Current Timeline: 1987 Location: Mumbai (Bombay), India
Prologue: The Red Earth of 1987Part 1: The Sunlight
Bombay, August 1987
The monsoon had finally retreated from Bombay, leaving the air washed clean and the humidity clinging to the city like a second skin. The sky was a brilliant, hard blue, innocent of the smog that would choke the city in decades to come. In the upscale, leafy neighborhood of Dadar Parsi Colony, the Deshmukh household was a portrait of the burgeoning Indian middle-class dream—a dream constructed of hard work, education, and the quiet comfort of tradition.
Their home, 'Vasant Villa', was a ground-floor apartment in a curved Art Deco building that smelled perpetually of jasmine, sea salt from the nearby Dadar Chowpatty, and the faint, dusty scent of old books. It was a happy home, vibrant with the specific rhythm of a Bombay morning. You could hear it before you saw it—the sharp hiss of the pressure cooker signaling the dal was done, the crackle of the radio tuning into Vividh Bharati playing old Hindi classics like Lag Ja Gale, and the chaotic, muffled thuds of school preparations.
Vikram Deshmukh, forty-two, was an architect with a firm that was currently reshaping the skyline of Nariman Point. He was a man of science and lines, pragmatic and gentle, with a penchant for neatly pressed bush shirts and a habit of cleaning his spectacles when he was thinking. He believed in structure, in the safety of walls and roofs. Nalini Deshmukh, thirty-eight, was the anchor of the house. A Deputy Director at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), she was a woman of intellect and warmth, known for her crisp cotton saris that rustled when she moved and the scent of Mysore Sandal soap that lingered around her like a protective aura.
And then there were the children. Rishi, thirteen years old, was at that awkward age where limbs grew faster than coordination. He was quiet, observant, a boy who lived half his life in the pages of Indrajal Comics. He preferred the phantom justice of The Phantom and the magic of Mandrake to the noisy cricket matches played in the colony lanes. His sister, Riya, eleven, was the sun to his moon. Loud, vibrant, with two plaits that danced when she ran and a laugh that could shatter the tension in any room.
"Rishi! If you don't put on your shoes now, the school bus will leave you, and I am not driving you to Bandra! The traffic on the reclamation is impossible!" Nalini's voice rang out from the kitchen, layered with maternal exasperation.
Rishi hopped on one foot near the shoe rack, struggling with the velcro of his black Bata school shoes. "Aai, Riya hid my socks again! The ones with the blue stripes!"
"Did not!" Riya shouted from the dining table, her mouth full of poha, swinging her legs which were clad in the very socks Rishi was looking for. "You lost them in the pile of comics under your bed!"
Vikram walked in, adjusting his silk tie, chuckling as he surveyed the battlefield. "Peace, nations. Peace." He kissed Nalini on the forehead as she handed him his steel tiffin carrier, warm to the touch. "You seem excited today. When do you leave for the site?"
Nalini paused, wiping her hands on a checkered kitchen towel. Her eyes, usually calm, sparkled with a sharp, professional excitement. "Tonight. The train to Aurangabad is at 9 PM. From there, we take jeeps into the interior, past the Ajanta range. It's officially a generic survey, but the villagers reported finding some copper plates while digging a well. The script... from the rubbings they sent... it looks pre-Satavahana. Maybe even something unrecorded."
"Just be careful," Vikram said, his smile fading slightly as he sipped his tea. "It's wild country out there. No phones, no police nearby."
"I have my team, Vikram. Three doctoral students and the local excavator crew. Besides," she smiled, touching the small silver Ganesha pendant around her neck, "Ganpati Bappa Morya. He travels with me."
That evening, the house was filled with the divine smell of camphor and fresh marigolds. Nalini performed the evening aarti as she always did before a trip. She lit the brass lamp near the tulsi plant on the balcony, watching the flame dance against the Bombay twilight. Then, she moved to the small wooden temple in the kitchen. She circled the silver thali with haldi and kumkum, the golden light reflecting in her eyes, making them look like pools of honey. Rishi and Riya stood behind her with folded hands, eyes closed, listening to her soft, melodic chanting of the Shubham Karoti Kalyanam.
