Arjun Mehta
Part 1 – The Disappearance
The Delhi Metro was alive with its usual evening rush—voices overlapping, the metallic shriek of sliding doors, hurried footsteps pounding the tiled platforms. Inside the swaying compartments, the city pressed itself into tight spaces, strangers brushing shoulders, the air thick with the scent of perfume, sweat, and the faint metallic tang of rails. Rhea Kapoor moved through the crowd with practiced ease, her leather satchel slung diagonally across her body, her eyes hidden behind a pair of round glasses. At thirty-four, she was one of the country’s most fearless investigative journalists, but here she looked like just another commuter—ordinary, unremarkable, and that was exactly how she wanted it.
Yet even in anonymity, she carried the sharp edge of tension with her. Her fingers kept returning to the folded note inside her satchel, the one she had received that morning in a plain brown envelope slipped under her door. “If you want the truth, ride the Yellow Line. Last compartment. 6:45 p.m. Don’t tell anyone.”
Rhea wasn’t new to threats, nor to clandestine meetings, but there was something unnervingly quiet about this message—no signature, no flourish of menace. Just a command. Her instincts told her she couldn’t ignore it. For weeks she had been chasing whispers of an underground syndicate called The Black Pencil, a name that surfaced only in fragmented conversations, in hushed tones from sources too frightened to give details. Now, finally, she might have a lead.
The clock struck 6:45 as the train screeched into Rajiv Chowk station. The crowd surged like a tide. Rhea slipped into the last compartment, her eyes scanning the passengers. Office workers, students, a couple arguing softly, a mother rocking her infant. Nothing unusual. She gripped the cold steel pole, her eyes darting to every movement, every face. The train jolted forward.
She didn’t know that this was the last time anyone would see her.
—
Hours later, Inspector Kabir Malhotra leaned back in his chair at the Connaught Place police station, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his temples throbbing from nicotine and fatigue. At forty-two, Kabir had the frame of a man who still carried the weight of his youth’s athletic promise, but his eyes were heavy with a permanent exhaustion. A decade of chasing kidnappers, smugglers, and violent men had etched into him a cynicism he wore like armor. He had been staring at a thin file on his desk, the routine paperwork of a property dispute, when the phone on his table buzzed.
The call was brief, clipped: a missing person, high profile, urgent. Rhea Kapoor. Last seen entering the metro. No trace afterward.
Kabir swore under his breath. He knew the name well—Rhea’s stories had rattled governments, exposed mafia networks, toppled corporations. She had been on television debates, her calm voice cutting through political doublespeak like a blade. And now she had vanished, swallowed by the veins of the city.
Minutes later, Kabir was at the Metro Control Room, watching grainy CCTV footage. The video showed Rhea stepping into the last compartment at exactly 6:45, her satchel visible, her walk brisk but cautious. The train doors slid shut. The camera followed the train as it rolled out of the station. When the train reached the next stop, passengers disembarked, others boarded, the compartment shifted and shuffled—and yet, frame by frame, there was no sign of Rhea exiting. It was as if she had dissolved into the air.
Kabir replayed the footage again, slower this time. He paused at the frame where she entered, zooming in on her face. Behind her shoulder, half-obscured by a reflection, was another figure—tall, wearing a mask that looked almost theatrical, its surface pale and expressionless. The figure seemed to lean toward her, and then the crowd closed in. Kabir leaned closer to the screen, his pulse quickening. When the doors opened again, the figure was gone too.
The duty officer beside him muttered, “Sir, maybe she slipped out on the other side, camera blind spot?”
Kabir shook his head. “No. Look at the reflection. That mask. That wasn’t random.”
—
By midnight, Rhea’s apartment was sealed, its silence heavy, broken only by the buzzing of a faulty tube light in the corridor. Kabir walked through the flat, methodical, his gloves brushing against bookshelves crammed with journalism anthologies, law reports, and sketchpads. That surprised him. Dozens of sketchpads, some stacked neatly, others left open across her desk. He picked one up. Inside were pencil drawings—faces. Dozens of them. Men, women, children. Some complete, others only half-formed, their eyes blank circles.
He frowned. The faces weren’t famous, not recognizable. Yet something about them clawed at him, the expressions captured mid-scream, mid-fear. He pulled out his phone, snapping photos, sending them to his junior team for cross-checking against the missing persons database.
A draft email blinked on her laptop, unsent, the cursor still waiting. Kabir clicked it open. The subject line read: The Black Pencil. The body was incomplete: They are everywhere. The sketches are not just art. They are records. If anything happens to me—
The screen flickered, then went black. The laptop had been remotely wiped.
Kabir cursed. Someone was already covering tracks.
—
Outside the apartment, the night air was thick with smog, the glow of the city reduced to a blur. Kabir lit a cigarette, the smoke curling upward, his mind turning. He remembered a case from seven years ago—the kidnapping of a young cartoonist named Sameer Joshi. Sameer had disappeared on his way to an exhibition, leaving behind only unfinished sketches in his studio. That case had gone cold, unsolved, gnawing at Kabir’s conscience ever since.
And now, here it was again. A journalist, sketches of faces, a name whispered—The Black Pencil. He felt the old wound reopening.
His phone buzzed. A message. Unknown number.
Kabir opened it. An image appeared.
A pencil drawing.
Of him.
Eyes crossed out.
—
He stood frozen, the cigarette trembling in his fingers. The city moved on around him—cars honking, vendors shouting, the hum of sleepless Delhi—but for Kabir, time seemed to fracture. He stared at the crude sketch, the mocking outline of his own face. Whoever had taken Rhea already knew him. They were watching.
And they were telling him, in the simplest, most chilling way possible—he was next.
Part 2 – The Black Pencil
The sketch haunted Kabir all night. He left Rhea’s apartment with the drawing still glowing on his phone screen, its pencil strokes crude yet intimate, as if the artist had studied his face for hours. He lay awake in his flat in Karol Bagh, staring at the ceiling fan spinning above him, the cigarette smoke pooling in the stagnant air. He had been watched, observed, chosen. And if the artist could sketch him, they were close enough to follow him through the city’s chaos without being seen. That realization made the hairs on his arms rise.
