Milan Chetri
Part 1: The Forgotten Graveyard
The road to Mangalpur was little more than a cracked ribbon of asphalt swallowed by the forest. Raghav Mitra leaned forward in his jeep’s passenger seat, squinting at the GPS signal that blinked in and out like a dying candle. “This better not be another ghost town with cows and bad reception,” he muttered, brushing dust off his camera lens.
Anya didn’t respond. She was too focused on keeping the jeep from skidding into the drainage ditch that lined the road. “Five more kilometers,” she finally said, her voice clipped. “After that, the villagers say we walk.”
“Perfect,” Raghav smirked, switching on his body mic. “Welcome back to NightTrace, folks. Today, we’re heading into the belly of darkness—Mangalpur. A village you won’t find on any map, a cemetery no one wants to talk about, and a date that every tombstone shares: November 13, 1965.”
Behind the sarcasm was curiosity bordering on obsession. The email that had brought them here was short, unnerving. No name. No contact. Just a black-and-white photo of moss-covered graves and one sentence:
> Don’t let the priest see you.
They parked at the edge of the forest. A narrow dirt trail wound through sal trees and waist-high grass. It was midday, but the canopy above made it feel like dusk. Cicadas buzzed. Distantly, a cowbell clinked once.
The village itself was a scattering of huts that seemed more tired than abandoned. Smoke curled from a single chimney, but the rest of Mangalpur lay in a strange, heavy hush. As they passed, a group of elderly women grinding spices fell silent, watching them with blank stares. One made a gesture Raghav didn’t recognize—three fingers touched to the lips, then flicked to the sky.
He smiled politely. “Friendly bunch.”
They made their way to the old riverbed the locals called Shushka Nodi—The Dried One. The map said the river had once separated the village from a British burial ground, but now it was a trench of cracked clay and thornbrush. Raghav’s boots crunched over salt-white soil as they crossed.
And then, they saw it.
Nestled against the curve of the jungle was a rusting black gate choked in creepers. A cracked stone arch bore the fading inscription:
“Mangalpur Christian Cemetery – Est. 1849”
Anya raised her phone to film. “Creepy rating: 7.5.”
“Just wait,” Raghav said, swinging open the gate with a protesting groan. Inside, weeds poked through shattered gravestones, and iron crosses lay twisted in the soil. The air was cooler, heavier. As they stepped in, it felt like walking into a room where someone had just stopped talking.
“Start recording,” Raghav said. “We’ve got something.”
One by one, they inspected the tombstones. Some were tilted, others sunken deep into the earth, but all bore the same chilling detail:
Date of Death: 13.11.1965
Twenty-three graves. Twenty-three deaths. Same day. Same year.
“I thought this was a colonial graveyard,” Anya whispered. “But these names—‘Hariram Basak,’ ‘Bani Devi,’ ‘Pulin Malakar’—they’re all local.”
Raghav knelt beside a headstone that had partially collapsed. Moss clung to the edges, but just visible beneath it was a symbol carved deep into the stone: a circle, pierced by what looked like four thorns.
“You recording this?” he asked.
Anya zoomed in. “Looks ritualistic.”
“Folk symbol? Occult? Maybe some kind of sealing mark?” Raghav brushed at another tombstone—same symbol. Every grave had it.
“Who the hell dies on the same day and gets buried with the same mark?” he muttered. “Accident? Mass suicide? Cult?”
As the sun began to dip, the shadows from the trees stretched long and jagged over the graves. Raghav set up the tripod for a drone shot. Anya switched to night vision mode and did a slow pan of the area.
Then they heard it.
A sound so faint it might have been mistaken for wind—except there was no wind.
A soft, rhythmic chant. Ancient syllables, low and urgent, repeating. Raghav froze. “You hear that?”
Anya nodded slowly. “It’s not in our language.”
Raghav grabbed the mic and whispered, “It’s coming from the trees.”
He stepped toward the edge of the cemetery where the jungle thickened. Beyond the vines and dry leaves, something glinted. Not metal—eyes. Watching. Still.
He raised his flashlight. In that flickering beam of light, they saw a figure.
A man, dressed in white dhoti and shawl, standing utterly still beneath a sal tree. His face was shadowed, but something about him made Raghav’s heart skip. Not fear—something older. A warning.
