Aritra Sen
Chapter 1:
The road to Devikulam wound like a serpent through the mist-laced hills of Kerala, each bend revealing a new secret of the land—clusters of tea bushes in perfect symmetry, skeletal trees clawing at the grey sky, and occasional shrines draped in red cloth and turmeric-smudged stone. Dr. Anirudh Menon sat in the back of a rickety jeep, gripping his weather-worn field journal and an old Sony audio recorder like a lifeline. The driver, a man of few words and fewer facial expressions, had merely nodded when Ani mentioned his reason for coming. “You’re here for the sounds?” he’d asked, lips curling just enough to hint at amusement. “They come on full moon nights.” Ani didn’t respond. He was here for the rhythm, the inexplicable percussive echo he had stumbled upon in a 1973 archive recording from an abandoned British missionary post. No known tribal catalog matched the rhythm. It was syncopated, off-tempo, yet hypnotically exact. The kind of sound that could either be the remnant of a forgotten ritual—or an elaborate hoax. He preferred the former. Facts were his foundation, but mysteries… they kept him alive. The jeep finally rolled to a halt in front of a half-dilapidated bungalow with faded green shutters and a sign that read “Hill Mist Homestay.” There, a bent old woman with a paan-stained smile handed him a room key without a word, then shuffled back into the kitchen with the air of someone who knew silence was safer.
That night, the rain stopped without warning. Ani sat on the narrow balcony, sipping watery tea and watching fog creep up the hills like a living thing. His recorder sat beside him, red light blinking. The tea estate below was a sea of silver shadows, the leaves glistening under a thin veil of moonlight. Crickets chirped, a distant owl hooted—and then it came. At first, it was a low murmur, like thunder trapped in a valley, but then it shaped itself: three slow beats, then four rapid ones, then silence. He held his breath. The pattern returned—stronger this time, closer. It sounded like drums, yet there was no visible movement, no sign of a festival, no flicker of flame or lantern on the hills. The beats circled the valley and slipped into his chest, mimicking his heartbeat. Anirudh turned on the recorder, the red light now steady, and whispered a timestamp. “00:46 a.m. Unknown rhythmic sequence detected. Matches partial sample from 1973 Devikulam archives.” But as he listened closer, a second sound appeared beneath the rhythm—a faint human hum, low and mournful. He leaned forward, but the moment he did, the drums stopped, and the fog thickened as though it had been watching.
The next morning, Ani played the recording over breakfast, his fingers trembling over the controls. To his horror, the playback contained only silence—no drums, no hum, not even the crickets. He rewound thrice, even plugged it into his laptop. Still nothing. He walked down to the edge of the tea fields, hoping to retrace the acoustics, and that’s when he met her—Thangam. She was standing barefoot on a stone ridge, singing to herself while plucking tea leaves with a rhythmic precision that mirrored the beat he’d heard. Her voice was low, filled with an ancient ache, and the melody seemed to vibrate with the very soil beneath. When she saw him watching, she stopped. “It’s in your ears already, isn’t it?” she asked, not unkindly. Ani blinked. “The drums. You’ve heard them.” He nodded slowly. She dropped her eyes and turned away. “Don’t record them. They don’t like it. The last one who did—his heartbeat never matched his breath again.” Ani wanted to laugh, to challenge her logic, to remind her he was a rational man. But for the first time since arriving, he wasn’t sure which part of his body was making the decisions—his brain, or the part that was still thudding to the memory of a beat no machine could catch.
Chapter 2:
The midday sun filtered weakly through the mist, giving the hills a silver sheen that blurred edges and cast shadows in places where there were no trees. Anirudh followed the gravel path down from Hill Mist Homestay toward the plantation slopes, his recorder in one pocket and a small note pad in the other, scribbled with rhythmic notations and timings from the night before. Though the playback had failed, the beat itself—its strange, asymmetrical cadence—was etched into his memory. He couldn’t shake it. Each step he took seemed to land in time with that forgotten rhythm: three slow pulses, four sharp ones, then stillness. The path led to the lower fields, where rows of women in bright headscarves moved like clockwork among the tea bushes. It was here, again, that he saw Thangam, her voice riding the breeze in a low, mournful tune that lingered longer than it should have. She turned to him before he could speak, as if she’d been expecting him. “It stays in your bones once it enters,” she said. “The drums.” Ani hesitated. “But why can’t I record it?” She smiled, but her eyes didn’t. “Because they’re not made for your kind of machine. They’re for the soul, not the ears. Some things only live when you’re listening.” Then she bent to her work again, leaving him standing amidst the green waves of tea, confused, intrigued, and—he was now certain—marked.
