"The air was still, the lamps were lit,
But truth walked quiet, never fit.
Two wandered where the echoes hum,
To places where the lost ones come.
They searched with eyes, but not with sight
For not all wrong is seen in light."
The morning in Bhairavpur tried very hard to be ordinary.
Sunlight poured over tiled roofs and smoked chimneys like a warm hand across skin.
Dust motes hung suspended in the light and turned slowly as if reluctant to fall, each particle taking its time, as if gravity itself was uncertain here.
Somewhere a goat bleated with the particular stubbornness of creatures who refuse to follow schedules, and a rooster decided—belatedly and with great ceremony—to join the day despite the hour being well advanced.
Clay lamps winked beneath low verandas like eyes half-closing;
A boy's laugh—bright and quick, the sound of genuine childhood—faded down a narrow lane and was swallowed completely by the press of houses.
Even the breeze seemed courteous, carrying smells of frying spices and wet soil, the scent of a place that had decided, years ago, to remain exactly as it was.
It was the kind of morning that begged for photographs and captions.
It was the kind of morning that made people remember what mornings were supposed to feel like—safe, warm, inevitable as sunrise.
Kabir woke from a shallow, jagged sleep.
He had expected stiffness, the dull ache of injured muscles that protest against unexpected violence, but for the first few seconds upon opening his eyes, he could not place the small, persistent wrongness at the edges of his awareness—only the memory of trees slamming into metal and the acrid smell of petrol mixing with dust.
His forehead still bore the thin line of the cut from the crash, scabbed over but tender.
His ribs ached with every deep breath, a dull, insistent reminder that his body had been thrown against metal and earth.
He had slept fitfully in the common room of the schoolhouse, eyes snapping open at imagined sounds, then closing again because everyone else slept in the same shared space, breathing in that synchronized way that evidence of the world continuing in orderly fashion demands.
The schoolhouse had no locks on the inside of doors—he'd checked. It had windows that opened only partway, as if designed to let in just enough air to breathe but not enough to escape.
He had told himself he'd slept poorly because of the accident, Because his ribs still ached when he drew a deep breath, Because the adrenaline hadn't fully drained from his system.
He had not told himself that he felt watched.
But the feeling was there, sticky and persistent, like something wet clinging to the skin even after you've wiped it away.
It lived in the space between his shoulder blades, in the back of his neck where the hairs occasionally prickled as if responding to a presence just outside his field of vision.
He could not say when those small suspicions had become opinions, then worries, then something closer to certainty.
When he drew the curtain back from the small window, he saw nothing more than fog clinging to the rooflines and the crooked branch of a neem tree casting shadows that didn't quite match the angle of the sun—yet the sense of someone having been there, recently, watching, remained sticky on his skin like a stain he couldn't wash away.
The schoolhouse was old, built with stone that had weathered decades of monsoons and summers. Its walls were thick, its rooms few.
The common room where they'd slept had a single small window and a door that creaked when opened, announcing anyone's movement.
During the night, he'd heard that creak twice.
Each time he'd jerked awake, heart pounding, only to find everyone still sleeping, their forms dark shapes on the floor mats the villagers had provided.
"Feeling poetic, Kabir?" Priya teased as she tied her hair back with practiced efficiency, winding it into a knot that would photograph well from certain angles.
Her voice had the practiced brightness of someone who took pictures first, thought later, and asked questions only when the moment had passed beyond retrieval.
She was already composing captions in her head: "Morning in the forgotten village. #BhairavpurDiaries #LostButFound." Her phone was already in her hand, despite the early hour. She'd barely slept—her eyes were slightly red, tired.
But the camera never stopped rolling.
He attempted to smile.
It did not reach his mouth.
The effort showed on his face like bad acting. "Just tired," he lied, and the lie sat between them like something alive and breathing.
Priya accepted it without question, as she always did, and turned back to her phone.
The group split naturally, as groups do when confined together too long and the space begins to feel claustrophobic despite its openness.
Yashpal and Rohit wanted the fields—"For science and the inevitable drone shots," Yashpal said with the seriousness of someone who genuinely believed data collection could explain phenomena that refused to be quantified; Rohit wanted nothing more than a story to narrate later with exaggerated bravado and hand gestures that would make the crash sound both more and less dangerous than it actually was.