“Who—” Raghav started to call out.
But the figure turned and stepped backward—vanishing as if swallowed whole by the forest.
Anya let out a sharp breath. “Was that—was he watching us the whole time?”
Raghav played back the footage. The man had been standing there for over three minutes before they noticed.
The chanting stopped.
Raghav looked around. The light was fading. The silence pressed in again.
“We head back,” he said quietly. We’re not alone.,
Part 2: The Archivist’s Warning
The walk back from the cemetery was quiet—too quiet. Even the insects had gone silent. Raghav and Anya didn’t speak until they were back at the jeep, sweat-streaked and breathing hard.
“That wasn’t a villager,” Anya said, tossing her gear into the back. “He didn’t blink. He didn’t move.”
“He knew we were watching,” Raghav muttered, eyes scanning the tree line. “And he wanted us to.”
They decided to stay the night in the village. There were no homestays or hotels, only a cement rest house meant for forest officials, dusty from disuse. A local teen with a stammer named Bablu handed over the rusted keys with a warning:
“Lock windows. And don’t… don’t record tonight.”
Raghav laughed it off. “We’ll be fine.”
But Anya didn’t. She kept the drone battery charging beside her and set up a night-vision trail cam by the back door. She’d seen something in the man’s eyes—not menace, but certainty. As if they were already part of something that had started long ago.
By late evening, the sun dipped behind the sal trees, and the village plunged into darkness. No streetlights. No glow from windows. Just one distant lantern flickering on a porch.
Raghav played the cemetery footage over and over. The man in white appeared on frame at exactly 3:08 p.m., motionless behind a tree. No signs of approach. No entry point.
Then came the chant.
Raghav slowed the audio, isolating the rhythm. Sanskrit, maybe. Or something older. The waveform pulsed irregularly, almost like a heartbeat.
Suddenly, the rest house door creaked.
Anya jolted upright.
A stooped silhouette stood in the doorway, framed against the orange haze of a hurricane lantern. His eyes were milk-white with cataracts, but sharp as flint.
“You are the one who asked about the graves,” he said. His voice was papery, but firm. “Come. You need to see the records.”
Raghav blinked. “And you are…?”
“Narayan Prabhu. I was the schoolmaster. Before the priest came.”
He led them through narrow alleys to a half-collapsed mud building—the old school. Rats scurried at their approach. The room smelled of mildew and ancient paper.
“This village had a library,” Narayan muttered, brushing aside cobwebs. “They don’t read now. They forget.”
He pried open a warped wooden cupboard and pulled out a brittle leather file with trembling hands. Inside were handwritten registers, dated, signed, and covered in dust.
Raghav flipped through the yellowed pages.
March 1965: student records.
August 1965: cholera outbreak.
October 1965: temple renovations.
Then—
November 1965: “All 23 deaths recorded under Ritual Sealing. Identity surrendered.”
The signature line read: “Rudranath Devacharya, Agni-ritwik.”
Anya frowned. “Ritwik means priest, right?”
Narayan nodded. “But not of your God or mine. He came from the river, barefoot, with a copper staff and a silent cow. Spoke to no one for weeks. Then on November 13th, he gathered them all—twenty-three villagers—and they… offered themselves.”
“Why?” Raghav asked, voice low.
“To keep something from waking.”
Raghav swallowed. “What did he bury?”
Narayan looked directly at him for the first time. His eyes were pale clouds. “Memory. The kind that can breathe if spoken of. It doesn’t need bones—it needs witnesses.”
He pulled out an old photograph. Grainy. Black and white. A mass gathering under a banyan tree. Men, women, children standing in a circle, holding hands. At the center, a tall, long-haired man in white robes stood with a trident in one hand, a burning brazier at his feet. His face was calm.
“That’s him,” Anya whispered. “That’s the man from the drone footage.”
Narayan held the photo closer to the lamp. “That was fifty-nine years ago. If he’s walking the jungle still, it means the silence is cracking.”
The wind moaned outside. Raghav suddenly felt very small.
Anya checked her phone. Still no signal.
“What happens if the silence breaks?” she asked.
Narayan looked at her.
“It remembers us.”
