona - 4

Chapter 4: The Unbelievable

                                                                                 By Gowthama Rajavelu

When Nikhil turned back, he saw nothing. But the growling noise grew harder - AAUUUURRRRR. He saw the coconut trees shuddering around impatiently. Adding to his concern was the low airstream in the forest. Yet, he saw the trees flapping its nuts and leaves to and fro. It was subtle, yet terrifying. And a shrieking noise emanated from within the forests added to the already existing roaring noise in the atmosphere.

“How is this even possible”, Nikhil trembled in fear and his feet moved backwards, instinctively as the noise seemed to come closer.

***

Matthew, stuck in the trap, was carefully screening Nikhil’s expression from below and started to worry. After a while, he moved out of sight and a huge creature appeared.

Beast Painting by Dmytry Yerokhin

‘What the hell is this?’ Matthew stumbled. Unable to believe his eyes, he rubbed and saw again. It was a massive beast. He looked confused though.

“What could this possibly be?” alleged Nikhil while observing the creature which had a huge drawn-out body like a lion, and with its skin covered by scales like a pangolin. Its feet looked tough like an elephant’s. There was no tail and its head resembled a Himalayan Mastiff.

Matthew looked absolutely stunned, contemplating over his own thoughts. And then he sneezed, which he was holding up tight for quite some time.

He looked up to check for any possible behavior change among the beast and observed nothing. There was no sign of the beast.

***

Nikhil, carefully took his steps, while observing the fast-approaching growling noise. He couldn’t see anything though.

He wasn’t watchful of every step as he was moving backward in dread. Something tripped him up and he fell on the ground. A strange silence followed. Using that moment, he picked himself up and went behind the huge rock that he climbed up before losing Matthew.

The silence continued.

He peeped to get a better sense of the atmosphere through a narrow gap between the rocks. To his surprise, everything around was calm. Yet he wasn’t sure about what awaited and the whole thing was unsettling.

Infuriated, Nikhil clenched his teeth making a cracking noise, ‘what is happening?’

He saw a light flashing from a distance. The light protruded the dense forest behind the rock. For him, it was a jamun thicket laden with dark and shiny plums.

The light flickered constantly.

“Wait a minute! Was it a Morse-code?” Nikhil wondered.

Incidentally, Nikhil’s father Major Swadeep Chand was part of the Indo-China War in 1962. He was placed in North-East Frontier Agency and was fighting Chinese force along the border of Bhutan and Burma. As one of the post-war pastimes, Major Chand used to play with his son. He used to give him a lot of puzzles to solve, as it was Nikhil’s favourite; Morse code was one among them.

He paid close attention to the flickering light, being signaled from the distance. In just a few minutes, he figured it out that it’s a three-letter word.

While cautiously detecting the signal, he was working out the code on the sand.

The first signal was a long flash followed by the short one  – that’s N, he wrote down. 

Next, he saw two shorter signals followed by one long flash – he decoded that as ‘U’. 

The third one had short and longer signals alternatively – must be R, he decoded.

“NUR? What’s that?” Nikhil mumbled scratching his head and that’s when he heard it from behind.

“RUN!”

Nikhil turned around to see Matthew floating in midair. Hanging upside down, he tossed a reddish glue-like material towards Nikhil and cried out loud, “see through this!”

Only half of his legs were visible and rest of it – forelimb – was being crunched by something invisible. He was bleeding profusely from limb to head. Blood started flowing down his limb onto the ground flooding the surface.

Nikhil stood rooted to the spot, unable to digest the scene happening in front of him. Swallowed, he picked up the reddish substance. He was horrorstruck by what he saw through it. His eyes wide open. Beads of sweat dripped down his brows. Whatever he has seen, sent chill down his spine.

“What the bloody hell is that?” he frowned.

Two multi-breed beasts were fighting each, simply to tear Matthew into two. Matthew let out a huge cry for one last time before vanishing into thin air. For this time, he has been torn apart and eaten alive by two monstrous beasts.

- To be continued -

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