They set off together, Rohit's energy and Yashpal's measured pace creating an odd but comfortable rhythm. Before they left, Rohit made a joke about finding "actual ghosts" and whether they'd photograph better in portrait or landscape.
No one laughed, but they smiled.
Meghna and Saanvi decided to visit the temple, drawn by the sound of bells and the promise of ritual, of something that followed rules and patterns.
Saanvi's ankle was still slightly swollen, but she insisted she could walk.
Meghna offered her arm without comment.
They moved slowly together, Meghna's presence seeming to calm Saanvi's obvious anxiety. Before they left, Meghna touched Saanvi's shoulder—a small, intimate gesture of reassurance—and they disappeared down the lane toward the shrine bells.
Priya wandered toward the village center with her phone already raised, hunting for the perfect light, the perfect angle, the perfect moment frozen in a frame.
She'd changed into her best clothes—a kurta that fit her perfectly, makeup reapplied despite the early hour. "Content won't create itself," she said brightly, though her bravado seemed thin, stretched over something deeper and more frightened.
Diya hovered near the schoolhouse doorway like a small, nervous lighthouse, watching Abhay who had kept to himself since they arrived—not hostile, not withdrawn exactly, but present in the way that ghosts are present.
Aware, observing, but not quite participating.
She had changed too, but differently—into comfort clothes, loose and practical, Her hair was pulled back severely, her face washed clean of makeup.
She looked younger without the usual armour of styling, more vulnerable somehow.
Abhay sat on an overturned crate in the schoolyard, his small notepad balanced on his knee, pen poised though nothing came out of it. He had been sitting like this for nearly an hour, staring at the blank pages as if the paper itself might eventually speak to him, might reveal some truth he was too afraid to articulate.
He watched people the way someone listens through a closed door—attentive, cautious, trying to understand a conversation they're not meant to hear. His clothes were the same as yesterday, unchanged.
There was a stillness to him that seemed unrelated to his physical position—something deeper, something that suggested his mind was very far away.
Diya drifted to his side and leaned against the crate without asking permission, without preamble.
She had always been the friend who asked the quiet question when others celebrated the loud ones, who noticed the small fractures before they became breaks.
Her presence was comfortable, not demanding.
She didn't speak immediately—just settled beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched.
"You okay?" she asked after a long moment, casual enough that it might have been about the weather.
There was no prying in her tone; only a check-in, a small acknowledgment that she'd noticed something was different.
But her eyes were searching his face, looking for something she couldn't quite name.
Abhay blinked, as if surfacing from deep water. "I'm fine," he said. The words were automatic, practiced, the default response to a question asked a thousand times.
His face told a slightly different story, though—there was a distance there, like a film over an otherwise ordinary gaze, like he was looking at the world through glass that had begun to fog. Diya caught that flicker and—because she was the kind of person who tended to small alarms before they became sirens—she offered him her thermal flask without comment.
He accepted it with two fingers, thumb brushing her knuckles for just a moment. He gave no smile, no thanks, no acknowledgment beyond the acceptance itself.
He simply drank, and the water seemed to disappear into him like an act of necessity rather than pleasure.
The flask was full when he took it. When he handed it back, it was still full.
Diya didn't comment on this.
She simply took it back and held it in her lap.
"Don't try to be mysterious," Diya said softly, settling herself beside him on the crate. "Weird people are boring."
He allowed a tiny, reluctant grin.
It lasted no longer than a breath—appeared and vanished like a light switched on and off.
But it was there, a small acknowledgment that her words had landed somewhere inside him. For just a moment, something flickered in his eyes—recognition, perhaps, or gratitude.
Then it was gone.
They sat in silence for a while, watching the village go about its day.
A woman swept her courtyard in methodical, repetitive strokes, the same motion repeated over and over. Sweep, pause, sweep, pause.
The pattern was hypnotic, and when Diya watched closely, she realized the woman was sweeping the same patch of earth repeatedly, never progressing forward, never moving to a new section.
A child played with a stick, drawing patterns in the dust.
But the patterns were strange—spirals and circles, the same design repeated over and over. When the child's attention wavered, an old man gently redirected the stick back to the same shape.
An old man sat beneath a tree and did not appear to be doing anything at all—just sitting, breathing, existing in the way that old men do when time has become their primary occupation. But his eyes were open, unblinking, and they seemed to track Abhay's position.
Abhay noticed this.
