Karan Mehta
1
The humidity hit Nisha Deshmukh like a slap as she stepped out of the cab in front of Dadar Heights. Her cotton kurta clung to her back, damp with sweat. It was past 11 p.m., but Mumbai’s summer showed no signs of cooling down. The street outside was quiet, punctuated only by the occasional honk from a distant rickshaw. A few stray dogs lazed near an old lamp post, while the flickering light overhead cast long shadows across the cracked pavement.
She looked up at the building—five stories of faded pink paint, streaked with years of monsoon grime. The nameplate, “Dadar Heights,” was barely legible. Iron grills covered every window, and balconies were cluttered with rusting planters, plastic stools, and clotheslines drooping with faded garments. The building looked tired, as though it had aged faster than the city around it. Still, it was central, close to the station, and the rent was shockingly low. In a city where single women were often turned away, this flat had felt like a blessing.
She adjusted her backpack, took a deep breath, and walked toward the entrance. The building’s lobby was dimly lit, with one dying tube light flickering above a bank of old mailboxes. The air was heavy with the scent of mothballs, mildew, and something metallic she couldn’t place. A creaky ceiling fan turned overhead with a sound more irritating than functional. Just beside the elevator was a board that read: “Flat 503 – Vacant. Contact Mr. T. Parab (Watchman).”
As she reached for her phone to call him, a dry cough startled her. She turned to find an old man emerging from the shadows beside the lift. He was tall and reed-thin, his white shirt neatly tucked but yellowed at the collar. His eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, were pale and unreadable.
“Madam? You’re the journalist?” he asked in a brittle voice.
Nisha nodded. “Yes, I’m Nisha Deshmukh. I spoke to the broker earlier—”
“You’re late,” he interrupted, not unkindly but without emotion.
“I got delayed at the office.”
“No matter.” He adjusted the keyring on his belt and gestured toward the lift. “I’ve already kept the key in 503. Come.”
The elevator groaned as they stepped in. Its interior was covered in old advertisements for Ayurvedic hair oil and tutoring classes. The panel inside had clearly seen better days. Oddly, the number ‘5’ was missing. Instead, Mr. Parab inserted a rusted coin into a slit just below the panel. With a metallic jolt, the elevator began to move upward.
“Why is the fifth floor button missing?” Nisha asked, trying to sound casual.
The old man didn’t answer. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, his fingers tapping lightly against his thigh.
When the elevator finally rattled to a stop and the doors opened, the corridor ahead was dim and silent. Only a single low-watt bulb glowed at the far end. The floor was lined with old mosaic tiles, cracked and discolored with age. Flat 503 stood in the corner, its door painted a shade fresher than the rest of the building—as if someone had recently tried to cover up the past.
Mr. Parab handed her the keys and spoke without meeting her eyes. “Lock from inside at night. Don’t open the door if someone knocks after midnight.”
Nisha frowned. “Sorry, what?”
But he had already stepped back into the elevator. The doors clanged shut behind him, leaving her alone in the corridor.
She turned to the door. Her new home. It creaked open easily, revealing a modest one-bedroom flat with sparse furniture—a metal cot, a plastic chair, and a foldable table. The ceiling fan spun lazily, creaking every few seconds. The air inside was thick with the scent of old wood and something stale. The windows opened to the rear alley, where a lone banyan tree stretched its gnarled limbs toward the black sky.
She wandered through the flat, checking the light switches, faucets, and cupboards. The kitchen was tiny but functional, and the bathroom seemed clean enough. It wasn’t luxurious, but for a struggling journalist trying to make it in Mumbai, it was a sanctuary.
She collapsed onto the cot with a groan, her back aching from the long day. “Finally,” she whispered to herself, letting her eyes drift shut.
At exactly 3:33 a.m., she awoke with a start. The room was quiet except for the creaking fan above. She held her breath, trying to figure out what had pulled her from sleep. Then she heard it.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Soft. Deliberate.
She sat up, heart pounding. It wasn’t coming from the front door—it sounded like it was coming from the wardrobe. Slowly, she swung her legs over the side of the bed, grabbed her phone, and turned on the flashlight. The old Godrej wardrobe stood against the far wall, its doors slightly ajar. She tiptoed toward it and flung the doors open.
Empty.
She exhaled a nervous laugh. “First night jitters,” she muttered. But then she noticed something inside the wardrobe door. Deep scratches. Dozens of them. The same number, etched repeatedly in shaky, erratic lines.
3:33
3:33
3:33
She slammed the doors shut and backed away. The flat suddenly felt colder.
The next morning, Mumbai returned to its usual noisy chaos. Nisha made tea, tidied up, and began setting up her laptop on the table. She had just landed a freelance column for an online magazine, covering forgotten or ‘haunted’ buildings of the city—a coincidence that now felt oddly ironic.
She met a few neighbors while refilling water downstairs: a woman in a green nightie, two sleepy schoolboys, and a bald man who ignored her entirely. No one smiled. The lift arrived with a metallic screech. Inside was a teenage girl, thin and nervous-looking. Nisha stepped in and nodded politely.
The girl looked away, clutching her tiffin close.
“You live on the fifth floor?” she asked in a whisper.
“Yes. Just moved into 503.”
The girl’s eyes widened. Her voice dropped lower. “They say the boy still lives there.”
Nisha’s smile faded. “What boy?”
But the elevator doors opened, and the girl rushed out without another word.
Later that day, Nisha ran into a plump, overly friendly woman on the fourth-floor landing. She introduced herself as Mrs. Fernandez from 402. The moment she heard Nisha was staying in 503, her tone shifted.
“Oh ho. You should’ve asked me before renting that flat,” she said, shaking her head. “People avoid it. That place has… history.”
“What kind of history?” Nisha asked, trying to sound curious rather than alarmed.
“Long time ago, a boy died in there. Locked up by his parents. They said he was mad, or possessed. No one really knows. He screamed all the time. Cried for help. Then one day, it stopped. They found him dead. Alone.”
“That sounds like an urban legend,” Nisha said, forcing a chuckle.
“Believe what you want,” Mrs. Fernandez said, her voice clipped. “Just don’t answer if someone knocks at night.”
That night, Nisha went to bed early but slept fitfully. At 3:33 a.m., she woke again.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
This time, it was at the main door. She tiptoed to the peephole and looked out.
Nothing. Just the dim corridor.
As she turned away, a soft voice came from the other side of the door.
“Didi… I’m cold…”
She froze, her body tense, her breath shallow. The voice was a child’s. Too soft. Too close. She backed away, bolted the door, and turned on every light in the house.
By the sixth night, she set up a small webcam aimed at the front door. She was determined to get proof—of something. Or nothing.
The next morning, she reviewed the footage.
At exactly 3:33 a.m., the hallway bulb outside her door began to flicker. The door handle moved, just slightly. Then something white pressed against the peephole.
A face.
Small. Round. Pale.
Eyes blank.
The video froze. Then the feed corrupted. Only static remained.
Nisha stared at the screen, unable to breathe.
