Mithilesh Sharma
1
The last train of the day hissed into Churchgate station like a tired animal, exhaling its mechanical breath into the near-empty platform. The digital clock above flickered—11:17 PM. A young woman in a pale blue kurti stepped off the 10:45 PM Borivali fast local, clutching her jute bag close. Nikita Majumdar. Her phone buzzed once in her pocket, but she didn’t check it. The cameras caught her image in three places—exiting the ladies’ compartment, walking past the stationery kiosk, then disappearing behind the pillar near the service stairwell. After that, nothing. The next time anyone saw her, she was lying in a back alley two blocks from the station, face down, wrist twisted, her jute bag missing, and blood clinging to her temple like dried vermilion. It was Thursday morning when ACP Vaishali Deshmukh stood over her body, staring at the lifeless shell that had once been a woman with a family, a job, and a life. Something gnawed at her. The place, the time, the victim—they all felt like echoes.
Back at the crime branch’s south Mumbai office, Vaishali’s cigarette burned untouched in the ashtray. The forensic prelim report had nothing unusual—no signs of assault, no drugs, death due to blunt trauma. But the missing footage irked her. She had seen this before. Six months ago, a student from Charni Road vanished from the same train, same time. A month later, a junior architect. Then a nurse. The files had slipped through the system like lost luggage—no pattern, no follow-up. Until now. Now she had a body, and she had blood. She stood staring at the CCTV footage—watching Nikita vanish behind the pillar again and again. “It’s not deletion,” said Kunal Gokhale, her partner. “It’s surgical. Whoever did this knew exactly what to erase and what to leave.” That chilled her more than anything. This wasn’t random violence. This was planned, timed, and tailored.
She lit another cigarette and leaned back, eyes narrowing. The railway control office claimed system glitch. But three different women, three different nights, same time, same place—and all of them lost in the static of Churchgate? Not a chance. Vaishali scribbled something on the corner of a file: Wednesday. 10:45 PM. Churchgate. Women. The ink bled a little into the paper as she pressed hard. The station was too public, too guarded, yet someone had found a way to make women vanish in plain sight. She closed Nikita’s file, walked to the window, and looked out toward the dark outline of the tracks. Somewhere between Borivali and Churchgate, a ghost was riding the train. And next Wednesday, she would be waiting.
2
Two days after Nikita’s body was discovered, ACP Vaishali Deshmukh sat hunched over a steel desk inside her office at Azad Maidan. The wall clock ticked slow, steady—mocking her sleeplessness. Her computer screen was filled with three open case files, all flagged from the past six months. Case 118B: Shruti Vyas, 24, student, last seen boarding the 10:45 PM Borivali fast local on a Wednesday night. Case 147C: Apeksha Pawar, 29, junior architect, same train, same timing, vanished from Churchgate platform. Case 203D: Meenakshi Iyer, 31, staff nurse, same again. Each one had ended in a missing report, a fruitless inquiry, and silence. None of them had bodies. Until Nikita. Vaishali rubbed her temple, feeling the dull throb of an old migraine stirring. This wasn’t coincidence. This was pattern. And someone had gone to great lengths to ensure the pattern remained invisible.
Kunal Gokhale entered without knocking, holding two cups of cutting chai. He dropped the files he’d pulled from the Western Railway’s security archive onto her desk. “Nothing new. Same glitch excuse. And get this—each of those days, the CCTV feed from Platform 2 at Churchgate shows a two-minute black screen. Just two minutes.” He sipped the chai and muttered, “Too clean to be real.” Vaishali opened the files. The footage wasn’t missing entirely—just the exact window when the women vanished. As if someone knew precisely where the cameras were, what angles they covered, and when to splice. “What about the rail control team?” she asked. Kunal shrugged. “Same guy supervising each night shift—Sudhir Patankar. Tech supervisor. Keeps to himself. Doesn’t even carry a smartphone.” Vaishali’s eyes narrowed. No phone. No trace. That was either paranoia or guilt. Maybe both. “Set up a visit. Quietly.”