Back at the rest house, Raghav locked the doors. Anya uploaded the files from the old register to her backup drive. The wind howled louder now, rising in unnatural gusts.
Then the trail cam pinged.
Motion detected: 03:08 a.m.
Raghav clicked open the live feed.
In the black-and-green night vision, a figure stood at the gate again. Same white robe. Still as a gravestone.
But this time, something had changed.
The figure was facing the camera.
And it was smiling.
Part 3: The Day the Bells Rang
The trail cam footage looped, static humming in the background. Raghav sat frozen, eyes locked on the night-vision image. The figure in white—unmoving, face eerily placid—stood with hands folded behind his back, as though waiting for something. But it was the smile that chilled him most. It wasn’t a threat. It was patient. As if it knew how the story ended.
Anya replayed the clip in slow motion. “He’s not walking. He just… appears.”
At 3:08 a.m., the frame was empty.
By 3:09, the priest was there.
“No footsteps. No sound. No transition,” she whispered. “What even is this?”
Raghav checked the external hard drive where they’d saved their footage. The drone files from the cemetery had been copied successfully—but now they wouldn’t open. “Corrupted,” the screen read. “Memory file unreadable.”
“That’s not possible. I checked these before bed,” he muttered. “It’s like something doesn’t want this footage to exist.”
Anya hesitated. “Narayan Kaka said memory is what it feeds on.”
By morning, Mangalpur looked as though nothing had happened. Children chased goats. A man sharpened his sickle on a doorstep. A woman carried water balanced on her hip. The quiet eeriness of the night had evaporated like dew. But there was something off about the air—too still, too uniform.
Raghav and Anya headed to the village temple, a white-domed structure cracked with age. Its bell tower loomed above, vines snaking across it. No priest, no offerings, just a fading scent of incense and something metallic underneath—like blood that had dried long ago.
They stepped inside. Empty.
Anya’s camera whirred softly. “Looks abandoned.”
“No,” Raghav said. “Look at this.”
On the altar lay fresh marigolds. Arranged in a perfect circle around a small copper plate filled with red sindoor and black ash. And in the center, the same thorn-pierced circle symbol they had seen on the gravestones—painted with absolute precision.
As they backed away, a sudden clang shattered the silence.
The temple bell.
It rang once. Loud. Then again. And again.
Raghav turned toward the tower. “Who the hell’s up there?”
The bell tolled a total of thirteen times, the sound echoing far into the sal trees. Villagers began to emerge from their homes slowly, almost in a trance, walking toward the temple in silence. Some had covered their faces with cloth. Some carried bowls of rice. No one spoke.
Anya gripped Raghav’s arm. “Is this a ritual?”
He pulled out his phone. No signal. Again.
From the far side of the crowd, Narayan Prabhu appeared. This time, his face was strained, sweat glistening on his temples.
“They’ve started it,” he muttered. “The Kaal-Bodh.”
“The what?” Raghav asked.
“Every sixty years, on the same lunar phase, the veil between memory and flesh thins. That is today. They’ve begun the silence ritual again to keep the seal intact.”
“Who is they?”
Narayan pointed upward.
The priest stood at the top of the bell tower.
Unmoving. Backlit by the sky. White robes fluttering despite no breeze.
“He doesn’t age,” Narayan whispered. “He was sent to bury the Vetaal’s memory. But the curse was never lifted. It just… waits.”
The villagers gathered in a circle. A girl, no older than eight, was brought to the center. Her eyes were painted black, her hands dipped in turmeric. She did not cry.
A woman beside her whispered, “Your silence keeps the sky clean.”
The crowd began humming—soft, guttural, rhythmic. A single tone repeated by all. Anya tried to record it. Her mic glitched.
Suddenly, the girl collapsed, eyes rolling back. Her body shook once. Then went still.
Anya gasped. “Did she—?”
Narayan shook his head. “No. It’s not possession. Not yet. It’s a memory exchange.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Raghav asked.
“She holds part of the Vetaal’s past. To contain it, the memory must pass into new vessels. It’s how the curse survives—by moving.”
Raghav turned to Anya. “We need to leave.”
She nodded. But as they stepped away, someone blocked their path.
The priest.
He was somehow already behind them, barefoot, his shawl untouched by dust. His eyes were calm. Familiar.