She wasn’t alone.
Whatever haunted Flat 503 at Dadar Heights was real.
And it had started knocking.
2
Nisha didn’t leave her flat all morning.
The corrupted footage from her webcam played on loop in her mind, that pale face pressing into the peephole like a child looking through a toy window, silent and still but horrifying in its stillness. Something in her rational mind screamed for logic, for a grounded explanation—perhaps a glitch in the camera, a neighbor’s prank, a trick of the night—but the rest of her couldn’t deny what she felt deep in her gut.
She had seen a ghost.
But instead of fleeing the flat or dialing her editor to scream for help, she did something she hadn’t done since her journalism school days—she dove headfirst into research. She pulled her old laptop to the floor, sat cross-legged on a cushion, and started combing through the limited digital archives of Mumbai’s lesser-known tragedies. Obscure deaths, strange hauntings, unexplained disappearances—anything that could remotely be tied to Dadar Heights.
The internet offered little. There was a reference to a child’s death in the early 2000s, listed under an “unnatural occurrence” in the ward’s municipal report, but no names, no articles, no details. The parents, according to a brief note in the file, had vanished. Their Aadhaar addresses were deactivated. Voter IDs invalid. It was as if the family had been erased, scrubbed from public record.
As she read further, Nisha found an article from a defunct tabloid called City Pulse Weekly. The PDF scan was fuzzy, but the headline was sharp enough:
“DAUGHTER OF NIGHT: Dadar Child Locked Inside for Weeks Before Death”
The article claimed the child had been mentally unstable, screaming nightly, neighbors terrified by the sound. Allegedly, the mother had been seen pouring what appeared to be holy ash around the doorframe. Rumors flew wildly at the time—some said the boy spoke in foreign tongues; others claimed he laughed when the priest came. None of it was substantiated, but a photo was attached at the bottom of the article.
It was grainy, black and white.
But Nisha recognized the window.
Flat 503.
Her flat.
She stared at the photo until the screen dimmed. Her mind tried to dismiss it—Mumbai was full of old buildings with histories, haunted or not—but her hands trembled. She minimized the screen and picked up her phone.
She needed to speak to someone who had been here longer. Someone who knew more than gossip and fourth-floor rumors. Not the watchman—he was too tight-lipped, almost robotic. No, she needed someone who remembered.
She remembered Mrs. Fernandez had mentioned another tenant. “Old Soman in 501’s been here since Indira Gandhi days,” she had said with a snort. “He knows everyone’s sins.”
Nisha changed into a loose t-shirt, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and marched out the door, notebook in hand. She knocked on Flat 501.
The door creaked open after a long pause, revealing a gaunt man with deep wrinkles and silver hair, draped in a cotton vest and faded lungi. His eyes were sharp behind thick glasses.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Soman?” she asked. “I’m Nisha Deshmukh. I live next door. In 503.”
He stared at her for a second longer than comfortable, then nodded slowly. “You’re brave,” he said. “Or foolish.”
“I need to ask you something,” she said, her voice steady. “It’s about the boy who died there. Years ago.”
Soman didn’t flinch. He opened the door wider and stepped aside. “Come in.”
His flat smelled like turmeric and incense. A Doordarshan news channel played on mute in the background. The living room was lined with dusty bookshelves and old sepia photographs of people in white-and-gold wedding attire.
He motioned toward a wooden chair. “Sit.”
Nisha sat, pulling out her notebook.
“I moved here in 1983,” he began without prompting. “Back then, it was a new building. Clean. We all knew each other. Middle-class families, mostly. Government servants, railway men, school teachers.”
He poured her a glass of water and sat down opposite her. “The couple in 503 were strange from the beginning. The Mukherjees. From Kolkata. The husband worked at LIC. Quiet man. Never saw him speak to anyone unless it was urgent. The wife…” He paused, his lips tightening. “She was different. She never left the flat. I mean never. Groceries were delivered. Milk left outside their door. No festivals. No neighbors. The only time anyone saw her was when she screamed at someone for knocking.”
“What about the boy?” Nisha asked.
“He was born in that flat. Around 1996, I think. Never enrolled in school. No birth certificate anyone saw. We only knew he existed because we’d hear him. Every night.”
He rubbed his temples.
“I remember the first time. Around midnight, he started crying. Not normal baby crying. Loud, sharp—like he was being hurt. Then came the banging. Not with fists—with something heavy. Furniture maybe. It shook our walls. We complained. My wife even called the police. They came once, knocked, but no one opened. They went away.”
Nisha leaned in. “And the parents?”
“They said the child had seizures. That he was sensitive to sound. Asked us to stay out of it. After that, we stopped asking. But the noises didn’t stop. Every night. For years. And then one night… it just ended.”
“Was there a priest?” she asked, remembering what she’d read.
He nodded. “Yes. They brought one. A tantric, not a pandit. The real kind. From Thane. He came twice. After the second visit, the boy’s cries turned into… something else.”
“Something else?”
He looked at her, and his voice dropped to a whisper.
“He started laughing.”
Nisha felt a cold draft slip across her skin.
“They found the boy dead three days later. Door locked from the inside. The couple was gone. Vanished. Just like that. Police sealed the flat. The media came and left. Nobody wanted the flat. It stayed empty until the owners sold it off to a broker in 2015.”
She exhaled. “And since then?”
“Six people have rented it. All left within weeks. One man jumped from the fifth floor. Survived, but now lives in a home for the mentally unwell. A couple ran out at midnight, barefoot. Never came back for their luggage. One girl disappeared.”
Nisha stared at him, her hand limp over the notebook.
“You’re the first to stay more than a week,” he said quietly. “You should leave.”
“I can’t. Not yet. I need to know the truth.”
Soman sighed and stood up. “Then you’ll need to speak to someone who understands more than just gossip.”
“Who?”
He handed her an old name card. Faded ink. A phone number scribbled below the name: Pandit Harinath Dubey – Spiritual Healer, Exorcist (Retired)
“Call him. He dealt with… similar cases during the 90s. He may help. But be careful. That child may be dead—but his shadow lives on.”
That night, Nisha dialed the number.
A slow voice answered on the third ring. “Haan?”
“Panditji, my name is Nisha Deshmukh. I’m calling about Dadar Heights. Flat 503.”
There was silence.
Then, “Have you seen him?”
She swallowed hard. “I think so. I have questions.”
“Then come to the temple near Kalachowkie tomorrow at 10 a.m. Do not delay. Do not tell anyone.”
Before she could ask more, he disconnected.
Sleep that night came in fragments. Every sound became suspect. Pipes creaking. Wind brushing the windows. At exactly 3:33 a.m., she was already awake, sitting on the cot with a knife in one hand and incense burning at the window. But there was no knock. No whisper.
Only the silence.
The next morning, she dressed modestly and took a taxi to Kalachowkie. The temple was small, tucked between an Irani bakery and a scrap metal yard. Inside, it was cool and quiet, the scent of marigold and camphor hanging heavy in the air.
