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Night Of The Full Moon
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 1

"I don’t know any ghost stories," the old engineer said. "I don’t know any werewolf stories either, and I’ve never even heard of anyone who was bitten by a vampire. So sorry, but there it is."

We were sitting over bottles of wine and plates of kebabs, with the lights dimmed. The rain poured down outside with the force of a waterfall, and it made the room all the cosier, and the atmosphere just right for storytelling.

"I’ve been listening to all of you," the old engineer continued, "tell stories about ghosts and ghouls and all manner of creatures from beyond the imagination, and I’ve been racking my brain, but I simply can’t think of anything you haven’t heard before."

"Oh," said our host’s wife, who sat hugging her shins with her chin propped up on her knees, "you must know something at least, some strange tale. Don’t say you don’t!"

"Real life," the old engineer said, stroking his grey goatee and smiling at her, "doesn’t have any pat explanations. I’ve seen some strange things, yes, and I could tell you of one or two of them. But that’s all I could do, tell you. I can’t claim that what I saw explains or doesn’t explain ghosts or demons or anything of the sort."

"Tell us anyway," said the host’s wife, who was very pretty, much prettier than she had any right to be at her age, and flirtatious to go with it. "I just know your story’s going to be the best of all!"

"Far be it from me," said the old engineer, "to resist a request from such a pretty lady. All right, I shall tell you of something I saw once. I have never been able to explain it or find an explanation that fits, but I shall tell you anyway."

The rain began to pour down harder than ever, and thunder crashed outside. We all poured ourselves more of the semi-sweet red wine and pulled our chairs forward to listen.


You know (the old engineer said) that I’m a mining engineer. At the time of which I am about to tell you, I was much younger, and still junior enough for my employers to send me out to godforsaken parts to do thankless jobs for them.

Back in those days, we were trying to revive mines that had been abandoned for many years but might still be made productive, especially with more modern techniques and equipment. Many of these mines were far away from civilisation, and often they had been left alone for so long that nature had reclaimed the sites, the remaining equipment, and the support facilities – all of it.

One of these sites was the old coal mine at Koehla on the border of India and what is now Myanmar. A team of us had been sent to try and restart this mine, which had been abandoned since the Japanese occupied Burma back in the Second World War. The mine area had seen some fighting and after the war, when the area had been hit for some years by insurgency, had simply been abandoned to be swallowed up again by the jungle.

Along with me in the team was Ganesan, a dark, lean Tamil with a bushy moustache and a fierce look. There would be others, as well, but later. It was basically for me and for Ganesan to do all the real work. We would be living on site; the others would be coming once we had done all the preliminary surveys.

Koehla was then, and for all I know still is, a smallish village of a few hundred people. It consisted of a row of huts straggling on either side of a red earth road, surrounded by a few cultivated fields and the hills, covered by forests, not far away. The derricks of the mine were visible from the village, standing tall at the top of a low, forested hill. There were railway tracks, too, which had once served to carry coal from the mine. But these were tracks along which no train had run since the Union Jack and the Rising Sun had flapped above the derricks in the distance, and what remained of the rails were rusted through and so overgrown that they could scarcely be seen.

The mine itself was, when we arrived, scarcely in better shape. The derricks, which had seemed so tall and impressive from the village, turned out to be corroded and tilted, their lines blurred with creepers, their foundations damaged by weather and water. The main mine shaft was collapsed on itself, and buried under a mass of earth and rock. Clearly, we would need a lot of work before we could even begin to determine whether the mine could be revived.

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Genre:General Horror
Type:Short story
Rating:7.6 / 10
Rated By:29 users
Comments: 0 users
Total Hits:24176

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