Sagnik Basu
The Kalka Mail pulled out of Howrah Station at exactly 7:40 p.m., its long, rattling compartments groaning like a creature awakened from slumber. Among the many passengers boarding that evening was Anant Vashisht, a man in his late sixties, lean and upright, with a faded Nehru jacket and an expression that gave nothing away. He moved quietly through the First AC coach, berth 42, settling into his compartment with the calm precision of someone trained to disappear in plain sight. He carried one thing of interest—a brown leather briefcase with steel corners, chained to his wrist. Fellow passengers noticed, but said nothing. The soft hum of fans, the scent of thermos tea, and the jolt of movement as the train picked up speed—all blurred into the background. Anant checked his phone signal, then the time—7:58 p.m. He opened his recorder app and muttered something low, then paused. He looked outside the window, into the encroaching dark, before pressing ‘send’. The voice message traveled quietly through the cellular tower near Bardhaman, reaching one single recipient: “The file is not dead.”
A few compartments away, an old Sikh pantry supervisor named Tony Bhullar walked through with trays of dinner, cheerfully delivering them to known faces. In Sleeper Class, chaos reigned as children fought over window seats, while vendors at platform halts rushed in and out with baskets of puris and cutlets. But in the hush of First AC, time moved differently. At Dhanbad Junction, the train halted for barely two minutes. Anant Vashisht remained inside, unmoving. Security cameras at the platform caught his compartment door still shut. At Gaya, a power outage cut lights in the AC coaches for ten minutes. When it returned, passengers dismissed it as a routine glitch. No one noticed the brief flicker of shadows outside Anant’s window. By midnight, the Kalka Mail entered Uttar Pradesh, sliding past forgotten junctions and asleep towns. Somewhere between Kanpur and Prayagraj, at around 2:46 a.m., Berth 42 became empty. The chain was unfastened. The briefcase gone. The door still locked from inside.
At Prayagraj Junction, a new RPF constable, Junaid Ansari, boarded the train on his night duty round. Nervous and eager, he moved from coach to coach, inspecting the logs. When the train pulled out again, a coach attendant informed him of an unresponsive First AC berth. Knocking yielded no answer. When Junaid opened the door with the master key, what he found was chilling: no occupant, no suitcase, no sign of forced exit. Only a faint blood smear on the lower window frame and a single, stopped Omega watch lying beneath the berth. He immediately called it in. By sunrise, news had reached Delhi: Retired CBI Officer Anant Vashisht Missing from Kalka Mail. But that wasn’t the part that would catch fire. The real storm came when Vaidehi Iyer, a Delhi-based investigative journalist, posted a screenshot on X (formerly Twitter): “Just received a message from Anant Vashisht: ‘The file is not dead.’ What file? Who wanted it buried?” The train hadn’t even reached Lucknow, but the story was already speeding faster than the rails beneath it.
–
The morning after Anant Vashisht’s disappearance dawned bright but tense at Prayagraj Junction. The Kalka Mail stood still, basking under harsh white lights and the glare of suspicion. Constable Junaid Ansari, barely three weeks into his first posting with the Railway Protection Force, found himself at the center of something far bigger than fare evasion or petty theft. He hadn’t slept a minute since discovering the empty berth. His superior barked orders from a distance, while Junaid stood quietly, staring at the blood smear on the window frame. A forensic team arrived late, indifferent and sleepy, wiping down surfaces with cotton swabs. Anant’s mobile signal had gone cold between two towers—Phaphamau and Karchana—a dead zone. But the voice note was real. It had reached someone. The question was—who? Just then, as Junaid reviewed the RPF incident form, a voice behind him said, “Don’t touch anything else.” It was a woman—confident, fast-moving, laptop bag on her shoulder. “Vaidehi Iyer. Independent media. He sent me the message.” Junaid blinked. He had seen her once on TV. And just like that, the case became national.