By morning, the cross-check from headquarters arrived. Of the fifty-two sketches found in Rhea’s flat, thirty-one matched people listed in the missing persons database—some cases closed without resolution, others still active. The latest entry was just two weeks old: a college student who had disappeared after leaving an art exhibition in Noida. Another was an architect who had last been seen sketching at Lodhi Gardens. All tied, directly or indirectly, to art.
Kabir closed the file, his jaw tightening. This wasn’t coincidence. This was a ledger. Rhea had stumbled onto something monstrous.
—
He drove across the city, the morning traffic crawling like a serpent of metal and exhaust. Rhea’s editor at The Sentinel, a lean, gray-haired man named Shankar Menon, was waiting in the glass-walled newsroom when Kabir arrived. The newsroom buzzed around them—phones ringing, keyboards clacking, televisions blaring muted news anchors—but inside Shankar’s cabin, there was only the low hum of an air-conditioner and the weight of fear.
“Inspector Malhotra,” Shankar said, shaking Kabir’s hand with a grip that lingered longer than necessary. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice taut. “Rhea is not just another journalist. She’s family here. And you know what she was working on.”
Kabir nodded slowly. “The Black Pencil.”
Shankar stiffened at the name. He glanced at the glass walls, as if afraid the words could seep through. “She told you?”
“She left drafts. Half-erased.”
Shankar exhaled sharply. “They don’t like being named. Even now, saying it out loud feels like dragging a knife across stone. We first heard the name last year. A whisper, nothing concrete. Rhea dug deeper. She found patterns—missing artists, cartoonists, designers. People whose last known activity involved drawing. And then she found the comics.”
“Comics?”
Shankar pulled a slim, tattered booklet from his drawer. Its cover was plain brown, the kind of pulp binding that looked like it had survived decades of dust and neglect. Kabir turned the cover. Inside were stark black-and-white panels, raw sketches filled with violence. Figures with faces slashed through. Bodies dissolving into blank space. And in every frame, somewhere, a symbol—a thick pencil striking across the page, leaving black scars.
“These were circulated underground in the late ’90s,” Shankar explained. “Photocopied, passed hand-to-hand in art colleges, banned soon after for obscenity and incitement. The official record says they were destroyed. But Rhea tracked a few copies through collectors. She believed the comics weren’t just stories. They were instructions.”
Kabir turned the brittle pages. One panel froze him. It depicted a train compartment. A woman standing near the door, a satchel slung across her body. Behind her, a faceless figure leaned in, holding a folded piece of paper. The details were unmistakable. It was Rhea.
But this comic was printed twenty years ago.
His fingers tightened around the booklet. “How is this possible?”
Shankar’s eyes were dark. “That’s what Rhea wanted to know. She thought the artists behind these comics weren’t ordinary illustrators. She said they had… access. As if they were recording disappearances before they happened. Or deciding them.”
Kabir shut the comic with a snap. “And you didn’t stop her?”
“I couldn’t,” Shankar said quietly. “You don’t stop Rhea Kapoor. You just hope she survives.”
—
Back at the station, Kabir called for his junior officer, Aditi Rao, sharp-eyed and restless, still fresh enough to believe in clean endings. She laid out the CCTV grids of the metro compartment, each frame frozen in sequence.
“Watch this,” she said, pointing at the reflection Kabir had noticed. She enhanced the masked figure’s silhouette. The mask was smooth, featureless, almost like plaster. But the figure’s hand—the fingers were stained black, as if dipped in ink.
Aditi leaned closer. “Sir, this doesn’t look like cloth or gloves. It looks like charcoal. Smudged.”
Kabir’s stomach churned. The blackened fingers of a draftsman.
Another envelope arrived at the station reception that afternoon, unmarked. Inside was a single sketch. Not Kabir this time, but Rhea—bound, her face only half-finished. The pencil lines trailed off where her eyes should have been. Written beneath in a jagged scrawl were the words: “To be completed.”
Kabir stared at it for a long time. It was not just a threat. It was a promise of an ending still being written.
—
That night, Kabir drove to Lodhi Gardens. The architect who had gone missing two months ago was last traced here. He wandered under the fading lamplight, shadows stretching long across the gravel paths. Couples whispered on benches, joggers passed, but Kabir’s eyes searched for something else.
On the wall of a ruined tomb, half-hidden by moss, he found it. A sketch in black pencil, etched roughly into the stone. A face, screaming. The eyes hollow. Below it, a symbol: a thick black line slashing across the mouth.
Kabir crouched, tracing the rough texture with his gloved fingers. Fresh strokes. Whoever had made this had been here recently.
From the corner of his eye, he caught movement—a flicker between the trees. He turned sharply, but the path was empty. Only the rustle of leaves in the warm night breeze.
He knew then he wasn’t alone. He was being watched, sketched into someone else’s story.
—
By midnight, Kabir returned to his apartment, the day’s weight pressing down on him. He poured himself a glass of whisky, the amber liquid catching the dim light. He thought of Rhea, of her unfinished sketch, of the faceless figures in the comics. He thought of his own portrait with the eyes crossed out.
The city outside roared on, indifferent. But somewhere, in some hidden corner, an artist was still drawing, deciding whose face to finish next.
Kabir crushed the empty glass in his palm until it cracked, blood mixing with whisky. He whispered to himself, as though swearing an oath:
“Not this time. Not again. I’ll find you before you finish her.”
Part 3 – Shadows in the Metro
The Delhi Metro was no stranger to crime—pickpockets, harassment, even the occasional stabbing. But disappearances? People did not simply dissolve inside compartments. Kabir sat in the interrogation room of the Rajiv Chowk Metro Station the next morning, his elbows on the metal table, a dozen statements scattered in front of him. Witness after witness had been interviewed, commuters who had shared Rhea Kapoor’s last known ride. Each account was ordinary, unhelpful. People remembered her entering. Some remembered her standing by the door, satchel slung across her body. Then the details blurred into a fog of everyday distractions.
One woman, a software engineer, said she might have seen Rhea speaking to someone, but couldn’t describe the person. Another swore Rhea was there one moment and gone the next, but chalked it up to her own lack of attention. Kabir’s pen tapped restlessly against the table. None of it added up.