Later that evening, Ani walked to the village square to find someone—anyone—who might know more. The town was oddly quiet. A few children played near a stone water tank, and a shopkeeper nodded curtly before sliding shut a wooden counter window. No one spoke of drums, but they did glance twice at Ani, especially when he mentioned “recordings” or “tribal music.” At the edge of the village, he spotted a narrow house shaded by a neem tree, its veranda stacked with books and old brass instruments. A nameplate read “Velappan” in faded red paint. Knocking, Ani was greeted by a wiry man in his seventies with fogged spectacles and fingers stained with ink. “Ah,” the man said, peering at Ani’s equipment bag. “You’ve heard them.” Ani sat on the wooden bench across from him and explained everything—from the archival sample to the vanished playback. Velappan listened without interruption, then slowly tapped his chest. “They play here,” he said. “Not there,” pointing to the recorder. “They only come for the listeners. Not for the collectors.” Ani pressed further, asking about the history, about Raktathotti, about the word soul-calling. Velappan stiffened. “Don’t speak their name aloud. Words have rhythms too.” Then he stood and shut the door gently, leaving Ani outside with more questions than before. The breeze picked up. Somewhere in the distance, the tea leaves shivered—not from wind, Ani suspected, but from something much older.
That night, unable to sleep, Ani took to the balcony again. The mist seemed denser, swirling unnaturally over the distant ridges. The moon had risen full, silver-white, and ghostly. The tea fields below, even in darkness, shimmered with moisture and silence. He adjusted his microphone toward the valley and waited. And waited. Then, it began again. This time, it was subtler—less a sound than a vibration, like fingers drumming on the inside of his ribs. He closed his eyes. The pattern returned: three slow beats, four quick. And then a pause. But in that pause was something terrifying—something waiting to be noticed. When he opened his eyes, he wasn’t alone. A figure stood at the edge of the path below, just within the reach of moonlight. A woman, wrapped in a shawl, unmoving. Her silhouette faced him. Ani squinted, heart thudding in sync with the phantom rhythm. The figure slowly raised a hand—not to wave, but to conduct. He gasped. The beat returned, perfectly in time with her motion. And then—she was gone. Vanished into the mist as if drawn back by the rhythm itself. Ani rushed to replay the recording. Once again: silence. Just the sound of wind. But this time, a faint breath had been captured, just before the end. A voice, barely a whisper. He played it ten times before recognizing the word: “Listen.”
Chapter 3:
By the next morning, Anirudh’s obsession had deepened. The word “Listen”, captured faintly on the previous night’s recording, had lodged itself into his psyche like a shard of glass. He replayed it over and over, isolating frequencies, amplifying waveforms, trying to find proof—any proof—that what he had heard was real. But nothing was consistent. The voice vanished in one format, deepened in another, and once even reversed itself, whispering something that sounded disturbingly like his own name. The rational part of his brain fought back—electrical noise, echo artifacts, pareidolia—but a smaller, older part of him, the one that had once cowered under blankets during power cuts as a child in Chennai, hearing phantom drums in the dark, was starting to believe. He needed answers—historical ones. So he made his way to the village’s only public building that bore resemblance to a library: a yellowing bungalow with columns and creaky floorboards, where age clung to the walls like mildew. The caretaker, a man named Moideen, stared suspiciously at Ani’s credentials but eventually led him to a dusty corner labeled “Colonial Records: 1850–1945.” And there, between a missionary’s travelogue and a ledger of estate taxes, Ani found it—a faded topographical survey marked “Devikulam Sector – South Ridge – Incomplete.” Scribbled in the margins of the map, near a red circle, were the words: Raktathotti – Unfit for Missionary Entry – Tribal Conflict (Unresolved).
