Sourendra Kumar
The envelope was old, yellowed at the edges, and bore no return address. Just her name — Kavya Rao — scrawled in ink that had smudged ever so slightly, as if the writer’s hands had trembled. It had arrived amidst a stack of predictable mail — utility bills, press invites, and a food delivery coupon — but the moment Kavya touched it, something shifted. Inside was a faded black-and-white photograph of a mist-covered river and a torn note in careful block letters: “They never left — they were taken. Vaitarna doesn’t forget.” She stared at the image. The scene was hauntingly still — a river that seemed to stare back. That night, she couldn’t sleep. Her fingers kept returning to the photograph, tracing the outline of the water, her mind a flurry of unease. By morning, her suitcase was packed. She hadn’t heard the name Vaitarna in years, not since her elder sister had vanished during a college trip somewhere near the area. The police had dismissed it as an accident. Her family called it fate. But Kavya, even after all this time, had called it unfinished.
The train journey from Mumbai to Nashik was forgettable, but the cab ride into the Vaitarna valley was something else entirely. The road coiled through dense sal forests and shadowed ridges where phone signals blinked out like dying stars. As the vehicle neared the village, the air changed — thicker, denser, and oddly silent. No birds. No cicadas. Even the breeze through the trees was cautious. Vaitarna wasn’t a proper town, just a loose cluster of homes with sloping red roofs and faces that disappeared behind doorframes at the sight of an outsider. Her arrival didn’t go unnoticed. The moment she stepped out with her duffel bag and camera gear, an old woman muttered something under her breath and vanished into a blue-painted hut. A man sweeping the front of a chai stall paused, looked at her, then continued sweeping the same spot for several minutes. Kavya walked to the lone police outpost, where she was greeted by Inspector Rakesh Thorat — round-faced, sunburnt, and utterly uninterested. “Disappearances?” he scoffed, flipping through a logbook. “City people always want stories. What disappears here are goats. Not people.” But the way his eyes lingered on the photograph she placed before him told a different story.
It was evening when she found the river. Vaitarna was not wild or dramatic — it was eerily still, like a thought that refused to finish. The water reflected the twilight like a sheet of unbroken glass. Kavya crouched at the edge, her boots sinking into the marshy bank, and reached into her backpack for the photograph again — but her hand stopped mid-motion. A glint of metal caught her eye near the roots of a half-submerged tree. She moved closer, brushed aside a tangle of reeds, and uncovered a rusted audio recorder. It was old, possibly analog, but the tiny red light on its side was blinking. Still recording. She brought it to her ear and heard nothing at first — then faint static, like whispers dragged through gravel. As the sun dipped behind the trees, a strange chill crawled up her spine. The silence around her had shifted. The river was watching. And something, somewhere, had just pressed ‘record’.
–
The next morning, the village of Vaitarna wore the same dull, indifferent expression it had the day before — but now, Kavya saw it differently. The rusting tin roofs, the mud-caked thresholds, the sluggish cows in narrow lanes — they were all too quiet. Too arranged. She reviewed the audio recorder over breakfast at the tiny lodge where she stayed — its single dining table covered with a tacky floral tablecloth and a laminated picture of Sai Baba watching her silently from above. The tape had recorded for at least 40 minutes, but the majority was white noise, interrupted only once — by a low, rhythmic thump, like a deep, slow heartbeat. The timestamp suggested it was captured around 2:00 AM, the very hour when locals claimed the river mist turns thick enough to swallow the moon. Curious, Kavya took the recorder to the only person in Vaitarna who hadn’t tried to hide behind curtains when she walked by — a girl. Teenager, maybe fifteen, seated under a banyan tree sketching something in a tattered notebook. The girl’s eyes flicked up when Kavya approached. “You found it, didn’t you?” she said quietly, before Kavya had said a word. “By the tree that leans into the river.” Her name was Riya Joshi, and she was the daughter of the forest ranger no one in the village seemed to talk about.
Riya led her through a back trail that curved behind the hills, away from the road, away from curious eyes. “He doesn’t like visitors,” she warned, before knocking on the half-rotten wooden door of a forest outpost nestled at the edge of a clearing. Devdatta Joshi, tall, greying, with a permanent frown etched into his forehead, opened the door without a word. He looked at Kavya like someone who’d already lost too much to entertain curiosity. But when she mentioned the word “tunnel,” his eyes narrowed. “That place should’ve been sealed years ago,” he muttered, grabbing a kerosene lamp. “Come. I’ll show you why people stop asking questions around here.” The walk to the tunnel took nearly an hour, down a trail thick with fallen leaves and the scent of moss. As they approached a bramble-covered ridge, a metallic echo rose faintly from somewhere ahead. Kavya felt it before she heard it — a vibration deep in her jaw, like a silent hum. The tunnel yawned before them, a crumbling archway of stone half-devoured by roots. Its entrance was marked with a strange symbol — concentric circles within a jagged triangle — carved so deeply into the wall that moss refused to grow over it.
