The setting sun far off in the distance casting a red fiery glow on the mountain cliffs behind me,a orange red light splayed on the rock by the hidden nooks and crannies carved in the mountains,and a deep blue sea infront, blue foamy water lit by sparkling iriscident luminosity,the kind that makes you think of a million lights twinkling inside a red orange bubble at the same time.

The wind sweeping against you,cold cold wind feeling like the embrace of a long lost friend,chilling the sweat in your shirt,making you feel the exhilaration of living.

Dusk is the best time for riding a bike.

The air is cold, there's no stress for the upcoming day,the roads are empty and everything will sing to you if you just let it sing.

The sea looks warm and inviting,sea gulls camping on the lighthouse in the distance, their cries breaking through the churning water,the shore receding and languishing periodically, disheartened by the rejection of land but still trying to come back to it.

There's a ship out there,peeking from behind the lighthouse,far off in the distance, alone and non descript,lonely without an anchor to anything that would keep it ashore.

Exactly like me.

Every morning for the past fourteen years I have travelled to this place on this same exact date.

On the anniversary of a reawakening,of a magical experience beyond joy and grief and fate.

Every year to just find someone who would have never even wanted that honor

A house in the hills,with an old man living in solitude and a garden with an apple tree and a dog whose eyes sparkled when you called his name.

Memories rewind in my mind as it all comes to that fateful day,when everything changed.

The first moment I realised I had started hating Jack Torrance was the moment I saw the red black cadillac besides him,after school in the parking lot,him showing it off to everyone who'd love to see that beautiful beautiful car.

Everyone in the school flocking to see it,a rarity of immense proportions in a school like ours.

I didn't go to see it though,even though I  love cadillacs.

Mostly because I hated Jack but that wasn't the main reason, after all even I could have forgotten my hate for a nice cadillac.

 I didn't need to see it though.

I had already seen it a hundred times in the past.

That was my dead father's car after all.

Jack was the golden boy,sweet haired and a popular star in the school.His father a practising attorney and his mother born in money.

He lived a golden life, popular and charismatic,good looking,well read and loved by almost everyone.

Everyone except me.

Being beaten everyday by him and his cronies never made for a good friendship story after all.

Jack hated me with a passion(I still don't understand why),but it was probably because I was the only one who was never really swept up by his presence and I was the only who didn't give a fuck about him winning this or that sports meet or banging that hot chick.

Maybe he thought it was me just  trying to steal his shine by acting cool.

But I was just disconnected.

Disconnected from everyone, disconnected from a normal life and mayhaps disconnected from myself too.

I had stopped caring about living itself.

My father lost all his fortune three years back in the stock market crash,and it spiralled into us losing all our finances to the creditors,the banks  selling and pawning off everything we had ever owned to pay off the debts we couldn't pay.

The cadillac being sold to Jacks father was just a consequence of that process.

My father,a proud but good man,forced to live in a six by six  flat after having lived all his life in an aristocratic house,couldn't bear the insult.His paranoia spreading inside him like a malignancy,everytime someone tried to comfort or help him, he'd lash out with venom in his words.

Anger and disappointment making him a bitter bitter man,and like all bitter men he turned to the bottle to hide his miseries.

Maybe being forced to work at the local McDonald's,serviing the same people who used to beg for his favour just a few years back was the final straw in the back.

A man without money is a terrible affliction,friends leave you,your wife doesn't care, your children hate you,and you're just gods lonely man,suffering in your own misery and filth, condemned to live in a place which never really cared about you but only your money.

Him looking at the TV set with unfocused eyes,his hands changing the channels but his mind in a different space,a dead place from where he could never come back,food stains on his Ralph lauren shirts,his face grimy and hair unwashed with a week's toil,beer bottles adorning his sides.

It'd have been better if my mother could have picked the pace but she was a rich socialite and couldn't handle poverty.

Nervous breakdowns were common,the meds making her just more addicted to them,her taking out her anger on me and my sister.

Me trying to shield my sister and failing.

Friendship bought with money never last, lack of money taking it away and this my mother failed to realise as she racked up a hundred thousand dollars of debt trying to emulate her previous lifestyle, gifting her friends with the latest accesories,just a vain attempt to placate her own obsessive pride.

My mother despising my father all the more in this quest to keep hold of ger own narrow self worth.

