I'mavampire I'mavampire I'mavampire.

I don't get the deal with shopping malls, really. It seems such a huge waste to put in all that glass and gleaming metal and then add shops and then sell things that cost a fortune at a discount. It seems a bigger waste to build a mall in the middle of nowhere, like in the place where Mani Square stands. I am very unsure as to where it is. I am very unsure about how to get there on my own. It's like a large gleaming oasis in the middle of mostly empty roads and straggly trees and lots of little sloping-roofed houses. It makes no sense at all.

What makes even less sense, however, is the Scary House thing they have in it. You're expected to pay fifty bucks and go in and, well, get scared. When we were trying to decide whether we should risk lightening our wallets and go in, we were treated to bunches of squealing girls being ejected out of a wooden door by some unseen force. Occasional snatches of eerie music and a lot of clatter. A lot of heaving and panting among the Recently Scared. Wild gesticulation. Incoherence.

What the hell, we thought, and went in. Now the guy standing at the entrance seemed pretty scary; he had a strange cock-eyed look to him which, when combined with his all-black ensemble and his top hat, made him look like a somewhat close approximation of Lurch from The Addams Family. Only shorter.

Inside it was all red and grey and eerie taped music. A voice told you to go left, and right, and left again through a passage. Amrapali suddenly said, "This is like a pujo'r pandal!", and I made up my mind to scream sometime soon just for the heck of it, when we came upon a room that looked empty, and then a bed flew at us.

I'm not kidding. I don't much remember the rest of it, but there definitely was a rope bed with someone on it, and it slid across the floor through a lot of creaking and groaning and wailing. And that was the coolest thing there, a bed jumping at you in an empty room. Now I'm usually scared of everything - everything - in a covert, maybe-noone-will-notice kind of way, but if this is the coolest thing about what is supposed to be a haunted house, it's no wonder I think Mani Square by itself is the scariest thing I've seen in a while.

We walked out to the same bunch of girls who'd been shrieking earlier, and they were planning to go in for a second time.

"You guys didn't get scared?" they asked.

We shrugged. We got looks. We spent some more time sitting at the food court watching bunches of yelping people emerge from the exit every five minutes. Later I found myself riding home in a bus that had a fascinating hole in its windshield, with an intricate mesh of cracks stretching out from it across the glass. It reminded me of a scene from one of the Jurassic Park movies, I forget which, where a woman, I forget who, is in a bus suspended vertically off a cliff, and upside down at that. She's lying on the windshield and her weight makes the glass crack slowly, really slowly, so you can see an entire spider web of fine crackly white spreading across. It was a nice scene, and it scared me, just like the way the chap was driving the bus today on the empty Bypass scared me, in a fascinated deer-in-the-headlights sort of way. Just like that creepy Sadako girl crawling out of the television scared me in the Japanese version of The Ring. I remember I couldn't pass through the hall at night without looking twice at the television for quite some time after that. I can't watch horror movies because they give me the heebiejeebies and I don't understand Scary House because I'm not scared of it, but buses and things like cranes at construction sites scare me, and I can't think why.

More scope for imagination, as Anne would say? Imagine a crane picking you out of the sand and up into the sky, where you scream and you scream but nothing happens, and then when you're tired of waiting you're suddenly dropped onto a slab of concrete and splat, you don't want to know where the spillage is from.

I don't know, really.