Devdatta stayed outside, but Kavya stepped in, flashlight in one hand, recorder in the other. The air inside was colder, heavier. The silence was not just absence of sound — it was listening. The deeper she went, the more unnatural it felt. The tunnel walls were covered in strange mineral streaks that shimmered faintly, like veins. Ten steps in, she heard it — a breath. Soft. Measured. As if the tunnel itself was alive, exhaling in slow intervals. She spun around, but there was no one. The light flickered. Her recorder picked up a faint resonance — a low frequency hum. Suddenly, a screech — metallic and sharp — echoed from deeper within, making her drop the recorder. When she retrieved it, the red light was blinking again. Another recording. Outside, Devdatta waited in silence, holding the lamp against a now darkening sky. “There are things in Vaitarna,” he said as they began walking back, “that don’t show up in reports. The tunnel… it breathes on certain nights. You felt it, didn’t you?” Kavya didn’t answer. But she did look down at her hand, where the recorder now felt warmer than it should.
–
Back in her room that night, Kavya couldn’t stop staring at the recorder as it sat on the wooden desk, its tiny red light now off but its presence oddly alive. The tunnel had left a taste in her mouth — metallic, unfinished, like the aftertaste of a secret half-spoken. She uploaded the latest recording to her laptop and put on her headphones. At first, the hum returned — soft, layered, deep, as though the earth itself were murmuring. Then, something new emerged: a set of irregular beeps, almost like Morse code, followed by a long pause and a human voice — broken, barely a whisper. “Don’t stay past the second moon… she waits… under the stone.” Kavya sat upright. The voice was male, ragged, afraid. She rewound and played it again. This wasn’t random noise; someone had recorded a message — or maybe a warning. She remembered the name Riya had mumbled on the way to the tunnel: Neel Patankar, the sound engineer who had gone missing six months ago. The police report said he was last seen near the river, studying “low-frequency anomalies.” Now it seemed he might never have left.
Kavya returned to the banyan tree the next morning, and sure enough, Riya was there, sketching the same symbol from the tunnel again and again. “You heard the voice,” Riya said before Kavya could speak. “Did it say her name?” Confused, Kavya asked whose name she meant, but Riya simply stared at her and whispered, “Ekvaani.” It was the second time Kavya had heard that word — the first had been from the village elder, Madhavrao Joglekar, whom she now sought out. His house was a crumbling mansion on the edge of the village, overgrown with vines and stories. Madhavrao was old, impossibly thin, with clouded eyes that somehow missed nothing. “You’re not the first to chase her echo,” he said as he poured bitter tulsi tea into mismatched cups. “The British came here with machines to map silence. What they found was not silence — it was her. Ekvaani means ‘the One Voice’. She was always here. Some say she’s the soul of the river. Others… something older.” Kavya pressed him for facts, not folktales, but Madhavrao only chuckled. “Facts crumble in places like this, child. Sound is safer to believe in than ghosts. Until the sound becomes one.”
That night, Kavya listened to all the files on the recorder again. In one, the beeping became clearer, forming a pattern — almost like a code. She tried matching it with known distress signals but found nothing. Then she slowed the audio to a quarter speed. Beneath the hum, almost lost in the frequency, was something else — a name. Her name. Whispered three times. Kavya… Kavya… Kavya. Her stomach turned. This was no coincidence. She checked the metadata of the file — the timestamp was from the night before she arrived in Vaitarna. Her hands trembled slightly as she stared at the screen. How could someone have recorded her name before she even stepped into the village? That night, she locked her door and left the recorder outside. But just past midnight, she woke up to a soft thud near her window. When she pulled the curtain aside, there was nothing there — except the recorder, now lying on the windowsill, red light blinking again, and faint static rising like breath through the night.