He traced the map with trembling fingers, noting the altitude marks and directional bearings. The hill labeled Raktathotti lay less than four kilometers from where he stood, just beyond the tea estate’s eastern boundary. There were no official trails leading to it. The margins bore curious symbols—crossed drums, circles like ripples, and one line that repeated over and over: “Do not enter alone. Do not record the sound.” Ani snapped a photo and packed up, rushing back to Hill Mist Homestay. On the way, he passed children drawing patterns in the dirt with sticks—one of them was unknowingly sketching a sequence that matched the beat he had heard. He asked the girl where she’d learned it. “The wind told me,” she said plainly, before darting off into the mist. At the homestay, he cross-referenced the location with GPS on his phone, but the screen glitched—Location Unavailable. Determined, he decided to visit Thangam again. If anyone would speak truthfully, it would be her. She was in the fields, hands stained with green and brown, but when he showed her the map, her expression changed. “Why are you walking toward what’s walking toward you?” she asked quietly. “The drums don’t want to be found. They want to find.” Ani pushed. “Who named it Raktathotti?” She didn’t meet his eyes. “It wasn’t a name. It was a warning.”
That night, a storm rolled in early, thunder rippling across the ridges like the murmur of approaching footsteps. Ani sat cross-legged on the floor of his room, poring over the old manuscript from the library, which he had not returned—he had no intention to. Amid the notes, he discovered an account dated 1907: a missionary named Father Colin Eames had written of “dark chants and infernal drumming rising from the ravine east of Devikulam,” which had led to the disappearance of two clergymen and a boy. The passage ended abruptly, the ink smudged, but a final scribble in pencil read: They beat the air and something opened. Ani leaned back, heart thudding, the room pulsing with echoes from memory. The lightning outside flashed once—twice—and on the second flash, his window reflected not his own face, but a masked figure with eyes hollow and mouth open as if mid-chant. He turned sharply—no one was there. But the smell of wet soil had entered his room, thick and raw, as if someone had walked in barefoot from the grave. Then the drums began again. Not from the valley, not from the hills—but from inside his walls. Hollow, ancient, and pulsing in sync with the storm.
Chapter 4:
At dawn, the hills of Devikulam seemed unusually still—almost reverent. Not a single bird call broke the silence, and the usual rustling of tea bushes in the breeze had given way to an eerie hush, as if the landscape was holding its breath. Anirudh hadn’t slept. The drumming from within the walls had faded around 3 a.m., but the memory of it lingered like heat after lightning. With eyes ringed in fatigue and his senses taut with anticipation, he packed his recorder, headphones, and GPS, then made his way toward the hidden ridge marked on the colonial map. The eastern trail had long since been swallowed by moss and bramble, forcing him to navigate through underbrush and slick stone. Halfway there, he stumbled across a shallow, mist-veiled lake—unnamed, unmarked on his phone’s map, but oddly central to the rhythms he’d heard. Its surface was unnaturally still, like glass stretched tight over shadow. When he crouched beside it and dropped a stone, the ripples came back slower than they should have, and not in circles—but in concentric waves, as if the lake was responding in pulses. He turned on the field recorder and lowered a hydrophone into the water, expecting to capture ambient gurgles or nothing at all. What he got instead chilled him to the core: a sequence of percussive beats, faint but deliberate, drumming from somewhere deep beneath the surface.
Anirudh played it back on loop, heart racing. The rhythm was identical to the “soul-calling” cadence: three long, four quick, and a strange low hum at the tail end that sounded almost like a voice exhaling underwater. He increased the gain and filtered the frequency. That’s when something in the headphones changed—the beat began matching his own breathing. Each inhale echoed with a sub-bass thump, each exhale ended with a faint metallic ring, like a bronze bell being tapped from inside a cave. He recoiled, yanked the hydrophone out, and stood quickly. The lake remained placid. But a trail of wet footprints—bare, wide, and too far apart to belong to any person—led from the water’s edge to a nearby cluster of trees before abruptly stopping. Anirudh followed them cautiously, expecting pranksters, perhaps villagers trying to spook the outsider. But in the trees, he found nothing—only silence, save for a single, stripped, headless drum nailed to a jackfruit tree, its hide torn clean. He reached out instinctively to touch it—and felt a pulse, warm and rhythmic, beneath his palm, like a heartbeat in cured wood. He jerked away, breath catching, and looked around, but there was no one.
