Do you believe in ghosts? That was the question, I used to ask myself. I never believed in ghosts until I became one!
I have no last name but people around me call me by the name Eli—just Eli, no last name and no relatives to claim - an unwanted little nothing. I have made peace with the fact, I was an orphan - nothing more, nothing less. Yes, an orphan who grew up where bread was stale and never fresh and warmth that was rationed, and kindness was as scarce as fresh bread. It was a decrepit shelter and the despair and mildew was the only odor this place reeked of, through the cold sleepless nights heart wrenching cries of children echoed through the walls too thin to muffle the horrid noise at that hour. It was a daily routine for the other children to fight —for scraps, for blankets, for even the faintest trace of affection from the weary, chain-smoking caretakers.
But for me,I never really found myself craving for such things.Almost never, it wasn't that I never felt these, but I was different. A bit of an introverted soul - didn't fight, just watched and listened. That's the way, I was. That's how I was, someone who never demanded attention, affection but I deeply craved for a place to belong. And this orphanage was my home until I found my real home.
I clearly remember how it started. It was too obvious not to believe but somehow it demanded attention - a feeling that I craved for deep inside but never asked for and felt I needed. And it almost automatically grabbed my attention.
I lived in noisy house, so I relied on selective listening - I just ignored most of the voices in the house. But that peculiar voice - I just couldn't ignore.
We lived in a countryside and often visited the surrounding places at day time. It was the only kind of freedom I enjoyed here. Not only me but all the children in orphanage enjoyed that liberty on alternate days.There were alternate days for problematic and well-behaved children to go on the errands during the day time. It was also a sort of scavenger hunt for food to fill our bellies and twigs to warm our destitute forever home.
Oh! I just got caught in the mundane description that nobody is interested in! Yes, where was I. Alright, the day time errands! while looking for berries to munch on, I came across an abandoned well in the forest, half a mile away from the orphanage's rotting fence. Rotting and not not eroding, because you could feel the gooey moldy touch of slippery rotting wood, the fence was made of.
At first glance, it just felt like a normal old well and I just inspected it a little, had some musky muddy water near the bottom. My reflection was almost faint in the well and I waved my hand - greeting my reflection that was almost never visible as there are no mirrors in the orphanage. It felt like, I satisfied a bit of my childish desire to greet someone familiar. A familiarity, I never felt at the orphanage with children who never wanted to befriend me.
Then suddenly, I heard the sound that
I wanted to ignore the usual familiar faint sound coming from the woods of the caretaker. I could have brushed it off as a trick of my imagination. It was barely more than a sigh carried by the wind - a whisper so faint.
"Eli." My name, it called my name. Yet, I heard it.
At that second, I felt my bones hollow. The way it called, it curled around my neck like a creeper and tightened around it and the suffocation made me faint.
I should have covered my ears and ignored it. But I didn't know voices could make you feel such a tightness in your throat. May be, I was hallucinating!
I should have raced back to the orphanage without any thing to salvage for the day and pretended I never heard the voice burying myself in the scathed woolen blanked of my bed. But nothing could be done now, I was claimed and I was summoned by the one who could sniff my deep yearning and longing that I often denied.
You can tell but I didn't ignore it. Voice of the caretaker jerked me to the reality from the trance that held me there. I looked around and I was looking at reflection of mine. The pain in the back of my neck made me realize, I stood there for hours and on.
I was not punished as usual but was retired to my bed early for some unknown reason. That night, I was possessed by exhaustion. I slept like a baby that night - that only night somehow my bed felt like a mother's lap. A sleep similar to a memory that still resides somewhere in my the back of my mind - where I see the silhouette of my mother bend over me standing before the warm hearth that makes her being in my existence sound even more warm that she actually felt in my imagination.
Unfortunately, at the very instance as I somehow dreamt about my mother, I felt a chill running down my spine and woke up to a sensation of my feet turning icy. My eyes could tell it was the silver moon shine that interrupted my sleep besides the cold feet. I just could fathom how my feet guided me to the well. One moment, I was in the warmth of my bed and the other, I found myself standing right over the wall ready to jump. I within the blink of an eye jumped off the wall of the well. I seem to be guided by something unseen. The abyss of black and rustling shadows stretched all around me, something was wrong. The air thick with damp earth and something else—something wrong.
I peered in the well that loomed before me, its stones slick with age, its wooden frame sagging like the spine of a dying beast. Darkness. Almost, engulfing and I backed off a little and crossed my armed over my chest. Then— the whisper. This time it was not coming from the woods but from deep inside the well. I should have run. I just didn't and found my self leaning in. I heard a fragmented raw murmur spoken like a secret through broken rotten teeth.
"Eli… come closer…!"
For the briefest second, I felt a cold kiss of night on my cheek, and something wrong and shapeless stirred in the shadows — a ripple in the darkness. And then — Hands, black as coagulated tar with fingers stretched unnaturally long, tapering into jagged, claw-like points, surged from the well. Those hands were not mine, not human; not warm, not comforting. I tried to scream, but my seized throat failed me. My last resort - my voice was stolen, before it could leave my lips.
My arms and feet left the ground as the sky twisted. I was falling—no, being dragged down, the cold stones scraping past me as the well swallowed me whole. I felt the bottomless beast swallowing me whole. I plummeted through a void that smelled of rot and ruin. The cold gnawed at my flesh, and my skin — God, my skin—began peeling like wet parchment. The voice spoke again, now inside my head, woven through my marrow.
"You were always meant to be here, Eli!"
I hit something soft. Something wet. It moved beneath me. I was sprawled upon a mass of writhing bodies, a grotesque sea of contorted limbs and hollow faces, their mouths frozen in soundless agony. They reached for me. Their fingers were shattered at unnatural angles. Their eyes—black, vacant pits — spilled thick rivulets of blood. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think.
Then — It rose. The thing! It had no form, no face, no defined existence—just a shifting, writhing absence of light, a void given some sort of hunger. It spoke, but it was not a voice. It was inside me. Through me.
"You are home!"
I wanted to beg. To weep. To claw my way back into the world of the living. But I was no longer a boy. I was becoming part of it. My fingers blackened, the flesh sloughing away to expose glistening sinew. My ribs cracked open, my spine contorted backward with a sickening pop.
I was dissolving. And as I screamed, my voice was swallowed into the chorus—an endless, hollow wail woven into the fabric of the dark. I don't know how long I have existed here.
Time is a meaningless thing in this abyss, where flesh and shadow merge in ceaseless torment. But I am not alone. I can feel the others. Hundreds. Thousands. Nameless children. Forgotten souls.
Not abandoned by men — abandoned by the world itself.
And I can feel it. It is always shifting. Always whispering.
Always hungry. Sometimes, I remember who I was. A boy without a home. Without a family. A boy who listened when he shouldn't have. A boy who leaned too close to the dark. Now, I wait. Because I know another will come.
Another lonely child, drawn by the whisper. And when they approach — I will whisper back, 'you belong with us . . . Where you won't feel lonely!". A child to be welcomed in another series of nameless that we are!