Vaidehi hadn’t slept either. When the voice note landed in her phone at 8:01 p.m. the previous evening, she had instinctively known something was wrong. She’d been chasing leads from the Emergency era for over a year, ever since a retired stenographer in Noida hinted at an unreported operation—Gulmohar. Vashisht had been her anonymous source, cautious and cryptic, insisting that he would only share the final truth in person. The train journey was his own idea. When she saw the disappearance headline online, she booked the earliest flight to Prayagraj, arriving minutes after the Kalka Mail. What surprised her most was the boyish constable who didn’t treat her like a nuisance. Instead, he listened. “You really think he was kidnapped?” he asked her. “Or maybe eliminated?” she replied, showing him the voice note again. “This wasn’t random. This man was carrying something that could burn careers in Delhi. I don’t think he vanished. I think he was removed.” Together, they scanned the coach, checking CCTV footage from Kanpur, even talking to the old pantry supervisor, Tony Bhullar, who remembered Anant asking for water but refusing dinner. “He was sweating too much. Like he was afraid of his own shadow,” Tony said, frowning. “And at Gaya, he asked me—‘Has anyone come looking for me?’”
Despite the swirling theories, the facts were few: Anant Vashisht had not deboarded at any station officially. His ticket, scanned at Howrah, had no destination marked—an intentional blank. His mobile data ended at 2:45 a.m., just before the window of his supposed disappearance. There were no signs of a break-in, no screams, no reported noises. But Vaidehi found something under the berth lining—pressed into the foam was a folded page torn from a diary. Faintly written on it were five words: “File not dead. Track 6.” It wasn’t much, but it was enough to start a trail. “Track 6,” Junaid repeated, puzzled. “At which station?” Vaidehi shook her head. “We don’t know yet. But whatever that file was, someone wanted it buried. And someone else—maybe on this train—wants to make sure it stays buried.” Outside, the whistle blew again. The Kalka Mail rumbled forward. The game had begun.
–
The Kalka Mail thundered northward, its wheels slicing through the plains of Uttar Pradesh like a needle stitching past and present together. Inside, the silence of Berth 42 had become almost sacred. Constable Junaid, now fully invested, sat beside Vaidehi with a printed dossier of Anant Vashisht’s career, pieced together hastily from internal RPF records, newspaper archives, and government bulletins. Born in 1957, Vashisht had served in the Intelligence Bureau before moving to the CBI in the late 1980s. During the late Emergency, he’d been just a sub-inspector, but his name appeared on one now-declassified memo dated June 1976, linked to a covert file marked Operation Gulmohar. Vaidehi, flipping through a copied page, murmured, “This is it. This is the thing he was going to hand over to me.” But it was vague—referencing unauthorized detentions, a ‘missing list’, and coded terms like Protocol 9 and Track Closure Orders. All redacted, all buried. Junaid leaned back. “Why would a retired man try to bring this up now?” She replied, “Because something must’ve resurfaced. Or someone powerful wanted it buried—again.”
Their first real lead came unexpectedly at the Fatehpur Station, where they halted for just seven minutes. A frail old man with thick glasses and a tea kettle slung across his shoulders approached Junaid hesitantly. “Babuji, are you asking about the man with the handcuffed suitcase?” His name was Raghu Mama, a platform tea-seller known to generations of passengers. “He got down late at night… not at the platform, though. Near the crossing where the signal box sits. I saw the window light flicker. Then a figure opened the door from inside and stepped out. Not a young man. Older. Limped slightly.” Junaid frowned. “And then?” Raghu’s lips twisted. “Another figure was already waiting there. They stood silently, and then walked off… like it was rehearsed.” Vaidehi’s heart pounded. “Did the man carry the briefcase?” Raghu shook his head. “The case stayed inside. I saw the first man toss it out to the one waiting. Then he came back in for something… and the light went off.” The story didn’t fully add up—but it was more than anything they had before. Someone had either helped Anant escape—or staged his disappearance with brutal precision.
