Chapter 03: Off The Road

He was sure he had heard it. The noise that Cecil had dismissed as nothing had been picked up by Shiloh’s keen ears. He strained to listen, while slowing down. The other two bikes were fast vanishing into the distance, but that wasn’t a problem – he could always catch up with them later.

Turning his head so that Sudha could hear him better, he asked “Did you hear that?”

“What? I didn’t hear anything.”

“I heard a noise. It was coming from somewhere out there.”

He pointed to a location away into the wilderness. Though she strained her eyes, Sudha was not able to see much apart from dark forms in the failing light. There were no lights here; no houses or shops. There couldn’t have been a noise.

“No, Shiloh, you must be mistaken. There’s nothing here really. Let’s go.”

The bike had come to a stop by now. Shiloh was looking out into the distance trying to make out one shape from the other, as each form melded into the next to form the gooey blackness that humans call darkness. It didn’t sound like anything he knew; it didn’t sound like anything he didn’t know, either. In fact, it didn’t sound like anything. It was simply a sound. Some sort of a noise. Shiloh’s mind raced. With an IQ over 160, he was often quicker with his mind than with his body. Like now. The bike had stayed still for some time, but his mind was working furiously, trying to narrow down the possibilities of what it could be.

“Sudha, we need to check it out.”

“Check what out? There’s nothing there!”

“There could be someone out there, calling for help. We need to go see if anything could be done.”

“Shiloh, please... We don’t have any time on our hands. The other two have gone on well ahead of us. We really need to catch up with them. Besides, there couldn’t be anyone out there because there has been no one on this road at all. Not a single soul, not a single vehicle, not a single person.”

“Exactly, my dear. If there is someone who needs help, and we don’t assist them, then that person could be lost, since no one is on this road. Think about it.”

She did. She thought about what could go wrong. How they could get lost. How the others would worry. Why it had to be them. Why the others as well couldn’t have heard the noise. Pointless questions. Purely rhetorical. But begging answers. Shiloh’s next few words pierced through the fogginess of the answer=laden questions.

“That could be either you or me, Sudha. Think about that.”

This time, she didn’t need to think. She knew what had to be done. If in case, someone was in danger and in need of help, then they had to go. If it was just the wind acting crazy, then it was still worth checking out, in the hope of saving another soul. Hope. That darned thing again. Busy as she was with her thoughts, Sudha failed to realise the obvious alternative to the two possibilities suggested by reason. What if it was something that would endanger them?

She had decided that they must check it out and see if someone was in trouble. But she didn’t want to abandon the comfort of the Highway. Shiloh knew. He quickly made up his mind.

“I’ll go check it out. You wait here, and call Cecil.”

Trying not to appear relieved, she got off the bike.

“Okay, but what should I tell them?”

“Tell them that we heard some noise off the road, and we’ve stayed behind to investigate the source and nature of the noise.”

“Should I ask them to come back and join us?”

“Not really. You could ask them to just pull over by the side of the road, wherever they are, and wait for us.”

“How long would it take? Any idea?”

“Sudha, dear, if I knew the answer to that question, we probably wouldn’t be here, needing to go there.”

She smiled. Shiloh did have his way with words. Quite an older guy, but pretty witty with his lines. She watched as Shiloh and the bike moved away into the night, her smile fading as the bike faded into nothingness. For a moment or two, she just stayed like that, staring into darkness. There was nothing there. Nothing, really. Oh wait. She had to call Cecil.

People always say that hindsight sees a lot more than foresight. And they’re right. If only the same people could remember that, before doing whatever it is they do which makes hindsight better than foresight.

Shiloh rode slowly forward. Dirt and sand is not exactly the kind of place that one wants to ride a Pulsar after dark. Especially, when one doesn’t know what he’s doing there, or where he’s headed to. As Shiloh moved forward steadily, the Highway disappeared quickly into the darkness that was behind him, while the darkness in front of him was unrelenting. Within a few minutes, Shiloh wasn’t even sure as to whether he should change direction. Which way had the noise come from? There was nothing out here other than small bushes and clusters of rocks. Who would have thought that right next to urban India, a barren desert wasteland thrived and survived? Looking to his left and to his right, he kept moving forward, still unsure. When all of a sudden, he heard it again. It wasn’t just a noise this time. It was a shrill, piercing squeak. It made him want to get back. The thought of getting back made him look over his shoulder towards the Highway. Nothing. In the thrill of coming out here, Shiloh had not realised it – there were no street lights or lights of any other kind on the Highway. Sudha was out there all alone, in the cold, without a single light. At the very least, he thought to himself, she could keep chatting with Cecil.

Sudha looked at her mobile for the sixth time in half as many minutes. No change. The tiny bars that generally indicated that she had network signal range were simply not appearing. She had held the phone this way and that, pointing it up towards the sky in the vain hope that somewhere, somehow, she would be able to catch a smidgeon of network signal range. Hope. That blasted thing again. If only she had known then. In hindsight (another wonderful thing, that hindsight), even if she had known then, there was next to nothing that she could have done. To stop it. To stop life from happening the exact same way that it eventually did happen. To all of them.