Back at the homestay, Thangam was waiting for him, standing in the veranda like a figure carved from shadow. “You went to the water,” she said simply. “You heard them beneath.” He nodded slowly. “What are they?” Her gaze didn’t waver. “They were keepers of the crossing—the drummers who played when souls passed between this world and the next. But they were killed during a ritual. No one played the final beat. So the crossing stayed open. Now they wait… for someone to finish it.” Anirudh felt his mouth go dry. “Why me?” Thangam looked toward the hills. “Because you’re not just hearing it. You’re starting to answer.” She placed something into his hand gently: a folded piece of black cloth with a symbol—a circle pierced by three lines. “It’s called the Veerkai. It’s their signature. It marks the ones who will drum next.” Anirudh opened the cloth slowly, and his blood ran cold. The pattern wasn’t unfamiliar. He had drawn it himself the previous night—absent-mindedly—into the margins of his notebook.
Chapter 5:
The hills around Devikulam had changed. Or perhaps, Anirudh had. The mist now clung to his skin like breath on glass, and every rustle in the undergrowth made his pulse accelerate in time with an invisible rhythm. As he stared at the Veerkai symbol in his notebook—three lines piercing a circle, identical to the one on the black cloth Thangam had given him—he realized it wasn’t just a symbol; it was notation. A language written in rhythm, not words. He compared it to the beat he had heard repeatedly: three long, four short, one pause. The geometry made sense, in a terrifying, instinctual way. He returned to Thangam that evening, his voice low, shaky. “Tell me about the ritual.” She sat with her back to a banyan tree near the village’s edge, humming again—this time a slower tune, a sadder one. “It’s called Aathmavillakku, the soul-lantern ritual,” she said. “It was practiced by the Kurukkanmar tribe, highland drummers who weren’t just musicians—they were mediums. They believed that at the moment of death, a soul lingers, confused and weightless. The ritual drums would call it, guide it through a rhythm of release. But when the missionaries came, they thought it was devil worship. The drummers were captured during their last Aathmavillakku. They were executed mid-performance.” Her voice dropped. “The ritual was never finished.”
Anirudh felt a cold chill coil around his spine. “So the beat that keeps repeating…” Thangam nodded. “It’s the final rhythm, unfinished. It echoes until someone finishes it. But to do that, you don’t just play the drums—you have to open yourself. You must let them in.” She reached into her cloth pouch and unwrapped an old, cracked urumi drumhead, the kind used in ancient Kerala temple festivals, smeared with faded red pigment and worn smooth in the center. “This belonged to my grandmother,” she said. “She was the last one to know the full sequence. She sang it to me when I was a child, never completely, always stopping just before the end.” Anirudh’s breath caught. “Why?” Thangam looked into his eyes with that same eerie steadiness. “Because finishing it… calls something back.” That night, Anirudh sat alone in his room, rain pattering on the tiled roof, the urumi in front of him. He placed his hands on its stretched skin and waited. At first, nothing. Then—three soft thuds, rising from within the drum, not from his fingers. He followed. Three long, four quick. Then silence. Then again. Faster. Louder. A low hum grew in his throat without his will. His heartbeat aligned with the rhythm, and his eyes rolled back involuntarily. Something unseen moved in the room, brushing against the hanging mosquito net, scattering papers. The urumi vibrated under his palms. He stopped suddenly, gasping. His fingers were bleeding—small cuts where the drum skin had split. But the most disturbing part? The blood drops fell to the floor in a perfect Veerkai pattern.
The next morning, he found Velappan waiting for him on the path by the homestay, gripping a wrapped bundle of papers with both hands. His face was pale, his lips trembling. “You’ve gone too far,” he said. “You opened the drum.” Anirudh, still shaken, could barely respond. Velappan handed him the bundle. “These are my notes. I never shared them before. Take them, but know this—once you hear their final beat, you don’t walk away. The ones who do are never completely alone again.” Anirudh unwrapped the bundle back in his room. Inside were hand-drawn diagrams, drum patterns, and passages in Tamil and Malayalam documenting drumming traditions that had no official record. One sketch in particular made him shudder—it was the lake, the same one he had found, marked with the caption: “Under the water, the breath waits.” The page beneath it was a torn fragment, with the final line in thick charcoal: “When the drums stop… it means they’ve found the next.” Anirudh sat frozen. Outside, the mist thickened once more. The full moon was three nights away. And the drumming—he realized—hadn’t stopped. It had simply moved inside him.
