Suspense Short Story – It Happened One Fight
It is 11:45 pm in the night, Shantanu wakes up to find himself in a house. Almost immediately he can sense the melancholic mood in the environment. He feels a pain in his head and he can see blood coming from a deep wound on the left side of his head. He tries to remember the events which led to this injury and fails to remember anything, not even his name. Suddenly he finds himself to be in a strange state of amnesia.
He tries hard to get some clue which could help him find his identity. Shantanu tries to break the lock of a cupboard where he believes there must be some document may help his to find his name. But, it strikes him that it may be possible that the house may not actually belong to him and any document sans photo would not be foolproof evidence to identify his details.
As Shantanu struggles to decide his immediate plan of action, there is some movement in the balcony which goes unnoticed by him. A young man of average built sneaks into the hallway and is tries to locate something and he goes into the same room which Shantanu is currently in.
Shantanu experiences a sudden jerk when something hits his back and turns back to seen an unknown person is trying to kick him. He pushes that man with some force and tries to get away from him but the man is strong enough not to budge. That man is also laughing at him hysterically trying to hit Shantanu with a shoe at the same time. Shantanu in a fit of anger punches the man and then tries to hit him with the cricket bat lying in the corner of the room.
The punch does enough to shock the man and when he sees Shantanu approaching with the Bat, he is unable to do anything. Before he can say something, he feels the full force of the bat on his jaw and the shock on his face gives way to unconsciousness.
Shantanu inspects that unconscious man to find him breathing and feels a sense of relief. But at the same moment there is huge thud on the main door and lot of voices are audible outside. He can clearly hear people saying
“Today, we are going to finish Shantanu”
“Shantanu, Open the door or you are a dead man”
“Hahaha…. Coward is hiding I think”
“I think Malani has already killed him”
“Uski fat gayi hogi”
Shantanu starts sweating to find a number of people waiting to kill him. He can’t remember what he had done to piss off so many people. But he says to himself – whatever I did but I am not a coward. He looks towards the unconscious man and deduces that man must be Malani, who must have come to kill him. But the question is, “Is his name really Shantanu? If not, then Shantanu must be the guy to whom this mess belongs”.
Whatever the heck, he has two options – either to run away taking the balcony route or face his enemies. He believes that he is not a coward the way his enemies called him just now. He is ready to face them – Let the last survivor win. Making that particular cricket bat his only weapon, he tries to open the door. He is ready for any consequence which could follow.
As the door swings opens, half a dozen people barge into the house. Before these people can react, the bat comes down upon them.
Something has hit Shantanu on his face and it is flowing on his face from his eyes to his mouth and he thinks it is blood. But then he remembers hearing something near the door a split second before he opened the door – the exact moment at which he was swinging the bat at them. Reality dawns upon him albeit slowly. It gives him the shock of his lifetime. The blood which now was near his mouth is starting to taste sweet. He silently looks at the time and closes his eyes to believe that this day never happened.
The time was 00:00 and the sound was nothing but the same familiar song,
“Happy Birthday to you Shantanu,………………………….”
__END__