Pandit Harinath Dubey was waiting near the sanctum—tall, stooped with age, a saffron shawl draped over his kurta. His eyes were clouded, but sharp when they found hers.
“You are the girl from 503,” he said simply.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t be there.”
“I need answers.”
He nodded and led her to a shaded bench in the courtyard.
“The boy was not possessed in the way you think,” he began. “Not by a ghost. He was born… wrong. Not human, not fully. His soul carried something ancient. Something vengeful. His mother knew. She tried to contain it with mantras, rituals, but the house became its prison. And when the parents left, they left it behind.”
“But why me? Why now?”
He looked at her gravely. “Because you heard him. You opened the energy. These spirits, they are like dust in sunlight. They wait for motion to stir them. You moved. Now he remembers.”
Nisha felt goosebumps rise on her arms.
“Can it be stopped?”
“There’s a ritual. Risky. It must be performed in the flat, during the hour of his death.”
“3:33 a.m.?”
He nodded. “You must place a binding thread around the door, burn black camphor, and recite the Narayan Kavach. He will appear. But you must not speak to him. No matter what.”
She nodded, unable to form words.
He handed her a cloth pouch. Inside was a bundle of black thread, a small vial of oil, and three dark pills of camphor.
“Tonight. Be strong.”
That evening, Nisha returned to her flat as the sun dipped below the horizon. The city roared around her—trains screaming in the distance, horns blaring, dogs barking—but inside 503, it was silent.
She prepared everything as instructed. Tied the thread in a precise circle around the door, placed the camphor on a bronze plate, and sat cross-legged facing the entrance. She had copied the Narayan Kavach onto a page, her hands trembling as she traced each Sanskrit syllable.
As the hour neared, her breath slowed. Her heart thudded like a drum.
At exactly 3:33 a.m., the camphor burst into flame.
The door creaked—though no one touched it. The bulb overhead flickered. The shadows in the room thickened, pooling at corners like black water.
Then came the sound.
Bare feet, soft and dragging, walking on tile.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
The flames jumped. The thread twitched.
And then, a voice—closer than ever, a whisper that was no longer a child’s but something older, dry and cracked.
“Didi… why did you leave me?”
She shut her eyes and began to chant.
“Om namo bhagavate narayanaya…”
The voice laughed. A horrible, broken sound.
“You saw me. I saw you. Now you’re mine.”
The bulb shattered. Wind tore through the room like a cyclone. But Nisha did not stop.
She chanted louder. Her voice stronger. The air burned with heat and cold all at once.
And then—
Silence.
The flames went out.
The air cleared.
And the presence vanished.
She opened her eyes slowly. The door was untouched. The thread unbroken.
But on the floor, just in front of her, lay a single child’s footprint—burnt into the tile.
3
Morning light filtered through the windows of Flat 503 like a soft apology, brushing over the chaos of the previous night. Ash clung to the corners. The bronze plate lay scorched and warped. The single child’s footprint remained imprinted in the tile—an eerie reminder that the darkness had not been imagined.
Nisha hadn’t slept. She had sat by the wall all night, back against the cold concrete, eyes locked on the door. The footprint. The silence. The echo of that voice—the way it had cracked and laughed—still lingered in the air like humidity before a monsoon.
She got up slowly, her legs stiff and aching, and made herself a cup of tea. The mundane act grounded her. Her brain began returning to its old rhythm—the one that chased leads, questioned facts, doubted every conclusion. She grabbed her notebook and scrawled across the top of the page:
What is the boy? And why me?
The answer lay somewhere in the past. She could feel it.
Pandit Dubey’s words echoed: “Not possessed. Born wrong.”
Her reporter instincts clicked back into place.
If this was a curse or anomaly, there had to be records—somewhere. Her laptop lay shut on the dining table. She flipped it open and began digging. Not through media archives this time, but municipal floor plans of the building, especially for Flat 503.
After some crawling through obscure PDF files from the BMC’s online building registry, she found it.
The original blueprint.
Two bedrooms. Kitchen. Balcony. Hall.
But something was off.
She knew her flat well enough by now. But the measurements here didn’t match. The plan showed a storage room at the far right corner—adjacent to the kitchen. But no such room existed. In her flat, there was just a wall.
She ran to the kitchen. Her heartbeat rose.
To the right, behind the cupboard where she kept grains and masalas, there was a window. She remembered it being oddly narrow and placed lower than usual. And the wall to its right had always felt…off. Hollow.
She dropped to her knees and knocked.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
The sound was faintly…different. Like it wasn’t a supporting wall at all. Like there was space behind it.
Her breath quickened.
She ran back, fetched a hammer from the tiny tool kit she kept, and returned. With hands trembling, she raised the hammer and smashed it into the plaster. The sound echoed. A cloud of dust erupted.
She hit again.
And again.
And then—the wall cracked open.
Behind the layer of plasterboard was a wooden panel, covered in soot. She pried it loose.
Beyond it—darkness.
A narrow, unlit room.
Bare.
A single iron cot.
And on it—chains.
She stared, stunned. Her journalist mind screamed in triumph. This was it. This was the room. The boy had been kept here—hidden. The Mukherjees had sealed it off after his death. The real horror hadn’t just been supernatural—it had been cruelty, systematic and buried beneath paint and cement.
She stepped inside.
The air was thick. Still. Heavy with mildew and something older.
She turned on her phone’s flashlight.
The room had markings on the walls. Symbols. Scratched with fingernails or a blade. Circles. Eyes. Teeth. Repeating over and over. And among them, in Bengali, one phrase etched again and again:
“আমার ঘর, আমার রাজ্য”
My room, my kingdom.
She shivered.
She took photos. Dozens. Every angle. The cot, the floor, the marks. She would write about this. Expose it. The truth needed to be told.
But then she noticed something else.
In the far corner—hidden behind what looked like a torn mattress—was a small trapdoor.
Rusted. Barely visible.
Her throat went dry.
What else had they hidden?
She hesitated—but only for a moment—then pulled the mattress aside and tried to lift the trapdoor. It resisted, but with a grunt and a loud crack of rusted hinges, it opened.
A tunnel.
Or a crawlspace.
Leading down.
She knelt at the opening and shone her light into it.
Steps. Narrow and steep. Leading downward into pitch black.
Her hands trembled. Every instinct told her to wait. Call someone. Bring backup.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she lowered herself inside.
The air grew colder as she descended.
She counted the steps—twelve, twenty, thirty.
The staircase opened into a sub-basement. Possibly a forgotten service area from before the building’s renovation. The room was small, square, lined with tiles the color of decayed teeth. The floor was damp.
In the center, there was a metal chair.
Bolted to the ground.
And on the wall—taped with yellowing cellophane—was a photograph.
She approached.
It was a faded image of the boy.
Seven or eight years old. Skinny. Pale. Eyes unnaturally dark. He was smiling, but the smile looked strained—forced, as if he’d been told to smile and had forgotten how.
She pulled it off the wall, and behind it she saw something written in thick black marker:
“HE IS NOT DEAD. HE IS WAITING.”