Chapter 6:
The path to Raktathotti was more of a whisper than a trail, veiled in mist and memory. The villagers had long stopped naming it, preferring euphemisms like “that side” or “beyond the boundary,” and even those were spoken in hushed tones. Anirudh knew the name now—Raktathotti, the Blood Bowl. The map had marked it as a high ridge just beyond the tea estate, inaccessible, but as he moved through tangled undergrowth and wet stone, it felt as though the forest was slowly parting for him, vines sliding off rocks like veins peeling from a corpse. With the urumi drum secured in his pack and Velappan’s notes tucked against his chest, he climbed steadily upward. The air thinned, and the light dimmed, though it was mid-afternoon. No birds called here, no wind stirred the trees. When he reached the ridge, the clearing that spread before him took his breath—and his voice—away. A circular plateau, ringed by half-toppled stone monoliths, and at its center, a flat depression filled with moss, mud, and a sickly red sheen, like old blood refusing to dry. At each cardinal point stood the skeletal remains of drums, their hides torn, frames cracked, and yet… humming. He stepped inside the ring.
The silence was absolute at first. Then, like breath behind his ear, a low, slow beat began—not from any visible drum, but from the very ground beneath him. Three. Four. Silence. He recognized it now, not just as rhythm but as invocation. The soul-calling cadence. A welcome. A test. He moved closer to the largest drum, fallen on its side, and gently tapped it. The beat returned instantly from across the ring—an answer. Another beat followed. Then another. Then many. Drums began to play from no visible hands, each with its own tempo, its own voice. The mist inside the circle thickened, forming shapes—figures hunched over invisible drums, masks floating above air, hands that were not hands keeping time in mid-air. Anirudh staggered back, breath shaking, but his body responded as though it remembered something his mind had not taught it. His fingers moved to the urumi strapped to his back. He sat, placed it before him, and hesitated. The rhythm paused. Waiting. He played it. Three slow, four quick. A pause. He did it again. The ground responded. The air tightened. His pulse matched the cadence, and with each beat, the mist-figures turned toward him. A chant, low and guttural, rose—not from mouths, but from throats that no longer lived. Their masks began to sway. Anirudh felt heat rise from the earth beneath the circle, as if he were sitting atop a buried fire.
Suddenly, his hands lost control. The drumsticks—when had they appeared?—were in his palms, and he was playing something ancient, something complete. A rhythm he didn’t know but could not stop. The chant grew louder. The circle pulsed. The blood in the depression bubbled, though no heat touched it. Then he saw them—the Drummers. No longer just mist, they had form now. Skinless faces, exposed teeth behind carved wooden masks, arms that beat drums stitched into their own bodies. They surrounded him. One approached and laid a hand—not bone, not flesh—on his chest. In that moment, everything stopped. The wind returned. The drums silenced. The mist retreated. The circle was empty once again. Anirudh sat alone. Or so he thought. Until he looked at the Veerkai tattoo now etched into the skin of his chest, over his heart—red, fresh, and warm to the touch. As he stood, dizzy and drenched in sweat, a distant whisper floated through the trees. A woman’s voice. Familiar. It sang the final note of the lullaby Thangam had hummed for him days ago—only this time, complete. He looked toward the sound, but there was no one. The full moon was rising. And the drums, now silent in the forest, were alive inside him.
Chapter 7:
The silence followed Anirudh down the slope like a second shadow. Every step away from Raktathotti was heavy, as though the earth itself resisted his departure. The mark over his heart—the Veerkai—still throbbed faintly, not with pain, but with rhythm. Not his rhythm. Theirs. It pulsed with its own tempo, quiet but present, as if drumming its way deeper into his blood. By the time he reached the edge of the tea fields, the mist had cleared, the sun sat low behind the ridges, and the village once again looked like any other sleepy hill-town in Kerala. But everything had changed. He no longer felt like a visitor. He felt watched. Claimed. Inside the homestay, Thangam was waiting—not by coincidence. She stood near his door, her hands clasped, her face unreadable. “You went,” she said, not as a question. He nodded. “They showed themselves.” Thangam looked away for a long moment. Then she said something that unsettled him more than anything else had: “Then they’ve accepted you. You’re the one who remembers now.” Anirudh sat on the floor, the urumi beside him, Velappan’s torn notes spread open. “You told me your grandmother passed the song to you,” he said. “Finish it. I need to hear the end.”