But all this ended one sunlit day,when my mother stole my father's pistol from his almirah and shot him in the head at point blank range,taking him away from his vapid misery.

Then turning the gun towards her temple she took her own life.

I still don't understand why she let me and my sister live,maybe some kernel of maternal affection still did exist insider her heart and maybe her suicide was just a calculated attempt of her to let us have a new start at life,the insurance money paying out a hundred thousand dollars for her death,but the money went away in paying most of her debt.

I still wish I could ask her just why?

Why let me live?

Sister drifted apart as soon as mother took her life,using the insurance payout to buy accesories that she never had before, getting into fumbling relationships with older men to fund her lifestyle when there was nothing left of the insurance money.

Nights where she came in at two,hair messed up, mascara ruined,drunk and not able to even walk.

And me sitting in the living room,at the same spot where my father used to,in the dark, looking through the wall to a place where all good things happen to good people.

Maybe she wanted me to say something,to stop her from becoming what she hated?

Maybe she wanted me to man the fuck up?

Maybe I was the one in the wrong?

Life was a cruel malady and we are all just playthings livin' Inna cruel dramatization.

So needless to say I was feeling marauded as Jack pushed my face into his car's windshield later that afternoon, forcing me to look at him making a mockery of my dead father's car, forcing me to acknowledge my tragedy, forcing me to face what I never really wanted to face.

Rage took me,subsuming my body in hatred,this person needed to die, anything else would be less than just.

In a supreme effort of will I turned myself away as he pushed my head into the window, and landed a punch on his right eye.

But that wasn't enough,the hate I had for him made my emaciated body a conduit for rage, and with strength I thought I never had I smashed his jaw again.

His friends trying to pull him off me,but failing to do so.

Anger makes a man blind and strong.Stronger than he ever could be but blinder than he normally is too.

And maybe that's the reason i didn't see the rock smashed into my face from the side by one of his cronies.

Blessed darkness.

I woke up in a duvet of darkness.

Night had fallen and every part of my body ached with an intensity that I couldn't even explain.

I was on the local beach,shirt drenched with salty water and dead twigs in my hair,my wounds scraped by dirty dirty wet moss,clots and scabs on my abrasions and contusions.

Jack and his friends had thrown my body in the sea,maybe spooked into thinking that I'm dead and trying to get rid of my body.

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I picked myself up,trudging back towards the town, trying my best to hobble the odd twenty miles back to home and realising as time went on and the miles never decreased that I'd die on this very road.

The black rocky cliffs behind me and the sea infront, unseen but churning and active with ferocious intensity.

Dehydration and blood loss was taking me over, hallucinations and apparitions filling my sight,the pain from the wounds finally catching up to where adrenaline couldn't work at all.

And as I saw two bright fluorescent lights in the far off distance thinking them to be mother and father finally reaching down from heaven I decided to stop struggling and welcomed it's embrace, Fallin down on the road.

My consciousness muttering emptily to me that death doesn't sound like a motor cars engine as oblivion took over me

I woke up on a bed.

Sunlight peeking through the windows and a sweet smell of apples mashed with old woody smell of antiques filling my nose,

Old Victorian architecture surrounding me, something from the eighteen ninetys,

Trying to stand up I saw the bandages on my arms and the splint on my leg.

Water.

Thirst overtaking all my needs, my throat parched from inside out and as i clumsily stood up to take that bottle off that shelf,i fell down with an intense racket,hadn't even realized how weak I had become.

The sound richocheting off the wooden structure.

Footsteps ensued and as I strained my neck to look at my would be savior,I saw the most curious site.

An old man and a dog enter the room.

White receding short cropped hair and a patchy salty beard that looked unwashed from years of grime,the hunter in his eyes emphasized even more by the rifle strapped on his back.

A black German shepherd with him looking at me with an inquisitive curious expression which was not suspicion,not suspicion at all but plain old curiousity,unused to visitors.

It made me pause and no words came out of my dried mouth but thirst made me point towards the bottle and he just grunted , understanding what I needed without a second thought.

Picking up me from the floor and making me sit on the bed with ease,him making me drink from the bottle.

The dog nuzzling my bandaged legs, gentle enough to not scrape at the wounds but firm enough to show me his affections.

I asked him for food,and he grunted again, bringing a piece of roasted deer from another room in a ceramic plate.

