Desi Horror Stories

Manjunath

The tale of Manjunath was born out of an impulse but it stayed on for years. Rohit, who was eleven at that time, hadn't been getting any sleep that night. When the hours passed and he was just as energetic in the evening, his grandmother casually told him, "Go to sleep or Manjunath will come and take you away." She made large fearful eyes and the wrinkles on her face wove closely together giving her the appearance of a cat. Then she made an offhanded gesture towards the large window at the very end of the corridor of the house. To Rohit's childlike mind, that was where Manjunath would come from.

But who was Manjunath?

The shape, size, and character of Manjunath altered in Rohit's mind over the years. As long as he was in that house, he made sure to never go near that window after dark. When he left for college and then to work in the city, he returned to his native house only on occasion. But whenever he did, he would see the window of Manjunath and let out a shudder. As a child, Rohit thought Manjunath was a burly seven-feet-tall man dressed in white who could scramble in through that window and break his slender neck in his sleep. As a college boy, he thought Manjunath was a ghost, and even locking the window shut would not matter to him. But now, as a father of a young son himself, he thought of Manjunath as a child-stealer; someone who did not have children on his own and hence took away other people's children to increase his brood.

"What are you thinking so much about?" his wife, Rashmi, asked him. They were sitting at the forty-year-old dining table in the village house over a meal of rice and fish curry. In Rohit's plate, food had been untouched.

"He's thinking of Manjunath," Rohit's mother said and laughed.

"Manjunath? Who is he?" Rashmi asked.

As Rohit looked firmly into his plate, his mother said, "He had this thing as a child that someone named Manjunath would come from the window and kill him in his sleep. Whatever! Childhood fancies!"

"Mother, who's thinking about it now?" Rohit said, angrily digging into his bowl of fish.

The topic ended in laughter at his expense. Only one person at the table did not laugh. That was Avi, Rohit's six-year-old son. It was later in the night as they were getting ready to retire for the day that Avi asked, "Da, who is Manjunath?"

Rohit felt a shiver run down his spine at the mention of that name from his son's mouth. He cursed his mother for bringing up that topic, mumbled something to Rashmi, and then looked the other side and turned off the lights.

In the middle of that night, he was roused from his sleep by the tiny hand of his son. "Da, Da, wake up!" Avi was saying when he rubbed his eyes open. "There's someone outside."

The first thing Rohit did was to pinch himself. It hurt. Not only did it hurt but it also made him wide awake and conscious. That long corridor was outside, the corridor with the window, and yes, he could hear the sound of feet scraping against the roughness of the corridor outside.

"M-M-Manjunath..." the child said, still pulling at his arm.

Terrified beyond measure, Rohit shook Rashmi, who snapped back, "Let me sleep, Rohit. I have been working all day." She turned over, pulled the blanket over herself and slept.

"It's nothing, son," Rohit said, his voice trembling. "Go back to sleep and shut your eyes tight. That's what I used to do. He'll go away."

"But he'll keep coming back. The way he does for you," the child said.

And that was what did it. In that one instant, even as the sound of the scraping feet grew louder and closer, Rohit realized that his childhood phobia hadn't gone away. It would not go away for his son either. Did he want that? Did he want his son to grow up into a coward too? Everyone told him, very emphatically, that there was no Manjunath. Maybe there wasn't. For a while, he had been thinking of facing his monster. Maybe it was time to do that.

"You stay here," said Rohit with a gulp in his throat. "Don't move an inch. I'll check."

Rohit got up, the old bed creaking under him. He tiptoed to the door of the room and pushed it open. He couldn't see anything at once, because it was utterly dark, and then he heard the shuffling again. His legs quivering like jelly, he stepped out into the corridor and closed the door behind him and then looked in the direction of the sound.

It was his first view of Manjunath. His back was turned to him. There was a heavy dirty ragged blanket wrapped around him. He could see his arms and legs, which were as hairy as a forest undergrowth. There was a stench of rotting flesh in the room. Rohit saw a large sack in Manjunath's hand, which was filled with some lumpy objects.

"Wh-who are you?" he asked, trembling.

Suddenly, Manjunath's feet came to a dead halt. Rohit felt his innards freezing as he slowly turned. He feared he might collapse when he saw the face.

Just then, there was a voice, a child's voice. "Go! Go away, you bad man! You cannot come to our house!"

Rohit could not breathe. Standing in front of Manjunath now, holding him back with his green plastic sword, was his son, Avinash.

"Avi, Avi, step back, Avi!" Rohit shouted.

But before Avi could do anything, Manjunath opened his bag of goodies. As he undid the string, he said in a cold rasping voice that would torment Rohit for the rest of his life, "Don't you want to come play with the others, Avi?"

As the bag opened, Rohit collapsed in shock. There were heads of children inside, dozens of them, decomposing away. He recognized some of those heads—there was his childhood buddy Vijay who had gone missing when he was twelve, Bunty the bully who used to tease him as an adolescent, and Keshav his college rival. They had gone missing years ago—what were they doing in this sack?

Avi screamed so hard that his lungs probably exploded, and Manjunath grabbed him by his neck. The last thing Rohit saw before passing out was the face of Manjunath.

It was his own face. It had always been his own face.