For a long time, Thangam didn’t respond. Then she walked to the window, staring at the ridge in the distance, veiled again in faint clouds. “When I was a child,” she said softly, “I used to hum parts of it without knowing what they meant. My mother would hush me every time. One day, I sang the last line in my sleep. That night, the roof shook like thunder, though the skies were clear. In the morning, our dog was gone. So was my grandmother’s voice. She never spoke again.” She turned to face him, tears welling but not falling. “This song… it isn’t just music. It’s an invitation. A key.” Anirudh reached across and placed his hand gently on hers. “Then sing it. Please. If I’ve been chosen, I need to understand why.” Thangam closed her eyes. Her lips trembled. Then, in a voice low and ancient—older than her, older than memory—she sang. The melody rose slowly, curling through the air like incense. It was haunting, uneven, and impossibly beautiful. The first part was familiar. He had heard it in fragments from her before. But the final passage—eight notes long—shivered through the room like a chill wind through bone. As she finished, the lamps in the corridor flickered, and the ceiling creaked as if footsteps moved above them—though the upper floor had been locked for years. From Anirudh’s chest, the Veerkai flared softly. The rhythm returned—not from outside—but from within the room itself. A drumbeat, faint but urgent, began to echo from beneath the floorboards.
They both stared downward. Thangam didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. The beat was the answer. It was the completion of a ritual left unfinished for generations. Now it had found voice. She slowly walked to the center of the room and knelt. “You must understand,” she whispered, “they don’t take us by force. They call. And once someone listens completely, the beat never leaves. It becomes yours. Or you become theirs.” Outside, the wind picked up. The trees bent without rustling. Then—a second voice joined in, humming from somewhere inside the house. Not Thangam. Not Anirudh. A male voice, ancient and cracked, humming the same tune she had just finished. It wasn’t a memory. It was a response. They weren’t alone anymore. The room had become a drum, and they were both sitting inside its skin. The haunting had evolved. The drums had not just found a listener. They had found a conductor.
Chapter 8:
The rain returned the next morning, light but unrelenting, as if the sky was drumming softly over the hills. Anirudh barely noticed. He hadn’t slept. The song Thangam had sung—the final haunting refrain—still hung in the corners of the room like a lingering incense, and the second voice, the male hum that had joined it, continued to echo faintly in his ears, even though no one else seemed to hear it. Thangam had left before sunrise, saying only, “You’ll need to read his pages now. He wrote them for you.” Before Anirudh could ask who, she had already vanished into the fog. A knock came an hour later. Velappan stood at the threshold, soaked to the bone but clutching a thick bundle wrapped in oilcloth. His eyes looked more sunken than before, but determined. “I told myself I’d burn this,” he muttered, stepping inside. “But now I know… it doesn’t matter. The drums don’t stop because we forget. They stop when we remember incorrectly.” He placed the bundle on Anirudh’s lap. “This is the truth. As close as I could get before the sounds started following me too.” With trembling hands, Anirudh opened the manuscript. Inside were yellowed sheets filled with notes, sketches, annotated rhythms, and field reports Velappan had compiled over forty years—research, obsession, and perhaps survival, all bound together in ink.
Page after page documented a history erased deliberately—ritual rhythms that had no written notation but passed aurally from generation to generation. Velappan had transcribed dozens of drum patterns from various tribes, but the soul-calling beat—the one echoing through Raktathotti—was different. According to his manuscript, it was not a composition but a summoning structure, designed to bind the soul to the rhythm and carry it beyond. “Aathmavillakku,” he had written in a particularly aged section, “is not just a death ritual. It is a bridge. The drummers were guides, not performers. And they were murdered mid-bridge, leaving the souls they were guiding trapped, halfway between. That unfinished beat became a loop—a ritual seeking closure.” In another section, Velappan described his own encounter in 1982: he had followed the rhythm to the lake and seen “a shape made of fog, conducting invisible percussion.” After returning, he found the rhythm embedded in his sleep cycle—he would blink, and his eyes would twitch in 3-4-1 time. “They do not possess,” he had written in crooked hand, “they replace. Quietly. You remain, but your rhythm is no longer your own.” Anirudh dropped the paper, suddenly aware that his fingers had begun tapping the edge of the table in that very same beat. Unconscious. Automatic.