–
By dawn, Kavya had stopped trying to rationalize what was happening. Logic dissolved easily in Vaitarna, like ink in river water. She stared at the blinking recorder as she sipped her tea, its red light no longer ominous, just quietly insistent — as if urging her forward. She needed help decoding the strange beeping from the tapes, and the only person who had shown her any real insight — no matter how cryptic — was Riya. The girl was waiting by the banyan again, her notebook now filled with intricate sketches of concentric circles, jagged tunnels, and tree roots bending unnaturally into each other. “You’re not the only one who hears it,” Riya said, flipping to a page that showed a crude but precise map of the forest. Certain patches were marked with symbols — Xs, spirals, and words like “LOUD,” “PULLS,” and “FORGET.” Kavya leaned closer. “These places… what are they?” Riya didn’t look up. “Places where the voice is strongest. Where people go and… lose pieces of themselves.” She pointed to a shaded hill near the tunnel’s mouth. “That’s where Neel Patankar was last seen. He camped there. After that, no one saw him again — except maybe the river.”
Kavya took the map and traced it against the police files she had managed to copy. The pattern was unmistakable — every disappearance in the last ten years had happened within Riya’s marked zones. It wasn’t superstition. It was a perimeter. She brought the map to Inspector Thorat, half expecting him to brush it off. Instead, his jaw tensed. He slammed the file shut and stood up. “You’re in over your head,” he snapped, pacing the dusty floor of his office. “I told you this isn’t a place for your kind of reporting. You dig too deep, you won’t find answers — just… cracks.” Kavya pressed him. “You’ve seen something, haven’t you? In the tunnel?” Thorat stopped pacing. His voice dropped. “Eight years ago. My junior officer and I chased some smugglers toward that ridge. We heard footsteps, saw lights. He went in. I waited outside. Two minutes later — gone. No scream, no sound. Just silence so thick it hurt. I waited for three hours. Never found him. I reported it as a lost trail. I lied.” He looked away, his voice barely above a whisper. “Because if I’d told the truth, I’d be locked up.”
Armed with the map, the tape, and her unshaken obsession, Kavya decided to enter one of the marked zones herself — alone. She picked the smallest one: a grove near the eastern edge of the forest, just an hour’s walk from the village. As she moved closer, her body responded before her mind could. Her skin prickled. Her ears rang. And then, her thoughts began skipping — she’d remember entering the grove, and then suddenly she was kneeling at its center, the recorder in her hand, without memory of walking there. The trees around her leaned unnaturally inward, as if listening. She pressed ‘record’ and placed the device on a rock, then stepped back. For five minutes, nothing. Then the trees rustled, though there was no wind, and from the soil itself came a low vibration — like the land humming in mourning. The recorder’s red light blinked faster, and the whisper returned. Not just a voice — many, overlapping, speaking in languages she didn’t understand. But one phrase stood out, in English, clear as a bell: “She’s close. Don’t listen too long.” Kavya snatched the recorder and ran, the sound of footsteps following her — but when she turned, there was no one. Only the forest. Only silence. The kind that watches.
–
The next morning arrived like an apology — golden sunlight streaking through the mist, birds finally calling across the trees, and a deceptive calm that made Kavya question everything from the night before. But when she played back the recorder, there was no doubt. The voices were still there — layered, distorted, looping that same phrase: “Don’t listen too long.” She stared at her reflection in the cracked mirror above the washbasin, noticing her own face looked slightly… off. Tired, yes, but more than that — her pupils seemed dilated, and her hearing was still oddly muffled in one ear. She needed answers. Not stories. Not whispers. Hard evidence. And that meant returning to the place where the story had first begun — the tunnel. Devdatta Joshi was reluctant at first, but when Kavya showed him the audio of the multiple voices, something changed in his posture. He didn’t speak for a long while, then finally muttered, “Then it’s started again.” He pulled out a bundle of old keys, a kerosene lamp, and a notebook filled with sketches and notes — dates, phases of the moon, rainfall readings, and a recurring symbol: the three-ringed circle.
This time, they didn’t stop at the tunnel’s mouth. Devdatta led her deeper, through the darkness until they reached a fork — the left path sealed with stone, the right half-collapsed. Behind the rubble, they discovered something unexpected: a steel door, rusted but still intact, buried behind wooden scaffolding and British markings. Using the oldest key, Devdatta unlocked it with a shuddering click. Inside was a hidden chamber carved into the rock, lined with strange metal instruments, glass tubes, and a thick layer of dust — but unmistakably a laboratory. A rusted plaque near the ceiling read “Acoustic Resonance Lab – Est. 1943.” Kavya stepped inside, her breath fogging the stale air. It didn’t feel like a place — it felt like a wound. On a table lay several old tape reels, some broken, some intact. One had the name “PATANKAR” scrawled in pencil. “Neel was here,” she whispered. Devdatta nodded grimly. “And not just him. Others too. The experiments started during the war. The British believed sound could control minds, bend memory, even erase identity. After they left, some locals kept it going. Not for science. For silence. To make people forget.”