The next morning, Vaishali visited Nikita’s workplace—a boutique digital marketing firm in Lower Parel. Her manager, visibly shaken, mentioned something strange. “She was tense the last few weeks. Said someone was following her at Churchgate. She even filed a complaint to RPF but never heard back.” That complaint was never forwarded to the city police. Vaishali requested her work laptop and phone. On Nikita’s phone, she found a trail of unsent messages and voice notes. One of them, recorded two nights before her death, chilled her to the bone: “If anything happens to me, check the train. The man in the uniform. He always gets off one stop before Churchgate. He doesn’t blink.” Vaishali played it again. And again. Something about Nikita’s voice—low, urgent, certain—made the silence afterward feel like a scream. Someone had been watching her. And now, they might be watching them too.
3
Nikita Majumdar’s home in Kandivali was tucked behind a row of laundry-clad balconies, in a crumbling three-storey building that smelled of old paint, incense, and the faint trace of damp. Her grandmother, Ashalata Majumdar, opened the door with sunken eyes and trembling hands. “She never came home late, beta,” she whispered, clutching a photograph of Nikita from a childhood school play. “Except on Wednesdays, after her poetry group.” The small flat had shelves lined with books, train ticket stubs, old cameras. On a table in the corner lay a leather-bound notebook, its corners frayed from years of thumbing. Vaishali opened it gently, as though afraid to disturb the voice still lingering between the pages. The entries weren’t diary-like; they were fragments—poems, sketches, words that read like whispers from within the crowded compartments of a city train. “We walk in tunnels / lit by names we don’t know / under clocks that blink / but do not warn.” She paused at a marked page. The poem read: “Churchgate isn’t the last stop. Platform Zero waits behind the mirror.”
Vaishali had heard the phrase before. “Platform Zero.” A myth, told by late-shift motormen and overworked coolies—a phantom platform said to exist somewhere in the folds of Churchgate station, visible only after midnight. Some claimed it was built during the British era and sealed off after a fire. Others said it was never real, just a ghost-story version of the train delays people couldn’t explain. But Nikita’s references were too specific. Vaishali noted drawings of Churchgate station from odd angles—one sketch showed a hidden stairwell between Platforms 2 and 3, ending in a thick door labeled “Maintenance Use Only.” “We should see this place,” she murmured. Kunal, flipping through the last pages, froze at a dried leaf pressed between two sheets. Under it, in jagged handwriting: “Watch the uniforms. They lie. They vanish.”
They returned to Churchgate that night, posing as commuters. The bustle had faded, the platforms humming in silence. Vaishali, in civilian clothes, traced Nikita’s last seen path. Past the kiosk, the vending machine, the dusty pillar near the ladies’ coach zone. Kunal walked further down, past the shuttered tea stall, and paused. “Vaishali,” he called softly. Behind a black curtain covering a cleaning supply zone, they found a bolted metal door. It had no label, no surveillance above, no signage. Just old rust and a faint humming noise behind it—like a generator, or maybe a screen. Vaishali pressed her ear against it. The air was cold, metallic. She felt the pull of something ancient, like a riddle that wanted to be solved. “This isn’t just about trains anymore,” she said. “Someone built a door inside this city, and now they’re feeding it girls who won’t be missed.” Kunal stared at the bolt. “You still think this is one killer?” Vaishali’s jaw tightened. “No. This is infrastructure. Someone’s built an entire system to make people disappear—and it runs right on schedule.”
4
The next morning, ACP Vaishali Deshmukh requested access to Churchgate’s underground maintenance roster. It took nearly five hours, three phone calls, and one signed threat to the Western Railway Vigilance Department before she received the name she was looking for—Gautam Shinde, night janitor, employed under a private outsourcing contract. His ID showed 17 years of service. Never promoted, never transferred. His shift always started at 10 PM and ended at 6. The control office described him as “quiet, strange, talks to himself.” The kind of man people learn to ignore. Which made him, to Vaishali, exactly the kind of man who sees everything. She found him crouched near the end of Platform 1, scrubbing a corner tile with unnecessary care, humming an old Lata Mangeshkar tune. He didn’t flinch when she crouched beside him. Just said, “Another one, right? The girl in blue. She was scared.”