She stumbled back.
A noise.
A soft whisper.
She turned off the flashlight instinctively, crouching low.
Footsteps.
Bare. Wet.
Coming down the staircase.
She covered her mouth, heart hammering.
Something entered the room.
She could hear it—breathing. Soft. Ragged. Then came a giggle, low and broken.
“Didi…”
Nisha bolted up the stairs.
She didn’t look back.
She burst out into the storage room, kicked the cot aside, slammed the panel shut, and covered the hole with the cupboard again.
She collapsed to the floor, gasping.
Something was wrong. Very wrong.
This wasn’t just the ghost of a tortured child. This was something more. Something that had been kept buried—alive.
And now, it had remembered her.
That evening, she returned to Pandit Dubey.
He sat cross-legged near the sanctum, reading from a palm-leaf manuscript. She interrupted without apology.
“There’s a room behind my wall,” she said. “And a tunnel below it. Something’s still there.”
His eyes snapped up.
“You opened it?”
She nodded.
He looked away, muttering to himself. Then, firmly, “Then it’s begun.”
“What?”
He rose slowly.
“There are things in this world that are not ghosts or spirits. They are remnants. Leftover energies from something ancient. The boy was not human. Or not fully. I told you.”
“But what is he?”
“A vessel. A gate. Some say certain children are born at the wrong time, under cursed stars. Others say they are marked by things that existed long before gods.”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a stone tablet.
“This is a Yantra. A seal. We must place it in the heart of his prison—under the floor. It will trap the entity again.”
“Will it kill it?”
“Nothing born of hate can die. Only sleep.”
She hesitated. “Then we do it tonight.”
He looked at her for a long time. Then, finally, he nodded.
At 3 a.m., they entered the hidden room.
Nisha led the way with a lantern. The air stank of mold and something like rusted iron.
They descended into the sub-basement again.
This time, it was cold. Too cold.
The chair was gone.
The photo too.
The floor was smeared with something dark.
They moved quickly. Dubey knelt and began drawing symbols with ash around the center of the room. He placed the stone tablet in the middle and began to chant.
Nisha stood guard.
The moment he began, the whispers returned.
Soft at first.
Then louder.
Then came the screams—not human, not even childlike. Shrieks like metal tearing.
The floor trembled.
Dubey chanted louder.
The shadows began to swirl, as if alive.
Nisha saw eyes—not one or two, but dozens, forming in the walls.
The symbols on the floor glowed white-hot.
With a final chant, Dubey slammed his palm to the ground.
The light burst from the tablet—blinding, searing.
The scream became one long, shrill cry.
Then silence.
They both collapsed.
Nisha could hardly breathe. Her ears rang.
The tablet smoked but stayed intact.
Dubey was pale but alive.
“It is done,” he gasped. “For now.”
She looked at him. “How long will it last?”
He didn’t answer.
The next morning, Nisha wrote everything down.
Photos. Transcripts. A full report.
But she didn’t submit it.
She printed it, sealed it in an envelope, and locked it in a drawer.
Some truths, she realized, were not for headlines.
She moved out of Flat 503 the next week.
But the building never left her.
Because every now and then, when she walked past Dadar Heights on her way to work, she would glance up at the fifth floor.
And sometimes, when the curtains blew in the wind—
She saw a face.
Small. Pale. Watching.
Still waiting.
4
Rain fell relentlessly over Mumbai, drenching the city in a metallic scent that clung to clothes and memories. Nisha sat alone in a Colaba café, sipping cold coffee, her hands trembling just enough to cause ripples in the glass. It had been two weeks since she left Flat 503. Two weeks since the sub-basement, since the seal. Since the whispers.
She hadn’t gone back.
Yet every night, the dreams followed.
Not just of the boy, but of the room, of something older beneath the building. A pulse, like a drumbeat below the earth.
She had stopped answering Dubey’s calls. His last message was cryptic—”The seal will weaken. You must be ready.” She had deleted it.
But pretending life had returned to normal was getting harder.
Because something was spreading.
At first, it was small things—strange static in her phone, her name whispered in rustling leaves, cats mewling at her window in the middle of the night.
Then came the dream three nights ago.
In it, she stood on the fifth floor balcony, rain falling hard. Below, the road shimmered. Above, the sky cracked with lightning. And behind her, inside the flat, something laughed.
Not the boy.
But something that used his voice.
The same night, she woke to find her sink gurgling. Not dripping—gurgling, as if something inside the drain were trying to climb out.
She opened it slowly.
The sound ceased.
Just stale water.
But when she returned to bed, she found the message written on her mirror in steam:
“You saw me.”
She hadn’t turned the geyser on.
Now, in the café, she checked the news on her phone. Out of curiosity—or instinct—she searched for recent incidents around Dadar Heights.
A headline stopped her heart.
“Woman Found Dead in Elevator Shaft of Dadar Heights.”
The article was brief: a 60-year-old woman, Ms. Usha Vaidya, had been found in the service shaft near the fifth floor. No CCTV footage. Elevator technicians claimed the shaft had been shut off for maintenance. Police suspected a suicide.
But Nisha recognized the name.
Ms. Vaidya was the old woman in 501. The one who had once muttered, “You should leave, beta. Before it remembers.”
Nisha closed her phone and left the café.
She needed answers.
If the entity had returned—or never left—it was no longer content with whispering. It was taking. Again.
And maybe it had never been fully trapped.
By nightfall, she was standing outside Dadar Heights once more. Rain drizzled. Traffic honked in a tired rhythm. The gate security had changed. The new watchman, a sleepy teenager, didn’t recognize her.
“I used to live in 503,” she said casually. “Left some documents. Need ten minutes.”
He waved her in.
The moment she stepped inside, the building felt different. Not older. Just…tired.
As if the walls themselves were holding their breath.
The lift worked, but she didn’t take it. She remembered Ms. Vaidya’s body. Instead, she climbed the stairs, counting each creak.
Fifth floor.
Silence.
She walked past 501. The door was sealed with police tape.
503 stood waiting.
She unlocked it.
Inside, everything looked untouched. Dust lay over the floor like skin. The wall she had broken was patched crudely with plywood. But the energy… it was humming. Softly. A sound just below hearing.
She turned toward the kitchen.
And froze.
The drain was bubbling again.
She approached it slowly. Leaned in.
“Didi…”
The whisper floated up from the pipe.
Not imagined.
Real.
She dropped the phone in shock.
The voice came again.
Closer.
“Didi, come down. Play with me.”
She backed away, heart pounding.
The drain cover rattled.
Then silence.
She ran to the hidden room. Tore away the plywood.
The cot was overturned. The wall markings had faded slightly but remained visible.
The trapdoor, however, was open.
She hadn’t opened it.
She knelt by it. The air below felt warm. Not the cold dampness from before.
And from within—a humming.
She considered leaving.
She considered running, for good this time.
But some part of her, older than fear, told her this would never stop unless she faced it.
She descended.