The bells chimed, a sweet, high-pitched sound that seemed to seal the house in a bubble of safety. It was a moment of perfect, suspended grace.
It was the last time the gods would be welcome in Vasant Villa.
Part 2: The Excavation
Nalini returned two weeks later.
It was a Sunday afternoon, heavy with the post-lunch stupor. Rishi was watching He-Man and the Masters of the Universe on Doordarshan, mesmerized by the grainy animation, when the black-and-yellow Premier Padmini taxi pulled up.
When Nalini walked in, the air in the room seemed to drop by a few degrees. She didn't look like the woman who had left. Her sari, usually impeccable, was crumpled and stained with red dust—a deep, ochre earth that looked like dried blood and refused to be dusted off. Her hair, usually in a neat bun, was frayed, strands escaping like wild roots. But it was her eyes that terrified Rishi. They were wide, unblinking, and rimmed with dark, bruised circles, as if she hadn't slept in days. They held a thousand-yard stare that looked through the walls of their home.
She carried a heavy, canvas duffel bag that clanked when she set it down. When Vikram reached for it, she slapped his hand away.
"Nalini?" Vikram recoiled, shocked. "You look... exhausted. Was the trip okay? Did you find the plates?"
She flinched at his voice, as if the sound caused her physical pain. "It was... enlightening," she whispered. Her voice sounded parched, scratching her throat. "We found something. Not Satavahana. Older. Much older. Before the history books. Before the Vedas."
She went straight to the bedroom and locked the door. She didn't come out for dinner. She didn't ask about school. She didn't ask to see Riya's drawing book.
The changes began slowly, insidious like black mold growing behind expensive wallpaper.
First, it was the nightmares.
Three nights after her return, Rishi woke up to a scream that curdled his blood. It wasn't a scream of fear, but of agony mixed with a strange, guttural pleasure. He rushed to his parents' room. Vikram was sitting up, pale and trembling, trying to shake Nalini awake. She was thrashing on the bed, her back arched unnaturally, her fingers clawing at the sheets. She was speaking in a language that sounded like stones grinding together, full of harsh consonants and hissing vowels.
"Astoretha... shuth'ka... raktam... bhunja..."
When she finally woke, she didn't cry. She just stared at the spinning ceiling fan, her breathing ragged, her eyes devoid of recognition for a long, terrifying minute. She claimed she didn't remember anything. But Rishi saw her hand under the pillow, clutching a piece of jagged black rock.
By late September, the house fell silent. The radio was never turned on; Nalini said the static hurt her head. The heavy curtains were permanently drawn, keeping the apartment in perpetual twilight. Nalini stopped going to the ASI office. She claimed she was "analyzing the data" at home, but no typewriter clacked.
Rishi would often peek into the study. He would find her sitting on the floor, surrounded by papers she had brought back. There were charcoal sketches of a creature—a humanoid figure, skeletal, with large, membranous wings like a bat, and a face that was a void of eyes, a smooth surface with only a vertical slit for a mouth. She had written the name 'ASTORETHA' over and over again in red ink, covering the margins, the table, even the walls.
"She thinks it's Astaroth," Vikram told his friend Suresh on the landline one evening, his voice hushed, shielding the receiver with his hand. "The Great Duke of Hell from biblical demonology. But she says the texts she found are pre-biblical. She says Astaroth is just a later, diluted interpretation of this entity. Astoretha. She says it's hungry, Suresh. She says it's waiting in the cracks of the earth."
Then came the day the puja stopped.
It was Navratri, the festival of the Goddess. The house should have been festive, filled with the smell of sweets. But when Vikram tried to light the morning incense, Nalini stormed out of the bedroom. She snatched the agarbatti from his hand, the burning tip grazing her palm, but she didn't flinch. She crushed the incense sticks into dust.
"No!" she hissed, her face contorted in a sneer that looked foreign on her soft features. "The smoke... it chokes Him. He does not like the smell of sandalwood. It smells of weakness."
"He? Who is He, Nalini?" Vikram shouted, his patience fraying into fear. "You need help. I've made an appointment with Dr. Chinmay for tomorrow. This has gone too far."