Back inside the moving train, the clues took a darker turn. A sudden text arrived on Vaidehi’s encrypted number, from an anonymous source: “Don’t trust Track 6. It was shut in ‘77 for a reason.” The message vanished seconds after reading. Vaidehi, chilled, explained to Junaid that Track 6 wasn’t just a railway line. During the Emergency, it was a coded phrase used by internal security units for transporting unregistered detainees between black sites—those who were never formally arrested, tried, or even named. Some were journalists. Some were activists. Most were never seen again. “Do you think Anant was one of them?” Junaid asked, eyes wide. Vaidehi shook her head. “No. But I think he knew someone who was. And maybe… that’s what this file proves. That they didn’t all die in custody. That some survived. And worse—someone is still using that system.” The Kalka Mail howled past Unnao station. The sun dipped low. Somewhere ahead, the past waited—unburied and still bleeding.
–
The long stretch between Prayagraj and Mughalsarai brought a heavy silence over the Kalka Mail. The windows reflected the flickering shadows of trees, and the dull throb of steel against tracks gave the night a hypnotic rhythm. At berth 17A, constable Aftab Khan sat staring at his notepad, the voice note echoing in his earphones again and again: “The file is not dead.” He noted how calm the tone was, how deliberate. Across from him, journalist Shalini Mitra scribbled names from the passenger list into her own notebook. Their list of people with possible access to Cabin B during the officer’s disappearance had grown — and oddly, most of them had boarded at Kanpur. The train had made a scheduled halt of just nine minutes there, yet within that tight window, the impossible had occurred. Shalini muttered, “Whoever took him, they knew the route. This wasn’t spontaneous.” Aftab nodded, his eyes fixed on a retired army man across the aisle, whose eyes hadn’t blinked once in minutes. Every small move was suddenly suspicious.
As the train slid into Mughalsarai Junction, the darkness outside bloomed into dim yellow station lights. Porters moved like ghosts, luggage piled like ancient ruins. Aftab and Shalini stepped off the train together. The retired CBI officer’s bag had been found near this very platform, left behind at a tea stall — containing only a vintage file from 1977, water-damaged and incomplete. Inside were pages redacted in black ink, a typed letterhead of “Internal Affairs Directorate”, and a single name underlined in red: Raman Dey. Shalini’s face went pale. She remembered the name from one of her father’s old journals — a powerful man once linked to suppression during the Emergency. “They’ve tried to erase him from every digital record,” she said, voice trembling. Aftab called headquarters in Lucknow requesting immediate archival access and identity tracing. Time was narrowing. Shalini began calling retired journalists who might’ve known Dey. But one after another, numbers were disconnected — or the people were dead.
Back inside the train, their pace picked up. Every compartment now felt like a locked room, every stare too long, every silence too deliberate. At midnight, the TTE handed them a surprise: a crumpled railway ticket found wedged inside the washroom vent — Kanpur to Lucknow, under the alias “Ram Das”, purchased using cash. It matched neither the CBI officer’s nor any listed passenger. Shalini quickly whispered, “A decoy? Or a handler?” Aftab turned to the mirror above the basin. Scrawled faintly with what seemed like soap: “They watch us even now.” The message had nearly faded. As the train screeched into Buxar, a thick fog rolled in, swallowing platform lights and blurring outlines. In that dense obscurity, Aftab felt the true weight of this case: this wasn’t just about one man disappearing — it was about something larger resurfacing, a chapter India had tried hard to forget. But the Kalka Mail, relentless and indifferent, kept moving forward — pulling along its ghosts and secrets alike.
–
The Kalka Mail neared Tundla Junction as night descended again—only this time, every station felt like a checkpoint from a forgotten war. The atmosphere in First AC had changed. An unspoken tension sat between passengers, like a storm about to break. Vaidehi and Junaid narrowed in on a name that kept reappearing in fragmented records: Ritika Mehta, a junior typist in the PMO during the Emergency, mysteriously transferred to the External Affairs Ministry after 1977. A reverse-image search on an old black-and-white ID card gave them a shock—it matched Rekha Malhotra, the woman traveling in First AC Berth 9, under the guise of a diplomat’s wife. Vaidehi approached her calmly, recorder hidden in her sling bag. “Mrs. Malhotra, or should I say, Ritika Mehta?” The woman’s expression didn’t flinch, but her fingers twitched. “You’ve got the wrong person,” she said coldly. Vaidehi leaned in. “Anant Vashisht is gone. But the file isn’t. You were listed in its index. I think you know exactly what ‘Track 6’ means.” Rekha’s voice lowered to a whisper. “Do you know what happens when you say things like that in public? You disappear. Just like him.”
