ROY VILLA

I slid my hand through the broken windowpane, and undid the latch. The window creaked opened, letting out murky thick air with eerie noise. It seemed to have been chained there for ages. For a moment I thought, I had lost my balance and was going to hit the rocks below, but I was fortunate enough to have my friend Rohit along with me, who held me up from behind.

We climbed inside and were now in a room, which I guess might have been the dining room from the kind of furniture that occupied the room. A few oil portraits hung on the walls, with thick layers of dust left them beyond recognition. We didn’t bother to wipe off the dust to see who the faces were. With each step the wooden floor creaked beneath our weight which sent shivers down our spine.

We continued our solitary vigil inside the house but sound of heavy breathing, probably someone in late fifties made us stand still outside a door, we stopped to give it ear but it stopped. I guess we had disturbed someone in sleep. We stood still but we didn’t hear the breathing again. Curiosity drove us to enter the room. A victorian four-poster bed in dilapidated state stood in the middle of the room with a ragged mattress on it, which might have belonged to the previous occupant.

In the moonlight that filtered through the stained glass, what we saw made our hair stand on it’s end. Someone was sleeping inside. Body weight had made shape on the mattress. We checked beneath the bed, but there was no one hiding there. Rohit checked the window latches and to his surprise they seemed to be bolted for ages. We looked into each other eyes and fear was clearly visible. I guess we had made the wrong decision to visit Roy Villa, specially by this time of the night, when previously we had heard hundreds of stories about it being haunted.

We quickly ran out of the room, ran the length of the passage in no time before arriving at the staircase. ‘Wait , what was that ?’, I asked Rohit pantingly, but he was as clueless as I. We were hearing a voice, very heavy yet innocent. It was inviting us. Wanted to talk science, philosophy or religion, it was difficult to distinguish. Out of fear we ran downstairs into a big hall with tiled floor. With bill remaining unpaid by it’s previous occupant, the electricity supply was cut decades ago, so we had streaming moonlight coming in through broken window panes to help us find our way out.

We tried hard pushing the main door, so that the padlock would succumb to our strengths and let us out, but it stood there like a honest guard, serving faithfully it’s master like the hundred and fifteen years it had served. We ran towards the nearest window, tried our might to open it, but it too didn’t give in so easily unless Rohit struck at it with a broken leg of a chair, which he found in the hall.

Roy Villa popularly known as Sister Nivedita’s residence among people of Darjeeling, stands atop a cliff overlooking the Lebong Race Course with majestic Kanchenjunga forming the backdrop, a hundred and fifteen years mansion and as many secrets.

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