A Face in the Dark

The original  Ruskin Bond's A Face in the dark.....

Mr Oliver, an Anglo-Indian teacher, was returning to his school late one night, on the outskirts of the hill station of Simla. From before Kipling’s time, the school had been run on English public school lines and the boys, most of them from wealthy Indian families, wore blazers, caps and ties. Life magazine, in a feature on India, had once called it the ‘Eton of the East’. Mr Oliver had been teaching in the school for several years.

The Simla bazaar, with its cinemas and restaurants, was about three miles from the school and Mr Oliver, a bachelor, usually strolled into the town in the evening, returning after dark, when he would take a short cut through the pine forest. When there was a strong wind the pine trees made sad, eerie sounds that kept most people to the main road. But Mr Oliver was not a nervous or imaginative man. He carried a torch and its gleam—the batteries were running down—moved fitfully down the narrow forest path. When its flickering light fell on the figure of a boy, who was sitting alone on a rock, Mr Oliver stopped. Boys were not supposed to be out after dark.

‘What are you doing out here, boy?’ asked Mr Oliver sharply, moving closer so that he could recognize the miscreant. But even as he approached the boy, Mr Oliver sensed that something was wrong. The boy appeared to be crying. His head hung down, he held his face in his hands and his body shook convulsively. It was a strange, soundless weeping and Mr Oliver felt distinctly uneasy.

‘Well, what’s the matter?’ he asked, his anger giving way to concern. ‘What are you crying for?’ The boy would not answer or look up. His body continued to be racked with silent sobbing. ‘Come on, boy, you shouldn’t be out here at this hour. Tell me the trouble. Look up!’ The boy looked up. He took his hands from his face and looked up at his teacher. The light from Mr Oliver’s torch fell on the boy’s face—if you could call it a face.

It had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. It was just a round smooth head—with a school cap on top of it! And that’s where the story should end. But for Mr Oliver it did not end here. The torch fell from his trembling hand. He turned and scrambled down the path, running blindly through the trees and calling for help. He was still running towards the school buildings when he saw a lantern swinging in the middle of the path. Mr Oliver stumbled up to the watchman, gasping for breath. ‘What is it, sahib?’ asked the watchman. ‘Has there been an accident? Why are you running?’

‘I saw something—something horrible—a boy weeping in the forest—and he had no face!’

‘No face, sahib?’

‘No eyes, nose, mouth—nothing!’

‘Do you mean it was like this, sahib?’ asked the watchman and raised the lamp to his own face. The watchman had no eyes, no ears, no features at all—not even an eyebrow! And that’s when the wind blew the lamp out.

The End.

The following is a contiuation for this open ending. 

He looked forward into the abandoned darkness hoping to catch a glimpse of understanding if what he saw was a mere hallucination or a mistaken reality. He looked deep into the dense darkness  and waited long, and the darkness looked back at him even more deeper as if asking him to move out of its territory. He obliged, and started walking - no started running to the comfort of the walls and halls of the school like a child running into his mothers embrace. At this thought  something within him stirred, a small light of familiarity that juxtaposed itself amidst  the indifferent black night. It brought with it a small hazy memory that was long buried under the confines of his consciousness. A distant memory of a young Master Oliver running from the school and into the forest while a security with a lamp followed him wondering what made a child as small as him go crying into the night far from the school's madding crowd. Mr. Oliver stopped dead in his tracks. 

Smiling Mr. Oliver climbed into his small bed and turned off the lamp welcoming the empty and eerie silence with a sigh. A few minutes trickled and he finally fell asleep with the words of a drunkard he heard when he visited the market playing on his lips.

"Time certainly knows how to show a pitiful mortal how fast and how far it has passed in the most mysterious and ominous ways."