Rekha’s resistance didn’t last long. In the lounge car, over weak tea and stronger words, she broke. “We were told we were typing code names. Orders. But we heard things. One day, I handled a list. Fifty-two names. Most of them never came back. But two… they resurfaced years later under new identities.” Vaidehi pressed harder. “Did Anant find one of them?” Rekha hesitated. “He found all of them.” Her eyes flicked toward the corridor. “And someone else knew he had.” Vaidehi glanced at Junaid, watching from a distance. The pieces were forming a picture no one wanted to see. Back at her seat, Vaidehi opened her voice memo app and backed up Rekha’s admission—but the screen flickered strangely. The recording was gone. Wiped clean. “What the—” she muttered, heart racing. A low beep sounded on her phone. Remote access triggered. Junaid rushed over. “They’re watching us,” she whispered. “They wiped the audio.” Junaid cursed under his breath. “Then it’s not just political. This goes deep—into systems we don’t even control.”
Moments later, a guard passed by and quietly dropped a folded note into Junaid’s lap. No name. Just two words: “Berth 46.” He sprinted to the manifest. There was no Berth 46 in that coach—it was marked as “cancelled in allocation.” But old printed manifests said otherwise. A middle-aged man had boarded from Kanpur, assigned Berth 46, listed as Partha Sen, retired telecom officer. No ID photo. No digital trail. No one remembered him boarding. “He’s our ghost,” Vaidehi said. “He was planted. Either to protect Anant—or to silence him.” Junaid paled. “What if he’s still on board?” Vaidehi’s reply was quiet but firm. “Then we’re not just chasing the past. We’re sitting in its jaws.” Outside, the train passed an abandoned signal tower, long decommissioned. Its rusted sign still read: Track 6 – Closed Until Further Orders.
–
By the time the Kalka Mail slowed into Aligarh Junction, a strange unease had gripped the train like a fever. The air felt charged, conversations had thinned to whispers, and the usual chaos of the platform seemed distant, like a memory. Vaidehi stared out the window, her thoughts racing. She couldn’t shake the image of Berth 46—a name without a face, a ghost that the system couldn’t trace. Junaid returned from speaking with the train superintendent, holding an incident log sheet from the Kanpur control room. “Look at this,” he said. “Between 2:30 and 3:10 a.m., the Kalka Mail was held outside Khaga Station, even though the track was clear.” Vaidehi frowned. “That’s exactly the time when Anant vanished.” Junaid nodded grimly. “And get this—the signal report shows a manual override.” That meant someone physically changed the light, stopping the train in a dead zone. No station. No CCTV. Just silence and darkness. “They didn’t take him off the train,” Vaidehi said slowly. “They made the train stop long enough… for someone to come on.”
As they traced the origin of the override, Junaid spoke to a junior stationmaster at Khaga who seemed nervous even mentioning the log. “We call it the dead minute,” he said, eyes darting. “Sometimes trains are made to halt… without any record. It happens more than you think.” He handed over a dusty register with pencil marks against something called Protocol 9. Vaidehi’s pulse quickened. That term had been in the file. “What is Protocol 9?” she asked. The man shrugged. “It’s just… something from the old days. When signals were used for more than just trains.” Later, back in their coach, Vaidehi connected the dots. “Protocol 9 wasn’t a railway code,” she said. “It was a cover phrase—used during the Emergency to authorize ‘non-documented passenger transfers’ via rail. Human transfers. Prisoners, political threats. No record, no paper trail. Just bodies moved like freight.” Junaid’s expression darkened. “And now someone’s revived it. For one last job.” The thought chilled them both. If Protocol 9 had returned… that meant someone inside the current system had deep access—and older loyalties.