As the two combed through the chamber, Kavya found a heavy stone slab in the far corner — circular, engraved with the same triple-ringed symbol, and covered in soot. Devdatta refused to go near it. “That’s the source,” he said, voice trembling. “They built the lab around it. Some say it hums even when there’s no power. Some say it hears you.” Kavya knelt beside it, and for a moment, everything in her head went quiet — terrifyingly, completely silent. No thoughts. No emotions. Just emptiness. She snapped back with a gasp, stumbling to her feet. Devdatta steadied her. “That slab… it’s not stone. Not entirely. It absorbs sound. And maybe… it keeps something trapped.” As they prepared to leave, the kerosene lamp flickered, casting brief shadows along the curved wall — and in one, they saw a human silhouette, motionless, watching from behind the glass of a broken observation window. But when they turned, there was nothing. Only a cold gust of air and the faint sound of a child’s lullaby playing from a tape that no one had pressed ‘play’ on.
–
That night, the storm returned, more violent than ever, shaking the very bones of the Haveli. As the thunder cracked like a whip across the skies and rain lashed against the high windows, Esha sat near the dying embers of the fireplace in her room, unable to sleep. She had found an old diary wedged beneath a loose stone in the fireplace—faded and stained, but its words still legible. It belonged to a woman named Parveen, dated 1927. As Esha flipped through the brittle pages, she found entries that spoke of loneliness, betrayal, and something darker—of being watched, of whispers from beneath the floor, and of footsteps in the night that did not belong to any living soul. The deeper she read, the more she felt a strange kinship with this woman who had lived nearly a century ago. One entry stood out: “They said she died of fever. But I saw the blood. I saw the mirror shatter. And I heard her scream, even after her body was buried.”
Meanwhile, downstairs, Vihaan paced the length of the dining hall, going over the blueprints of the Haveli they had found in the municipal archive. There was something odd—one room in the blueprint didn’t match the structure of the house as it stood. A sealed-off space behind the eastern wing, directly beneath Esha’s room. With the help of the old caretaker, Imtiyaz, they pried open the false wall near the kitchen. A narrow stone staircase emerged, curling downward into darkness. Vihaan and Imtiyaz descended, torches in hand, their steps echoing in the hollow silence. The room they found was covered in old blood stains and rusted chains hung from the walls. It wasn’t a storage room—it was a prison. Or worse. On the ground lay a small brass plate engraved with the same symbol Esha had drawn unknowingly days ago—the serpent eating its tail. Vihaan took photographs and turned to leave, but Imtiyaz lingered, staring at the wall. “This is where they kept her,” he said suddenly. “The girl with no name. The one the family never spoke of.”
Upstairs, Esha was no longer alone. She had fallen asleep with the diary open on her chest, but awoke to the sound of breathing—deep, ragged, not her own. She sat up, heart pounding, and saw the mirror fogging up. Slowly, letters began to form on the surface from the inside. “I REMEMBER YOU.” Her breath caught in her throat. The voice came next—not loud, not whispering, but steady and mournful. “You came back. Just like she said.” The floor beneath her began to creak, as if something stirred underneath. She backed toward the door but found it locked. As thunder boomed again, the floorboard under her foot gave way slightly, revealing a crack through which she could see movement. Not rats. Not roots. Fingers.
–
The sun had barely risen, casting a dull, grey sheen over the sleepy town of Devgarh. A low mist curled across the empty lanes as Meera stood before the ancient banyan tree on the outskirts of the old missionary school, the place that had haunted her dreams for days. She could still recall the chilling entries from Father Lawrence’s journal—an unnamed ritual, hidden beneath the roots of the tree, sealed with silence and blood. Though skeptical, Inspector Aamir had finally agreed to accompany her that morning, armed with a search team and a quiet dread neither of them voiced. As the ground was dug beneath the gnarled roots, the earth slowly gave way to a circular stone slab—an old sealing gate, etched with strange Latin phrases and a rusted iron handle. Beneath it, a spiral staircase descended into darkness, as if into the very throat of the town’s secrets. The stale air that rose from it carried with it the scent of mold, dust, and something older—perhaps even evil. With only torches and instinct, they descended into the stone passageway, unaware that each step was drawing them closer to the core of the conspiracy.