“You’ve seen too much,” he said, voice like dry leaves scraping against stone. “But not enough.”
Raghav lifted his camera.
The screen blacked out.
“You brought glass eyes to record what should not be spoken.”
Anya pulled Raghav’s hand. “Let’s go.”
But the priest stepped closer.
“Tonight, at 3:08, if you are still here… you will no longer be visitors.”
The villagers didn’t react. As if they hadn’t seen him speak.
As if he didn’t exist—outside their memory.
They ran.
Back to the rest house, slamming the door behind them. Anya locked the windows. Raghav downloaded the few salvageable clips to a hidden SD card. Outside, the chanting resumed. Soft at first. Then louder. Like it was moving through the forest toward them.
At exactly 3:08 p.m., the power flickered.
And in the corner of the room, the wall cracked.
Thin. Barely noticeable.
But from it, something seeped.
Not liquid.
Whispers.
Part 4: The Night of Red Soil
The crack in the wall widened as the whispers thickened into a low, tremulous hum—like a distant chant underwater. Anya dropped her mic. “It’s… talking.”
“No,” Raghav said, pressing his ear closer. “It’s remembering.”
The whispers came in fragments, broken syllables laced with gasps and sobs:
“Hariram… Basak… burn the seed… she knew… bury the tongue… never speak again…”
Anya backed away slowly, her face pale. “We’re not just filming anymore, are we?”
“No,” Raghav whispered. “We’re part of the ritual now.”
He sealed the SD card inside his backpack and zipped it shut. “We leave before sunset. No interviews. No more drone shots. We walk to the highway if we have to.”
But when they stepped out of the rest house, the forest had changed.
The sky, though still blue, felt pressed down—closer than it should be. A coppery light spilled across the village paths. And the soil, once pale brown, had darkened into a deep red, as if soaked in old blood.
Children sat cross-legged by the roads, drawing symbols in the dirt with pieces of bone. One looked up at Anya and said softly, “You’ll forget your name by morning.”
She froze.
Raghav kept moving.
The trees leaned in. The sal leaves crackled in a wind that wasn’t blowing. A slow drumbeat thudded from deep inside the jungle—no rhythm, just persistence, like a second heartbeat synced with theirs.
Narayan Prabhu stood by the schoolhouse ruins, clutching a string of prayer beads. “They’ve opened the tree.”
Raghav turned to him. “What tree?”
“The Nagmani tree. Burned in 1965. Its roots held the Vetaal. Now they’re digging beneath it.”
Anya frowned. “To release it?”
“To remember it.”
Raghav didn’t understand. “I thought sealing it was the goal.”
Narayan looked away. “Some want to remember. They believe the Vetaal’s memory is a god forgotten by man. Not evil. Just buried.”
“Who?” Anya asked.
Narayan pointed deeper into the jungle. “The ones who smile but never blink.”
They followed a narrow footpath into the heart of the forest. The soil turned slick and sticky. Red. Like clay kneaded with old blood. Even the trees looked infected—trunks veined with dark sap that pulsed faintly.
A small clearing opened up.
There it stood.
A massive charred stump, blackened by time, its roots twisted like a dying octopus clawing at the earth. Around it, villagers circled with bowls of ash and flower petals. They chanted in unison, eyes closed.
At the center, a shallow pit had been dug.
And Anya was in it.
Raghav blinked.
No. That wasn’t her.
It was a girl wearing her clothes, arms outstretched, eyes glazed white. Her voice, eerily calm, echoed across the clearing:
“I remember the fire. I remember the screaming. I remember the silence.”
Raghav turned. Anya stood beside him. “What the hell is that?”
Narayan whispered, “A mirror of memory. The Vetaal uses your shape to test the seal. If you speak to it, it opens wider.”
The imitation-Anya tilted her head.
“You brought glass eyes. You recorded our death. Now speak, or be erased.”
The chanting stopped.
Raghav stepped forward. “I don’t care what you are. We’re leaving. We don’t want your secrets.”
The Vetaal’s voice deepened. “But you already carry them.”
Suddenly, Anya collapsed.
Her hands dug violently into the red soil, fingernails breaking. She whispered over and over:
“Dig… dig… dig…”
Raghav pulled her back, screaming. Her fingers bled, caked in crimson mud. Her eyes rolled back, then focused. “Where… where was I?”