Kunal, standing nearby, glanced at Vaishali in surprise. Gautam never stopped scrubbing. “She stood near that pillar. Didn’t want to go up the stairs. Said someone was watching her. She wasn’t the first.” He looked up, his eyes watery and yellow. “They always come alone. Always on Wednesday. They see something that shouldn’t be there.” Vaishali leaned in. “What did she see?” He dropped his voice. “The man in the faded railway jacket. His shoes don’t leave footprints. His cap is always too clean. He gets off the train, but no one sees him get on.” She asked why he never reported it. Gautam smiled, the kind that made your skin go cold. “You ever try reporting a ghost to a man behind a desk?” He pointed toward a darkened corridor at the far end. “There’s a door. We used to clean there years ago. Now it’s locked. But some nights… I still hear voices behind it.”
That night, Vaishali and Kunal followed Gautam’s directions and found the corridor again. This time, they came equipped—with a portable video unit, two high-lumen flashlights, and a bolt cutter. The steel door groaned when it opened, revealing a narrow stairwell choked in dust and mold. The smell was of old metal, grease, and something faintly chemical. They descended slowly, their footsteps echoing as if inside a forgotten lung of the city. At the bottom, they entered a long chamber—abandoned control panels lined the walls, old analog switches labeled in rusted typeface: Zone 1 – Platform Control, Feed 3 – CCTV Bay A, Western Relay Hub. Most of them were dead. Except one. A screen in the center blinked faintly with static, then flickered. Vaishali stepped forward. The feed showed a dark compartment—empty seats, the hum of a train in motion. Then, a man in a railway jacket entered the frame, walked slowly past the camera, and stopped. He turned. For a brief second, he looked directly into the lens, though it was hidden. As if he knew he was being watched. The screen cut to black.
Kunal swore under his breath. “This isn’t a station. This is a bunker.” Vaishali stared at the dark screen, her pulse slowing to match the hum of the place. “No,” she said quietly. “This is where they edit reality. And this—” she tapped the dead controls, “—this is their stage light.” She took a step back, glanced around the hidden room, and realized something chilling: there were no cobwebs. No rats. No signs of abandonment. Someone had been here recently. And someone didn’t want them looking any further.
5
Two nights later, inside a dimly lit cyber café tucked between a betting kiosk and a paan stall in Andheri West, Inspector Kunal Gokhale sat across from his old acquaintance Ajay Devre, a former Railway IT technician turned freelance coder. Ajay’s desk was cluttered with modems, circuit boards, and half-drunk Thums Up bottles. The room smelled of sweat and static. “You sure this is clean?” Kunal asked. Ajay smirked. “Clean enough to keep your seniors out of my hard drives.” He inserted a pen drive and pulled up a reconstructed segment of the Churchgate CCTV logs. Layer by layer, frame by frame, he exposed what the official files had erased—a fragment of Nikita’s last night, where she was briefly seen speaking to a man in a faded railway uniform. The clip glitched, cut, and resumed ten seconds later with the man gone and Nikita looking over her shoulder. “That’s not deletion,” Ajay said. “That’s surgical tampering. Someone’s using a military-grade feed switcher—ghost software, built for warzones, not railway stations.”
Back at HQ, Vaishali leaned over the footage with growing dread. The tampering wasn’t limited to Nikita’s case. Three other incidents—Shruti, Apeksha, Meenakshi—showed the same disruption at identical time stamps. The same missing ten seconds. Always on a Wednesday. Always at 11:07 PM. “He’s working with someone inside,” she muttered. “Someone who understands the timing and visibility gaps between rail feeds. Who knows where blind spots lie.” Her list of suspects narrowed to the group of employees with Level 4 access to Churchgate’s internal CCTV system. Only six names appeared. One of them was Sudhir Patankar, night shift control engineer. The man with no smartphone, no online presence, and zero reported sick days in the last seven years. A ghost in a department full of bureaucrats.
Vaishali and Kunal visited Sudhir’s cramped government flat near Elphinstone Road. He opened the door hesitantly, blinking like a man unaccustomed to daylight. Bookshelves of technical manuals lined his walls. No television. No music. Just silence and circuit schematics. “I just follow commands,” he said softly. “I don’t ask why.” Vaishali pushed forward. “Then let me ask. Who told you to edit those feeds? Whose name is on those orders?” Sudhir’s hand twitched. “There are no names. Only codes. The system sends them directly. One digit wrong, and the camera burns out. I don’t even see the whole picture. I’m not allowed to.” When shown the footage of Nikita, he turned pale. “She wasn’t supposed to be there. She walked into the wrong segment. That zone was… reserved.” Vaishali stiffened. “Reserved for what?” Sudhir looked at her, fear crawling into his eyes. “Not what. Who.”