The sub-basement was unchanged—except now, the stone tablet Dubey had placed was cracked.
A thin black ooze leaked from the center.
She touched it. It hissed, evaporating.
From the corner, the voice came again.
“You broke it.”
She turned, and for the first time, saw him fully.
Not the boy.
Something that had worn the boy’s face like a mask. Now the mask had started to melt. His skin was gray, his eyes too wide, his mouth too red. He smiled, impossibly wide.
“This was my home,” it whispered. “You opened the door. Now I can leave.”
“No,” she said. “You were sealed. I saw it. Dubey—”
“Dubey lied.”
The shadows around the room shifted. Shapes emerged from the walls. Other faces. Older. Hollow.
“She was first,” the boy-thing said. “The old woman. She fed me whispers. I drank her mind. You’ll be next.”
Nisha took a step back.
But her foot struck something metal.
The chair.
Now it was filled—with bones.
Children’s bones.
So many.
She dropped to her knees, heaving.
And the boy stepped closer.
But just then, she remembered—
The symbols in the wall.
The markings she had photographed.
Quickly, she pulled up the photo on her phone.
The Bengali phrase: “আমার ঘর, আমার রাজ্য” — My room, my kingdom.
She whispered it aloud.
The boy-thing flinched.
“Say it again,” it snarled.
“My room. My kingdom.”
It screamed, covering its ears. The other shapes began to flicker, like dying projections.
The room began to shake.
Suddenly, she understood: The symbols weren’t made by the creature. They were made by the real boy. The child who had suffered here. He had tried to bind it—using his last strength.
She had misread it.
It wasn’t a declaration.
It was a prayer. A containment.
“My room, my kingdom,” she shouted again.
And again.
The boy’s face twisted. Cracked.
His body folded inward.
The shadows screamed.
Then—collapse.
The air sucked in, like a vacuum, and the tablet on the floor pulsed one last time before shattering completely.
Silence fell.
She collapsed to the floor.
When she woke, she was in the main flat. The trapdoor gone. The wall sealed. Her phone beside her, battery dead.
She stumbled out of 503 and down the stairs. Outside, dawn had broken.
And for the first time in weeks, the building felt…still.
A week later, Nisha met with Pandit Dubey in a small Andheri temple. He looked older, more frail.
She recounted everything.
He listened without interrupting.
When she finished, he said, “You completed what I could not. The boy was only ever a shell. You gave the original child justice.”
“What was that thing?”
He looked up at the temple ceiling.
“A fragment of something very old. Older than cities. They sometimes slip through… into damaged children, into grief. But you closed the gate.”
She left feeling not relief—but caution.
Some things never die.
They wait.
Back in her new flat in Bandra, Nisha pinned the printed photograph of the boy’s scratched wall above her desk. A reminder.
Below it, she wrote the phrase again:
My room. My kingdom.
Because if he ever came back—
She would be ready.
5
The monsoon had subsided, leaving behind a sullen quiet in Mumbai that seemed unnatural. It was the kind of silence that carried weight—so thick and watchful, it made even crows forget to caw. Nisha had moved out of Dadar Heights, yes. She had sealed the horrors, the whispers, the cursed boy. Yet there remained a persistent feeling, as if something was watching her reflection when she passed mirrors. Something waiting for the silence to deepen again.
Her new Bandra apartment had all the elements of a safe place: sunlight through curtains, polite neighbors, a chaiwala who remembered her order. But safety is a fragile illusion once you’ve seen the darkness behind the plaster and floorboards. Some nights, Nisha would wake up without cause, heart hammering, a taste like rust in her mouth.
She never returned to journalism after Dadar Heights.
Instead, she found herself absorbed in occult research, poring over archives of urban legends, old crime reports, forgotten rituals. She told herself it was for closure. But deep down, she knew—it was preparation. Because Dubey had warned her: things like that never truly die, they only go dormant.
Then, one night in late October, her burner phone rang.
Only three people had the number. Dubey was one of them.
“Hello?” she answered, heart thudding.
There was a pause, then a scratchy voice said, “Come quickly. They’re back. On the fifth floor. I see them every night.”
The voice was unfamiliar. A woman.
“Who is this?” Nisha asked.
“My name is Trisha Roy. I live in 504 now. I read your story. I found it… online. On a forum.”
Nisha felt ice in her spine. She had never posted the story.
“How did you get my number?”
“You left it in a comment,” Trisha replied quickly, nervously. “On a paranormal thread. Six months ago. Please, I’m not lying. I moved into Dadar Heights recently. I live next door to 503. And I’ve started hearing the same things you wrote about. The boy. The drain. The scratching in the walls.”
Nisha didn’t speak.
“I think… he never left.”
Nisha wanted to hang up. To tell the woman to call a priest, a psychiatrist, anyone else. But some part of her knew the truth.
She dressed and left within the hour.
Dadar Heights hadn’t changed much.
The paint was flaking more, the signboard sagging, but the building stood tall and smug, as if it remembered everyone who had entered and everyone who hadn’t left whole.
Trisha was waiting at the entrance.
Late twenties, short hair, eyes bagged from too little sleep.
“You came,” she whispered. “Thank God.”
Nisha nodded. “Let’s go up.”
The lift was miraculously working, but they took the stairs.
When they reached the fifth floor, Nisha hesitated. Everything looked…too quiet. That strange, unnatural hush that had followed her once. The walls looked the same, but the air was thicker.
Trisha opened the door to 504.
“I hear it mostly at night,” she said. “Footsteps above, even though there’s no sixth floor. My taps run even when they’re shut tight. And yesterday…”
She walked into the kitchen.
“…I found this.”
Nisha followed—and stopped cold.
In the sink, in a pool of brownish water, was a handprint.
Small. Child-sized. But stretched unnaturally, the fingers thin and long, ending in sharp points.
Nisha leaned in. The water trembled slightly. As if reacting to her presence.
She turned to Trisha. “Pack your things. Leave tonight.”
“I tried. But every time I pack and step out, I forget something. And when I come back, I find more marks. On the mirror. The fridge. The bedsheets.”
She opened her palm and showed Nisha a burn. Faint, but there. In the shape of an eye.
That broke Nisha’s hesitation.
“I need to go back into 503,” she said quietly.
Trisha’s eyes widened. “Are you mad? After what happened to you?”
“If it’s awake again, I need to know what it wants.”
They crossed into 503. Nisha still had the spare key.
The air inside was like soup—humid, thick, and wrong. The lights flickered once and then died.
She didn’t bother trying them again.
She pulled out her torch and stepped in.
The wall she had sealed months ago was untouched. But the plywood patch was now splitting. Thin cracks ran across its surface. One corner was black with soot.
Something had been pushing out.
She touched it—and the wood flaked away like paper.
Beyond it, the secret room waited. The cot was gone.
Only darkness.
The trapdoor—sealed with concrete by Dubey—was now lined with tiny fractures. And from beneath it came a drip… drip… drip, like saliva from a hungry mouth.
Then she heard it again.
The whistle.