That night, Vaidehi couldn’t sleep. Around 1:40 a.m., the Kalka Mail shuddered briefly as it entered Ghaziabad sector, the final stretch before Delhi. She slipped out and walked the corridor. A few passengers stirred, but the coach was mostly asleep. As she turned a corner, she saw him—just for a second. A tall, lean man standing beside the door of the luggage van, wearing a grey Nehru jacket. His posture was identical to Anant’s. She blinked—and he was gone. Only the faint scent of burnt tobacco lingered. She rushed back, breathless. “He’s still here,” she whispered to Junaid. “Either him… or someone wearing his skin.” Junaid stared at her. “We need to open the sealed van. The one that was off-limits after Kanpur.” But by the time they got permission, it was empty. Just an old handkerchief and a torn envelope marked: “To be delivered: Raisina Hill, PMO—Top Secret.” Junaid picked it up with trembling hands. Vaidehi looked out at the creeping dawn. “We’re not chasing a disappearance,” she said. “We’re riding with a legacy that refuses to die.”
–
The Kalka Mail thundered past Mirzapur into the heart of a night thick with unspoken truths. Vaidehi Iyer sat in the pantry car, her laptop open but forgotten, eyes locked on the railway constable Junaid Ansari as he unfurled the yellowing file retrieved from the retired officer’s secret locker. The pages trembled under the dull overhead light—handwritten reports, intelligence logs, and two faded photographs from 1977. “You see this?” Junaid whispered, pointing at a grainy image of a man standing beside Sanjay Gandhi, unnamed, yet circled in red ink. “Same signature that shows up on Vashisht’s old case notes.” Vaidehi leaned in, her breath catching. “That means he was working undercover during the Emergency. And someone buried it deep.” The old train screeched briefly as it curved around the bend, a sound that cut across the tension like a blade. Outside, stations flickered past like ghosts of a country still trying to forget what it once allowed. Inside, history clawed its way back to the surface.
Elsewhere in the train, inside the dimly lit AC First Class, an old man stirred in his sleep. His name wasn’t on any manifest. His luggage bore no tags. But from his coat pocket protruded a lanyard — a CBI visitor badge dated five years back. As the train slowed near a signal, he rose silently and moved toward the junction between compartments. A conductor spotted him and called out, but the man vanished like smoke. Moments later, a maintenance worker found the rear vestibule door unlocked and swaying. Meanwhile, Vaidehi received a cryptic WhatsApp from an unknown number: “Check the junction at Prayagraj. It wasn’t just a stop — it was a switch.” The message disappeared within seconds. Her heart pounded. Junaid, looking over her shoulder, nodded grimly. “Looks like we’re not just chasing ghosts. They’re watching us back.”
At Prayagraj Junction, the Kalka Mail made its unscheduled 10-minute halt. Under the cover of luggage trolleys and crowd bustle, Junaid and Vaidehi slipped out into the fogged platform, following the coordinates embedded in the metadata of the voice note Vashisht left behind. It led them to a closed parcel office near Platform 3, padlocked from the outside but buzzing faintly with a power source. Inside, behind a false panel, they found an old railway map marked with inked trails—one of them diverging off the Kalka Mail’s official route. “What the hell is this?” Vaidehi whispered, fingers brushing the line leading toward a now-defunct Cold War-era intelligence outpost near Fatehpur. “This line doesn’t even exist anymore,” said Junaid, visibly shaken. A train horn pierced the silence outside, jolting them both. Vaidehi exhaled sharply. “Maybe it never stopped running. Just went underground.” Their eyes met, the file between them fluttering like a trapped bird. They were not chasing the past anymore. The past was chasing them.
