The night’s watch
By: Aniruddha Dan
Tags: Thriller Suspense, Thriller, Psychology, Dreams

The night’s watch

Mr Richardson hadn't jammed on the door for ages. Probably because he had been dead for two months now. The room upstairs where he lived alone was quite empty. Adding to the grieves, he hadn't paid me rent for the last two months of his desolate life. It'd been about a month now since I heard the sound of the water pipes shaking on the roof. Happened about every night after midnight. Not that the thought of Mr Richardson's ghost coming down back there to bang the pipes hadn't entered my mind, but that would be weird, since why would anyone travel in afterlife just to do that. Plus I was nice friends with him. No way his departed spirit would ever want to scare the living hell out of me. But he did, well, if it was him who it was. Mr Richardson hadn't been doing well through the last few months. He had been seeing his psychiatrist once a fortnight. He was home to a couple of newly developed mental conditions. That probably explained why he got hit by a car just outside the house on his way to his office. He worked as a typist in the local magistrate court and couldn't stop using his typewriter that reeked of a whole other time from the past. Well, Mr Richardson was pretty old school. An old school psychopath who I had seen meet Dr Scott, his psychiatrist only in the last six months.

let me apologize for the late introduction, but my name is Eric and I live alone in the 1st floor of my three storey house. I had let the only room in the second floor on rent. The rest of the place in the top most floor was an open terrace. Mr Richardson had been living there for the last 5 years. He was my second ever tenant, after the first one had to move out on a job transfer. I had stopped feeling sad over Richardson's death since the sinister sound of the water pipes banging had begun. I had been more terrified than sad. But for the last 15 days Or so, it hadn't bothered me a lot. I felt like it filled the silences left behind by my late tenant. It started to sound like more of a lullaby I fell asleep to. But that didn't stop my hyper-curious mind from going down to the local market and buy a Closed circuit video camera and connecting to the monitor of my PC. I had to find out what the 'fuss' was all about. I had to find out what it was.

There had been not even a sound of a pin dropping for the last two days since I installed the cameras. The perpetrator probably had knowledge about the incident and didn't want to be seen. Which made me think that it was at least a human and it had got me scared a little. On the third day, whoever had made the sound, came back to do it again. The thought of what I would have to see the next morning through the monitor had got me freaking out.

The next day, I extracted the chip from the camera, inserted into my PC and put the recorded video from the last night on play at 2X speed. The recording started off at 12 in the morning and after about an hour and a half, the ball finally dropped. I spotted the ungodly monster on the screen. It had made its menacing appearance on a rather small screen. It had two big round eyes, white skin and a terrifyingly graceful walk. It was a big milky-white owl that after settling down on the metal pipes for a couple of minutes, had flown off into the dark, exerting pressure on the pipes. And the sound of the pipes shaking had broken the multilayered silence of the night. That was the end of it, or what they called 'mystery'. It was not as bad, but wasn't clearly the climax I was waiting for. I was gearing up for a more dramatic end to the turn of events, one that would've left me dumbfounded, and just not as terrified when I would want to move out from the place. Because I had nowhere else to go to. But I was not sure what I wanted to see there, but not definitely, an owl. The ghastly creature started making appearances shortly after Richardson had died. Quite a coincidence it was. Maybe Mr Richardson had a thing or two to do about the owl. Maybe someone had to be there when Richardson wasn't, to make up for the void filled with the absence of his insomnia.

One night, I finally gathered up all the courage to go upstairs and try my luck to witness his majesty set its foot on the down to Earth roof of my humble place, with my own eyes. I had looked up on the internet on what owls preferred to eat and couldn't find a thing in my place that the bird would eat. So I cut up some white bread in chunks and took them along just in case it wanted some treats. I walked up the stairs as I approached the front door of Richardson's room by the left. I stopped at the sound of a typewriter. As if it was being played from a speaker. It must be Jake, the maid of the house. Jake seemed to be listening to some 80's music cover by Sixpence none the richer. Don't dream it's over. Unmistakable. It was one of the very few songs Richardson listened to. It was loaded in his worn out music player. But I wasn't certain what Jake was thinking. He had probably got a screw loose in his head. Or he was really missing Richardson that day. I pushed opened the door to make sure what I believed was true.