"Doctors cannot cure the waking," she said coldly. She walked to the temple, her movements jerky and puppet-like. She blew out the eternal flame of the diya with a sharp breath. Then, with a dispassionate efficiency, she swept the idols of Ganesha and Lakshmi into the trash bin.
Riya cried that day, sobbing into her pillow. Rishi, trembling, retrieved the idols secretly from the bin. He wiped the tea leaves off Ganesha's trunk and hid the gods in his school bag, wrapped in a comic book, terrified that his mother would find them.
The atmosphere in Vasant Villa turned toxic. Nalini began bringing strange things into the house. Rishi found a leather pouch of coarse black salt under his pillow one night. He found charred pieces of coal arranged in a triangle under the dining table. One day, the milkman complained that a severed goat's head, eyes open and glassy, had been left at the gate of the building with a red thread tied around its snout.
Nalini's physical transformation was horrifying. Her skin grew pale, waxy, and translucent. She lost weight rapidly, her cheekbones protruding, looking skeletal, mirroring the drawings in her study. She stopped eating cooked food. Rishi once walked into the kitchen at 2 AM for water and saw her standing by the open fridge. She was eating raw liver from the butcher's packet, blood dripping down her chin, her eyes vacant, chewing with a rhythmic, wet sound.
She didn't look at him. She just kept chewing.
Part 3: The Red Night
October 12, 1987
The horror culminated on the night Riya turned into a woman.
It was late evening, the streetlights outside flickering with the inconsistent voltage of the city. Riya had come to Rishi's room, scared, clutching her stomach. She told him about the cramps, the blood. Rishi, awkward but protective, told her it was normal, that she had to tell Mom.
When Riya told Nalini, a strange, terrifying smile spread across their mother's face. It wasn't a smile of comfort or maternal pride; it was the smile of a predator that had finally spotted its prey in the tall grass.
"The vessel is ready," Nalini whispered, touching Riya's hair. "The cycle has begun. The pure blood flows."
She didn't give Riya sanitary pads. She handed her a white cotton frock, stiff with starch. "Wear this. Only this."
"Vikram," Nalini called out. Her voice was suddenly sweet, normal. It was the voice of the old Nalini, the one who sang in the kitchen. "Let's celebrate. I've made kheer. For Riya. She's growing up. A special occasion."
Vikram, desperate for any sign of normalcy, desperate to believe his wife was returning to him, agreed eagerly. "Kheer? That sounds wonderful, Nalini."
The family sat at the dining table. The heavy teak wood table that had seen so many laughs, so many arguments over homework, now felt cold, like a slab in a morgue. The overhead fan spun lazily, casting moving shadows over the plates.
Nalini served the kheer in silver bowls. It was thick, creamy, but it smelled odd—acrid, metallic, with a hint of something burnt. Rishi took a spoonful out of politeness and almost gagged. It tasted bitter, masked poorly by an overload of sugar.
"Eat, Vikram. Eat, Riya," Nalini urged, her eyes gleaming in the dim light, watching them with an intensity that made Rishi's skin crawl.
Vikram ate. He ate quickly, smiling at Nalini, happy to see her engaged. "It's... distinct, Nalini. Is this saffron? Or maybe cardamom?"
"Something like that," she said. "An herb from the hills. For strength."
Five minutes later, Vikram Deshmukh dropped his spoon. It clattered loudly on the mosaic floor. He grabbed his throat. He tried to stand, knocking over his chair, but his legs gave way. He collapsed onto the floor, his body seizing, frothing at the mouth. His eyes rolled back, fixing on Rishi with a look of utter confusion and betrayal.
"Baba!" Rishi screamed, jumping up, his chair scraping screeching against the floor.
"Sit down, Rishi," Nalini said. Her voice was like ice, devoid of any vibration. She didn't even look at her dying husband.
Riya was screaming, backing into a corner, clutching her stomach. "Baba! Aai, help him!"
The doorbell rang. Not a ring—a rhythmic pounding. Three heavy knocks. A pause of silence. Three heavy knocks.
Nalini walked to the door, stepping over Vikram's twitching hand, and opened it.