Then came the boy.
He couldn’t have been more than twelve—skinny, restless legs swinging under the chair, his mother beside him wringing her hands. His name was Arjun. He was returning home from tuition classes that evening when he spotted something strange.
“I saw a man,” Arjun said, his voice pitched high with the seriousness of being listened to by police. “He wore a white mask. Not like a doctor mask. A scary one, like in the movies. He came close to that lady—Rhea, right?—and gave her a folded paper. Then she turned to read it. And then…” He hesitated, his eyes darting to his mother.
“And then what?” Kabir asked gently.
Arjun swallowed. “Then he wasn’t there anymore. Like, poof. Gone.”
Kabir leaned forward. “Did he get off the train? Did you see him walk out?”
The boy shook his head. “No. The doors opened, people went out, but he wasn’t among them. I looked.”
Kabir asked him to draw. The boy’s fingers gripped the pencil awkwardly, but what emerged on the page was chilling: a crude sketch of a tall figure in a featureless mask, with eyes shaded black. The hands, smudged heavily, looked dipped in ink. Kabir studied it, the back of his neck prickling. The resemblance to the comics Shankar Menon had shown him was unmistakable.
—
That evening, Kabir replayed the CCTV footage for the hundredth time. He slowed the frames to near stillness. Rhea’s profile, her head turning, as if responding to someone beside her. A sliver of a mask in the reflection. The movement of her hand—taking something. Then the jostle of the crowd. The reflection warped. When the doors opened, Rhea was swallowed. The masked figure gone.
Kabir knew Delhi like the lines on his palm, every blind corner and forgotten alley. Yet this—this was something else. An illusion executed in plain sight, a vanishing act scripted into the everyday rhythm of the city. He wondered if the metro was chosen deliberately: a machine of order and repetition, where people stopped noticing the details. A stage where disappearance could pass as a trick of memory.
—
Late that night, Kabir returned to Rhea’s flat once more. He needed to see the sketches again, the unfinished faces. The room was just as he had left it, stale with the smell of paper and graphite. He flicked through the sketchpads. One caught his attention: a drawing of a train interior, faint pencil lines outlining windows, bars, passengers. At the center, a lone woman by the door—unfinished, her face blank.
Kabir exhaled sharply. Rhea had drawn her own disappearance before it happened.
Or someone had drawn it for her.
—
The next morning, a plainclothes constable handed him another envelope, this one left anonymously at the station’s front desk. Inside was a single folded sheet. Kabir opened it carefully. It was a pencil sketch of him again—but this time, not alone. Beside him was Rhea, bound, her face obscured by shadows. Both figures stood inside a train compartment, the windows streaked with black lines.
At the bottom, scrawled in jagged letters: “Your stop is coming.”
—
Kabir’s temper was rarely short, but this was different. He stormed into the Commissioner’s office, slamming the sketch onto the desk. “This isn’t just kidnapping. This is staging. Someone is orchestrating every move, mocking us, leaving messages like a performance. They know our every step.”
The Commissioner, a stoic man with years of political survival etched into his face, frowned. “You’re suggesting a cult?”
“I’m suggesting an artist,” Kabir replied. “Someone who believes drawing isn’t just representation—it’s control. They sketch it, then make it happen. Every missing person was an artist or connected to art. They’re building something, an exhibition of disappearances.”
The Commissioner’s jaw tightened. “Find proof. Until then, it’s speculation. And keep it quiet. No media frenzy.”
Kabir left, rage simmering under his skin. Proof. That’s all they ever wanted. He knew what he had seen—the comics, the sketches, the child’s testimony. But proof was smoke when the artist himself was still hidden.
—
That night, Kabir drove back to the metro. He wanted to feel it, the rhythm, the crowd, the place where Rhea had last breathed free air. He boarded the same Yellow Line train, standing in the same compartment, watching faces blur past in the glass. Students glued to phones. Workers nodding off. Lovers whispering. He tried to imagine how she had felt—waiting, watching, heart racing when the masked figure approached.
As the train rolled through tunnels, the lights flickered. For an instant, the compartment dimmed into near-darkness. In that half-second, Kabir saw it—on the glass, a reflection not his own. A pale mask staring back at him, ink-black fingers raised as if sketching his outline.
He spun around. The compartment was ordinary again. People shifted, oblivious. No mask. No figure. Just the hum of the rails.
But his pulse pounded, his mouth dry. He wasn’t imagining it. He was inside someone’s drawing now, a character being written.
—
When he reached home past midnight, his door was ajar. He drew his pistol, moving inside silently. The apartment looked untouched—no overturned furniture, no missing valuables. But on the dining table lay a fresh sketch.
It was his living room. Detailed, precise. Every chair, every lamp. And in the corner, drawn with sinister clarity, a masked figure watching him.
Kabir felt a chill run through his veins. This wasn’t a threat. This was surveillance, translated into art. Whoever this was had been inside his home, sketching him in silence.
For the first time in years, Inspector Kabir Malhotra felt true fear.
Part 4 – The First Trap
The sketch on his dining table did not leave Kabir’s mind for hours. It was not merely a drawing—it was evidence, proof that someone had been inside his private space, moving silently while he was away. Every detail was accurate: the crooked curtain rod, the stain on the carpet, the old clock frozen at 10:15. Whoever sketched it had not just entered his home but studied it, captured it with obsessive fidelity.
Kabir locked the sketch away in a folder and sat on his bed, his pistol on the side table, sleep miles away. He had been in homicide long enough to know that killers taunted. They left trophies, they left riddles. But this—this was different. This was performance. Each sketch wasn’t just a threat. It was prophecy.
At dawn, his phone buzzed with a new message. No number, no signature. Just a single line:
“If you want to see her again, follow the lines.”
Attached was another drawing. A crumbling building, its façade scarred with graffiti, its windows shattered. Kabir recognized it instantly. The abandoned printing press near Daryaganj—once the heartbeat of Delhi’s publishing world, now a ruin squatting between spice warehouses and crumbling tenements.
It was bait. A trap. He knew it. And still, he couldn’t ignore it.
