A Face in the Dark Workbook Answers — ICSE Treasure Trove Class 9 & 10

Mr. Oliver was an Anglo-Indian teacher who had been working for several years at a school on the outskirts of Shimla. He was a bachelor. Most evenings he would walk down to the Shimla Bazaar — about two miles away — to visit its cinemas and restaurants, and come back after dark through the pine forest shortcut.

The all-boys boarding school in Shimla where Mr. Oliver taught was called the 'Eton of the East.' Eton College is one of the most reputable and prestigious English boarding schools in England. Mr. Oliver's school was given this name because it was run on English public school lines — the boys, mostly from wealthy Indian families, wore blazers, caps and ties. 'Life' magazine had given it this title in a feature on India.

There was a strong wind blowing through the pine forest that night, and the trees were making sad, eerie sounds. Oliver's torch batteries were running low, so the light kept flickering. Most people stayed on the main road because of these sounds — the forest felt wrong at night. But Oliver was not the nervous type, so he walked through anyway. That detail is important: it tells us this is not a man who imagines things, which makes it harder to dismiss what he sees.

While walking back to school through the pine forest, Oliver's flickering torch revealed a boy sitting alone on a rock with his head hung down, his face held in his hands, and his body shaking convulsively. After seeing the boy, Oliver immediately assumed he was a miscreant from his school — boys were not allowed out after dark. He moved closer to identify him and asked sharply what he was doing there at that hour.

At the start of the story, Oliver is described as brave and level-headed — not the kind of man who believed in ghosts or got scared easily. He walked through the dark pine forest every night without hesitation, even in bad weather. But when he saw the boy's blank, featureless face, he completely fell apart. His torch dropped from his shaking hand and he ran through the trees in blind panic, shouting for help. Bond sets up Oliver this way on purpose. If a fearless man cannot handle what he sees, the reader knows it must be something truly beyond ordinary fear.

Mr. Oliver found the boy sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the pine forest. He noticed that the boy's head was hung down, his face was held in his own hands, and his body was shaking convulsively. Most strangely, the boy was weeping in complete silence — without making any sound — which unsettled Mr. Oliver deeply.

A miscreant is someone who has done something wrong or mischievous. The boy was called a miscreant because school rules strictly forbade boys from leaving the school premises after dark, and it was now well past nine at night. Oliver found the boy sitting alone on a rock in the pine forest, weeping silently with his head hung down, his face hidden in his hands, and his body shaking with soundless sobs.

At first Oliver was angry, assuming the boy was a student breaking school rules. But when he saw the boy crying, his tone changed. He asked what the matter was, told the boy he should not be out at that hour, and kept asking him to look up and tell him his trouble. The boy did not respond at all — no answer, no movement — and just kept sobbing without a sound, which made Oliver more and more uneasy.

Since the boy had no face at all — no mouth, no nose — he simply could not make any sound. This is the most straightforward explanation. But Ruskin Bond reveals this fact only later. When Oliver first sees the boy, all he knows is that someone is crying without making a single sound, which is deeply unsettling. Weeping is naturally noisy, so silent weeping feels wrong. It is this wrongness that first makes Oliver uneasy, before he even sees the face.

When the boy finally looked up and took his hands away from his face, the light from Mr. Oliver's torch revealed that the boy had no face at all — no eyes, no ears, no nose, no mouth. It was simply a round, smooth head with a school cap on top. Mr. Oliver was horrified. The torch fell from his trembling hand. He turned and scrambled down the path, running blindly through the trees and calling desperately for help.

The 'trembling hand' refers to Mr. Oliver's hand. He had just held up his torch to see the boy's face and found nothing there — no eyes, no nose, no mouth, no ears. Just a smooth blank head with a school cap. His hand started shaking so badly that the torch fell. He could not hold it. That single detail — the torch dropping — tells you everything about how badly Oliver was shaken.

The word 'scrambled' tells us Oliver was not running in a controlled way — he was clambering and stumbling desperately. 'Blindly' means he had no idea where he was going; he just ran. This was not a decision. Oliver saw the faceless boy and every rational thought left him. He acted on pure animal fear. The man who used to walk through this same forest calmly every night was now fleeing through it in complete terror, not even sure which direction he was heading.

Oliver told the watchman that he had seen something horrible — a boy weeping in the forest who had no face. When the watchman asked him to be more specific, Oliver said the boy had no eyes, no nose, no mouth — nothing at all. He was still gasping for breath and speaking incoherently from shock when he said this.

Yes, the ending is thrilling. Oliver runs from the faceless boy and feels relief when he spots the watchman's lantern. The watchman is a familiar, safe figure — someone who belongs to the normal world. But then the watchman holds up his lantern to his own face, and Oliver sees that he too has no face, no features, not even an eyebrow. At that moment the wind blows the lamp out, leaving everything in complete darkness, and Oliver has a heart attack. What makes this so effective is the false sense of safety. The reader relaxes along with Oliver — and then the horror hits again, even worse than before. The story does not end with an explanation. It ends in darkness.

The title works well, though it is ironic. 'A Face in the Dark' sounds like something you would see — a face half-hidden in shadow. But the real horror of the story is the opposite: when Oliver brings light to the face, there is nothing there. No eyes, no mouth, no features at all. So the title is appropriate because it draws you in with a familiar image, but what you actually find is the absence of a face rather than one. The 'dark' in the title also suggests something deeper than just nighttime — the story ends in literal darkness when the lamp goes out, and the reader is left in the dark about what really happened.