First Encounter
It all started in the year 2014. I was a village boy and my village was slowly beginning to expand. Lots of strangers began to come and live there. Some villagers left, more arrived. Lands became smaller and the village began to grow. My family didn’t like these changes because most of the villagers were my relatives and now it was filling with strangers.
A new family became our neighbors and left after a couple of months. A few weeks later, we could hear weird noises on our roof as if cats were screaming. My father told me it was wild cats fighting. Our home was surrounded by a little forest and it never was an unusual thing to hear at night.
Our roof had two layers. The one on the top was covered with “Ulu”(Some sort of a tile that is made from burned and hardened clay) and the layer underneath was covered with sheets made out of concrete and there was a small passage kind of space between the two, large enough for a 10-year-old to walk here and there. I had to crawl through some places. It was one of my hideouts (I’ll tell about the rest in another post). It was the place for me to hide things and to daydream. I usually go there when I’m bored.
One Sunday evening, I was so bored that I decided to go to my hideout. Usually you need a ladder to go there, but I had my own little trick to go without one.
There were two entrances to it. One was from our kitchen and the other one was from my room. There was a little hole in the ceiling. My brother had made it by accident. The room belonged to him until my dad decided to give it to me. The room was “L” shaped and the hole was on one end of the “L” shape which was right above my bed.
To get in to the hideout all I had to do was break into a sprint towards the wall, jump onto the headboard of my bed and kick the wall to get some support to hang on to the bar on the ceiling. It was strong enough to hold me until I climbed into the wooden layer where the passage existed. Sometimes it took one or two tries because I had to remove some of the plywood sheets loosely placed on the ceiling.
I sat down in a corner to daydream. I already had thrown a pillow in there and cleaned the place so I could sleep when I felt like it. Empty food cans, half-eaten packets of chips and fruit juice bottles were strewn all over the wooden floor of my little secret place. There was an emergency light placed by my father so he could see better when he wanted to clean the place out. But for more than a year no one except my brother and my gang had paid it a visit. My gang consisted of my friends, Nadun, Navod, Sahan, Binura, and me. I once tried to take my dog inside but he bit me. -_-
I could see orange sun rays coming through the holes on the roof. It erased some of the darkness inside the hideout. I began to place the packets and cans in an orderly manner to tidy up the place. I pushed the pillow to a corner where the ceiling met the roof and hid my face inside the pillow. The pillow had been untouched for so many hours that it had cooled and the softness it brought made me start counting sheep.
I suddenly woke up to the sound of my mom calling me for dinner. Slept for more than two hours. It was so dark that I couldn’t even see my hands. I got up quickly, found the emergency light and switched it on.
“Click ! Click click !!”
A bright yellow colour filled the hideout and what I immediately saw caught me by surprise. Two little balls of light were looking at me. My eyes weren’t adapted to the bright light yet. Slowly, I began to see the whole picture.
To be continued…
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