Question

Give an ending for the story below:

Mr Oliver used to teach in a school in Shimla. He is a bachelor who usually walks to the town in the evening. One day, Mr Oliver was returning to his school from the outskirts of the hill station and he got late. When he was returning, it became dark, and so he thought of taking a little detour from his route to school. He took a shortcut through the pine forest. As we think of the beautiful town of Shimla, it is filled with mountains, hills and woods. It became very dark by the time Mr Oliver was about to cross the pine forest. Whenever there is a strong wind or breeze, the pine trees make sad and terrible sounds that keep most of the people on the main road. But Oliver was not nervous or an imaginative man, so he took the narrow forest path. This also shows that he was very familiar with the area. He generally carried a torch along with him. It might be often that he got late or returned when it was dark. But this time as he was returning, there in the forest he saw a figure of a boy. He used his torch to infer that someone is present there. In the light of the torch, he found a boy sitting alone on a rock.

He could see the figure of the boy from a distance. Oliver stops and moves closer to the figure in order to recognise it. He was puzzled and worried that why a student or a boy was in the forest at this hour. Mr Oliver thought that all students are advised to stay inside the campus or at home during the dark. They were not supposed to be out and definitely not in the forest as it was not safe.

Oliver pondered what the boy was doing out in the dark, and so asked him what he was doing out there at that time. He sensed that something was wrong. The boy had seemed to be crying and his head hung down. He appeared to be holding his face between his hands and his body was shaking continuously. It was a strange soundless weeping and Mr Oliver felt uneasy. Despite these unusualities, Mr Oliver approached the boy. He kept asking the boy who he was and why was he out in the dark. The boy neither answered nor looked up but kept weeping continuously.

Oliver was worried about the fact that the boy is out at night. So he asked the boy why he was crying. The boy finally took his hands off from his face and looked up at the teacher. The torch from Mr Oliver’s hand falls down. The boy was not a normal one but some ghostly figure. The boy had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. He just had a round, smooth head with a school cap on.
The torch fell from Mr Oliver’s trembling hands, and he runs down the path blindly through the trees calling and crying for help. He ran towards the school building and saw a lantern swinging in the middle of the path. Mr Oliver was petrified after the encounter with the faceless boy.

There he found the watchman standing at the school gate. The watchman saw Mr Oliver running and asked him what had happened. Oliver replied that he saw something horrible. He said in parts that he saw a boy weeping in the forest and he had no face. The watchman showed him his own face and asked Oliver, “Do you mean it was like this?”
The watchman too had no eyes, no ears and no features at all. He did not even have eyebrows and that is when the wind blew and turned the lamp out.

Answer 1

The wind blew the lamp out and Mr. Oliver had his heart attack. The story is eerie, leaving one haunted in a melancholy sort of way, and is beautifully written. In his stories, ghosts, jinns, witches—and the occasional monster—are as real as the people he writes about. He makes the supernatural appear entirely natural, and therefore harder to ignore.

He adroitly uses language to create his mysterious and strange atmosphere. He opens the story with a everyday, normal occurrence and through the use of words and phrases like ‘sad,’ ‘eerie sounds,’ ‘racked with silent sobbing,’ ‘shook convulsively’ succeeds in creating an atmosphere replete with supernatural and fearful connotations. Thus we can rightly say that he is a story teller par excellence and a master of his craft.