Looking for the Unseen/Seen by Anshika Arora

On a sunny winter morning, I heard the honking of my school bus; dressed up in my new uniform I hastened to get to my first day in the assembly. Standing in the last queue I noticed a woman in a white cloak crossing from the adjacent window in the dark passage that led to a remote corner of the school. I wondered who it was; what she was doing there; where she was heading to. I had heard many stories from my sister about such mysterious creatures but I felt that these were just rumors, and none of them was true.

But the sight made me suspicious and the suspicion developed into fear. In order to get rid of it, I thought of taking it head on. I revisited the window in the backyard for three consecutive days but could not see anything unusual. Thereafter, I made it a practice to visit the place during my interval, alone.

It was a cloudy monsoon day. As usual I went to my customary place, becoming more emboldened by the non-appearance of the mysterious soul. While returning from there, I suddenly chanced to look into the window of the adjacent apartment. A disfigured woman was holding a candle and shrieking; as I looked in that direction, she gestured me to come, giving a cunning smile. As I approached her she vanished but her chuckling sound kept reverberating in my ears, sending shivers down my spine; congealing my blood. Screaming for help I ran into the ground towards my friends who in turn got horrified looking at me. It was from that day onwards that I decided to stop exploring the unexplored, seeing the unseen, and chasing the un-chased.