—
That evening, Kabir parked two blocks away and approached on foot, his steps deliberate, hand resting near his holster. The sky above was bruised with smog-stained twilight, the city’s noise muffled in this forgotten quarter. The printing press loomed ahead, its iron gates rusted, its walls lined with peeling posters of long-dead political candidates.
Inside, the air was heavy with the smell of damp paper and mildew. The silence pressed against his ears, broken only by the distant drip of water. He moved carefully, his flashlight beam cutting through dust motes. Old machines sat like skeletons in the dark, their gears stiff with rust.
Then he saw them.
Sketches.
Hundreds of them.
They covered the walls, taped and pinned in haphazard rows—faces, so many faces. Men, women, children. Some screaming, some serene, some with eyes gouged out in pencil strokes. Kabir’s stomach twisted as recognition struck. Many of them were the missing persons from Rhea’s files. Some had already been confirmed dead. Others were still on record as vanished.
The flashlight beam trembled as he scanned the wall. His throat tightened when he saw her.
Rhea Kapoor.
Half-finished, her face captured with chilling precision, the pencil lines tapering off where her mouth should have been. It was as if the artist had paused mid-stroke, waiting to decide whether to silence her forever.
Kabir stepped closer, heart pounding. He reached out, fingers brushing the paper—and that’s when the sound came.
A hiss of static.
He spun around, gun raised. A reel-to-reel tape recorder sat on a metal desk, its spools already turning. The crackle grew, and then a distorted voice filled the room.
“Every face is a story unfinished,” the voice said, deep and warped as though filtered through layers of static. “You complete stories with ink. I complete them with absence. We are the same, Kabir Malhotra. But you refuse to see.”
Kabir’s jaw clenched. “Where is she?” he barked into the empty room.
The voice chuckled, low and hollow. “She is still in draft. Perhaps she will remain. Perhaps she will not. That depends on you.”
The tape clicked. A new sound replaced the voice: the faint, muffled cry of a woman. Rhea. Gagged, struggling. Kabir’s heart lurched.
He lunged toward the machine—but suddenly the air trembled. A low whoosh, then a blast. Fire erupted along the walls, the papers igniting in quick, greedy tongues of flame. Within seconds, the room was alive with crackling heat, sketches curling into ash.
Kabir swore, pulling his scarf over his mouth. Smoke clawed at his lungs, heat seared his skin. He shoved through the choking haze toward the exit, shielding his face with his jacket. The walls roared as fire ate the paper lives pinned to them.
He stumbled out into the alley just as the roof caved with a deafening crash, sparks shooting into the night. Behind him, the press collapsed into an inferno, flames licking the sky.
But one image seared itself into his memory—the sketch of Rhea, burning, curling, half-complete.
—
By midnight, Kabir sat on the steps of his station, soot-stained, his shirt damp with sweat. Aditi approached with two coffees, her eyes widening at his state.
“You went alone, didn’t you?” she accused, thrusting the cup into his hand.
Kabir ignored the question, staring into the darkness. “They wanted me to see. To hear her. To know she’s alive. And then they burned the trail.”
“Or burned the evidence,” Aditi countered.
He sipped the bitter coffee, his hand trembling. “No. They don’t erase. They perform. That fire wasn’t destruction—it was spectacle. They wanted me to carry those faces in my head. To know they hold the power of finishing or erasing.”
Aditi sat beside him, quiet. Then she said, “Sir, there’s something else.”
She handed him a photograph—recovered from an old missing-persons file. Kabir’s eyes narrowed.
It was Sameer Joshi, the cartoonist who had vanished seven years ago. Kabir’s cold case. But in the background of the photo, half-hidden, was a mural painted on a wall. The same black-pencil slash he had seen in the comics.
Kabir exhaled slowly. “It’s them. It’s always been them.”
—
At home later, the city asleep outside, Kabir stared at his scarred hands. He had lost Sameer Joshi. He couldn’t lose Rhea. Not again. The difference was, this time, the enemy wanted him to play. They wanted an audience.
He opened his drawer and took out the sketch left in his apartment—the masked figure in his living room. He placed it beside the new one from the printing press, Rhea half-finished. Two pieces of a puzzle, inked by hands he hadn’t yet seen.
The words from the tape echoed in his skull: Every face is a story unfinished.
He knew now this wasn’t just about kidnapping. It wasn’t even about killing. This was a philosophy—a twisted belief that art wasn’t representation but fate itself. That once a face was sketched, its story belonged to the artist alone.
And Kabir’s face had already been drawn.
—
He lit another cigarette, staring out of the window at the city that slept beneath a haze of smog and neon. Somewhere out there, Rhea was alive, waiting for her story to be completed. Somewhere, a masked artist sketched in silence, deciding whose chapter to close next.
Kabir ground the cigarette into the ashtray, eyes blazing.
If it was a performance they wanted, he would step onto their stage. But this time, he would rewrite the script.
Part 5 – Echoes of the Past
The fire at the printing press lingered in Kabir’s mind like a fever dream. He could still hear the crackle of burning sketches, still feel the heat singe his lashes. Yet it was the tape—the muffled cry of Rhea—that had sunk its claws deepest. She was alive. He had heard her. And somewhere in this city of thirteen million souls, she was being kept like a character waiting for the artist’s final stroke.
But he also knew something else now. This wasn’t new. The Black Pencil had been weaving its dark threads for years, maybe decades. And if he wanted to catch them, he had to return to where he had failed before.
—
Seven years earlier, Kabir had worked a case that still woke him in the middle of the night. Sameer Joshi, twenty-eight, cartoonist, known for his satirical strips that mocked everyone from politicians to police officers. He had vanished on his way to his first solo exhibition. Kabir had been lead investigator then, and he had promised Sameer’s sister, tears in her eyes, that he would bring him home. He never had. The file had been closed, labeled “Unsolved.”
Now, with the photograph Aditi had shown him—the mural in the background marked with that same slashing pencil—Kabir knew the Black Pencil had claimed Sameer too.
At his desk, he pulled the old files, their edges yellowed, dust coating the folders. He spread photographs, statements, forensics across the table like a gambler’s losing hand. And there it was again: sketches. Sameer had left behind dozens, many incomplete, some grotesque in their imagery—figures with hollow eyes, mouths erased. At the time, Kabir had dismissed them as an artist’s eccentricity. Now, they looked like echoes of the same sickness stalking Rhea.