“You were digging with your hands. Like you were looking for something.”
“I heard a woman calling. She said my name… and hers.”
Narayan bent down and opened her palm. A broken tooth lay inside.
Raghav recoiled. “Where the hell did that come from?”
Narayan said nothing.
He just turned to the pit.
The figure wearing Anya’s face was gone.
But at the bottom of the pit, something breathed.
Not loudly.
Not with lungs.
But with memory.
A slow, sighing inhale. As if something centuries old had begun to wake from its burial.
Back in the rest house, Anya washed the red soil from her skin. It wouldn’t come off completely—it stained her fingertips. The tooth had turned to ash before they could wrap it.
Raghav packed frantically. “We leave tonight.”
Anya sat still. “I think it touched my mind.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked at him, voice flat. “I remember things. Not mine. A fire. A temple burning. A woman swallowed by smoke. I remember being inside her.”
Raghav stared. “That’s not memory. That’s possession.”
“No,” Anya said. “It’s inheritance.”
As night fell, the drumbeat returned.
This time, from beneath the rest house.
And with it came the voice.
Not outside.
Inside their heads.
“At 3:08… you will remember who you were.
And what you never buried.”
Part 5: The Priest Returns
The silence before 3:08 a.m. felt like the universe holding its breath.
Anya lay curled on the cot, shivering though the air was warm. Her skin glistened with sweat, and the red soil stain had deepened into dark streaks across her fingers and wrists—like veins pulled to the surface. Her eyes fluttered open now and then, murky with half-formed visions.
Raghav sat beside her, gripping the only flashlight that still worked. “You’re going to be okay,” he whispered.
But even he didn’t believe it.
The floor beneath them groaned softly, as though something ancient shifted deep below. The drumbeat returned—slow, deliberate, echoing like a second heartbeat through the earth.
And then, the bells rang.
Once.
Twice.
Thirteen times.
Raghav rushed to the window. The village was glowing in faint amber torchlight. A procession of villagers in white walked barefoot toward the forest. In their midst was Narayan Prabhu, head bowed, hands tied in front of him with red thread.
And at the front of the line walked the priest.
Still unblinking. Still smiling.
He hadn’t aged. He hadn’t changed. But now, his face looked more defined, as if something had stepped further into flesh.
Raghav grabbed his camera and pressed record.
Nothing. The display blinked with a red “ERROR: No Memory Device” warning.
“That’s impossible,” he muttered. He hadn’t touched the SD card.
A voice behind him said, “He’s claiming it.”
Raghav turned. Anya sat upright. Her pupils had narrowed to pinpricks. “Every camera, every file. He’s not afraid of being filmed. He wants it. The Vetaal is made of memory. The more we record, the more shape it gets.”
“That’s why the footage kept getting corrupted,” Raghav realized. “It wasn’t protecting us—it was growing.”
They had been feeding it.
He bolted out of the rest house, Anya stumbling behind him. They followed the procession into the woods, torchlight flickering across their faces. No one turned. No one spoke.
They reached the burnt Nagmani tree again, now surrounded by a ring of fire. Inside it, a freshly dug pit waited. And in the center stood the priest, arms raised toward the sky.
Narayan was forced to his knees beside the pit.
The villagers began to hum.
Anya’s breath caught. “They’re about to seal him.”
“What do you mean?” Raghav asked.
“The priest isn’t human anymore. He’s only flesh borrowed to protect the seal. Now he needs a new vessel.”
The priest’s voice cut through the chanting:
“One must remember, so the rest may forget.”
Raghav screamed, “No! You can’t bury this again. We need answers!”
The priest slowly turned.
His eyes were black. Not empty—full. As if layered with thousands of lives, memories, deaths, screams, chants, and names Raghav had never heard but somehow knew.
“You already carry it,” the priest said.
Raghav dropped to his knees, his head splitting with sudden pain. Visions flooded him.
— A girl burning under the banyan tree
— A crowd cheering the silence
— A tongue being cut and offered to the fire
— The priest weeping into a bowl of salt
— A boy filming graves that shouldn’t exist
He gasped. “What… was that?”
“Remembrance,” the priest said. “Your camera made it real again. And now it must return.”
