The haunting of Goliath by a dead David

Grr…grrr…jingle…thud. Ashayna heard that terrible noise at 12 a.m. “Thirty is the new sixty,” she muttered to herself as her heart jumped in terror. She threw her blanket aside and went for the light switch. “I feel old. The bravado of my twenties has left me way too soon," lampooned her frizzled brain. Philosophical rambling about the ephemerality of life aside, Ashayna had all the right reasons to be frightened. There had been alleged reports of a Pichal peri, a twisted-feet witch, roaming in the town. Earlier that day, the cursed she-demon had greeted one of her cleaning maids on the path to the well. “There she was! Luminescent face, fair complexion, knee-length hair—all smooth and glistening in the bright sunlight ("As if the demon world has salons of their own," Ashayna had thought dismissively at that time), dressed up in the pitch-black color of doom, reddened lips as if she had recently feasted on flesh…and her feet! Gah! Twisted backwards!" said the poor maid between sobbing hiccups. “Oh! mistress, her face was cherubic, but don’t be fooled by the child that is playing on their countenance. That is how these witches lure travelers into following them…with their guileless appearance." “Hades’ hell is suffering from a population bust, it seems,” Ashayna had mused sarcastically. Else, why would they be interested in something scarier than themselves? Ever since her little brother had strangled himself to death, a deep pessimism about human nature had settled on her mind. Those humans, their blind devotion to tradition, had sucked the life out of her little brother’s dreams. All of them, including herself, had sneered at David for becoming a sportsman. What else could they do? They were citizens of a caste-driven society. In education they saw the Brahmin; in sports and music, the Vaish.

"Ah! David. Goliath did kill you this time,” she had wailed as she furiously rubbed some warmth into the ice-cold, blackened feet of her brother’s corpse. Goliath wins most of the time. Otherwise, how could the iron-man David be hanging from an iron pole in her house… But Ashayna was saved from the morbidity of her thoughts by another noise, different from before—the growling of her two dogs. They began with barely repressed growls, but their voices quickly shifted to scared whimpers. “Who could be out there on the lawn?” said Ashayna to herself as she felt blood begin to pool in her lower legs. Fear is a funny thing in how it makes blood run in a funny way.

But Ashayna didn’t feel funny. She felt downright afraid. She was raised on Indian folklore after all. Sheshnag, Dayan, Jinn, Asaib, Hamzad (spiritual doppelgänger), Ifrit, and the spiciest of them all; human witches taking newly buried babies out of their graves and taking a bath over their dead bodies on a full moon to boost fertility…the Indian lore was rife with one horror story after another. But what scared her the most was the story of genies shapeshifting into the form of bald children. “Those genies," her elder sister had whispered to her once as they huddled under their blanket during a blackout in their childhood, “have an elastic head that bounces like a rubber ball. And with every slap on its head, the genie-child utters a flamboyant laugh filled with malice. That is scary, don't you think, Shay?" To see a symbol of innocence and hope be ruined by malice and despair, she supposed, was what scared her more than any physical aberration. Humans live for meaning, abstract values that they coin with certain physical acts and things. Trample that holy ground with the imagery of demons-embodiment of distorted abstract values such as malice—and the entire humanity is soiling its pants at night. A genie’s malformed face would not have evoked fear in people had it borne some traces of friendship on it. It is not the physical abnormality that spooks, but, rather, the defilement of ideals of virtue that scares us to our idealistic cores. But even that doesn’t embody true dread. The scariest thing is to see yourself as the Dayan that killed her own baby brother and the mirror smiling back unremorsefully every day.

"If the dogs are whimpering, there must be something really unusual out there because Grandmother used to say, ‘Dogs are the sightseers of the supernatural,’" muttered Ashayna in the dark. Then whispered another voice in her head, that of her recently deceased mother, "The gates of Hell open twice a day: at noon and at midnight, and the demons come rushing to Earth. Never be awake or alone at those times, Shay.” With these old memories resurfacing, her fear tripled and quickly quadrupled as she found the light switch unresponsive to her commands. Another blackout! If India had such relish for the occult, the least it could do to keep its people from having fear-induced cardiac arrests was to provide electricity all the time. It ought to be illegal for a country to pride itself on its vast literature of the arcane and suffer from an energy crisis simultaneously. Ting, ting, jingle. What is that noise? The jingling of anklet bells. It is as if a woman is walking with Ghungroo anklets! Could it be the fabled Pichal peri come to haunt the wicked? “Could it be 15-year-old David seeking his justified revenge on me for robbing him in the cradle?” said another part of her brain. But what about that growling and thudding she had heard before? As soon as this thought flashed in her mind, she heard the noise again. Grr… Then the shrill laughter of a woman followed by running footsteps and then a thud. Again. It sounded as if a marathon was taking place in her hall with runners crashing into walls. All for sake of high-pitched laughs. With every footstep was intermixed the jingle-bell sound of Ghungroo anklets.

Suddenly, the curtain of her bedroom window swooshed as if propelled by a gust, and her window began to creak. As if in a trance, Ashayna felt herself moving to the window overlooking her lawn. There she was! A woman in a blood-red bridal Lehnga, her bare arms decked with gold bangles, and the red of kumkum shining bright in her raven hair. She was barefoot, that much Ashayna could surmise in the bright,full moonlight. And then, that woman turned around, and at that time, all the lights in the house turned on. There was the face of David, staring at Ashayna, through the body of an undead woman…