That night, Vaishali couldn’t sleep. The footage looped in her mind like a curse. A phantom man in a uniform. A woman alone on the platform. Ten seconds lost to shadows. And now, an engineer talking in riddles. The deeper they dug, the less sense it made—and the more it felt like they were chasing not just a killer, but a mechanism, something built into the rails themselves. A system that could erase people with bureaucratic precision. She poured herself another cup of black tea and stared at the map pinned to her wall. Borivali to Churchgate. Seventeen stops. All visible. All accounted for. Except one. She circled it in red ink. A siding between Marine Lines and Churchgate. Long abandoned. Disconnected from official schedules. But what if… it wasn’t?
A new theory surfaced—not all trains on the schedule are meant for passengers. Some may run empty. Some may never arrive. And some may exist solely to take the wrong person to the wrong place, at exactly the wrong time.
6
Rain slicked the Churchgate tracks that night like oil, turning reflections into shadows. Vaishali and Kunal waited near the northern end of Platform 2, out of uniform, dressed like exhausted office-goers trying to blend in. The station was quieter than usual—Wednesday nights were always quiet—and the electronic signs blinked indifferently as the 10:45 PM Borivali Fast pulled in. The two officers didn’t board. Instead, they watched. Watched the compartments. Watched the faces stepping out. And watched the uniformed man from the old footage. He was there. Faded blue jacket, brown boots, no name tag. He stepped out and walked straight ahead—not toward the exit, but toward the far end of the platform, into the blind spot beyond the last pillar. Vaishali nudged Kunal. “There. He’s real.” Kunal had already started moving.
They followed him down a corridor used mostly by railway staff. At the end of it was the old steel door they had opened before, the one that supposedly led to abandoned tunnels and unused storage. But this time, it was unlocked. As if expecting them. Inside, they descended the same dusty staircase, but something had changed. The lights were on. Flickering, but alive. The corridor pulsed with power—soft hums, warm machinery, subtle beeps. This wasn’t abandonment. This was operation. They reached the long hall from before, but found more than static screens. There were now open terminals, heat from a recent server cycle, and the smell of industrial-grade lubricant. And in the center of the room—an old rail monitor, blinking a destination in green text:
PLATFORM 0 — STATUS: ACTIVE — TIME: 23:07
Kunal stepped back. “Is this some kind of ghost server?” Vaishali leaned in. “It’s live. Look at the timestamp.” The monitor showed a live feed of a train entering a siding tunnel, not visible from any official line map. The compartment was unlit. But inside were three figures, unmoving, heads bowed. She paused the feed. “Playback,” she said. The system obeyed. A segment from one week ago appeared. Nikita. Alone. Sitting by a window. The train didn’t stop at Churchgate. It passed it—no one else inside—until it pulled into a non-existent platform, flanked by tiled walls and an overhead sign with no number. And there she got up. And someone walked toward her from the dark. The feed ended there.
“That’s not a glitch. That’s a whole platform,” Kunal said. Vaishali scanned the blueprints she had stolen earlier from the Western Railway records room. Nothing about such a platform existed. But there it was—built beneath the current ones, deeper underground, sealed off after a British-era tunnel fire in the 1940s. And somehow… still connected. Still functional. She looked at Kunal. “This was never meant for passengers. This was meant for disappearances.” They stood in the silence of the hidden room, surrounded by technology too old and too precise to be accidental. It wasn’t just the software. It was the infrastructure—a secret tunnel system, a false platform, edited memories captured in static, all protected by access clearance no cop had. “Somebody built an entire ghost station,” Kunal muttered. “Right under the city. And they’ve been using it.”
The room suddenly flickered. One of the terminals beeped. A new feed loaded. Live. Wednesday. 11:05 PM. A woman—alone—boarded the 10:45 PM from Borivali. She sat by the window. She didn’t know the train wouldn’t stop. Vaishali froze. “This is happening now.” They ran. Up the stairs, back through the service hallway, past the mop carts and the old switchboards. The 10:45 PM was still rolling in slow toward Churchgate. But the compartment where the woman sat was already empty when it stopped. Gone in the distance between the last signal and the platform. As if she had vanished between time and track. As if Platform Zero had opened again—just long enough to swallow someone whole.