His hand found Diya's, and he held it for a moment—just long enough to feel real, then released it.
The gesture was so small that she almost wondered if she'd imagined it.
Meanwhile, Kabir found Priya at the schoolhouse itself, fingers tracing the chalk-ghost letters on the slate boards that no one yet understood.
The spirals were everywhere—childlike grooves carved into desks and the undersides of window sills, deep into the wood as if someone had spent years, decades perhaps, practicing a single obsessive pattern.
They were repeated, compulsive, like someone practicing a secret signature over and over until it became a prayer.
Some of the spirals were old, worn smooth by time.
Others looked fresh, the wood still splintered where the carving had been recent.
"Look at these," Priya said, pointing with the tip of her phone. "I've never seen anything like it." She was already recording, her phone's camera capturing every detail. "This is insane. The comments on this alone will get me to fifty thousand followers."
But there was something in her voice—underneath the enthusiasm—that suggested she didn't quite believe her own words.
The brightness felt forced, like she was performing for an audience that might not be there.
Inside the classroom the dust lay thin and suspiciously even, as though it had been carefully arranged rather than naturally accumulated.
The blackboard still bore erased marks that read like half-remembered sentences, fragments of lessons that had been taught and then deliberately forgotten.
There were no cobwebs in the corners where you would expect them—only an immaculate dryness, an order that did not belong to an abandoned place.
Abandoned places gather dust like grief gathers silence.
This place was different.
This place had been tended.
Someone had been here, maintaining it, keeping it ready.
"This place is staged," Priya whispered, her voice taking on the tone of someone who had just realized they were in a horror film. "Like someone cleaned it yesterday.
Like someone wanted us to think it's lived in." She lowered her phone for the first time. "Like someone knew we were coming."
"Like someone wanted it to look lived in without leaving fingerprints," Kabir added.
He crouched and ran a finger over one of the spirals, it was warm to the touch, not with human heat but as if it had retained the day's sun, held onto it like a secret.
He felt, briefly and unsettlingly, that the carvings were not meant to be read—they were meant to be seen by something that recognizes shapes rather than words, something that understands patterns and obsession and the careful marking of territory.
Something that marks its domain.
He pulled his hand back quickly.
"We should leave this place," Priya said quietly.
It was the first genuine thing she'd said all morning.
"Kabir, I'm serious. Something is wrong here."
But even as she said it, they both knew they wouldn't leave. Couldn't leave. The decision had been made long before they arrived.
Rohit found them there, examining the walls like they were paintings in a museum.
He limped slightly where his ribs protested, but he was smiling—or wearing the shape of a smile, anyway.
"This place is creepy as hell," he announced with the satisfaction of someone who had been proven right about something.
"We're totally getting haunted. This is the point where the audience screams at the screen." He tried to laugh, but the sound came out wrong—too high, too brittle. "So what's the plan? Do we run screaming, or do we document it for clout?"
They moved on, drawn by a curiosity that had begun to feel less like choice and more like compulsion, as if their feet were following a path that had already been decided for them.
The well waited at the village's edge, old bricks blackened by rain and time, stacked with the kind of care that suggested someone had once loved this place enough to build it properly.
A crude board, newer than the well itself, read in faded paint: Closed. Unsafe.
The pulley hung above the opening, broken in half, the rope trailing down into darkness like a severed limb.
"What's with wells and ominous signs?" Rohit joked, already raising his phone to document what he was certain would be an excellent photograph.
"This is perfect. Absolutely perfect. I can already see the comments: 'Don't go down there!' 'That well is definitely haunted!' The algorithm is going to eat this up." But his hands were shaking slightly as he held the phone.
Kabir peered down into the black ring of the well's opening.
The depth was impossible to gauge—it seemed to go down forever, or perhaps not very far at all. The perspective refused to settle.
He held a pebble at the edge, feeling the slight weight of it in his palm, and dropped it into the darkness.
He held his breath, waiting for the sound of stone striking water, the small splash that would confirm the well's ordinary nature.
There was no splash.
Instead, a thin metallic hum rose from the shaft—too consistent to be echo, too deep to be wind, too regular to be anything random.
It was almost musical, if music could be rendered in a frequency that made the teeth ache and the spine vibrate.
The sound continued for perhaps three seconds, then cut off abruptly, as if something had reached up from the depths and closed a door.