The most chilling page was tucked near the end, folded like a secret. It contained a list of names—fourteen in total—scholars, musicologists, and local tribal elders who had all disappeared over the decades. Every one of them had reportedly spoken about “hearing the drums.” The last name on the list was smudged, but Anirudh could still read it: “A. Menon – 2023 – Recorder malfunction, claimed to hear rhythm under water.” His own name. A year too early. He stared at it, heart pounding, breath shallow. Velappan only nodded slowly. “I wrote it in after I saw you in my dream,” he said. “Two years ago. You were standing in the circle, surrounded by fog. But the fog was listening to you.” Thunder cracked outside, low and distant. Anirudh opened his laptop and played the recording from the lake again—this time, amplified through new software. Something strange occurred at minute 3:17. A barely audible voice whispered a sequence of numbers. He enhanced it. It wasn’t numbers. It was a lullaby—Thangam’s, rendered in reverse, sung by a male voice. Anirudh’s own voice.
Suddenly, every note, every drumbeat, every symbol began to make sense. He flipped through Velappan’s manuscript in a frenzy, matching tempo charts with Veerkai symbols, syncing rhythm drawings to topographical curves. The landscape of Devikulam, he realized, wasn’t just terrain—it was notation. The hills formed patterns. The lakes were rests. The stone circle of Raktathotti? A drumhead. The entire region was a living, breathing instrument, designed for one purpose: to remember the dead through rhythm, to complete the ritual that was interrupted. And he, Anirudh Menon, had been unknowingly conducting its reassembly. As he processed this, the room dimmed unnaturally. Velappan slumped in the chair, eyes shut. Anirudh rushed to him, shook his shoulder—but the old man didn’t respond. A single trickle of blood ran from his ear. On the floor below, the Veerkai symbol had appeared—drawn in water, but evaporating fast. And from the corridor outside came the unmistakable sound of a drumbeat—soft, patient, and moving closer.
Chapter 9:
Velappan’s body was still, but not lifeless. His pulse flickered like a weak signal, and though his mouth was slack, Anirudh could feel a faint warmth at his wrist. The old man hadn’t died—not yet. He had crossed, in some in-between state, pulled partially into whatever threshold the drums guarded. Anirudh hoisted him onto the bed, wrapping a shawl around his shoulders. But the house… the house had changed. The rhythm from the hallway floorboards was no longer distant. It was underneath the floor, resonating like a wooden chest cavity being tapped from the inside. The air had grown heavier. Walls creaked with invisible motion. And somewhere above, in the attic no one ever entered, something shuffled—slow, deliberate, in time. Anirudh clutched the urumi drum and crept out of the room, heart thundering not in fear, but in sync. The hallway was empty, the corridor windows fogged from inside. As he passed the cracked mirror near the staircase, he glimpsed a flicker—his own reflection blinking in 3–4–1 time. He turned quickly. Nothing. But the moment he stepped on the third stair, the beat stopped. Everything froze.
Then, all at once, the attic trapdoor swung open above him, slowly, as if welcoming. From the blackness above came a low hum—one he recognized too well. It was his voice. Calling… chanting the final stanza of Thangam’s lullaby in reverse. Against reason, he climbed. The wooden ladder groaned under his weight, and as his head emerged into the attic, he saw them. Drums—dozens of them—small, large, rotting, ceremonial, piled along the sloped ceiling like offerings in a forgotten shrine. And seated in the center, in a pool of dustless moonlight, was a single masked figure, arms extended as though playing an invisible instrument. The mask was wooden, carved with spirals and pierced by the Veerkai. Its eyes were hollow. Its chest was still. But as Anirudh stepped forward, the figure turned to him, slowly, without moving its limbs. The mask faced him fully now—and in a single, horrible moment, Anirudh realized that beneath it, the face was his own. Decayed. Split-lipped. Smiling. Then it began to drum. Not on any instrument, but with the rhythm of the house itself—walls creaking, glass trembling, drawers opening in perfect time. The house had become an instrument, a living memory. And Anirudh? He was its player, and its echo.