The chamber beneath was vast and chilling, its walls lined with shelves of old artifacts—some stolen, some preserved from centuries past, and all catalogued in the same style as those missing from the museum archives. What struck Meera most was the center of the room: a pedestal upon which rested an ancient relic—a small statue of a veiled woman, her eyes made of jet-black stone. As Aamir examined the idol, Meera noticed the inscriptions circling the floor around them—a diagram resembling the one sketched in the back of Father Lawrence’s journal, marked as “The Keeper’s Circle.” It was then that a sound echoed from above—the screeching of the slab sealing back into place. They were no longer alone. Panic set in, but before they could react, the chamber’s torches flickered to life on their own, revealing a figure in the shadows—Dr. Kabir Sharma, the very historian Meera had once trusted. His voice was calm, even reverent, as he spoke of balance, legacy, and protecting the truth of Devgarh from corruption. What he said next chilled them both: the truth about the original ritual, a sacrificial act that had to be performed once every fifty years, lest the town suffer its fate. And this year, that cycle ended—with Meera and Aamir standing directly in the center of the circle.
Meera struggled to make sense of it all—was this madness, or had they truly unearthed a forgotten pact rooted in colonial greed and local superstition? Kabir claimed that the missionary priests had struck a deal with a dying local sect, binding the relic to Devgarh’s fate—using it to protect the town from plague and drought, in exchange for secrecy and sacrifice. The last ceremony, as per Kabir’s words, had taken place in 1975, hidden by the Emergency and written off as a mass hallucination. Now, the cycle had returned, and Kabir intended to continue the pact—with or without their consent. Aamir moved to draw his weapon, but Kabir merely stepped back into the shadows, uttering a phrase in Latin that caused the idol to glow faintly. The relic, the chamber, even the very roots of the banyan above them—everything began to vibrate with an unnatural hum. They were trapped not just underground, but inside a ritual they barely understood. And outside, the town of Devgarh continued its quiet morning, unaware that history was about to repeat itself—in blood.
–
The storm returned that night—louder, madder, as if it remembered something it had once tried to hide. The rain beat like warning drums on the tin roofs of Darjeeling, and in that chaos, Advait stood by the hospital window, watching red-and-blue sirens bounce off the wet streets. Inside the intensive care unit, Aarti was still unconscious, her body healing from the car crash that wasn’t an accident. Her file had been tampered with, her oxygen supply nearly compromised—only Advait’s sudden arrival had stopped something irreversible. Beside her, a folded letter lay untouched—Raka’s confession. Inspector Tanveer entered, his silhouette blurred by the fogged glass. “The fingerprints match,” he said grimly. “Raka Roy faked his death. The man we cremated wasn’t him. His body was switched en route to the morgue. This has been in motion for longer than we thought.” Advait clenched his fists. “So he’s still out there?” Tanveer nodded. “And he’s watching. He’s always watching.”
Meanwhile, in a secluded cottage just outside town, Raka Roy scribbled in a leather-bound notebook, candlelight dancing across his face. He looked gaunt, like a man hollowed out by vengeance. Every page he wrote bore names, dates, and sins—the sins of those who betrayed him and buried his truth. “They called me a monster,” he whispered. “But they made me one.” His plan had been to erase his past by burning the present—Aarti, Tanveer, and most of all, Advait, who had unknowingly stepped into the shoes Raka left behind. But something had changed. Watching Aarti cry in her sleep, hearing Advait recite poetry to a near-dead woman—it stirred the last ember of his humanity. Yet, the monster inside him remained louder. He pressed a blade to his palm and carved a line across the skin. “Blood remembers,” he murmured, “and blood settles scores.”
As morning broke over Darjeeling, the storm finally relented, but the silence it left behind was worse. At a local monastery, where Raka had once been hidden as a child after the riots, the monks found a package addressed to “The Man Who Lost Himself.” Inside were photographs—some old, others recent. Aarti, Tanveer, Advait, and finally, Raka himself in disguise, watching from a distance. With them, a tape: his voice, clear and calm. “You think I’m done, but shadows don’t die in the light—they simply shift. The past is not a ghost to be buried; it’s a fever that comes back every time it rains.” Back at the hospital, Aarti stirred. Her eyes opened for the first time in days. “He’s alive,” she whispered. Advait leaned in. “Who?” Her hand trembled as she pointed toward the foggy window. “Raka. He’s not gone. He never was.” And somewhere across the town, a monsoon wind lifted a piece of newspaper bearing the headline: Local Cop Declares Serial Killer Case Closed. It fluttered into the sky, carrying with it the one truth nobody wanted to face—The storm wasn’t over. It had just begun again.
_____