A childish tune. Off-key. Hummed by something without lips.
She turned.
Nothing behind her.
She turned back—and screamed.
A face was pressed to the floor’s underside, staring up through the trapdoor cracks.
Not human. Not the boy.
Something worse.
The skin looked stitched together, wet, eyes glowing like coals.
Then the voice:
“Why did you leave me, Didi?”
She stepped back.
The cracks widened.
The cement bulged.
With a deafening pop, the trapdoor burst open and something slithered out.
It wasn’t walking. It was dragging itself, arms too long, spine arched like a hound. Its face flickered like bad static—boy, beast, mask, blank.
“You opened the door. Again.”
Nisha turned and ran, slamming the hidden panel shut. She bolted from 503, heart racing.
Trisha was in the hallway, sobbing.
“It was in my room. On my bed. I saw it—smiling.”
“We’re sealing it,” Nisha said. “Tonight.”
She called Dubey.
No answer.
She sent a message: “It’s back. Fifth floor. Meet at the temple. Midnight.”
At midnight, Dubey opened the sanctum gate. He was paler, older, thinner.
“I told you it would return,” he muttered. “They always do. Especially when fed.”
“Fed?”
“The woman in 504,” Dubey said. “If it touched her, marked her—it’s feeding. Growing.”
“She hasn’t invited it. She’s terrified.”
“Fear is nourishment,” he said. “It’s not a demon. Not a spirit. It’s a parasite of consciousness. A tangle of regret, sorrow, punishment. It lives in spaces we forget—behind walls, under drains, inside trauma.”
Nisha told him about the trapdoor reopening. The entity emerging.
“I need to go back,” she said. “Finish what we started.”
Dubey shook his head.
“It doesn’t want sealing now. It wants to leave.”
“Then we trap it inside me,” she said suddenly.
Dubey looked at her, aghast. “That’s suicide.”
“No. It’s bait.”
The next night, they returned.
Trisha had been relocated temporarily.
Nisha stood alone in Flat 503’s secret room. Dubey sat in the hall, chanting. His voice rose and fell in waves, laced with mantras from scriptures no longer spoken aloud in most temples.
The trapdoor gaped like a mouth.
Nisha stood above it, eyes closed.
And said aloud, “Come out. Come back to me.”
There was a silence.
Then the ground trembled.
The creature rose again—this time fully formed. Taller, leaner, its body like smoke laced with bone. Its head turned sideways, like a curious dog. And it whispered:
“You will be my home.”
Nisha opened her eyes. “Then enter.”
It lunged.
Darkness enveloped her.
Screaming wind. Cold lightning.
Her mind filled with images—rooms in flames, children sobbing, a corridor of doors endlessly closing.
She stood in the void—and saw the boy.
The real boy.
Crouched in a corner. Thin, bruised. Crying.
She walked to him.
He looked up. “You came back.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He smiled.
Then touched her chest.
A blinding white light exploded through her mind.
And the darkness began to burn.
Screams echoed.
The entity howled.
She opened her mouth and shouted the phrase:
“MY ROOM. MY KINGDOM.”
Over and over.
The boy’s image grew stronger.
The creature split apart—first in streaks of shadow, then like a crumpled photograph catching fire.
When she woke, she was in Dubey’s arms outside the building.
“The boy’s soul is free,” he whispered.
“And the creature?”
“Banished. For now.”
She sat up.
The sky was purple with dawn.
“I don’t think it’s just tied to this building,” she murmured.
“No,” Dubey agreed. “It moves. Like a virus. To where it’s needed.”
She nodded, eyes heavy.
“But we’ll be ready next time.”
6
The city moved on as it always did—oblivious. Dadar Heights returned to its casual neglect, its rusted water pipes and flickering lights tolerated like background noise in an aging song. But for Nisha, the silence wasn’t peace. It was a waiting room. The kind where the clock ticks too slowly and every creak could be a call from something that remembers your name.
Weeks had passed since the entity was banished, or so Dubey had said. Yet Nisha found herself staring at ceilings, reading esoteric texts at 3 a.m., listening to drainpipes whisper. The boy was gone, yes—but what about the thing that wore his face? The way it split and burned still echoed behind her eyelids.
She had decided never to return to Dadar Heights.
That vow lasted exactly twenty-six days.
Because that’s when she got an envelope. No return address.
Inside it, a photo.
Of her. Standing in front of Flat 503.
Taken the night the entity entered her.
On the back, someone had scrawled in neat handwriting:
“He’s awake in 509 now.”
She dropped the envelope. Her fingers went cold.
Flat 509 didn’t exist.
Dadar Heights had five floors. No more.
The next morning, she met Dubey at his temple. He was lighting camphor sticks and sprinkling water, his hands steady despite his paper-thin skin.
She showed him the photo.
He didn’t speak for a long time.
Then: “I’ve heard of this before. Places build extra spaces. Not physically. But psychically. Hidden pockets that open when pain demands a room.”
“A ghost floor?” she asked.
“More like a ghost’s memory of a floor,” he said. “If 509 exists, it was built by something—to house something.”
“Then why me?”
“Because it remembers you.”
That night, she returned to Dadar Heights.
Not by will.
But because she had a dream.
In it, she was climbing the stairs. Past the fifth floor. A door appeared—green, metal, numbered 509. From within, something knocked.
Not fists. Nails.
She woke with blood on her pillow and the copper taste of dread.
The building hadn’t changed, but the air had. As if something had shifted inside the concrete. The walls felt tighter. Claustrophobic.
She walked past the fifth floor.
The stairwell ended.
But when she ran her hand along the wall, it phased for a moment. Like static. A ripple of unreality.
Then it solidified again.
She stepped back.
“This isn’t real,” she whispered.
And the wall opened.
Not physically.
But to her sight.
A corridor stretched ahead—narrower than the others. Damp. It didn’t smell like mold. It smelled like old breath.
The door at the end bore a tarnished brass number: 509.
She touched the handle.
It was warm.
She opened it.
Inside, the flat was wrong. Longer than it should’ve been. The furniture was antique, but in pristine condition. The walls were green and veined with black roots. The light came from no bulb—just a dim, pulsing glow, like something sleeping.
And at the center sat a man.
Thin, barefoot, wearing a kurta several sizes too large.
He looked up at her.
“You’re her,” he said. “You’re the one who opened the wall.”
Nisha stepped back, but the door was gone. Replaced by a blank wall.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I was once Mr. Pujari. I moved here in 1986,” he said. “Flat 509 wasn’t here then. But one night, after my daughter died, I dreamed it. And when I woke up, the door was just there. I stepped in…”
He didn’t finish.
“Have you been trapped here?”
“No,” he said. “Not trapped. Used. I kept it fed. With memories. With grief. It eats that. It makes rooms for the lonely.”
“What is it?”
“It’s not one thing. It’s a need. A building’s sorrow. Your sorrow. My guilt. It mixes and becomes… shape.”
He leaned forward. “You made it stronger when you opened 503.”
Nisha shook her head. “No. I banished it.”