Narayan looked up, defiant. “Let me go. I sealed you once. I will again.”
The priest leaned down. “You broke the vow, Narayan. You told the tale. And now you’ll become it.”
Then he raised the copper trident.
Anya surged forward. “NO!”
Raghav caught her, dragged her back behind the circle of fire. The villagers turned toward them for the first time—blank faces, mouths stitched with soot. One by one, they began to chant, “Let it be buried. Let it be silent. Let it be buried…”
The fire blazed higher.
The priest lowered the trident.
Narayan whispered, “Forgive me.”
The earth cracked.
And the pit swallowed him whole.
The fire died instantly. The villagers collapsed as if asleep. The priest stood alone, staring into the ground where Narayan had vanished.
Then he looked up at Raghav.
“It’s your turn,” he said calmly. “You’ve seen too much. You’ve carried too much. You must either bury it—”
His eyes glowed faintly.
“—or broadcast it.”
Then he walked into the trees and vanished.
Back at the rest house, Anya sat silent, her eyes back to normal, but distant. Raghav’s backpack, untouched, had burst open. The SD card was gone. In its place was a scrap of parchment, hand-written in a language neither of them could read.
“What do we do now?” Anya asked.
Raghav stared into the night. “We leave.”
“But what about the footage?”
He hesitated. “If it still exists… maybe it’ll find someone else.”
They didn’t see the figure on the hill behind them.
Standing still at 3:08 a.m., arms folded behind his back.
Smiling.
Part 6: Ritual of the Black Fire
They left before sunrise.
No farewell. No thank you. No trace. Raghav and Anya walked the seven kilometers to the main road, ignoring every rustle in the underbrush, every flicker of white between the trees. No vehicles passed. The morning air was unnaturally warm, and the sky seemed bleached—no blue, only a dull metallic grey.
By the time they reached the highway, Raghav’s lips were cracked from dehydration, but he didn’t speak. He couldn’t. Words felt wrong in his mouth.
Anya walked beside him silently, rubbing her thumb over her stained fingertips, the red soil now faded but not gone.
A truck finally stopped. The driver gave them water and asked no questions. It took them to a town 30 km away. Back to reception. Back to people. Back to noise.
But they didn’t feel back.
They felt hollowed out.
And Raghav couldn’t stop thinking:
The priest told me I had a choice.
Bury it… or broadcast it.
Two weeks passed.
Back in Kolkata, Raghav locked himself inside his studio. He scrubbed through every file from Mangalpur. Half the audio was warped. The rest was blank. Drone shots disappeared mid-frame. Anya’s trail-cam footage had flickers of something inhuman moving through the trees—but only for a second, before dissolving into black static.
But there was one file he hadn’t remembered recording.
A folder titled “BlackFire_0001.mp4.”
He clicked it open.
It began with a top-down view of the Nagmani tree.
The pit glowed red. The priest stood beside it.
But this wasn’t drone footage.
It was eye-level, handheld, shaky.
Raghav’s voice—his own—spoke from behind the lens:
“I don’t remember pressing record…”
The priest turned to the camera, mid-ritual, and said,
“You did.”
Raghav slammed the laptop shut.
He couldn’t breathe.
That night, Anya came to his flat, her eyes wide.
“I’m hearing it again,” she said. “At night. In the gaps between dreams.”
He sat her down, poured tea with trembling hands. “What do you hear?”
She recited:
“The fire remembers.
The fire repeats.
Let it pass through flesh.
Let it forget its name.”
Raghav dropped the cup.
“That’s the chant. From the ritual. But no one taught you that.”
“I dreamed of a woman covered in black ash,” Anya said. “She had no eyes, but she spoke through my mouth. She told me the seal didn’t work. Not this time.”
Raghav opened his laptop. The folder was gone.
Only the parchment remained—now on his desk.
Neither of them had brought it there.
And it had changed.
The script was slowly translating itself, line by line, into English. Just one sentence had appeared so far:
“The fire is hungry again. It wants a name.”
The next evening, Raghav received an anonymous email.
No subject. No body. Only a video attachment.
It was his own face—filmed from across the street, through a window. He was sitting at his desk, staring into nothing. But his lips were moving.
He downloaded it and played it back with audio boosted.