Five men entered. They wore ordinary clothes—bush shirts and polyester trousers—but their presence filled the room with a suffocating dread. Their eyes were dead, matte and flat like shark eyes. They carried the smell of damp earth, sulfur, and unwashed bodies. Leading them was a man who looked deceptively ordinary, like a college professor, wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a white khadi kurta. This was Mihir Kutti.
"Is it time, Sister?" Kutti asked. His voice was smooth, cultured, the voice of a man who read poetry.
"The Architect is gone. The girl is bleeding. The moon is in the house of scorpions," Nalini recited, her voice mechanical. "It is time."
They moved towards Riya.
"No! Stay away from her!" Rishi grabbed a serrated steak knife from the table and lunged at Kutti.
Kutti didn't even flinch. One of the other men moved with a speed that shouldn't have been possible, backhanding Rishi with unnatural force. Rishi flew across the room, hitting his head against the plaster wall. The world spun into a blur of colors. Darkness encroached on his peripheral vision.
Through his blurred vision, he saw them pick up Riya. She was limp, her struggles weak—possibly drugged by the kheer she had eaten. He saw his father's body lying still, eyes open, staring at the ceiling fan that kept spinning, indifferent to the death beneath it.
"Leave the boy," Kutti said, glancing at Rishi's crumpled form. "He is not part of the design. He will rot with the father. Or the police will find him with the bodies and blame him. It matters not."
They carried Riya out like a sack of grain. Nalini followed, stepping over her husband's body without looking down, her face beatific. She grabbed a bag—the same canvas bag from the excavation.
Rishi fought the blackness. I have to save her. I promised to protect her.
He dragged himself up. His head throbbed with a blinding pain. He staggered out the front door. The corridor was empty. He ran down the stairs, stumbling, nearly falling, using the railing to keep himself upright.
In the building compound, a dark grey Maruti Omni van was idling. The back door was sliding shut. They were loading Riya inside. Nalini got into the passenger seat, staring straight ahead.
Rishi knew he couldn't fight them. He was thirteen, skinny, and dizzy. He saw the boot of the Omni was slightly ajar; the lock was broken, held by a frayed bungee cord—typical for Bombay cars of that era.
As the men got in, Rishi sprinted, keeping low in the shadows of the parked Fiats and Ambassadors. Just as the van started moving, he threw himself at the back, grabbing the bumper and hauling himself onto the small ledge, prying the trunk door open just enough to squeeze his frame inside. He landed on a pile of spare tires and oily rags that smelled of gasoline.
He pulled the hatch down. Darkness swallowed him.
Part 4: The Salt and the Quill
The ride felt like an eternity. The van vibrated violently, the suspension shot. It smelled of rust, old rubber, and something sweeter—chloroform.
Rishi lay curled in the dark, tears streaming down his face, listening to the muffled voices from the front.
"The alignment is perfect," Mihir Kutti was saying, his voice carrying over the engine noise. "The offering of the first blood from the womb of the seeker's kin. Astoretha will be pleased. The resonance is building."
"Will He rise tonight?" Nalini asked. Her voice sounded small, like a little girl seeking approval from a teacher.
"No. Tonight we feed the dream," Kutti replied. "He needs five more years to fully wake. Tonight, we open the door. We grease the hinges with blood. In 1992, or perhaps later, He will step through."
The van slowed and stopped. The air that rushed in when the doors opened was salty and reeked of rotting fish, chemical waste, and stagnant water. They were likely in the marshlands near Thane Creek or perhaps the abandoned, haunted mills of Bhiwandi on the outskirts of the city.
Rishi waited, heart hammering against his ribs, until they dragged Riya out. He cracked the trunk open.
They were in a colossal, dilapidated warehouse. The corrugated tin roof had collapsed in places, revealing a sky choked with industrial smog and a sliver of moonlight. The ground was dirt, packed hard by years of neglect.
Rishi crept out, hiding behind rusted textile machinery that looked like the skeletons of prehistoric beasts.
In the center of the warehouse, a large, intricate circle had been drawn. Not with chalk, but with coarse black salt mixed with bone dust. Inside the circle were heaps of coal, burning with a low, blue flame that gave off no heat but a terrible, acrid stench.
