The House of Strange Stories

A Dreadful Gurgle by Ruskin Bond

          Have you ever woken up in the night to find someone in your bed who wasn't supposed to be there? Well, it happened to me when I was at boarding school in Shimla, many years ago.

I was sleeping in the senior dormitory, along with some twenty other boys, and my bed was positioned in a corner of the long room, at some distance from the others. There was no shortage of prankstars in our dormitory, and one had to look out for introduction of stinging-nettle or pebbles or possibly even a small lizerd under the bedsheets. But I wasn't prepared for a body in my bed. 

At first I thought a sleep-walker had mistakenly got into my bed, and I tried to push him out, muttering, "Devinder, get back into your own bed. There isn't room for two of us." Devinder was a notorious sleep-walker, who had even ended up on the roof in one occasion. 

But it wasn't Devinder.

Devinder was a short boy, and this fellow was a tall, lanky person. His feet stuck out of the blanket at the foot of the bed. It must be Ranjit  I thought. Ranjit had huge feet.

"Ranjit," I hissed. "Stop playing the fool, and get back to your own bed."

No response.

I tried pushing, but without success. The body was heavy and inert. It was also very cold.

I lay there, wondering who it could be, and then it began to dawn on me that the person beside me wasn't breathing, and the horrible realization came to me that there was a corpse in my bed. How did it get there, and what was I to do about it?

"Vishal," I called to a boy who was sleeping a short distance away. "Vishal, wake up, there's a corpse in the bed!"

Vishal did wake up. "You're dreaming, Bond. Go to sleep and stop disturbing everyone."

Just then there was a groan followed by a dreadful gurgle, from the body beside me. I shot out of bed, shouting at the top of my voice, waking up the entire dormitory. 

Lights came on. There was total confusion. The Housemaster came running. I told him and everyone else what had happened. They came to my bed and had a good look at it. But there was no one there.

On my insistence, I was moved to the other end of the dormitory. The house prefect, Johnson, took over my former bed. Two nights passed without further excitement, and a couple of boys started calling me a funk and a scaredy-cat. My response was to punch one of them on the nose.

Then, on the third night, we were all woken by several ear-splitting shrieks, and Johnson came charging across the dormitory, screaming that two icy hands had taken him by the throat and tried to squeeze the life out of him. Lights came on, and the poor old Housemaster came dashing in again. We calmed Johnson down and put him in spare bed. The Housemaster shone his torch on the boy's face and neck, and sure enough, we saw several bruises on his flesh and the outline of a large hand.

Next day, the offending bed was removed from the dormitory, but it was a few days before Johnson recovered from shock. He was kept in infirmary until the bruises disappeared. But for the rest of the year he was a nervous wreck.

Our nursing sister, who had looked after the infirmary for many years, recalled that some twenty years earlier, a boy called Tomkins had died suddenly in the dormitory. He was very tall for his age, but apparently suffered from a heart problem. That day he had taken part in the football match, and had gone to bed looking pale and exhausted. Early next morning, when the bell rang for gym, he was found stiff and cold, having died during the night. 

"He died peacefully, poor boy," recalled our nursing sister.

But I'm not so sure. I can still hear the dreadful gurgle from the body in my bed. And there was the struggle with Johnson. No, there was nothing peaceful about that death. Tomkins had gone most unwillingly...

------------

A/N - Shimla is a place in India