The silence that followed was worse than the sound—heavy, expectant, hungry.
Priya took a step back from the well.
"That's not normal," she said, voice small and uncertain.
"Wells don't... do that."
An old woman appeared as if conjured by the sound itself—or perhaps she had been standing there the entire time, and they had simply failed to notice her until the moment required noticing.
She stood a few paces away, hands folded before her like someone in prayer or supplication. Her sari was a faded green, threadbare at the hem, patched in places with fabric that didn't quite match.
A rust-colored mole marked the curve beneath her left eye.
She did not blink when Kabir turned to greet her, did not react to their sudden awareness of her presence.
It was as if she had been waiting for them to acknowledge her, and now that they had, she was simply present.
"Don't go down," she said to them in a voice like a dry reed being bent back and forth, a voice that had spoken very little recently and had grown rusty from disuse. "It never gives back what it takes."
"Sorry?" Kabir started, half-laughing at the theatricality of it all.
For a moment they all expected a hammy local actor to break character, to wink at them and explain this was a tourist attraction, a performance meant to frighten the city folk.
But something in the woman's face—the absolute seriousness, the absence of any playfulness—suggested this was no performance.
But the woman turned and walked away without a rustle of her sari against leaves or the expected sound of feet against stone.
She simply moved away from them, her figure growing smaller, then smaller still, then disappearing entirely into a lane that seemed to lead nowhere in particular.
When Kabir blinked, he couldn't quite remember which direction she'd gone.
He turned to Rohit and Priya, about to ask if they'd seen where she'd gone, but they were both staring at the well with expressions of such profound unease that he decided not to speak.
Back at the shrine, Meghna and Saanvi found themselves in a space that seemed caught between times.
The temple itself was small, made of the same weathered stone as everything else, but it was maintained meticulously.
Flowers—fresh flowers, impossibly fresh given they were in a place where nothing seemed to change—lay at the feet of a goddess whose name neither of them could read in the script carved into the stone.
The bells above the entrance hung perfectly still despite the breeze that had followed them into the courtyard.
When Saanvi reached up to touch one, it was ice cold, though the morning was warm.
"It's beautiful," Saanvi whispered, and she meant it.
There was something genuinely lovely about the care evident here, the way the space had been preserved.
Yet there was also something deeply unsettling—the perfection of it, the absence of any decay or weathering.
It was as if the temple existed outside of time.
Meghna knelt and touched her forehead to the cool stone, and for just a moment—just a fraction of a second—she felt something that might have been presence, might have been blessing, might have been something trying very hard to communicate through the language of stillness and silence.
When she opened her eyes, she found Saanvi staring at something behind her.
She turned to look, but there was nothing there—just the lane, empty and quiet. But the feeling of being watched intensified.
They left the shrine quickly, Saanvi's hand finding Meghna's.
Neither spoke about what they'd felt.
Some things, they understood, were better left unnamed.
The thing about Bhairavpur was that small, ordinary transactions between people—childhood banter, a shopkeeper's negotiation, someone lending a ladder—had the lightness of ritual, as though everyone here had agreed to play their parts in a script written long ago.
Villagers smiled, fixed their gaze politely, offered water from clay pots.
Someone pointed them toward a schoolroom, a man in a turban gave directions in a tone that assumed they belonged here, that the village had been waiting for them specifically.
It was a tone that suggested arrival rather than discovery.
The group accepted the kindness like a balm, like something that could heal the rawness of the crash, the strangeness of this place.
They wanted to believe it.
They needed to believe it.
But the kindness was always just a fraction behind the moment, as if catching up to itself.
A greeting would arrive a heartbeat late—the villager's mouth moving, then the words following a half-second after, like a dubbed film where the audio didn't quite sync.
When they asked a question, the answer sat on the lips of the speaker for a second too long before being offered, like a delayed transmission from somewhere far away.
Children laughed and then paused mid-laugh as if remembering something more important.
Someone would pass a cup and their fingers would brush the other's hand for an almost imperceptible length of time—then retract as though surprised to have touched skin, as though human contact was something they had to remember how to do.
Small misalignments collected into a larger unease—a clock with its hands stopped at an impossible hour (three fifteen, forever), a rooster that crowed when no one expected it (at sunset, at midnight, at moments that had no relation to any natural cycle), a dog that watched from a rooftop and did not bark (didn't seem to breathe either, now that Yashpal thought about it).
