The Heart Of The Matter

This particular experience could be a bit hard to explain. Whatever the case, I'd try my best to clarify.

In 2011, my family finally got transferred from Jhenaidah Cadet college to Sylhet cadet college. All our stuff was put on a moving truck and my father went with it. I and my mother made the same journey by a bus. It was a 12 hour journey. We took the night coach. I slept through most of it. I did, however, see a dream. One that is oddly clear in my head to this day.

In the dream, I was in a bus, but a different one from the one I was actually in. It had higher windows and the seats were smaller. Outside was night and I honestly do not remember seeing much scenery through the window save for the darkness. There were other people there with me, but their images were hazy and incorporeal. My mother wasn't by my side.

Suddenly, our bus pulled into a fuel station. But where the pump was supposed to be, there was a giant heart in a transparent glass box filled with slightly yellow liquids. Looking at it gave me a sickening feeling. Almost like being carsick, but deeper. It felt like my intestines were tying themselves up in knots with every beat of the enormous heart. Veins and arteries came out of it, some reaching down through the concrete and some coming out of the glass, pumping a black liquid outside that pooled on the ground. The sickening feeling amped up as the bus drew closer to the heart. The bus pulled up beside it and I woke up to find that it was already dawn.

We reached Sylhet cadet college by noon and began unpacking immediately after having lunch. By evening, all things essential for decent living were ready.

For the next two weeks or so, nothing really happened. I made a friend. I won't tell her name, but we were both ten, worryingly reckless, and equally worryingly friendless. We hit it off just fine. Being a year long denizen of Syhet Cadet college, she took it upon herself to show me around.

The day of this incident, she was showing me around the hills behind the campus garage. Sylhet has short, domelike hills that we call tila. We had, that day, gone past the hills (went north from behind the garage, then took a earthen path that went east, which winded around the hills until we reached a somewhat wider earthen road which we took south) and were on a road that went beside a small plantation.

My friend had to pee, so she excused herself. In that break, I spotted the chassis of a bus under the tree canopy. It was covered in vines and other greenery and had I not stopped there to look around, I wouldn't have spotted it.

I considered waiting for her, but then thought it would be harmless to go and take a closer look at it.

As I danced over the tree roots and vines on the ground to come closer to it, I noticed that it wasn't a discarded chassis. Some of the windows had tainted glasses and a little paint was still sticking to the body in some places. Three of the tires were gone, and shards of rubber from the front left one was still hanging weakly from the axel.

The chassis, from outside, had the same feeling to it as the dead scorpions in fake amber keychains. Once a terrible thing, but now nothing more than a statement of preserved decay.

My friend caught up with me from behind. She told me that she's been in the bus and there's nothing salvageable in there. The cushioning in all the seats were rotten and you could always bet there's at least three snakes in that thing.

We went in, my friend before myself. The first thing I felt when I stepped in was a deep feeling of sickness. But buses and cars have always made me feel a bit queasy, even when sitting still, and this was a rotting bus, so I sketched it off to that. The dream wasn't in my mind at the moment.

I suppose it might've started the moment we stepped into the bus, but I was five rows in when I felt/heard the muffled beats. I called out to my friend, and after a second of listening she said she heard it too. It sounded like it came from underneath. It increased gradually growing to the point where the metal plate under our feet was perceptibly moving up and down with every beat, and our initial awe changed gear into panic. It took one of the window glasses slipping and falling outside to go running out of the metal structure. Neither of us saw any snakes in there. We reached our homes before sundown. Nobody had felt an earthquake. And earthquakes don't rise up gradually.

Winter came a few weeks after this. Sylhet is a very misty place. Our home this time was on the third floor of an old residential apartment complex. There was nothing wrong with the apartment. It overlooked the fields. The mist rolled over the field on winter mornings and was stunning to look at while walking to school in the wee hours (7:30 am).

Sometimes, though, I'd see things in the mists. I'm sure they were mostly shadows of trees and such. But a few times, they seemed too real. Humans, animals and unidentified things alike. Sometimes I and my friend both saw it, sometimes either of us alone. Other people did too. Maybe it was to merely scare us, but one groundskeeper once told us he clearly saw a Lady wearing red Saree standing in the field and then vanish into thin air.

There was one time while going to school when a couple stones fell on the road around us. We ran that time.

There was something about the place. The lecturers and professors of the institute kept us assured there are no such thing as the supernatural. But the groundskeeper and the native people were even scared to get off the road after dark, in fear of disturbing the spirits that dwelled in that place.

The next incident concerning the location of the abandoned bus happened a year and a half later, when my friend's parents were transferred to a different cadet college.

It was monsoon, and we had climbed up on one of those dome hills. The rain had come and I urged us to get down and seek shelter. But my friend insisted that she wanted to see the rain from the hilltop. Since she would be going away in three days, I listened to her. Luckily for us, it wasn't accompanied by heavy thunder.

It was a windy rain; one of those where the water drops travel sideways and carries white wailing curtains of rain across the space that slam across things and make a white coat of scattered rainwater around them.

I remember sitting there, drenching in the rain, looking towards where the incident with the bus happened (it was around two hundred meters away) and watching a white curtain of rainwater travel towards it.

And then it scattered in the air. There was no hill or other large visible structure there. But the rainwater slammed and scattered around in a very defined shape. It was taller than it was wide, and quite a bit taller than the hill we were on top of.

Several more gusts of rainwater scattered across it as I watched, before the rain ceased. It didn't seem to have a humanoid shape. Just an invisible monolith the water scattered around.

I asked my friend, but she said she couldn't see because of the water that got in her eyes. It was struggle getting back home that day. Both of us were covered in mud when we got home. I had torn my pant a little. We both got massively scolded when we got home. Rightfully so, because the hills are risky after a rainfall.

My friend moved away three days after.

Even after she went away, odd things kept happening. None was overtly problematic. It wasn't a jarring experience like the house in Jhenaidah. Just a quiet understanding that the place had more to it than what met the eye.

Now for the disclaimers.

It can be explained to some degree by a wild animal getting under the bus, local superstition, ten year old imagination and odd atmospheric phenomenon. But that explanation feels like a bit of a patchwork to me. You people have any such clues? Any of you experienced anything similar?