He lit a cigarette, staring at one drawing in particular: a faceless figure holding a pencil like a dagger. Above it, in Sameer’s handwriting, were the words: “They only exist when drawn.”
—
The next morning, Kabir drove to Sameer’s old studio, a dusty single-room space in Shahpur Jat now padlocked and abandoned. With official clearance, he broke the lock. The smell hit him first—stale paper, mildew, the ghost of turpentine. Dust coated every surface, but the sketches still remained, stacked in boxes, pinned to boards.
He picked through them slowly, one by one. Faces again. Dozens, maybe hundreds. Some matched people who had been alive then. Some matched victims who disappeared later. Kabir’s hands trembled when he recognized a face among them—Rhea Kapoor. Drawn years before she vanished.
The timeline shattered in his head. How could Sameer, missing for seven years, have drawn Rhea, who had only now been taken? Unless the Black Pencil had possessed his hand, or absorbed him into their ranks.
On the studio wall was a sentence scrawled in charcoal:
“Art is not imitation. Art is anticipation.”
Kabir felt the room closing in. He had thought he was chasing kidnappers. But what if he was chasing a doctrine, an ideology that believed drawing was power over reality itself?
—
That night, Kabir returned to his apartment. Aditi was waiting, restless, a file clutched in her hand.
“We found something,” she said. “Sameer’s bank records. His last withdrawal before vanishing was at a printing supply store in Old Delhi. I checked the address. The shop is gone, but the building still stands. Guess who owns it?”
Kabir raised an eyebrow.
“An artist collective. Registered under different names over the years. But the pattern is the same. Always people tied to illustration, design, underground publishing. And they vanish—leaving new members to take their place.”
Kabir sank into his chair, rubbing his temples. “So it’s not just one man. It’s an evolving cult. The Black Pencil isn’t a person—it’s a lineage.”
“Exactly,” Aditi said. “And I think Sameer became part of it.”
The words hit Kabir harder than he expected. Sameer, his childhood friend, absorbed into the same void that had taken Rhea. Perhaps not even against his will. Perhaps he had chosen it, seduced by the idea that art could predict, could control.
—
The next day, Kabir visited Sameer’s sister, Ananya Joshi, now older, her face lined with years of unanswered questions. She still lived in their family home, its walls covered with Sameer’s framed cartoons.
“You’ve come after so long,” she said softly, bitterness under her calm.
Kabir lowered his head. “I failed you then. But I need your help now. Rhea Kapoor is missing. And I believe Sameer’s disappearance is linked.”
Ananya’s eyes filled with tears. She guided him to a drawer and pulled out a folder. “I kept this. I never showed police because they wouldn’t understand.”
Inside were letters Sameer had written before he vanished. Fragmented, half-mad in their imagery. “They say the line decides the fate. Once you’re sketched, you belong. I feel them watching when I draw. My characters look back at me.”
One letter ended with: “If I disappear, know that I am not gone. I am completed.”
Kabir closed his eyes. Completed. Like the half-finished sketch of Rhea he had seen at the printing press.
—
That evening, driving back through Delhi’s traffic, Kabir felt the city pressing in on him, its neon lights and billboards now resembling panels in a comic strip, each passerby another potential sketch waiting to be claimed. He couldn’t shake the sense that he was already inside someone’s frame, moving according to their pencil strokes.
At a red light, his phone buzzed. Another message.
A sketch.
This time, not of him, not of Rhea.
It was of Ananya Joshi. Sameer’s sister. Her eyes wide with fear.
Beneath it, the words: “Echoes must be silenced.”
Kabir’s blood ran cold. The trap wasn’t just for him anymore. They were erasing the past—anyone who remembered.
He floored the accelerator, the city blurring around him.
—
Back at headquarters, Kabir spread out all the sketches—the boy’s drawing of the masked figure, Sameer’s faceless panels, the cult’s comics, the taunting envelopes. A pattern emerged, jagged but undeniable. Every disappearance, every sketch, every message was part of a story unfolding in chapters.
The question was no longer whether the Black Pencil existed. The question was how to stop a story once you were written into it.
And Kabir feared he was running out of pages.
Part 6 – Rhea’s Voice
The city lay under a damp haze of monsoon rain, the streets shining with mirrored neon. Kabir sat in his office long past midnight, Sameer’s sketches strewn across the table. The air smelled of wet paper, his ashtray heavy with cigarette stubs. For hours he had stared at the faces—missing people, unfinished mouths, hollow eyes. Each page felt like a confession, yet none spoke clearly.
The shrill chime of his phone cut through the silence. Unknown number. He hesitated, then answered. Static filled his ear, then a voice—Rhea’s.
“Inspector… Kabir…”
He sat up so fast the chair screeched backward. “Rhea! Where are you? Speak—”
But her words came broken, fragmented, as if filtered through interference. “They’re… not who you think… art is… prison… exhibition… death shown as beauty.” She coughed, her voice raw. “They want… me to… finish…”
The line cracked, then silence.
“Rhea! Stay with me!” Kabir barked, but the call was gone. His pulse hammered. It wasn’t just a taunt this time. It was her, alive, reaching out.
Moments later, his phone buzzed again—this time with a message. A file attachment. Encrypted audio.
—
At cyber forensics, a tired young technician worked to decode the file. Hours bled into dawn as the rain lashed outside. Finally, the boy nodded, pushing his headphones toward Kabir. “Sir, it’s her voice. It’s genuine. We traced the packet. The origin is masked, bounced through servers, but the first relay pings from an industrial zone near Noida.”
Kabir’s jaw set. “Play it.”
The audio began. Rhea’s breath came ragged, hurried. “If you’re hearing this, I’m still alive. They move me constantly. I don’t know the time, the day. But I’ve seen what they’re building. It’s an exhibition—faces, hundreds of them, displayed as if they were trophies. But they’re not paintings. They’re records. The sketches are… made of us. And once the sketch is complete, the person vanishes. Completed. Like Sameer Joshi. Like others.”