Ravishly devouring the roast with a ferocity that scared even me,i took a look at my saviour.

He was an old pockmarked man,short in stature but with an old man strength that belied his narrow tiny frame.

The short cropped hair was probably ex army.

And as I ravished the food,curiosity took over me and I started my line of questioning.

But the only answers I got were a few non committal grunt.

How much time I have been here for?

Where are we?

What day is it?

When am I going to heal?

Every question of mine answered just by grunts.

I was perplexed.

It was only days later I realised that it's not that my saviour didn't want to speak but he couldn't speak.

And as I realised I wasn't getting any answers today, fatigue took over me and forced me into blessed sleep.

We fell into a comfortable routine after that day

Him leaving the house early morning,a bowl of porridge lying on my table and coming back late evening ,sometimes with a successful hunt and sometimes with nothing.

Sometimes he'd leave the dog at home,a sort of holiday for the dog,which the dog would promptly start by licking my face early morning and pestering me until I gave him some of my porridge.

Time had no meaning there,and everytime I tried to explore the house i found myself hampered by my broken leg.

But I could still see that we were in a Victorian mansion,ornate railings, expensive curtains and carpets everywhere,but I could never really explore the house much,my leg in a splint, hurting me even for a little incursion.

The only view of outside was a green garden an apple tree in full bloom in the midst of it.

In full bloom.

In a season where apples aren't supposed to bloom.

In the subsequent days too as I asked questions they were answered only by grunts and affirmations,so I stopped asking .

A yes or no,one would never know.

I was left to my devices in the day time,and gradually I started looking around, trying to ascertain the world I'm inhabiting,a beautiful library in another room,filled with all the books a man can imagine became my usual haunt.

When bored out of the books I'd explore the house,my broken leg limiting my mobility by a percentage but still me trying my best.

And this continued my journey into his house,a broken leg and sometimes a dog being my only companions.

Cut off from the world,no telephone lines ,no mail alone with just a dog makes you think.

One evening while picking up myself from the floor(I had fallen off it during a nightmare)i saw an old dusty cardboard box just below my bed.

There was nothing special about it, nothing extraordinary about the box,it was just a box like every other cardboard box,but there was a pull to it.

It's only later I understood like calls to like and misery loves company.

Opening it up got me a diary and a few newspaper clippings and some black and white polaroids.

I looked over the polaroids.

A young army officer in deep woodland with his friends,ruddy smiles on their faces posing with their guns.

A woman,in her prime, beautiful and serene, elegance exuding from her fair face.

A young man with the same beautiful woman,now a wife, infront of the town church,The man scowling at the camera and the woman playfully pinching his cheeks.

A young man with a beautiful wife and two kids,strapped on a beautiful red car,the kids smiling at the camera and the man happily looking at them.

Then the newspaper clippings.

Army officer found in a compromising position with a junior

Army officer court martialled after being accused of adultery.

Army officers family dead in a freak accident dated 21st April 1989

Woman dies with her children after a fall from the cliff 21st April 1989

Obituaries of three,a woman 34 and two children 6 and 8 dated 21st April 1989

Ex army officer in psychiatry unit after death of his family in a freak accident.

A sense of impending ominosity overcame me as I saw the clippings but the diary called to me and curiousity wine as I picked up the diary.

The smell of old paper with dried out ink filling the room as I opened it mixed with a peculiar smell.

Black ink on yellowed out pages.

A woman's journal of a life that was lived an era ago and all of a sudden I realised that peculiar smell was a woman's perfume.

I started reading it.

Day turned into evening.

And when the old man came back that night I was waiting for him in the foyer, sitting on that ornate table,the cardboard box besides me. And the diary in my hands.

And when he saw the box he realised that the day of not answering questions is over.

He picked up a paper and wrote on it with a scraggly handwriting like someone who had forgotten how to use a pen and a paper or achild who had never learnt how to use it.

You have my diary.

A mumble came through my mouth.

Sorry.

The old man nodded and picked up the diary and opened up the last page,there was a piece of paper folded between two adjacent pieces hidden in there.

He picked the page and gave it to me.

I took it from his hands and started reading him.

It was a diary entry

Dated 20 th April,1959

I know he's cheating on me,and i accept the fact I'm not enough and our two children could not be enough for him.