A whisper from the recording:
“At 3:08… let the watchers burn too.”
His blood ran cold.
“This thing’s following us,” Anya said. “It’s using us as anchors.”
Raghav nodded slowly. “The priest wasn’t keeping the Vetaal locked away. He was channeling it. Containing it through memory. But we… we’ve been spreading it.”
“Through video,” she whispered. “Through storytelling. Through… us.”
They reached out to Narayan’s niece, who lived in Shantiniketan.
She agreed to meet at a university café.
Her name was Meera Prabhu, a doctoral student in Vedic literature.
When shown the parchment, her face turned pale. “Where did you get this?”
“It was… given to us.”
She stared at the thorn-pierced circle now visible on the reverse side.
“This is not Vedic. It’s older. Proto-Tantric. The phrase ‘Agnivetaal’—it’s mentioned once in the Bhuta Vidya section of Atharvaveda, but only as a warning: Do not name the fire that remembers.”
“Why?” Raghav asked.
She looked up, eyes grave.
“Because it is the first fire. The one before speech. Before man. And it never forgets.”
That night, Anya disappeared.
Raghav found the door to her apartment ajar. No sign of forced entry. Her cameras, gear, and laptop were gone. But on her mirror, written in red soil, were five words:
“You chose to remember me.”
The SD card—lost in Mangalpur—was on her pillow.
He plugged it into his laptop.
Only one file: BlackFire_Final.mp4
He hovered over it.
His finger trembled.
The priest’s voice echoed in his memory:
“You must either bury it… or broadcast it.”
He clicked play.
And the screen went black.
Part 7: The Silent Sacrifice
The screen stayed black for thirteen seconds.
Then came the image.
Not pixels, not digital clarity—grainy, analog-like footage, as though filmed on film stock decades ago. A forest clearing shimmered in low candlelight. The camera panned slowly across villagers in white robes, faces blurred and flickering, like memories half-forgotten.
At the center stood the Nagmani stump, but no longer charred.
Now it pulsed—alive.
Raghav leaned in. “This isn’t drone footage. This is… memory.”
The footage zoomed in on a girl sitting cross-legged before the tree. Her eyes were sealed shut with ash. Her lips were stitched with red thread. Her body trembled with each beat of an invisible drum.
The voice-over began—not his, not Anya’s.
A woman’s voice, soft and ancient, whispering:
“I was the first to remember. And so I burned. Not in pain, but in knowing.”
Suddenly, the screen flickered and changed.
Anya.
Tied to a ritual pole. Her face calm. Her eyes wide open.
She wasn’t struggling.
She was smiling.
A ring of black-robed figures circled her, humming the same low, rhythmic tone they had heard in Mangalpur. A bowl of ash was placed at her feet. A priest—the same priest, unchanged—stepped forward and gently marked her forehead with the thorn-pierced circle.
“She offered herself,” the voice whispered again. “So others could forget.”
Raghav screamed.
He ejected the SD card. Threw it against the wall.
But when he turned back to the screen—
It was still playing.
Only now, his own face filled the frame.
Eyes blank. Mouth open. Whispering.
“I will carry it now.”
Raghav fell to the floor, gasping. The room spun. The air thickened into heat. Then cold. Then ash. His hands shook as he touched his face—a smear of red soil on his cheek.
He wasn’t filming anymore.
He was inside the memory.
When he woke, hours had passed.
A letter sat on his desk.
It hadn’t been there before.
It was addressed in curling, red ink: To the Final Witness.
He opened it.
Inside was a single sentence:
“To remember is to burn.”
And a ticket.
Train to Mangalpur Junction.
Departure: November 13, 11:45 p.m.
Raghav went.
Not because he wanted to.
Because he had no choice.
He felt himself dissolving each day—as if memories of his real life were peeling off. The sound of traffic became humming. Every shadow reminded him of the priest’s eyes. When he tried to speak to others, his voice faltered—as if his tongue wasn’t sure which words to form.
He arrived in Mangalpur under a waning moon. The village hadn’t changed.
Except it was completely empty.
No lights. No footsteps. Just the distant beat of that invisible drum.
He walked to the cemetery.
The gate stood open.
Inside, every gravestone now bore his name:
Raghav Mitra. Died: 13.11.2023.