Her voice dropped, urgent. “Kabir, they call themselves The Black Pencil, but they’re not just one person. It’s an order. An artist collective, bound by a doctrine. They believe drawing summons fate. They sketch you, then make it happen. Some join willingly, seduced by immortality. Some are taken. Either way, no one leaves.”
A pause. Then softer, trembling: “I don’t know how much longer I can resist. They want me to draw. They think because I’m a journalist, because I record truth, I can become one of them. But I won’t. Kabir—if you can—burn the sketches. Don’t let them finish me.”
The recording ended with a scream, the scrape of a chair, and then silence.
Kabir sat frozen, the headphones heavy in his hands. He had heard many confessions in his life, but this one carved into his bones. Not just because it was Rhea, but because she confirmed what he had begun to fear—that this was no gang, no criminal syndicate. It was a cult of art, a philosophy sharpened into violence.
—
He drove to Noida at dawn, the city still waking under slate skies. The industrial zone sprawled like a graveyard of factories—corrugated warehouses, broken chimneys, mud roads pocked with puddles. He moved carefully, his coat collar raised, pistol holstered but ready.
The building that matched the ping was a warehouse with faded lettering: Gupta Paper Mills. Rust streaked the walls, its windows blind with grime. He circled once, noting tire tracks in the mud, cigarette butts still warm. Someone had been here recently.
Inside, the air was damp, metallic. Machines stood silent, their belts sagging like dead snakes. Kabir swept the flashlight, every shadow making his nerves itch. In the far corner, a small wooden desk held another tape recorder.
He pressed play.
The distorted voice he had heard before filled the air. “You chase echoes, Kabir Malhotra. You think her voice will guide you, but she is already sketched. Her outline is waiting for its end. As is yours.”
Kabir’s jaw tightened. He scanned the room, finger on the trigger. Then he saw them—new sketches pinned to the wall. His stomach clenched.
One was Rhea again, this time more complete—the gag drawn over her mouth, her eyes wide.
The other was of him, but different from before. He was in this very warehouse, standing before a desk, pistol raised. The exact pose he was in now.
Kabir’s pulse spiked. They weren’t just sketching his future. They were sketching his present, anticipating his moves like panels in a comic strip.
A noise behind him—footsteps. He spun. The beam of his flashlight caught nothing but dust swirling. Then the door slammed shut.
Smoke hissed from vents, acrid and choking. He stumbled, pulling a cloth over his mouth. The world blurred. He forced the door, lungs burning, stumbling into the wet daylight, coughing until his ribs ached.
When he looked back, the warehouse windows glowed faint orange. Another fire. Another trail erased.
But not before they had shown him what they wanted: that they could predict him, stage him, capture him in art before he even lived the moment.
—
Back at headquarters, Aditi listened in stunned silence as Kabir replayed Rhea’s recording. Her young face was pale, but her eyes sharp. “Sir, she said they want her to draw. Maybe that’s why she’s still alive. They need her.”
Kabir nodded grimly. “And that means we have time. But not much.”
Aditi leaned forward. “Think about it, sir. If they believe sketches dictate reality, then burning them might break their power. If we can find the originals…”
Kabir shook his head. “We tried that. They burned the press themselves. They’re not afraid of losing sketches. They’re afraid of being exposed. This exhibition Rhea spoke of—if it’s real, that’s where they’ll gather. That’s where she’ll be.”
His voice hardened. “We find the exhibition, we find her.”
—
That night, as Kabir returned home, he found yet another envelope wedged under his door. His breath caught.
Inside was a single drawing.
It was Rhea again, her sketch now almost complete. Her mouth was shaded shut, her wrists bound.
But this time, in the corner of the sketch, there was something new: a door with an eye drawn on it, wide open. Beneath, scrawled words:
“The Exhibition awaits.”
—
Kabir sank into his chair, the rain pounding against the window. He finally had his clue. The Exhibition was real. And if he didn’t stop it, Rhea would not remain unfinished for long.
For the first time, he allowed himself a thin smile. “You want me at your stage? Fine. I’ll come. But remember—sometimes the audience changes the ending.”
Part 7 – The Exhibition
Delhi’s nights were never silent, but this one felt stranger than most. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets slick, reflecting the glare of sodium lamps. Kabir drove without headlights through a network of back lanes, his pulse steady though every muscle in his body thrummed with tension. In his coat pocket lay the latest sketch delivered to him—Rhea bound, the door with an eye etched above it, and the words The Exhibition awaits.
For three days he had followed whispers, bribes exchanged for fragments of truth. A warehouse district near the river had been rented under a shell company linked to an “arts foundation.” Trucks had been seen hauling canvases inside at night. No workers, no artists, only masked figures unloading crates. It fit too neatly. The Exhibition was real, and tonight, the invitations had gone out.
But Kabir was not invited. He would have to become part of the audience on his own terms.
—
At the warehouse gates, the guards were dressed not in uniforms but in black suits, their faces hidden by pale featureless masks. Kabir had worn one too, taken off a courier intercepted earlier. The mask was clammy against his skin, suffocating, but it bought him entry. He walked past without a word, his forged invitation a simple white card stamped with a black slash.
Inside, the air was different—perfumed, theatrical. Dim lights illuminated a vast hall where canvases stood on easels, each covered with cloth. The crowd was unlike anything Kabir had expected. Not starving cultists, not fanatics. These were Delhi’s elite—industrialists, politicians, men and women dripping with wealth, their eyes hungry above their masks. They whispered to each other in reverence, as though they stood in a temple.
Kabir drifted among them, forcing himself to breathe slow. On the walls, massive charcoal murals stretched floor to ceiling—faces twisted in agony, hollow-eyed children, anonymous men and women silenced with heavy pencil strokes. The darkness of graphite, smudged and violent, seemed to pulse with life.
At the far end of the hall stood a raised dais, draped in black. On it, a single spotlight illuminated a wooden chair. Rhea was bound to it, her face gaunt but defiant, eyes blazing behind the gag. Kabir’s chest clenched. She was alive. He forced himself to stay still, to wait. To reveal himself now would mean her death.