Mr Richardson turned his head away from the typewriter and watched me stand in disbelief. I stood there frozen, keeping eye contact with thr guy I knew was dead.

Mr Richardson didn't utter a word. He sat by the coffee table. Then he pulled one of the drawers in his cupboard and finally spoke

"I want you to see this.. "

He took out a micro sd memory chip and put it in his cell phone.

"Mr Richardson, how could you possibly.. " I muttered. Richardson stopped me midway and set the video on play. It was taken by a closed circuit video camera like the one I had bought. He kept rewinding the tape until it showed the visuals from the edge of the terrace. It recorded the activities on the street. After a couple of minutes, a yelllow taxi came raging on and run over Mr Richardson as he laid on the street bleeding to his death. The tape didn't look graphic or disturbing to me at all. Probably because someone was making me watch the video tape of their own death. Richardson was wearing a red t-shirt and blue trousers when the cab had run him over. The outfit that he had always put on, on Tuesdays.

All of a sudden, Mr Richardson stood up from the bed and grabbed me by my shoulders and demanded "Who are you? How did you get here? "

But I was in luck. I heard voices outside the door. Somebody knocked on the door violently.

"So it was you that night who.. " Richardson got interrupted with the door getting kicked open by Dr Scott, Mr Richardson's psychiatrist.

Dr Scott stormed in, almost ignoring my presence in the room and grabbed Mr Richardson by his shoulders, just like Richardson was still holding mine..

"Who are you talking to. Eric is dead. He's been dead for two fucking months. You've got to let him go, Richardson.. " Dr Scott continued..

"You've seen him get hit by the car. Remember? He was just wearing your clothes that day, 'cause he'd forgotten to pick his from the laundry the previous day. That's not you, that's him.. Get over it."

With that Dr Scott slapped him in the face.

"I have seen him steal my cameras that night."

Richardson snapped at Dr Scott.

"That was you. It's either you or it didn't happen.."

After a pause, Dr Scott took out a medically used syringe with a needle at the front end of it.

"Richardson, you know all about this. It's you who had called me to tell me to come over an hour ago. Remember. You said you were having trouble.."

"Trouble is a friend. Haven't you heard the song yet, doctor. "

"Okay we're gonna get a shot and sleep it off for now.. " Dr Scott said in a rather calm voice as he stuck the needle up his arm and pushed the plunger along the tube.

By then, Richardson's head was already spinning. And so was mine. The clock had struck twelve and I thought I heard sounds of wings flapping out on the terrace. Mr Owl was on his nightly visit again. Lucky I'd got the bread chunks with me. I didn't have much time to think about Mr Richardson as I threw the pieces of bread at the bird. He probably didn't notice them. If anything at all, he got scared and put an end to one of his short visits to the house and banged the pipes on his way back into the pitch-dark. The noise sounded to fade faster than my existence.

I am aware of the incidents that have taken place. Sometimes I still struggle to believe that were true. A part of me knows it was me who had died in that damned car accident, wearing Richardson's clothes. He was sitting on the terrace and saw me die on the street. Since then, slowly and gradually he had developed a couple of new mental illnesses, according to Dr Scott. He was diagnosed with both of those after a psychometric test. He started hallucinating me and believed that it was him who had died instead of me. That's precisely how I came back to life again. My wearing his clothes that day had a thing or two to do with this, probably. In other words, he had developed the walking corpse syndrome where the patient believes he or she is dead or rotting away. The other condition was schizophrenia which, when combined with clinical depression, can lead to cause the former syndrome. One of the diseases was the reason I still exist, and the other why, he doesn't anymore. Well, to tell you the truth, neither of Richardson's mental conditions has a definite cure. So fuck that car, I'm not going to go away from his life very soon. But my existence is a function of that of Richardson's. And he believes he doesn't exist. So how can I. You see, Like Mr Richardson I too, have lived more than one lives. Apparently, there have been two contrasting worlds for me. And only, one of them is real.