7
Churchgate station shimmered under the sodium streetlights, casting long shadows on its arched colonial frame. ACP Ira Rathod stood on Platform 2, her eyes locked onto the blinking red of the surveillance monitors temporarily set up for live access. Ravin leaned beside her, silent, clutching a thermos of black coffee that had long gone cold. The tech team from Mumbai Cybercrime had hardwired into the station’s feed, trying to track anomalies in the real-time stream. The plan was simple: recreate the 10:45 PM scenario exactly, using decoy officers posing as late-night commuters. The air hung thick with humidity and tension. Trains screeched in and out, people rushed past unaware that Churchgate tonight wasn’t just a transit point—it was bait.
Ira’s fingers tapped impatiently on the monitor’s edge. Ananya’s autopsy report hadn’t yielded anything new except for a faint residue of sedative near the clavicle—administered without needle marks. Whoever was doing this knew how to drug someone in a crowd, without drawing attention. That evening, Ravin had tried to trace the signal disruptions from last week. The problem? The data packets weren’t missing—they were never there. It was as if the cameras stopped recording for precisely four minutes, always during the last stretch between Marine Lines and Churchgate. The blackout window. Ravin called it the “ghost in the feed.” Ira called it murder. Tonight, she wanted to catch the ghost with her own eyes.
As the 10:45 approached, the energy shifted. From the feed, Ira watched the decoy woman—Constable Divya in civilian wear—board the train at Borivali. Every station ticked by, and the signal remained clean. But just as the train crossed Charni Road, the monitors flickered. Not out. Just—fuzzy, like an old VHS. Ira squinted. For a split second, there was a shadow, not on the platform but inside the camera lens—a silhouette of someone watching from the other side of the feed. Her breath caught. “Pause it!” she shouted. But the feed jumped ahead two seconds. Divya had disappeared from frame. In those seconds, the station appeared empty—eerily, artificially empty. Ravin muttered, “Someone’s scrubbing it in real-time.” Ira turned to him slowly. “This isn’t just someone with access. This is someone inside the system, writing the rules.” For the first time since the case began, Churchgate felt not like a crime scene—but a trap built to keep the truth buried.
8
The morning after the failed decoy operation, ACP Ira Rathod stood alone inside the dimly lit tunnel between Charni Road and Churchgate, flanked by signal engineers and forensic officers. The walls, coated in decades of soot and mineral sweat, seemed to breathe with an unsettling hum. This was the blackout zone—the stretch of track where the surveillance feed always glitched, where Ananya was last seen, and where Divya too had disappeared from the feed the previous night, only to be found unharmed and unconscious in the train’s final compartment. No one had seen her enter that coach. No camera had caught the moment. It was as if something had reached into time and snatched her presence away.
As the forensic team took electromagnetic readings, Ira scanned the tunnel floor. A single steel maintenance hatch caught her attention—its corners rusted but recently disturbed. With a silent nod, she signaled to open it. The hatch groaned as it lifted, revealing a vertical shaft with a metal ladder, leading into what the engineers called an abandoned cable vault—a relic from the early 20th century, sealed decades ago. Ravin descended first, flashlight cutting through the darkness. What they found beneath was not just forgotten architecture—it was something else entirely. Crude recording equipment, jumbled wiring, and screens still running on backup battery showed live train feeds with a six-second delay. Someone had built a ghost system. A secret node tapping into the city’s backbone, manipulating what the city saw—and what it didn’t.
On one of the walls, scratched in hurried strokes, was a phrase in Marathi: “सत्य एक अंधारात आहे” — “Truth lies in the dark.” The scratch marks were fresh. Someone had been here recently. Someone who knew when the decoy would be sent. Ira’s phone vibrated. A new email. No sender. No subject. Just a timestamp and a video file. 10:45 PM. Same day. She played it. On the screen, Divya boarded the train. But this time, the camera didn’t glitch. Instead, it captured a cloaked figure seated in the rear coach, staring directly into the lens. Not moving. Not blinking. Behind them, a shadow that didn’t belong to the lights. As Ira watched the figure slowly raise their hand to wave—timed perfectly with the moment the live feed had glitched last night—she realized: whoever was behind this wasn’t just watching. They wanted her to see. And they were waiting.