–
The Kalka Mail resumed its journey, carving through Uttar Pradesh’s sleeping countryside like a metal serpent dragging forgotten sins in its wake. Vaidehi and Junaid boarded in a flurry of urgency, barely escaping the suspicious gaze of a plainclothes officer they were certain wasn’t part of the Railway Protection Force. The discovery at Prayagraj — that old, buried map with a ghost line veering off the official railway grid — had shifted their investigation into a realm neither of them was fully prepared for. As the train clicked steadily toward Kanpur, Vaidehi sat by the emergency door, wind rushing through her hair, laptop balanced on her knees, decoding the hand-scrawled notations found behind the map’s panel. “This station,” she murmured to Junaid, pointing at a red ‘X’ not listed on any modern record, “is codenamed Indigo Yard. It hasn’t existed on paper since 1980.” Junaid leaned in. “So either it was dismantled—or hidden deliberately.” Somewhere deep inside, they both suspected it was the latter.
Midway between two scheduled stops, the Kalka Mail slowed inexplicably. No station lights. No platform. Just thick foliage and an eerie sense of pause. “Why are we stopping here?” Junaid asked aloud. A passenger stirred from sleep. The train’s PA system remained silent. Then came a knock—three distinct raps—on the exterior of the pantry car door. Too rhythmic to be accidental. Vaidehi and Junaid rushed out and saw nothing, except the faint outline of a man walking into the woods with a lantern that emitted a bluish hue. “That’s not a regular oil lamp,” Junaid murmured. “Infrared-suppressed. Military issue.” They exchanged no words, just followed. Through bushes, gravel, and forgotten trails they walked until they reached it — a dilapidated signal cabin marked in faded paint: Indigo Yard. The entrance was blocked with tarpaulin, half-buried under years of soil and branches. Inside, however, time stood still. A typewriter on a table. A bulletin board with yellowing orders. A rack of old communication tapes. And a single word scribbled in Devanagari on the wall: “न्याय” (Justice).
As Vaidehi dusted off a recorder unit, Junaid played a reel labeled KM-41. Static hummed before a male voice crackled through — “Kalka Mail cleared to reroute for Indigo extraction. Subject under Operation LANTERN. Do not stop at official platforms. Repeat: Do not stop at platforms.” The date on the reel? 25th June, 1975. Emergency Day. Vaidehi’s hands shook as she looked at Junaid. “This wasn’t just a political operation… this train was a mobile detention center.” Her voice faltered. “And someone’s trying to erase every trace of it.” At that moment, a low whistle echoed from the woods — not a train, but a signal. The lantern man had returned, but this time he wasn’t alone. Behind him stood two others, faces obscured, all wearing lanyards with emblems of a long-defunct intelligence agency. One raised a walkie. “They’ve seen it,” he spoke into the static. “Initiate Black Compartment protocol.” Somewhere, inside the Kalka Mail, a light turned off in one compartment—and a hidden passage clicked open. The past was not only alive. It had been waiting.
–
The train screeched to a halt in the middle of nowhere — no platform, no lights, just a blanket of fog settling like a shroud over the tracks. Vaidehi pressed her face against the glass. Through the mist, a sign emerged — faint, rusted, almost forgotten: Baksapur Halt. It wasn’t on the scheduled stops of Kalka Mail, and Junaid confirmed it by flipping through the route sheet. They stepped off cautiously. The halt had an eerie stillness, as if it belonged to another time. The sole tea stall was boarded shut. Grass grew over old benches. A station clock, frozen at 3:17. But what sent a chill through them was the portrait of a young police officer hanging on the broken wall, faded but unmistakable. Junaid stared in disbelief — it was a much younger version of his late father, dressed in an old Uttar Pradesh Police uniform. Vaidehi felt it too — this place was not just a stop; it was a forgotten witness to something buried.
As they explored, they found the entrance to an abandoned records office behind the waiting room. Inside, documents were scattered, eaten by termites and time. But in one file, hidden beneath pages from 1977, they found a photograph — a black-and-white image of Anant Vashisht in civilian clothes, standing beside a known political fixer of the Emergency era, a man named Bansal, long thought dead. The note attached read: Operation Hades — Delhi Directive — Confidential. Just as Vaidehi took out her phone to photograph the evidence, a sound echoed — the crack of gravel behind them. They turned sharply. A man in a railway uniform stood at the doorway, eyes glassy, expression blank. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a hollow tone, reaching slowly into his coat. Junaid stepped forward, his hand instinctively moving to his belt, but he wasn’t carrying his service weapon. The man’s hand came out — not with a gun, but with a flare. He struck it and threw it toward the pile of old records. Flames burst up instantly, hungry and wild. In the chaos, the man disappeared into the darkness.