Shiloh thought of stopping the bike and getting off. But he decided against it; the bike’s headlight was the only available light here, and he needed that. Turning the bike to the left and to the right, he tried to throw light on the darkness that was present all around. Curse this darkness. Curse this highway. Curse the noise that he had heard. Curse the ---

Shiloh froze. His ears had picked up something again. Something more than a noise. Something worse than just a noise. Fearful of the unknown, he slowly turned his head towards it. The sound had come from a point away to his right, just a few meters into the night. Right there, in the faded darkness of this gloomy night, he could see a bush. The bush was anything but spectacular. It was just a bush. What scared him wasn’t the bush. It was what was happening to the bush. The bush was growing larger by the second!

Sudha had walked a little ways to and fro along the National Highway, from where she’d been standing. She was still trying to find that perfect spot which would have network range. Her mind conjured up frightening thoughts; thoughts which were not based on any reason. She pushed such thoughts away from her mind. She tried to convince herself that not having range here was normal. They were on a dark, desolate stretch of the Highway. Obviously, one couldn’t expect network operators to put in network towers in every possible location in India. Not even Airtel – India’s leading mobile services provider. Sudha started wondering if Vodafone would have range in this spot. It actually didn’t matter much. Shiloh should be back soon, and they would be on their way. This wasn’t a hope. This was a surety of knowing exactly what she expected to occur within the next few hours of her life. Or so she thought.

Getting back to wherever Cecil was, was the only thing that kept her from getting scared. His warm eyes, his loving look, his amazing presence. Oh man! If only she could ---

She was sure she had heard it this time. A noise. Was this the same noise that Shiloh had heard? She couldn’t be sure. If it was, then Shiloh was wrong. This noise had come from the opposite side of the road, away from where Shiloh had gone off into the darkness. She crossed the road to the other side. Straining to see into the night, she was looking to find the source of the sound. Just when she was about to give up, she heard it again. It was closer and almost right next to her. If her ears had heard it right, it was coming right from that small bush which was just a few meters away from her, to her left. She was about to step out onto the barren land to check out the bush, when she froze. Someone was looming up behind the bush. Someone or something. She wasn’t really sure which it was.

At times, when a person is scared beyond everything that has ever been known, the mind tends to wander. It wanders into questions which have no point. These questions become pointless because in the light of what is going to happen, you really don’t care too much for the answers. But the mind still does what it does. It’s the only thing that the mind knows to do.

A few hundred meters away, Shiloh couldn’t move as well. His limbs felt like lead, and his mind was like jelly. There was nothing really that he could do. He was alone, in a place that was quite some distance off from the National Highway. No lights. No people. No anything. And a bush, that had been making the scariest noise he had ever heard, was now growing. He wasn’t sure whether the bush was coming towards him as it grew, or whether him and the bike were being drawn to it, like iron to a magnet. Whatever it was, the bush, which had grown to the size of a tree by now, was just three feet away. And then he saw it. It wasn’t a bush at all. Oh man! How could he have been so blind? The noises, the size-increase, everything made sense now. But that would also mean that he was going to be---

That was the last thought Shiloh’s mind could have, before it lost consciousness.

Caught in in inescapable situation herself, Sudha knew she should run. She also knew that flight, however quick, was a waste of energy – it would be only a matter of time before that monstrosity caught up with her. Her mind raced. Frozen as she stood, there was not much she could do. Then she remembered her mobile. She checked it to see if it had range by now, without hope. There wasn’t any.. Quickly deciding on her course of action, before whatever was about to happen to her happened, she held the mobile down, and switched on the voice recorder with the fingers of just one hand. Once she was sure that the voice recorder had been switched on, she threw the mobile towards a bush on her right. True, her mobile couldn’t record more than a minute of continuous recording. But Sudha didn’t feel like she had more than a minute. Whatever it was that was moving behind the bush, anyone who came looking for her should know about it. They should be warned.

She shouted. “WHAT ARE YOU?”

There was no response. There wasn’t going to be.

The looming shape kept growing to monstrous proportions. There was nothing that she could do. Strangely, the shape made no motion to get closer to her. She parted the bushes in front of her and headed towards the shape behind the bush. Oh my God! Sudha nearly dropped in fright. She knew she couldn’t run – shouldn’t run. But she wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to! Even the thought was useless. Whatever was going to happen to her, her mind had calmly begun to accept it. As it sank into near-nothingness. She was aware of a dull pain in her temples. Then she passed out completely.

Life throws many things at people, as it walks them by. The things they know and are used to, they term it ‘routine’. The things that are unknown, they never fear. They never wonder about such things. Until they come up face to face with them. Until such things catch up with them in a manner that is so far from routine, that their wildest dreams wouldn’t have dreamt of such things. Until those same things envelope them within a cold, deadly embrace. Until they lose consciousness because of these things and all happiness is drawn from them, as a child is drawn from its mother at birth.