“You banished one mouth. But the hunger stayed. Now it’s grown. It has a new room. A new voice.”
From behind him, a door opened. She hadn’t seen it before.
A child walked in.
Pale. Hairless. Its mouth sewn shut with wires. It pointed at Nisha.
Then turned—and walked back into the dark.
“You see?” Pujari whispered. “They’re calling.”
Nisha didn’t respond. She walked to the child’s door.
Inside, the air shimmered.
The walls were covered in photos—of every resident who had ever lived on the fifth floor. And in the center—her. Hundreds of pictures. Taken from angles no one should have had.
The final one showed her asleep in her Bandra apartment.
Taken from inside her room.
She dropped it.
Then turned—and saw Pujari hanging from the ceiling, smiling as he swayed. His eyes glowed yellow.
“Don’t worry,” his corpse said. “You’ll get your room too.”
She ran. The hallway twisted behind her. Doorways multiplied. Laughter echoed from the walls.
Then—a window.
Not real.
But real enough.
She jumped.
And fell—
Into Flat 503.
She hit the floor hard.
When she looked around, it was morning. Birds chirped. A kettle whistled next door.
Had she dreamed it?
Then she felt something in her pocket.
The photo.
Her. Sleeping. Last night.
She stood slowly. The wall to the hidden room was sealed. Undisturbed.
But on it, someone had scratched three words:
“Find Room 509.”
She stepped back into the hallway.
A delivery boy passed her, music blaring in his earphones.
Nisha walked toward the stairs—and looked up.
Above the fifth floor landing, there was no ceiling anymore.
Just an endless staircase curling upward.
Like the building had decided to grow another level.
7
They say nightmares end when you wake up. But Nisha had learned that some dreams are made of cement, sweat, and memory—and they wait behind walls. The next morning, standing in the fifth-floor corridor of Dadar Heights, she looked up at the spiraling staircase that shouldn’t exist. Above the fifth floor, there had always been a ceiling. A rusted iron grill and cement block wall. Now, it was open—a new staircase curling into gray nothing.
No sunlight came down from it. Just air—dead and dry, like it had been trapped in a tomb for years.
She took a photo of the staircase with her phone.
It didn’t show up.
The image stopped at the fifth floor.
Her hands trembled.
Not out of fear anymore.
Out of recognition.
This wasn’t an ordinary haunting. This was evolution.
She dialed Dubey.
He didn’t pick up.
The line cut to static.
Instead of his voice, she heard a child whisper, “Keep climbing.”
Then a soft giggle.
The line went dead.
She should’ve run. She should’ve called the police. A priest. Anyone.
Instead, she adjusted her backpack—torch, camphor, a rusted key from the old apartment, her grandfather’s Gita—and started climbing.
The stairs bent in impossible ways.
They coiled like a shell, gravity loosening with each step. Her breath didn’t fog. The walls were damp and warm, like the insides of something alive.
Every few steps, she passed a door.
None were numbered in sequence. 511. 526. 590. 503 again.
“Are these memories?” she whispered aloud.
From inside one of the doors, she heard a voice.
It was hers.
Crying.
She leaned in.
“I didn’t mean to leave you… I didn’t know it would follow me…”
She stepped away, face pale.
The stairs creaked under her.
Up ahead, a sign hung from the ceiling. Painted crudely.
“TOP FLOOR — ENTRY RESTRICTED”
The floor was labeled: 609.
No such floor had ever existed in Dadar Heights.
And yet—here it was.
The door looked normal. Yellow paint. Wooden.
But around its frame pulsed black veins, throbbing like arteries.
She touched the handle.
It was cold.
As she turned it, the corridor behind her collapsed. Stairs crumbled, dissolving into smoke.
Only forward remained.
She stepped in.
The room looked like her Bandra apartment.
Same couch. Same lamp. Same coffee table.
On the sofa sat a woman.
Her exact double.
The copy turned. Smiled.
“You climbed,” it said.
Nisha stared, breath shallow. “Who are you?”
“I’m what’s left of you. The part you buried.”
The double stood. “All the guilt. The things you saw. The story you never told. I fed it. And it grew.”
The air shimmered.
Suddenly, the room changed.
Now it was the trapdoor chamber in Flat 503.
Then it became the hidden hallway with the boy.
Then… a hospital room.
Nisha stood in the middle.
This was real. A memory.
Her mother lay on the bed, tubes in her nose, skin yellowed from liver failure.
“I’ll be back,” Nisha had said years ago.
But she never returned in time.
She was chasing stories in Shillong. A career move. The job that led her to Dadar.
And her mother died alone.
“You always blamed the building,” the double said. “But it didn’t pull you in. You were looking for something to punish you.”
“No,” Nisha whispered. “That’s not true…”
“You needed the dark. And now you are its author.”
Then the walls cracked.
The double opened its mouth—and a torrent of black smoke poured out.
Screams echoed inside it.
Familiar voices.
Dubey.
Trisha.
The boy.
She backed away.
The smoke swirled—and from it emerged something new.
No longer the boy.
No longer a mimic.
This was the building itself, walking.
A skeletal figure made of bricks, wood, wires, and dripping faucets. Its eyes were power meters. Its spine an elevator cable. Its fingers, rusted nails.
“I have grown,” it said in a thousand voices. “Thanks to you.”
It moved forward.
“I am 509. I am 609. I am every door that grief built. Every room people forget.”
“You’re not real,” she whispered.
“But I am remembered,” it hissed. “And you… will be my architect.”
The walls behind her sealed.
It lunged.
She ran toward the kitchenette.
Inside her bag, she found the old key from 503.
She gripped it, muttered the chant Dubey had taught her: “Naarayana… Agni-roopam… Chhindhi…”
The key glowed.
She stabbed it into the floor.
The building screamed.
The floor split—and light shot upward.
A rift opened.
The entity howled, retreating into shadow.
The apartment collapsed—walls folding like paper.
Nisha fell—
Through air.
Through memory.
Through regret.
Until—
She hit wood.
She awoke in Flat 503.
Dubey stood over her.
He looked bruised. A cut on his forehead. A fire mark on his shawl.
“You found the staircase too,” she whispered.
He nodded. “I climbed after you. But the building turned me around. Made me live my worst days on loop. I had to burn part of my own mind to escape.”
“Did we win?” she asked.
Dubey didn’t answer.
He helped her up.
Together, they looked out the window.
Dadar was unchanged.
Trains. Taxis. Life.
But above the fifth floor—there was now a crack in the sky.
Invisible to others.
But to them, it pulsed like a scar.
That night, she went back to Bandra.
Burned the envelope.
Deleted every photo.
She moved out within the week.
But sometimes, as she passed certain old buildings at dusk, she would catch sight of a staircase where none should be. Curling up toward something unseen.
And once, while half-asleep, she heard a knock.
Not on her door.
On the inside of her mirror.
She never looked back.
Because if you see the floor, it remembers you.