—
The crowd hushed as a figure emerged from the shadows. The Curator. Masked, tall, wearing a black apron stained with streaks of graphite. In his hand, he carried the same thick black pencil Kabir had seen in sketches, sharpened to a lethal point.
“Welcome,” the Curator’s voice echoed, distorted yet clear. “Tonight, you witness the unveiling of endings. These are not mere portraits. They are stories finished, fates sealed. You—our patrons—will own what others can never reclaim: the last face of a vanished soul.”
He gestured, and attendants pulled the cloths from the canvases. Gasps rippled through the crowd.
On each canvas was a sketch of a missing person, rendered in brutal precision. Kabir recognized them—faces from Rhea’s files, from the missing-persons database, from Sameer’s unfinished pads. Men, women, children. All drawn in their final moments—eyes crossed out, mouths slashed, expressions caught mid-fear.
The crowd did not recoil. They leaned closer, their masked faces lit with awe. A woman in jewels whispered, “Magnificent. The detail is exquisite.”
Kabir’s fists clenched. These weren’t just victims. They were commodities, sold as art to those who wanted to own death like a collector’s prize.
—
The Curator raised his hand. “And now, the final unveiling. The journalist who thought she could expose us. Tonight, her sketch will be completed before your eyes. Witness how story becomes art, how art becomes fate.”
He moved to the dais, standing over Rhea. Her chest rose in frantic breaths, her eyes searching the crowd. For an instant, they locked on Kabir’s. She froze, recognition flashing in her gaze. He gave the faintest nod, a silent promise.
The Curator lifted his black pencil, holding it like a knife above the blank canvas set beside her. His voice swelled with ritualistic cadence. “She has been outlined. Half-drawn. Tonight, the lines will close, and the story will end.”
The crowd applauded softly, reverently.
Kabir’s hand brushed the pistol under his coat. His instincts screamed to act now. But he waited, heart pounding, for the right moment.
—
The Curator’s pencil touched the canvas. Thick black strokes carved the page—Rhea’s outline taking shape, her bound hands, her gagged mouth. With each line, she flinched as though her very body felt the drag of graphite. The crowd murmured in ecstasy.
Kabir could wait no longer. He slipped through the audience, weaving closer to the dais. His mask itched with sweat. When he was ten feet away, he pulled the pistol free.
“Enough!” His voice cracked like a whip through the hall. “This exhibition is closed.”
The crowd gasped, scattering in panic. Some masks turned toward him, others toward the exits. The Curator froze, pencil poised mid-stroke. Then he laughed—a hollow, chilling sound.
“Ah, the inspector,” he said. “Right on cue. You play your role perfectly. Even this, we sketched already.”
He snapped his fingers. Attendants surged from the shadows, knives flashing. Kabir fired, one shot, two, the noise deafening in the cavernous hall. A man crumpled. Another staggered. Chaos erupted. The elite patrons screamed, pushing toward exits as masked guards clashed with Kabir.
On the dais, Rhea struggled against her bonds. The Curator leaned close to her ear, whispering something that made her eyes widen. Then he turned back to Kabir, lifting the sketch he had begun.
On it was Kabir himself—pistol raised, mask torn, blood blooming across his chest.
“You see?” the Curator hissed. “The lines are already written. You cannot escape the page.”
Kabir lunged, firing again. The Curator darted aside, impossibly swift, the pencil slashing across the canvas in jagged fury. Sparks flew as bullets tore through easels, ripping paper into confetti of faces. Flames licked up where lanterns crashed, smoke filling the air.
Kabir reached the dais, cutting Rhea’s bonds with a fallen knife. She ripped the gag from her mouth, gasping. “Kabir! They won’t stop! The sketches—burn them!”
He seized a lantern, hurling it onto the nearest row of canvases. Fire raced upward, devouring charcoal and paper. The crowd screamed louder, masks trampled in the stampede.
The Curator shrieked, lunging at Kabir with the black pencil raised like a dagger. Their bodies collided, grappling amid smoke and fire. Kabir caught his wrist, forcing it back. The Curator’s mask tilted, revealing for a heartbeat the face beneath—lined, gaunt, eyes burning with madness. A face Kabir recognized.
Sameer Joshi.
His childhood friend.
—
The revelation stunned him, but only for a heartbeat. Sameer snarled, “I told you, Kabir. They only exist when drawn. And now your story ends here.”
He drove the pencil downward. Kabir twisted, the point grazing his shoulder. He shoved back, muscles straining. With a roar, he turned the weapon, plunging it into Sameer’s chest. The Curator gasped, his body jerking, eyes widening in disbelief. The pencil slipped from his fingers, clattering to the floor.
The fire raged around them, sketches collapsing into ash. Sameer staggered, his mask sliding from his face, his features twisted in fury and grief. “You… can’t erase me. The line… remains.” Then he fell, swallowed by smoke.
Kabir pulled Rhea to her feet. Together they stumbled through the inferno, dodging falling beams, choking on the thick air. They burst into the night, coughing, the warehouse behind them consumed in fire. Sirens wailed in the distance.
Kabir collapsed on the ground, chest heaving, his shoulder bleeding. Rhea clung to him, trembling.
“It’s over,” she whispered.
Kabir looked back at the burning warehouse, the flames clawing the sky. “No,” he said softly. “It’s only begun. Look.”
On the ground beside him, half-burned but intact, lay a sketch. Not of Rhea. Not of him.
A faceless figure, standing in firelight, holding a pencil.
And beneath it, scrawled in jagged graphite: “To be continued.”
Part 8 – The Final Sketch
The warehouse smoldered for hours, flames clawing at the night sky until the rain returned and steam hissed upward like the city itself was trying to exhale its sickness. Firefighters battled the inferno, police cordoned off the perimeter, and journalists pressed microphones into chaos. By dawn, only a blackened husk remained, charred canvases collapsing into ash.
Kabir sat on the back bumper of an ambulance, his shirt torn, his shoulder bandaged roughly. Beside him, Rhea sipped water from a plastic bottle, her face pale but eyes alive with defiance. They had survived—but the fire had not ended the story. If anything, it had deepened it.