He turned and saw the priest standing beside the Nagmani tree, glowing in the firelight.
“You brought the fire into the world,” the priest said.
Raghav dropped to his knees.
“I didn’t know.”
“But you do now,” the priest whispered.
And with that, he extended the trident—not to harm, but to pass it on.
Raghav understood.
It was a passing of guardianship.
Someone had to carry the memory.
Someone had to burn, so others could forget.
He stepped into the ring of flame.
Closed his eyes.
Whispers filled his ears.
“She burned. He carried. You continue.
The circle does not end.
The watchers must never sleep.”
Weeks later, a new video appeared on a dead YouTube channel named NightTrace, inactive for months.
It was titled: “The Final Memory”
Only 13 seconds long.
A still shot of a burning tree.
A whisper in a woman’s voice:
“To remember is to burn.”
And the sound of a bell.
One.
Two.
Thirteen times.
Those who watched it claimed strange dreams followed.
Of ash in their mouths.
Of priests in white.
Of a man whispering their names in a language they didn’t know—but recognized.
One by one, they started forgetting who they were.
And one of them, always, made the journey to Mangalpur.
Part 8: Upload or Delete
The cursor blinked at the center of Raghav’s laptop screen, silent as a held breath.
One file remained on the desktop.
“Final_Memory_v2.mp4”
Its thumbnail was black, its metadata unreadable. No duration. No creation date. No file size. But it pulsed faintly—almost like it was breathing.
Raghav stared at it, his face pale and drawn. His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Upload.
Delete.
Two choices. Both irreversible.
Behind him, the lights in his apartment flickered. The room buzzed with low frequency—almost imperceptible. But he could feel it in his bones. A hum older than electricity. Older than sound. The same hum from the woods of Mangalpur. The one that followed him back.
He opened the file.
This time, it didn’t play.
It whispered.
“They will not forget.
Unless you choose to forget for them.
Let it burn in you.
Or let it spread in them.”
Raghav’s eyes watered.
He saw flashes behind his lids:
— Anya’s face, serene in the circle of black fire
— Narayan’s hands trembling before the pit
— The priest’s eyes, full of infinite memory
— The burning stump
— The grinning watchers
— The gravestone etched with his name
— A thousand others, all watching
And then—you.
Yes. You.
The watcher. The reader. The one seeing this now.
“To know is to be marked,” the whisper said again.
He reached for the delete key.
But his hand froze.
The laptop fan kicked into overdrive. The air in the room grew thick, the shadows stretched toward him. On the wall, the red soil circle had appeared again, bleeding slowly into paint.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock read 3:08 a.m.
Raghav pressed upload.
The browser opened on its own.
The file transferred in thirteen seconds.
No title. No tags.
Just one word in the description:
REMEMBER.
He closed the lid.
The humming stopped.
But outside, down the hallway, someone knocked.
Three times.
Then silence.
He opened the door slowly.
No one there.
Only a small envelope on the floor.
Inside: a train ticket.
Mangalpur Junction.
November 13.
No departure time.
Just one sentence scribbled in ink:
“Thank you for carrying the fire.”
One Week Later
The video, now titled “The Mangalpur Footage,” had gone viral. Over 4.8 million views in five days. Comments flooded in:
“Watched this at night, now I can’t stop hearing bells.”
“Why does the timestamp loop at 3:08?”
“I had a dream where I burned in a pit while chanting in a language I’ve never heard.”
“There’s a man in white standing outside my window every night.”
“I saw my name on a grave.”
YouTube took it down.
But mirrors popped up everywhere. Reddit. Telegram. Torrent sites.
People couldn’t stop sharing it.
And soon, viewers began to report blackouts. Lost time. Visions.
Some woke up with red soil under their fingernails.
A few simply disappeared.
In a different city, at a different time, a girl sat at her desk and opened a forwarded link.
It was unlabeled. Just a black screen. A file that refused to be deleted.
She clicked play.
And in the darkened glow of her screen, a voice whispered from the speakers:
“To remember is to burn.
To forget is to die.
Welcome, witness.”
The bell rang once.
Twice.
Thirteen times.
And far away, deep in the sal forest of Bengal, beneath the roots of the Nagmani tree—
the fire sighed in satisfaction.
It had found another.
END