Riya was laid in the center of the circle on a stone slab that looked ancient, covered in carvings similar to the ones Nalini had been studying. She was awake now, groggy, whimpering "Aai... Aai... I want to go home..."
Nalini stood over her. But she didn't comfort her daughter. She began to strip off her sari, unwinding the six yards of cotton until she stood in a white petticoat that looked grey in the gloom. Her body was painted with symbols in ash.
Kutti handed Nalini a brass bowl. "The purification. Lion's urine mixed with the blood of a black rooster and the venom of a krait."
Nalini took the bowl and poured the foul, viscous liquid over Riya. Riya screamed, thrashing against the ropes that bound her wrists and ankles. The liquid hissed as it touched her skin.
"Quiet, child," Nalini said soothingly, stroking Riya's forehead with a bloody hand. "You are the key. You are the door."
Then came the sounds. They were not mantras. They were not Sanskrit. They were anti-sounds, noises that shouldn't come from human throats.
"Zat... Haa... Raa... Kaa... Gor... Thum..."
The men began to chant, stomping their feet in a jarring, asymmetric rhythm that hurt Rishi's ears. They reached into their bags and pulled out long, sharp objects—porcupine quills, tipped with something dark.
"The piercing of the veil," Kutti announced, raising his hands.
Rishi watched, his hand clamped over his mouth to stop the scream, hot tears streaming down his face, mixing with the dust.
Nalini took the quills. She looked at Riya. There was no love in her eyes. No recognition. Only a fanatical, consuming void.
"For Astoretha," she whispered.
She drove the first quill into Riya's shoulder.
Riya's scream tore through the warehouse, echoing off the rusted iron, startling the bats nesting in the rafters.
"Aai! Stop! It hurts! Aai! Please!"
Rishi couldn't take it. The dam broke. He grabbed a rusted iron rod from the floor and ran out from his hiding place, a scream tearing from his throat. "Leave her alone! You monsters!"
He swung the rod at the nearest man, hitting him in the knee with a sickening crunch. The man grunted and fell.
The chanting stopped abruptly. Mihir Kutti turned slowly to look at Rishi. He didn't look angry. He looked amused, like a scientist observing a rat in a maze.
"The boy followed," Kutti said softly. "Tenacious. It runs in the blood."
Nalini looked up. She held a dagger now, the blade wavy and dark, shaped like a bat's wing. Her face was splattered with the mixture she had poured on Riya. "Rishi. Go back to the car. This is not for eyes that have not seen the darkness."
"You're crazy! You're killing her! She's your daughter!" Rishi screamed, swinging the rod wildly. He looked at Riya. She was pale, bleeding from the quill wound, her eyes wide with betrayal and pain, silently mouthing his name.
"I am freeing her," Nalini said, her voice trembling with conviction. "And I am feeding Him."
She raised the dagger.
"NO!" Rishi lunged, aiming for his mother.
But Kutti was faster. He moved with a blur of motion, grabbing Rishi by the throat and lifting him off the ground with supernatural strength. Rishi kicked and clawed, but Kutti's grip was like an iron clamp.
"Watch, boy," Kutti whispered in his ear, his breath smelling of rotting meat. "Watch the glory. Witness the end of the age of man."
Rishi watched helplessly, suspended in the air, as his mother, the woman who used to put turmeric on his scraped knees, the woman who sang lullabies about Krishna, drove the dagger into his sister's heart.
The sound was wet. Final.
Riya gasped once, a small, confused sound, a bubble of blood escaping her lips, and then went still. The light left her eyes instantly.
The coals flared up into a roaring inferno. A wind howled through the warehouse, cold and biting, though there was no breeze outside. The shadows in the corners of the room seemed to detach themselves from the walls. They swirled around the body, around Nalini, coalescing into a dense, oily blackness.
For a second, Rishi saw it. Behind his mother, rising from her shadow, towering over the cultists—a shape. Massive, leathery wings that spanned the warehouse. A face that wasn't a face, but a cluster of geometric voids.
Astoretha.
It lasted only a second. Then the shadows collapsed back into the darkness, sucked into the wound in Riya's chest.