8
A full year had passed since Nisha escaped the nightmare of Dadar Heights, but she had never truly been free; the building, or what lived within it, had woven itself into her memories, her pulse, the very air she breathed in her sterile Andheri flat, where she now worked as a ghostwriter for crime podcasts—true crime, ironic, considering the unreal truths she had witnessed; every night, she awoke from dreams drenched in sweat, the ceiling above her turning into tiles, the fan transforming into a spinning elevator dial, and behind her eyelids, she still saw doors—impossible doors—in places where no architecture should allow them; the fifth floor never quite left her, and sometimes, when her phone buzzed late at night and no one was there, she was certain the building was trying to call her back; one July evening, during the monsoon’s endless moaning, she found a package at her doorstep—no return address, no delivery slip, just her name scrawled in tight, black ink—and inside, wrapped in decaying cloth, was a single, dusty brick etched faintly with the inscription “Room 000”, and instantly her blood turned cold because this brick didn’t belong to Dadar Heights—it felt older, more malignant, more foundational, and buried beneath the cloth was a note in Dubey’s unmistakable hand, trembling and urgent: “It has learned to build on its own. It’s spreading. I can’t contain it anymore. But you might still be able to trace it back to the first wound. —Dubey”; Nisha hadn’t heard from Dubey in nearly nine months, not since he vanished into his ancestral village near the Konkan coast, searching for some spiritual ritual to cleanse himself of the architecture’s shadow—clearly, he had failed, and now something worse had emerged, something no longer confined to one haunted tower; she dove headlong into a citywide hunt for architectural anomalies, poring through building plans, speaking to frightened tenants, interviewing real estate agents who’d quietly scrubbed listings of flats where geometry twisted or light refused to enter; in Jogeshwari, a woman swore her apartment’s hallway stretched longer every morning; in Byculla, a church had sealed a storage room after a priest saw a small boy clinging to the ceiling, laughing; in Lalbaug, a school janitor disappeared inside a closet and returned three days later, aged by decades and unable to speak except for repeating “don’t open the blue door”; and always, in every story, there was a brick—small, old, marked with impossible numbers: Room 014, Room 099, Room Infinity—suggesting a growing network of infection, an urban parasite spreading from building to building, feeding on trauma, loss, and memory; with the help of two remaining allies—Rohan, a disillusioned architectural historian at JJ School who once believed all haunted places were metaphor, and Aditi, a blind Mahim-based medium with sensitivity to spiritual blueprints—they pieced together a horrifying theory: the original structure, or consciousness, had found a way to root itself across the city, using psychic wounds as doorways, and that if they could find the true Room Zero, the original seed cell, they might collapse the entire psychic grid before it grew into something Mumbai could never cleanse; Nisha recalled something Dubey once said offhandedly: that during the British era, secret plague wards were buried beneath hospitals and bricked off forever, abandoned not just physically but metaphysically—perfect breeding grounds for malignant architectural ghosts; combing through colonial records and old blueprints, they found a candidate: St. George Hospital, near CST, had a long-forgotten sub-wing under the laundry unit, marked for demolition but never touched; when they reached it, they found a sealed stone wall behind industrial dryers, and the bricks bore the telltale symbols: Room 000; breaking in, the air turned heavy, not with dust but with sorrow, the kind that coats lungs and memory, and inside was not a corridor but a twisted, organic thing—a tunnel that felt like walking through a being’s throat, the walls slick with moisture, pulsing slightly, the lights flickering despite no power source, and the farther they went, the more reality distorted, the corridor shifting from the sterile whiteness of a hospital to the cold wood of a Victorian asylum, then to a modern apartment with plush carpet and blank portraits that bled from the eyes, until finally it resembled a nursery, but one where the toys had teeth and the lullabies played in reverse; as they passed doorways marked not by numbers but by emotion—“Grief,” “Regret,” “Silence”—each one sent psychic jolts into their minds, images not their own: a father collapsing from debt, a girl watching her sibling drown, a widow swallowing broken glass; they reached the central chamber, an impossible space shaped like an inverted temple carved from bone, suspended upside-down in a dome of black stone, with wires hanging like veins and, in the center, a skeletal cube: Room Zero—pulsating with whispers, its surface made of femurs and knuckles, bound by screams rather than cement, and as they stepped closer, it began to speak not in words but in waves of unfiltered pain that collapsed time and ego, showing Nisha thousands of overlapping deaths, a montage of everything the city forgot—the faceless migrants, the plague victims, the evicted, the vanished; Aditi fell to her knees, muttering that the cube was “made of buried moments,” while Rohan vomited and passed out; but Nisha remained standing, guided not by courage but familiarity—this was not new, this was Dadar Heights magnified a thousandfold; she raised the Room 000 brick in her hand, now glowing faintly, and spoke the chant Dubey had once etched into her dreams: “Smarana bhūtaḥ… vismṛti nāsti…”—the cube split open, and light poured out, revealing a ghost—a shape—an echo—Dubey, or what remained, a flickering soul with the weariness of centuries, who smiled at her with a sadness too heavy for flesh and said, “You came,” to which she replied, “You stayed,” and he nodded: “I had to; I was its first builder, its architect, unwilling—but now, you can end it”; she asked what the cost would be, and his answer was simple and unbearable: “Your life won’t end. But your story will. You’ll be erased—not dead, just forgotten. No one will remember Nisha. Not your name. Not your work. You will become one of the silent rooms. Empty and unvisited”; she hesitated only a moment, because this—this horror—was not one that could be exorcised with prayers or fire; it was a design, a living draft that rewrote the city’s soul every time someone ignored their pain, every time a building stood on an unmarked grave; she pressed the brick into the cube’s core, and a howl tore through the city—not heard by ears but felt in glass and concrete—as every infected floor, every door that shouldn’t be, every vanishing staircase across Mumbai suddenly blinked out of sync and folded into nonexistence; in Chembur, a building shrank by two floors; in Kurla, a tenant found their home missing an entire room; in Malad, a lift no longer had a “5” button; Room Zero collapsed inward, the cube imploding into light, releasing Rohan and Aditi into the hospital corridor where they awoke, dazed but free—while Nisha remained behind, encased in a collapsing architecture of memory; the next day, a small article ran in Mumbai Mirror: “Unidentified woman found in bricked-off wing of St. George Hospital. No records. No history. Doctors report amnesia. Under observation.” No family came. No digital trace could be found. She was moved to a care home where she sat silently by a barred window, staring into nothing, occasionally whispering cryptic warnings to passing staff: “Don’t take the sixth floor. Even if the lift goes there.” And so, Mumbai moved on—as it always does—streets buzzed, towers rose, children played cricket in alleys, and yet… in certain buildings, if you squint just right, you might still see a hallway that curves impossibly, or a window where the view never changes, or a door that hums late at night; and if you ever find yourself in a new flat and realize your neighbor’s door has no number, or that your floorplan doesn’t match the blueprint—do not knock; do not open it; because the city may have forgotten her name, but the rooms remember the architect who tried to bury them; and they are always hungry for blueprints made of sorrow.
End
