Ishan Dey lived in a part of the city that had once aspired to be “up-and-coming” but never quite leapt. His rented room sat atop one such decaying structure, a third-floor walk-up with unreliable plumbing and exactly one window that hadn’t opened in months.
To most, Ishan would’ve seemed unremarkable: a final-year college student buried in textbooks, caffeine, and existential dread. But internally, he lived in constant motion, toggling between exam prep and job applications like it was a game he never quite knew the rules to. But he moved through life.
And then the nights came.
That’s when things started to feel... off. He noticed it first on a humid Tuesday evening, an odd collection of people gathering in the alley across from his window. The building they crept into looked abandoned, probably condemned. But inside, it was alive, making his skin crawl.
The group wasn’t large, maybe ten at most. Men and women, all dressed in clothes that seemed borrowed from a theatre department no one had funded in decades, flamboyant but tattered. Their movements were strange, not theatrical exactly, ritualistic. Heads tilted too far, hands moved like they were tracing blueprints. Their speech sounded like whispers trying to remember how to be words.
At first, Ishan chalked it up to the city’s typical weirdness. Every metro has its share of street prophets and failed performance artists. But these people weren’t just strange. They were... synchronised. And that was the worst part.
There was order in what they were doing. Not random madness. Not chaos. Pattern. And for reasons he couldn’t explain, Ishan kept watching.
It happened on a Thursday.
Not that Thursdays meant anything to Ishan anymore. Every day had started to blend into the same loop. But he remembered this one because of the air. The weather app said 28°C and sunny. But outside his window, everything felt... off. The kind of cold that didn’t belong to the season. The type that slipped into your spine like an uninvited thought.
Then came the knock on the door. Sharp, intentional. Like someone who knew he was home.
Ishan wasn’t expecting anyone, which made the interruption worse. He opened the door slowly.
What he got was something else entirely.
The man there looked like he’d walked out of a fever dream. His clothes were filthy but arranged, too neatly for a homeless man, too worn for anyone with a fixed address. His skin was streaked with lines of red and grey, like ash and old rust, painted deliberately across his face and arms. Not tribal. Not artistic. More like... a code. A map. Maybe a warning.
He smiled. Too wide.
“He’s returned, you know,” the man said.
“My son. He was taken. But now...” The man’s eyes glazed, like his body was still here, but his mind had moved underground. “Now he is found.”
Ishan didn’t answer. What was the right response to something like that?
The man leaned in, voice low, urgent. “You don’t hear Him?”
He paused, then tapped the floor once, twice, like he was knocking on a coffin lid.
“He comes from beneath. Always beneath. As do we all. In time.”
And then, without warning, the man let out a laugh that turned into something almost musical. He began to move, almost dance. Arms lifted, then snapped sideways.
Ishan slammed the door.
Bolted it. Sat down on his bed and didn’t move for a long time.
But even after the footsteps disappeared, even after the stairwell went still, the man’s voice echoed in his mind like something dropped down a well.
After a few days, exams ended the way all terrible things do, quietly and without celebration. Ishan submitted his final paper, caffeine-wrecked, and stumbled out into a world that didn’t seem to care.
To shake off the fog, he allowed himself to be dragged out of town by a few well-meaning friends. The trip was spontaneous and hardly planned, which, somehow, made it feel more real.
They headed south to a place the locals called the Guna Caves. The caves weren’t like the glossy Google images, just a mouth in the earth, black and yawning, as if it were tired of pretending to be harmless. The rock was slick, the air damp, and the green overhead whispered secrets that no one wanted to hear.
Ishan felt it almost instantly.
Not fear. Not exactly.
Something quieter. Pulling. Like gravity, but weirder.
He lagged behind the others, letting their laughter echo into the trees. He stared into the fissure, expecting to see darkness and nothing more, but what met his eyes was depth. Not just the physical kind. A depth you could fall into without moving. A kind that whispered things like:
Jump.
Scream.
Listen.
And under that, something worse.
Answer.
He shook it off. Took a breath. Backed away.
Later, when they posed for photos and cracked beers by the rocks, Ishan smiled along. But something had shifted. Something old. Something underneath.
After they came back from the caves, Ishan stopped sleeping properly.
He told his friends it was post-exam burnout, maybe some delayed stress reaction. But the truth was simpler and stranger: he couldn’t stop thinking about that man at his door. About the way his voice bent around that phrase, “He is returned”, like it was both a warning and a promise.
So, Ishan did what he always did when he couldn’t let go of something.
He researched.
It started with casual Googling, local disappearances, the history of Devil's Hollow, that sort of thing.
That’s where he found it.
A newspaper article. Grainy photo.
Date: over a decade ago.
A missing child.
Name: Rahul Banerji.
Age: Seven.
Status: Never found.
His father had been a known mystic within spiritual circles. After the disappearance, he dropped off the map completely. Some said he’d joined a cult. Others said he’d built one.
The rabbit hole widened.
Another article mentioned a ritual, unconfirmed, unverified, but whispered about. Something to do with the Guna Caves. Blood. Chanting. People who vanished before they could testify. No arrests. No bodies. Just silence and fear.
And the more he read, the more the cult stopped looking like a delusion and started feeling... calculated. Their movements, their symbols, their obsession with depth and descent, it wasn’t madness.
It was a Tuesday when it happened.
Ishan came home late from the library. He’d spent hours buried in printouts and photocopies, most of them written in fonts no academic journal would touch.
He unlocked his door. Paused.
Something was sticking out from under it.
An envelope. Plain. No stamp, no markings. Just his name.
Inside: a single sheet. Old paper. Crisp edges. The writing looked ancient, but deliberate. Not Hindi. Not Sanskrit. Not anything he recognised. Except at the very bottom, in tiny English letters:
“Ishan Dey.”
No message. No instructions. Just his name tagged onto something that had no business knowing it.
That night, sleep gave up on him completely.
The air in his room changed, like it had been holding its breath until now. The ceiling fan ticked, slow and uneven, as if counting down to something he didn’t want to see.
Outside, the alley was quiet, but not empty.
He looked out his window. He hadn’t meant to. His body just moved, like it had remembered something he hadn’t learned yet.
Across the street, the outhouse was lit again.
They were there. The same figures. Ornate clothes. Still bodies. Strange, tilted poses. But this time, they weren’t performing.
They were watching.
Directly at his window. Unmoving. Unblinking.
He felt it like a pulse behind his eyes.
They weren’t strangers anymore.
They weren’t mad.
They had been waiting.
For him.
React