I'm not a good wife sometimes and I must be the one in the blame,i must have hurt him for him to do something like that to me.

Maybe if I had loved him enough he'd d have never betrayed me.

But now all is done and left and I can't trust him anymore.

I don't know if I should confront him or not, should I tell him that I know it or not.

I can't stay anymore.In this place where there so many memories.

We can never be together, especially not now, I'll leave today.

The car is ready, it'll be hard driving on the cliffs this late night but I can't stay even a moment in this house,not a moment looking at his face.

And as I read through the page and all the dots connected in my mind like a puzzle uncovered I realised the old man's folly and looked towards him, tears streaking through the old man's broken eyes and broken soul.

His eyes reflecting pain and suffering and a deep apology,a relic of days gone past by,the pain of an unanswered apology marrinhyhis face,an apology which was never going to reach his wife and children.

And in him I saw myself.

Loneliness making our souls a breeding place for misery. 

I saw the parallels in my life,of how my own ignorance had led to the death of my family,of how I could have supported father,how I could have been the son he needed how I could have stopped my mother and of how I could have been the brother my sister needed.

But I was not and it was all due to my own hollow soul.

Due to me sitting like a passive agent in my own story, of me looking at my life through a far off lens because of my fear of being hurt.

Not even trying because I was scared of getting hurt.

I had let myself be dragged in that deep dark place of suffering and forgotten that sometimes we are the only light we actually need and sometimes all that abyss needs is just a candle of light.

We cannot always be heroes but we can always be men.

And as I stood up and hugged him and cried with him,our shared suffering opening up the wounds which can never really be cleared up,i realised I have to live.

I stayed there for a week, reading through the diary.

A diary of self recrimination and self absolvence,the old man had continued where his wife had stopped writing out,a cruel tapestry of blame and suffering but later on becoming a tale of absolvence.

Every evening the old man would write out a story of his wife and children and I'd read out that to him and then I'd tell him my life's story.

And as the day of our parting came near, which we both realised,we didn't cry or shed tears or said a goodbye because in the deep of our hearts we knew we'd always have each other.

it was how it was supposed to be.

The old man left me at the town square.

A starlit night above, streetlights flickering on the street.

Missing posters of me stuck on pillars everywhere.

I reached home,light still on at such a late time,my sister still awake.

Maybe she came from one of her another dailliances?

Opening the door made a racket,and as I reached into the parlour I heard my sister running down the stairs.

Tear streaked mascara and eyes red with crying, her deep blue eyes looking at me with disbelief and surprise.

I took a hesitant step towards her, knowing I had no right to demand forgiveness from her.

But there was no hesitation in her as she just ran into my arms

We hugged and fell down,crying together for what seemed like hours,all animosity forgotten in a single second of reunion,me brushing her hair telling her everything will be alright,all will be good.

The next day we went to the police station to take back my missing report.

I didn't talk about Jack Torrance, didn't utter a word about what he did to me,I was going to leave this town forever and never come back to it and that meant leaving my revenge against Jack Torrance too.

I told them about how I had been depressed and had moved to a different city for a few days.

The lazy detectives ate up my story not wanting to investigate and waste time on an already filled report.

And as they removed my photo from the missing report board,i saw an astounding sight.

Jack and his three friends' miniatures on the board, missing since July, approximately three weeks after I went missing.

I immediately went through the newspaper when I reached home.

Jack had also gone missing a week after me.

His car empty at the service road near the beach.

 signs of struggle present at the site.

Near that house in the hills.

Not only jack but all his friends had never come back again.

It was like he and his friends had vanished into thin air with no

A deep sense of suspicion and absurdity hit me,making me fumble when my sister came down asking what we were eating for supper.

I decided I'll go back to that house in the hills,to that old man once again.

A long trek in the mountains the next day was spent in vain, nothing to find,no trails,no farms,no apple tree that was blooming in the garden and no house in the hills.

Nothing 

No sign of anything there.

Doubt had started creeping in my mind, invading my thoughts with suspicion and chills.

Maybe the old man and the house was just an inventory of my mind,to suppress the trauma,just an apparition the mind had conjured to let me survive.

Maybe it was all just a dream,

Tired from the exerting trek I reached the spot where I was thrown on the beach by Jack and his lackeys and sat down and looked at the sea with a deep sense of disbelief and utter astonishment.