9
The city was unusually silent that evening, as if Mumbai itself was holding its breath. The Western Line trains ran on schedule, the crowds came and went, and yet there lingered an invisible weight—an unspoken fear among motormen, conductors, even seasoned commuters who usually slept through their rides. But ACP Ira Rathod wasn’t in uniform today. She sat quietly inside the women’s compartment of the 9:53 PM Borivali local, wearing a plain black salwar and clutching a worn jhola. Her badge was tucked away, her eyes alert behind a librarian’s pair of spectacles. She wasn’t alone—Ravin, in the guise of a daily commuter with a bandaged wrist and a sling, was three coaches behind her. The plan wasn’t to intervene. It was to observe. They were waiting for the train to enter the blind spot, that cursed stretch between Charni Road and Churchgate, one more time.
The train hummed into the tunnel. The lights flickered—once, then twice. The camera system, patched temporarily with a portable backup server, began to stutter. Ira’s breath slowed. Around her, five other passengers sat—two students, one elderly woman, and a silent girl with headphones. But it was the seventh person who made her freeze. He hadn’t been there before. A tall man in a grey hoodie, with hands gloved in black and a face hidden in unnatural shadow, now sat at the far end of the coach. She hadn’t seen him board. No one had. And yet… he was there. Sitting, unmoving. As the lights dimmed again, Ira’s radio crackled—Ravin’s voice, distorted but urgent: “He’s in Coach 7. Not on the feed. Repeat—not visible on the feed. You see him?”
“I see him,” she whispered.
Then came the sound again.
Click.
It was faint, metallic. Not from the train. Not from any mechanism. But from within the walls. The sound of a switch—familiar, methodical. Ira turned slightly. The girl with headphones was gone. Just gone. Her bag remained on the seat, her headphones still dangling. The old lady looked confused, blinking in the flickering light. The other two were asleep. Or pretending to be. Ira stood up slowly, not drawing attention. The man in the hoodie turned his head—and for the first time, she saw his eyes. Empty. Black. As if something had hollowed them out. And then, as the train entered complete blackout for exactly 11 seconds, the world fell away.
When the lights returned, Ira was gone.
No trace. No scream. Only her jhola sat on the seat where she had been, gently rocking from side to side.
Ravin, screaming her name over the comms, burst into Coach 7 at Churchgate station. But it was too late. The coach was empty. Silent. But from the ceiling, hanging by a safety chain, was a folded piece of yellow paper.
It had one sentence.
“You stepped into the Seventh Compartment. Now count backward to the first lie.”
And for the first time, Ravin realized—they had never been chasing a person.
They had been chasing a ritual. And now, the ritual had taken her.
10
The rain came down in sheets as the final confrontation unfolded at Churchgate station, now nearly deserted save for a few late-night workers and the ever-present beggars tucked into corners of platform benches. ACP Ira Saxena moved quickly, her sidearm tucked low by her waist, eyes scanning the empty compartments of the 10:45 PM Borivali-Churchgate local that had just rolled in. She was alone—on purpose. Tonight was a trap, and she was the bait.
In the control room beneath the station—hidden behind layers of bureaucratic indifference and outdated maps—Shaan Banerjee stood with his back to the glowing monitors. He had been expecting Ira. Ananya’s encrypted files had exposed enough to sink him, but the department still needed a smoking gun. Shaan, once an idealistic IT engineer, had long since traded principles for power, building a quiet empire by manipulating camera feeds, staging disappearances, and burying bodies where trains hummed louder than screams. But Ira had followed every breadcrumb, endured every misdirection. And now, with her mic transmitting live to her team stationed in CST, she confronted him—calm, sure, and deadly.
Shaan lunged first. He had a knife, sharp and fast. Ira fired once, a clean shot to the shoulder, enough to drop him without killing. As he writhed on the damp concrete, she stepped forward, retrieving Ananya’s final data chip from his pocket—the one that showed the missing frames from all six victims’ last sightings, including Ananya’s own final moment before she vanished into the static. The case was closed not with sirens, but with silence. As Ira stood alone in the monsoon-drenched platform, the 10:45 PM local began to depart, its lights flickering as it vanished into the night. The camera above her blinked back to life. This time, it would not be edited. This time, it would see everything.
-End-