They scrambled out of the burning room, Vaidehi coughing violently, eyes stinging. Junaid helped her up, his mind racing. The file — the photograph — was gone, but Vaidehi had snapped a picture. It was blurry, but enough to be proof. As the train’s horn wailed from the distance, signaling an unscheduled departure, they ran back toward it. The conductor was shouting for passengers to board, fear etched in his face. “Signal’s been tampered with. We have to move,” he yelled. Junaid and Vaidehi boarded just in time, the train lurching forward into the fog. Behind them, Baksapur Halt vanished like a ghost station, swallowed by smoke and night. They had a lead now — Operation Hades, a mystery older than them, more dangerous than they’d imagined. And someone was burning the past to keep it buried.
–
The train thundered on through the dead of night, wheels clanging like ritual drums. Inside, the once half-empty compartments now seemed packed with invisible eyes — suspicion, silence, and something ancient hanging in the air. Vaidehi, wrapped in a shawl, sat beside Junaid in the pantry car, examining the blurry photo of the old file on her phone. The image, though scorched and crooked, revealed two things clearly: the words Operation Hades and the year — 1977. The same year the Emergency was lifted. That alone connected Anant Vashisht, the late officer, to something far bigger than their personal pasts. Junaid leaned in, his breath forming vapor. “We need the last compartment,” he said suddenly. “The sealed one.” Every long-distance train had one: a storage coach, often locked, unused, overlooked. Something about it had felt wrong since they boarded. The conductor had hurried past it. The guards refused to speak of it. “What if that’s where they’re keeping the last piece?”
At the tail end of the train, the compartment stood like a tomb — rusted, bolted from the outside, no official markings. As the train entered a tunnel, swallowing all external light, Junaid picked the outer lock with a rusted spanner from the pantry. Inside, the air was frigid and smelled of camphor and old secrets. Rows of wooden crates filled the space, stacked floor to ceiling. Vaidehi opened one slowly. Inside was a file — newer, with crisp black lettering: Hades Continuum — Kalka Manifest. Dozens of names, photos, and stamps from agencies that had supposedly been dissolved after 1984. Spooks, informants, sleeper agents. Dead men who, apparently, still walked. Then they found it — a bloodied cassette tape, labeled Vashisht Intercept – Final Confession. Vaidehi’s fingers trembled as she held it. A portable player lay nearby, dust-covered but functional. They played the tape.
A voice, heavy with age and fear, filled the compartment: “This is Inspector Anant Vashisht. If you’re hearing this, I’m dead. In 1977, I was assigned to erase evidence — people, files, entire villages. I did it. We were promised it would end with the Emergency. But it didn’t. They moved everything into trains. Mobile prisons. Rolling vaults. This coach… this very coach… is one of them. We stored not just files, but bodies. Prisoners who vanished. Journalists. Revolutionaries. And someone — someone high up — kept the keys.” The tape ended with static, then a whisper — almost inaudible: “Trust no signal. Trust no map. The train never stops.”
Before they could react, the floor beneath them shook violently. The brakes shrieked. The entire train groaned as if wrenched by an unseen force. Screams echoed from ahead. They bolted out, running through carriages, past panicking passengers. When they reached the engine, the driver was unconscious — a deep gash on his forehead. And outside the window, nothing but pitch-black night, no track, no station, no sign of where they were. The GPS on Vaidehi’s phone spun wildly — showing No Location Found. The Kalka Mail had gone off-grid, and someone had cut its tether to the real world.
They had the tape. They had the story. But no exit. Only forward — toward the unknown, where a train full of shadows rolled into a place even the maps had forgotten. And they weren’t alone. In the mirror above the driver’s seat, a third reflection stood behind them. Not a man. Not alive. But wearing an old police cap — and smiling.
-End-