I couldn't believe it.

Was i going crazy?

The cold wind chilled my hands and as I put them in my pocket I felt the most curious sensation,i felt a piece of paper.

There was nothing in my pocket today morning when I wore them though.

And with an absurd amount of excitement and amazement I took that page out from my pocket and I realised that everything that had happened to me wasn't a lie after all.

The old man and the apple tree and the dog did exist.

It was the same page from the diary.

Dated 20th April 1959

But as I read through the page I saw a new addition to the page,at the end of the page written in the scraggly handwriting of a toddler learning to write or someone who hasn't written in a long long while.

And despite the bad legibility that 'goodluck' in that bad writing was one of the most beautiful verses I had ever seen in my life.

When I reached the town later that night I immediately went to the town library, the need to know more about the old man persuasive in my mind

I read through the newspaper clippings.

1959,1960,1961

Army officers suicide attempt rendering him a mute as the bullet tore through his skull.

Army officers incarceration in a psychiatric facility due to his repeated attempt for suicide

And finally the most vexing of them all.

Army officer vanishing from a closed psychiatric institution room

And like a mortal experiencing an absurd unexplainable event, chills ran through my spine reading through that final clipping, disbelief and absurdity written on my expressions as I left the Library in haste.

As I stared at that page in my room in the night I realised maybe and maybe god sent the old man to save me as a form of atonement for wht he did.

I spent days thinking about it, months trying to find out that house in the hills.

But as life progressed the mystery stopped occupying my mind.

I moved from that place after that.Me earning a scholarship to the state college for medicine, supporting my sister as she went to become an attorney.

But every year I'd come back here,these few days,in remembrance of my mother and father and that old man too.

Every year on this exact day trying to meet the old man and to know if he reached the place where he thought he'd reach.

But all those attempts were in vain

As the tears passed my curiosity started waning but even my recent marriage this year to my beautiful beautiful wife hadn't completely stripped me of my obsession to find that house, but I was realising maybe and maybe this was the last year I'd try finding it.

We were moving out of states the next month.

So here I find myself having biked towards this place,where years ago it all started.

My cadillac parked in a hotel at the town.

Dusk is after all the best time to ride a bike.

The red fiery glow of sunset on the mountains and a orange luminous light sparkling in the sea.

Today feels something different though.

I can feel it.

Something different in the air today.

A smell of magic and joy and apples permeating the atmosphere,the air smelling sweeter and the world seeming more realer.

And as the night completely blankets the world I spy a set of lights in the far off distance.

Golden yellow lights above in the mountains.

I move towards them and see a trail at the foot of a hill.Walking up through the trail in the rock,i see the mansion far off in the distance.

An apple tree in full bloom in its garden.

The same old broken house.

But anew as if calling me back,to a place that's forever beyond me.

Shudder and chills took over me as I opened the ornate wooden doors

My heart beating in rapid anticipation.

It was the same old house,the same old carpets and the same old curtains and the same old wooden aristocratic chairs and tables.

But It was empty,

Thoroughly empty.

As I moved towards the room I had stayed in years back I called for the old man and for the dog but there was no response

Dust and grime everywhere,wood stuck in ageless time.Abandoned both by time and death.

In the silence of dusk the door to the bedroom looked like an ornate wooden art,and as I opened the door with anticipation of finding an old man and a dog in it I was stuck with a deep sense of familiarity and melancholy as a cold wind passed through me.

The bed was recently made,the covers fresh and white and as I put my hands below the bed to find what I expected there to be..I felt the familiar weight of the cardboard box.

The box with the old polaroids and the diary

I skimmed through the diary tears coming to my eyes,a remembrance of love that could never really falter and could be felt beyond time and space.

And with a flash I understood what I had to do.

I folded the page and kept it in the diary where it's supposed to be, reuniting it with it's better half.

And as I hid the box below the bed once again and raise myself up I knew I did the right thing because I felt a weight lifted off from my heart,like a debt being repaid.

I left the house an hour later,coming down the trail.

And as I looked it at from the far off distance,a last look at the place which changed my life, I saw a shape in the window of the upper bedroom highlighted against the dark by a table lamp,a shadow in the shape of an old man,reclining against the window sill waving a joyous goodbye to me.

And as I smile and wave back to it I hear a joyful happy bark in the distance.