Prologue
"Asha... Asha..."
The voice slid under the locked door like warm oil.
Seven-year-old Asha sat up in bed, eyes shining, mouth curved in the exact smile her mother wore in the framed Durga-Puja photograph hanging behind her.
"Yes, Ma," she whispered to the empty room.
She slipped out of bed, bare feet silent on the clay floor. The bolts on the front door clicked open by themselves.
Outside, the village slept under a thin moon.
Asha walked straight toward the wall of black trees at the edge of the fields, never looking back, humming a lullaby only her mother knew.
By the time the first rooster stirred, the house was empty and the footprints stopped ten steps past the threshold, as though the earth itself had swallowed the rest.
Chapter 1
Victims' house, the next day at noon
The mother's wail cut through the cigarette smoke and ceiling fans.
"My little Asha... where are you..."
Inspector Satyakam Mishra didn't answer. He couldn't.
Twenty-six red pins stared back at him from the map. Twenty-six people in seventy-two hours. Old men, children, and two of his own constables. Gone between one breath and the next. No screams. No blood. Only smiles frozen on the faces of those who saw them leave.
Satyakam had once broken a counterfeit-currency racket single-handed. He had dragged a murderer out of the river with his own lungs half-full of water.
None of that prepared him for footprints that simply ended.
"We'll find her, ma'am," he said, tasting the lie.
The crowd outside the station swelled: angry, terrified, desperate.
"When will you useless people do something?" an old man shouted.
Phones flashed. Someone started filming.
Then a young woman stepped through the mob as if it parted for her. Faded black kurti, sleepless violet under her eyes, a single silver bangle that looked too old for her wrist.
She crouched beside the newest pin, touched the dirt with two fingers, and sniffed once, like a tracker.
"They were all barefoot," she said, almost to herself. "And they were happy. That's how it chooses."
She straightened.
"Amrita Kapoor. I take the cases your department quietly closes. Everyone you're looking for is already dead, Inspector.
But something is still very, very hungry."
11:47 p.m., inside the station
Satya pinched the bridge of his nose. "No disrespect, but who the hell are you, and why did you bring a schoolgirl to my crime scene?"
The girl in the oversized sweater and boys' school tie didn't even blink.
"I'm not a schoolgirl. I'm Tārā."
She tilted her head toward the ceiling as though reading subtitles only she could see.
"You'll lose one more constable tonight if you keep night patrol. He has a daughter who will be born next week. She'll never meet her father."
Satya barked a tired laugh. "Listen, beta, this isn't some Netflix horror-"
"No," Tārā said, soft as falling ash. "It's the one where nobody comes back. They're already dead. All twenty-six. Their bodies just haven't realised it yet."
The room went colder.
Amrita placed a hand on the girl's shoulder. "Three nights. Evacuate the village, give us the forest roads, and you'll never have to write our names in a report."
"I'm not handing a serial-disappearance case to two kids playing exorcist."
Tārā was already walking out. Over her shoulder, almost kindly:
"We still have to find the new vessel of the Vishnu fragment before the Nishi does. You're wasting starlight."
The door swung shut.
Amrita lit a cigarette under the flickering tubelight, hands trembling.
"If they'd listened, we might have saved a few more."
Tārā didn't turn. "The stars wrote their names in the past tense the day they were born, Didi.
He's almost here."
Somewhere beyond the paddy, a voice no louder than a mother's lullaby began calling another name.
Next morning, Police Station
Another empty uniform on a plastic chair. Another half-burnt beedi still glowing where Constable Rajesh had stood at 4:12 a.m.
Satya opened his wallet with fingers that wouldn't stop shaking.
His wife smiled out at him from a photograph taken the year before cancer took her.
"There are no ghosts, right, Meera?" he whispered.
The photo, as always, stayed silent.
He ordered tea without sugar and tried not to hear the girl's voice in his head.
At the only open tea stall, a boy sat hunched on the bench, his glass of chai gone cold hours ago.
Madhu hadn't slept in three days.
The dreams were eating him alive: endless corridors of black trees, something with too many mouths laughing behind him, a heavy shell-shield he could barely lift.
He died in new ways every night.
And every night at 2:00 a.m. the voice called three times.
Always three.
Always in voices he loved.
He was so lost in the memory that he didn't notice the girl until she spoke.
"You shouldn't answer those night calls, Madhu."
The glass slipped from his hand and shattered.
She stood two feet away, school uniform too big for her, eyes looking straight through him into next week.
"How do you know my name?"
An older girl-no, young woman-appeared instantly, hooking an arm around the child's shoulders.
"Sorry, my sister gets carried away. Come on, Tārā."
Tārā dug her heels in. "Didi, he's the-"
"Not here."
The woman dragged her away, but Tārā twisted back one last time.
"Three calls mean it's close.
Next time it will use someone you still have left to lose."
Then they melted into the frightened village.
Madhu stared at the broken glass.
The chai had frozen solid in the noon heat.
Night, guesthouse on the edge of the village
Madhu double-bolted the door, dragged the iron trunk in front of it, and wedged a chair under the handle for good measure.
Still didn't feel safe.
He had come here to escape the silent men who followed him in the city.
Instead, he found a village that was teaching him new ways to be afraid.
He sat on the bed fully dressed, every light blazing, counting heartbeats like rosary beads.
The cheap wall-clock clicked to 2:00.
First call - his mother, soft, the way she called him for dinner when he was eight.
"Madhu..."
He pressed both hands over his mouth.
Second call - his little sister, sleepy, confused, the way she sounded when nightmares woke her.
"Madhu..."
Tears burned. He shook his head until his neck hurt.
Third call - his own voice, small and cracked, coming from directly behind him.
"Madhu... why won't you answer me?"
Silence.
Three was the rule.
The bulb flickered once, twice, then held steady.
Madhu stared at the locked door. At the trunk. At the window bolted with rusted iron bars.
The voice hadn't come from outside.
It was already in the room with him.
He pulled the blanket over his head like a child and waited for morning, teeth chattering, knowing the next dream would show him exactly whose face the Nishi would wear when it finally came for him.
Outside, something that had no feet walked once around the guest-house
and left no shadow on the wall.
Somewhere deeper in the village, another door opened by itself.