Priya tried to take a photograph of the main courtyard and found the image on her screen slightly blurred at the edges, as though the village refused to be framed cleanly, refused to exist in two dimensions.
When she took the same photo again, it was sharp and clear.
But she couldn't see any difference in her positioning or the light.
Yashpal sat by himself that afternoon, trying to make sense of the data.
He'd been recording observations in his notebook—timestamps, weather patterns, behavioral anomalies.
But when he reviewed what he'd written, the handwriting was sometimes his and sometimes not.
The observations were sometimes accurate and sometimes described things he was certain had never happened.
He'd written "the well sang at dawn" in his own handwriting, but he had no memory of being awake at dawn, no memory of hearing any singing.
That evening the group reconvened at the common courtyard near the shrine.
The villagers had prepared rice and lentils—simple, generous, the kind of meal that spoke of care and ritual.
They ate together under the light of oil lamps, the group's small injuries bandaged with the casual competence of people who helped each other out of habit rather than hesitation.
The rice was warm and filling, but it all tasted the same—no salt, no spice, no distinction.
It filled the stomach without satisfying hunger.
Conversations flickered between practical checks—"Can you lift that?"—and the safer things people said to cover fear: jokes about the well, plans for exploring tomorrow (though no one actually wanted to explore further), even goofy bets about who would be brave enough to climb the old banyan tree that grew at the village's heart.
Yashpal made a joke about data collection that no one quite understood, his words becoming tangled as he tried to explain.
Rohit laughed too loudly, the sound carrying an edge of hysteria.
Priya asked questions about the village's history that the villagers answered in ways that somehow avoided information entirely—speaking in circles, repeating the same phrases, never quite answering the question directly.
When the flames of the communal lamp guttered low and the shadows began to pool in the corners like something gathering itself—becoming more substantial, more real than the light—Kabir drifted toward Abhay who had been watching the shadows grow long and strange, elongating in ways that didn't quite match the light sources.
Abhay sat alone on the edge of the courtyard, seemingly apart from the group but also somehow central to it, as if everyone's attention, no matter how distracted, kept returning to him.
"You sure you're okay?" Kabir asked again, softer this time, more genuine.
His own unease had grown through the day, and he found himself seeking confirmation in others.
If Abhay could reassure him, perhaps Kabir could believe that everything was still within the realm of normal, explainable, survivable.
Abhay's reply was a single, quiet sentence, delivered without preamble or explanation: "I remember the sound of my house burning.
For months after, I smelled something and thought someone would come and say it was a dream."
He said it like one name among many.
Like it was just another thing that had happened, another memory filed away.
But his eyes—when Kabir looked into them—seemed to be looking at something very far away, something that had nothing to do with Bhairavpur or the village or the present moment.
Kabir didn't know how to respond to that.
Didn't know if it was a metaphor or a confession or something else entirely.
He wanted to ask follow-up questions, but something in Abhay's tone suggested that answers wouldn't help.
Diya, who was standing beside him (and when had she arrived? Kabir hadn't seen her approach), heard and reached out to put a hand on Abhay's shoulder.
She didn't ask for details, didn't press for explanation.
She simply held it there—steady and small and human—while the others laughed too loud at a joke about ghost snacks that Rohit was telling, the kind of laughter that covers fear, that pushes darkness back a little bit further.
But the darkness didn't retreat.
It simply waited.
The lamp's light moved across their faces and washes of shadow pooled where the walls met the earth.
The air, which had been warm and welcoming at noon, felt less so now—cloying somehow, like the sweetness of a fruit that begins to rot from the inside, all honeyed exterior and rotten core.
It carried a smell—faint, but growing stronger as the evening deepened—of earth and stone and something older, something like memory made physical.
They were comfortable enough to think themselves safe.
They were comfortable enough, even, to sleep.
And while they did, the village listened.
It listened to their breathing, to the small sounds of their settling into rest, to the particular silence that only sleeping people create.
It listened, and it waited, and it remembered—because villages remember everything, and this village had been remembering for a very long time.
It remembered everyone who had ever come seeking sanctuary.
It remembered their names, their fears, their desperate need to believe that safety could be found in a place like this.
It remembered, and it held them.
"Some places pretend to rest.
Some eyes do not blink.
And some wells do not give echoes
Because they are already too full."