In a trance, he sat opposite the figure and placed the urumi before him. His hands trembled as they met the skin of the drum. Without thinking, he began. Three slow beats. Four fast. A pause. The masked figure mirrored him. And then, without cue, both played the final sequence, one passed down through bodies, bloodlines, and dreams. The sound that emerged wasn’t loud—it was deep, resonant, soaked in grief and longing. As the final note died, a windless hush swept the room, and every drum in the attic disintegrated into ash. The masked figure stood. Its mask cracked, slid off, and fell at Anirudh’s feet. Beneath it: Velappan’s face. Young. Peaceful. Whole. The figure’s lips moved once: “Thank you.” Then it vanished—no sound, no shimmer. Just gone. Anirudh sat alone in the moonlight. But the attic was no longer haunted. It was… hollowed. Purged. The rhythm had been completed. The bridge closed.
He descended slowly. The house had changed again—warm, quiet. Velappan now slept soundly on the bed, his face no longer pale. Anirudh sat beside him until dawn, staring at his fingers, still twitching. The Veerkai mark over his heart had faded into skin, like a birthmark long forgotten. The drums had departed. But before sunrise, a single tone rang once through the walls—a farewell beat. One note. Not an echo. Not a haunting. Just the sound of something that had waited too long, finally… released.
Chapter 10:
Devikulam never spoke of the drummers again. The mist still rolled over the hills every evening, the tea leaves still trembled with the rhythm of wind, but the nights grew quieter. As if the valley had exhaled after generations of holding breath. Anirudh remained at the homestay for three more days, walking the slopes in silence, visiting the lake once, and finding its surface still—neither pulsing nor calling. The path to Raktathotti had vanished. Where the trail had been, only thick ferns and moss now stood, as though the forest had closed an old wound. The Veerkai mark had faded completely from his chest. But the rhythm—though no longer pulsing within him—had left its imprint deeper than flesh. It had changed the way he walked, the way he breathed, the way he listened. He’d begun to realize that the drums hadn’t been calling him to remember the dead. They’d been calling him to become memory itself—the vessel in which their interrupted passage could finally complete. Not possession. Not haunting. Something far older: inheritance.
Velappan awoke two mornings later with no memory of the attic, the drums, or the night he nearly crossed. When Anirudh asked him gently about the manuscript, the old man blinked slowly and replied, “What manuscript?” Yet, he had begun humming softly again—tuneless, random. But every so often, Anirudh recognized a rhythm within the hum. A gentle 3–4–1, now stripped of urgency. Peaceful. Velappan had crossed, in some way, and returned lighter. And Thangam? She never came back to the homestay. When Anirudh walked to her quarters near the tea estate, he found her small house locked, swept clean, the hearth still warm. An old woman from the estate told him, “She left before dawn. Said her song was finished.” Anirudh nodded, understanding. She had been the bridge before him. And now she had passed on her rhythm. Her voice. The final beat.
On the morning of his departure, Anirudh stood on the veranda of Hill Mist Homestay and recorded the silence. The file was titled Final Track – Devikulam Field Notes. Just wind. Birds. Footsteps. And yet, when he played it back inside the taxi as it rolled down the hill, he noticed something peculiar in the background—subtle, almost imperceptible. Between the gusts and chirps, a breath. One exhale. Then silence. As if the land itself had taken its first true rest in a century. As they passed the final curve that led out of the village, he looked back one last time. A crow called from a eucalyptus tree. The valley stretched wide, shrouded in a gentle cloud. Somewhere within it, an echo of memory remained—not trapped, but free. A rhythm fulfilled.
Two years later, Anirudh’s research paper, “Drumming and Transitional Rituals in Forgotten Indigenous Tribes of Kerala,” was published to mild academic acclaim. His colleagues called it “speculative ethnomusicology.” Some critics dismissed it as “mythic anthropology” — more ghost story than science. Anirudh never defended or corrected them. He never returned to Devikulam. But on full moon nights, he would sometimes wake from sleep, place his hand over his heart, and feel stillness. Not absence. Not fear. Stillness.
And yet, in the farthest corner of his mind, where echoes lived long after their source had vanished, a question remained unanswered—who will be the next to listen?
Because the drums, though silent, are never destroyed.
They simply wait for the next soul…
who knows how to hear.
-End-