"It is done," Nalini said, dropping to her knees, her voice trembling with ecstasy. She dipped her fingers in Riya's blood and marked her own forehead, not with a tilak, but with a horizontal slash.
Kutti dropped Rishi. He fell hard, gasping for air, clutching his bruised throat.
"Kill him?" one of the cultists asked, pulling a knife.
Kutti looked at Rishi, who was crawling backward, sobbing, his mind broken. "No. He has witnessed the sacrifice. His fear is also an offering. Let him run. Let him tell the world. Who will believe a child who says his mother ate her young?"
Kutti leaned down to Rishi, his glasses reflecting the dying coals. "Run, little mouse. Run far. But remember, in five years, the sleeper wakes fully. And when he does, he will smell you."
Part 5: The Train to Nowhere
Rishi ran.
He ran until his lungs burned, until the soles of his shoes flapped against the tarmac. He ran through the marsh, slipping in the mud, through the slums where dogs barked at his scent of death. He reached the highway, the lights of trucks blurring in his vision. He flagged down a lorry, crying hysterically about murder. The driver, thinking he was a runaway or a thief, took pity on him and dropped him at the nearest police chowki in Thane.
Rishi told them everything. He sat on a wooden bench, shivering, grabbing the Inspector's khaki shirt, screaming about the warehouse, the cult, the quills, his father poisoned, his sister sacrificed.
Inspector Gaikwad listened, picking his teeth with a matchstick. He was a heavy man with paan-stained teeth. He exchanged a look with a constable who was filing paperwork.
"Deshmukh family? Dadar?" Gaikwad asked, writing nothing down.
"Yes! Please! You have to go! They are still there!"
Gaikwad sighed, a sound of heavy indifference. "Boy, we just got a call from your mother. Poor woman. She was crying. She said her husband had a massive heart attack during dinner. And her son... he went into shock. Started hallucinating. Ran away."
"No! She killed them! She's with a man named Kutti! They worship a demon!"
Gaikwad's face hardened. He leaned in close. The smell of tobacco and corruption was overpowering. "There is no Kutti. There is no cult. Go home, boy. Your mother is waiting. Or I will lock you up in the remand home for making false reports."
Rishi froze. His eyes darted around the room, looking for safety. He saw a calendar on the wall behind the inspector—a standard calendar with a picture of a god. But in the corner, drawn in faint red ink, was a small symbol. A bat-like shape.
They are here too. The rot is everywhere.
Rishi backed away, his blood turning to ice. "I... I need to go to the bathroom."
"Go. Then we take you home," Gaikwad grunted, turning back to his tea.
Rishi went to the back. He didn't stop. He climbed out of the small bathroom window, squeezing through the bars, scraping his skin raw. He dropped into the alleyway and ran into the night.
He knew he couldn't go home. Vasant Villa was a tomb. His mother was a monster. The city belonged to them. Every shadow looked like a wing; every person looked like a cultist.
He reached the railway station. It was chaos—people sleeping on the platforms, the smell of urine and chai. A train was chugging on the platform, steam billowing in the cool October air. The board clattered as it updated.
Mahanagari Express. Destination: Varanasi.
Varanasi. The city of the dead. Kashi. The city of Shiva. The only place, his grandmother used to say, where demons fear to tread. Where the fire of the cremation grounds burns eternally to ward off the dark.
Rishi climbed into a general compartment, squeezing between a milkman and a Naga sadhu covered in ash. The compartment smelled of sweat and bidi smoke. As the train jerked forward, the wheels screeching against the tracks, leaving Bombay behind, Rishi Deshmukh curled into a ball on the floor near the toilet.
He didn't cry anymore. The tears had dried up, leaving tracks in the grime on his face.
Inside him, the fear was hardening. It was calcifying into something cold and sharp. A knot of hatred.
He was thirteen. He was an orphan. He was alone.
In five years, the sleeper wakes.
"I will be ready," he whispered to the rhythm of the train wheels.
The train whistled, a long, mournful sound that cut through the night, carrying the boy towards the holy city, while back in the dark warehouse, the shadows began to feed.