Because Sameer Joshi—his friend, his ghost—wasn’t truly gone. Kabir had seen him fall, felt the weight of his body as the pencil struck, but the sketches proved otherwise. The doctrine of the Black Pencil was clear: as long as the line existed, so did the story. And the last sketch he had seen—half-burned, the faceless figure—was proof that the cult was not dead.
—
For two weeks the city buzzed with scandal. Whispers leaked of secret societies, missing artists, masked exhibitions. Officially, the fire was declared an accident. Unofficially, patrons with political ties buried the truth. The cult had been wounded, perhaps scattered, but not destroyed.
Rhea was kept under police watch, though she refused to hide. She returned to her newsroom, demanding to write the exposé. “They can’t silence me,” she told Kabir, voice sharp. “If we keep quiet, we become part of their story.”
Kabir admired her fire but worried for her safety. He had spent his life chasing men who thrived in shadows, but the Black Pencil was different. They didn’t just live in shadows. They made them.
One evening, as he walked her back to her flat, they found another envelope waiting at the door. Kabir’s gut tightened. He tore it open. Inside was a sketch—not of Rhea this time. Not of him.
It was of both of them. Sitting together, heads bent close, a shadow looming behind.
Beneath, the words: “Unfinished chapters must be closed.”
—
That night Kabir couldn’t sleep. He sat in his dim apartment, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, his pistol stripped and cleaned on the table. The city outside pulsed with life, indifferent. He felt watched again, like the night he had first seen the masked reflection in the metro glass. Every window across from him seemed an eye. Every shadow a hand moving charcoal across paper.
At 3 a.m., his phone buzzed. A video file. No message. No sender.
He played it.
Rhea, tied again, this time in a different chair. Her voice trembling: “Kabir, if you see this, they survived. It wasn’t just Sameer. He was one curator. There are others. The Exhibition was only one act. The Final Show is coming. Stop them. Please.”
The video ended abruptly, replaced by a new frame: a sketch of Kabir himself, standing alone, pistol lowered, a bullet hole drawn over his heart.
His blood chilled.
—
By morning he was back in motion. Aditi met him at headquarters, dark circles under her eyes. She laid out maps, police reports, seized evidence.
“We traced financials from the warehouse,” she said. “There are transfers to multiple shell companies. One points to Kolkata. Another to Jaipur. But the largest goes to Mumbai.”
“Mumbai?” Kabir muttered.
She nodded. “And guess what’s happening there next week? An exclusive art fair. Private collectors, international buyers, no questions asked. If they’re going to resurface, it’ll be there. A bigger stage.”
Rhea leaned against the wall, listening. Her jaw tightened. “That’s the Final Show. That’s where they’ll finish it.”
Kabir looked at them both. “Then that’s where we’ll end it.”
—
Mumbai.
The fair sprawled across an abandoned textile mill on the city’s edge, repurposed into a glittering venue. Neon banners screamed The Future of Art. Wealth flowed in disguised as philanthropy. Inside, champagne glasses clinked, and walls dripped with expensive canvases. But Kabir knew the real gallery was hidden.
Dressed in black, mask concealing his face again, he moved through the crowd with Rhea beside him, her courage disguised as poise. Aditi worked the perimeter with backup units, waiting for his signal.
At the far end, behind a curtain guarded by masked men, was the private exhibition. Kabir and Rhea slipped inside with forged invitations.
The sight froze them.
Hundreds of sketches lined the walls, floor to ceiling. New victims. Faces Kabir did not yet know but would soon. And there, in the center, under a spotlight, was a massive unfinished canvas—blank except for two outlines. Kabir. Rhea.
The crowd of patrons gathered, masked, murmuring in awe. From the shadows, another Curator emerged—different from Sameer, but wearing the same apron, wielding the same thick black pencil. His voice boomed:
“The Delhi act was only the beginning. Tonight, the inspector and the journalist will be completed. And you will witness the Final Sketch.”
He lifted the pencil toward the canvas.
—
Kabir didn’t wait this time. He ripped his mask off, pistol drawn. “Police! Drop it!”
The hall erupted in chaos. Patrons screamed, guards surged forward. Kabir fired, the sound echoing like thunder. Rhea ducked, grabbing a lantern and hurling it at the nearest wall of sketches. Flames leapt, smoke coiling upward.
The Curator snarled, lunging with the pencil raised like a dagger. Kabir met him head-on, their bodies colliding, struggling amid fire and screams. The pencil slashed his arm, hot pain searing, but he held his ground. With a roar, he turned the weapon back, forcing it into the Curator’s chest.
The man gasped, mask cracking, blood staining the graphite. “You… cannot kill the line,” he hissed. “The Pencil… remains…”
Then he fell, his body crumpling as the canvas behind him caught flame.
Kabir pulled Rhea close, guiding her through the inferno. Aditi and her team stormed in, bullets cracking, patrons scattering like rats. The mill shook with chaos. They burst out into the night, coughing, the city skyline blazing behind them as the fire consumed the Black Pencil’s gallery.
—
Hours later, as dawn broke over the Arabian Sea, Kabir and Rhea stood on Marine Drive, the sky painted with pale orange.
“Is it over?” she whispered.
Kabir lit a cigarette, the smoke curling into the salty breeze. He stared at the horizon, eyes shadowed.
“We burned the gallery. We killed the Curator. But…” He reached into his coat pocket, pulling out a charred scrap he had grabbed in the chaos.
It was a sketch. Crude, half-burned, but unmistakable. A faceless figure holding a pencil. And beneath it, the words scrawled in graphite:
“Every ending is only the start of a new page.”
Rhea’s breath caught. “They’ll come again.”
Kabir exhaled smoke, the cigarette trembling slightly in his hand. “Yes. But so will I.”
He crushed the sketch in his fist, the wind carrying the ashes into the sea.
—
Epilogue
Weeks later, Kabir sat alone in his Delhi flat, the city alive outside his window. On his desk lay a blank page and a sharpened pencil. He stared at it for a long time, then turned it upside down, refusing the temptation.
Because he finally understood the truth.
The only way to defeat the Black Pencil was not to draw.
And yet, in the silence of his apartment, he could swear he heard the faint scratch of graphite on paper—somewhere out there, another hand sketching, another story beginning.
