Night falls. Rudra continues his translation alone. He hears a door creak open upstairs—though the building was locked. Footsteps echo through the wooden halls. He hides the manuscript and climbs to the main floor. The head archivist, Mr. Ganguly, lies dead—eyes gouged, mouth sewn shut with red string.
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Rudra paced his narrow room like a trapped fox. The walls, stained ochre with decades of coal smoke and mildew, seemed to press inward. A single gas lamp hissed on the floor beside him, casting long shadows that flickered like twitching fingers.
He hadn't touched the manuscript since returning. It lay bundled on his desk, wrapped in the same scrap of cloth, the Shiv Yantra resting atop it like a paperweight or a seal. Rudra eyed it warily, as one might a venomous cobra that appeared to be sleeping.
The bloody fingerprint on the page hadn't smeared when he tried to wipe it. It had dried into the leaf, sunken like a fossil. It was not his. He was sure of that.
Still shaken, he'd resolved to write it all down. He opened his leather notebook and tried to reconstruct the mantra he'd heard through his own mind in the archive.
The pen hesitated above the paper.
Om karoti netram...
He stopped.
The words had dissolved. Faded like a dream before he could capture them.
He cursed softly under his breath, ran a hand through his damp hair, and sat down hard on the floor. He wanted to believe it was hallucination—a delayed fever dream from too many nights without proper sleep. Or some trick of sensory memory from his father's teachings long ago.
But Mr. Ganguly was dead. That was real.
And the soot. And the wheel.
A loud creak cut through the room.
Rudra froze.
The sound had come from the main stairwell just beyond the hallway.
Another creak.
Floorboards shifting beneath a step.
He extinguished the gas lamp with trembling fingers, plunging the room into dark.
Only the soft sounds of nighttime Calcutta filtered through the cracked shuttered window—the occasional distant rickshaw wheel, the bark of a mongrel, the faint clang of metal on stone. And... footsteps.
Measured.
Deliberate.
Climbing the outer stairwell.
He held his breath. Sat motionless.
The footsteps stopped.
A long silence.
Then, the sound of the archive's hallway door creaking open. The hinges whined in protest—slowly, as if opened with care, not force.
Whoever it was hadn't broken in.
They had a key.
Rudra moved quickly, silently.
He pulled the manuscript bundle from his desk, shoved it into a compartment hidden behind a false panel in his bookshelf—a remnant of the old wall that had once separated the servant's quarters from the estate library before the building became a boarding house. His father had used it to hide things. Ritual objects, mostly.
He slid the panel shut just as the floor above groaned again.
The footsteps were in the main corridor now, heading past the reading room.
He had to see.
Rudra slipped into the hallway, barefoot, careful not to let the wooden boards complain beneath his weight. He ascended the service stair on the rear side, its narrow spiral concealed behind a locked broom cupboard he had the key to.
As he reached the top, his hand clutched the carved wooden banister, breath held—
The main floor was empty.
Silent.
Moonlight spilled in through the stained glass window in the reading room, painting the hallway in sickly bands of green and violet.
Then he saw it.
The office door was ajar.
His stomach dropped.
He approached slowly, heart knocking against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Through the gap in the door, he glimpsed something on the floor.
Feet.
Bare, pale feet.
No shoes.
He pushed the door open.
And the world tilted.
Mr. Ganguly was slumped against the leg of his desk, his long, spidery limbs twisted in a prayer-like posture that could not have been natural.
His eyes were gone.
Not just removed—taken.
Two dark hollows, ringed with something like ash or soot.
And his lips—stitched shut.
Red thread glistened in the moonlight, crossing his mouth in an intricate spiral. No blood. No signs of struggle. It had been done cleanly. Patiently. Like embroidery.
On the floor beside him—
—a pattern.
Drawn in black powder.
Rudra stepped closer, chest tight.
A wheel.
Eight spokes.
Each tip ending in a small, almond-shaped eye.
The Ashta-Kala Chakra.
His breath left him.
He didn't realize his hand was reaching down—until his finger brushed the soot.
And the chanting returned.
In his own voice, without breath.