Sector 13, Old Delhi
Time: 22:47 hrs
The first thing the reader feels — is silence.
The kind that doesn't wait for sound.
The gate creaks as Moksh pushes it open, and the echo travels too far — like the sound took a wrong turn and never came back.
The Malhotra house looms ahead, its windows unblinking, its plaster peeling like flaking skin.
The moment they step in, even the rain stops at the threshold.
Only the whisper of wind moves — soft, deliberate.
"Static pressure," Aarav murmurs.
"The air's too dense."
To a reader, it's the sound of dread.
But to Moksh — it's the sound of physics misbehaving.
Inside, the hallway stretches longer than the blueprints show.
Footsteps echo three times when there should be only one.
The smell — burnt jasmine and wet metal — clings to the air like memory.
Amit Verma stands near the doorway, clutching his delivery bag like a talisman. His eyes flick nervously from wall to wall.
"It's just like before…" he whispers.
"Same sound, same… feeling."
A light flickers in the corner — a bulb that hasn't had electricity for years.
The shadow it casts doesn't match the furniture.
To the reader, it's a ghostly silhouette.
To Moksh's Sage's Eyes, it's the after-image of an electromagnetic pulse — a glitch in the visual field caused by layered temporal resonance.
Meera scans the doorframe, runes glowing faintly across her wrist console.
"Residual frequency pattern — repeated energy spikes at 15-second intervals. Like a recording stuck in loop."
"A haunting loop," Chakraborty mutters. Her blue eyes flicker — Spectral Recall half-activated. "The dead leave emotion where they fell. The house is echoing pain."
She steps forward, hand brushing the cold banister.
Suddenly, the temperature drops.
Whispers rise — faint, childlike giggles overlapping with something deeper.
A reader would swear it's the voice of the dead child.
Chakraborty's pulse quickens — but she steadies herself.
"It's not a child," she says softly. "It's sound memory — emotional frequency distortion. But it wants us to believe it's a ghost."
The reader doesn't see science — only terror.
The story lets you breathe the illusion.
Aarav kneels beside a dark stain on the marble floor.
"Blood pattern, radius ten centimeters. Not fresh. Two impacts — one splatter up, one outward. Someone dragged the body from here."
The reader sees the red glint and thinks — haunting.
But Aarav sees the direction of drag, the missing residue, the clue of a human hand.
At the staircase, the flicker returns.
Small wet footprints appear on the steps, one after another, leading upward.
Meera stiffens.
"A child's footprints."
"No," Moksh replies quietly. "Not child-sized. Distorted perception. The house refracts scale — the closer you look, the smaller they appear."
The reader shivers, imagining a phantom child.
Moksh calculates the angle of refraction and finds the truth: the footprints belong to an adult woman — Sana Kapoor.
Then comes the sound.
A laugh — bright, wrong, metallic.
It echoes through the hall, ricocheting like broken glass.
Amit clutches his head, crying out.
"That's her! That's Sana! She's laughing again!"
Lights explode.
The room becomes a storm of noise, air pressure crashing, vision bending — the reader is inside the haunting.
Moksh's Sage's Eyes flare.
The color drains from the scene — he sees only outlines, currents of energy, shifting layers of time.
He raises a hand.
"Anchor it."
Aarav slams his Chrono Anchor into the floor.
The noise collapses, the lights dim, the laughter fades.
Meera stumbles, breathless.
"What was that?"
Moksh answers, calm and cold.
"A memory construct — electromagnetic residue from repeated trauma, trapped by the architecture's mineral composition. This house isn't haunted."
He looks up the stairs.
"It's remembering."
At that moment, the reader realizes —
the house is not alive.
It's a machine made of grief and energy, looping the deaths it witnessed.
The ghosts aren't souls — they're data.
And someone — human, deliberate — made it that way.
M. Chakraborty looks at Moksh, her blue eyes dimming.
"So it was built to haunt. To disguise the real crime."
"Exactly," Moksh replies.
"And now we find who built the memory."
The camera that once belonged to Sana Kapoor lies on the landing — its lens cracked, the last light of the hall glinting on its surface like an unblinking eye.
Location: IPC Analysis Room, Delhi Headquarters
Time: 02:13 hrs
The footage begins with static — the kind that sounds almost alive, like breathing.
A low hiss fills the room. The projector's pale light flickers against the glass wall.
Moksh, Chakraborty, Aarav, and Meera sit around the observation table.
The camera — recovered from the second-floor landing of the Malhotra house — hums faintly, its circuitry still unstable.
Moksh's fingers hover over the console.
"Playback stabilized. Let's see what Sana Kapoor saw before she died."
The Recording
The image wavers into view — a narrow hallway, blurred at the edges, as though the walls are bending toward the lens.
Sana's voice — calm, professional, slightly nervous:
"Malhotra residence, Old Delhi. Local reports suggest multiple unexplained deaths and disturbances. We're checking for atmospheric inconsistencies, structural decay, or EM interference."
Her camera pans slowly.
The living room is empty.
But in the upper right corner, faint movement — a flicker, almost human, just out of frame.
"Wait…" she whispers. "Did you see that?"
She turns — but there's nothing.
A soft laugh echoes from the upper floor.
Her tone shifts.
"Hello? Anyone there?"
Footsteps.
Not hers.
The camera shakes slightly.
Behind her, the mirror on the wall ripples. For a moment, her reflection smiles — but her real face doesn't.
Meera flinches. "That's… impossible."
Chakraborty leans forward. "Not impossible. Reflection-layer anomaly — classic sign of reality overlay."
On-screen, Sana continues up the stairs. The air thickens. The audio distorts. Words fragment into static.
"If someone—help—house—shift—"
Then, abruptly, the image clears.
She's standing in front of a door. It's half open.
A light pulses inside — a warm, golden hue that feels wrong.
She steps in.
The camera tilts down —
and the reader sees the outline of another body on the floor.
Her whisper is barely audible.
"Oh God. What… what happened to you?"
The screen flashes white.
Sana screams — but it's not a sound of terror; it's surprise, as if she's seen something familiar.
Then — silence.
The recording ends.
Back in the Room
The lights flicker back on.
No one speaks for a moment.
Moksh breaks the silence first.
"Rewind. Frame 162."
The footage rolls back — the frame where the mirror smiled.
Moksh pauses it, zooms in.
"There. Look at the reflection."
Aarav squints. "That's not her smile. The cheekbones—too narrow. Eyes off-center."
Chakraborty exhales slowly. "It's another face, projected through hers. Someone was using her lens as a conduit."
Meera's runic scanner hums. "Signature trace found. Energy frequency doesn't match paranormal residue. It's synthetic — low-level pulse emitter. Someone tampered with the architecture to generate controlled hallucinations."
Aarav looks up.
"So the haunting was manufactured?"
Moksh nods.
"Yes. The Malhotra house was wired — not haunted. Whoever killed Sana Kapoor used EM distortion and reflective coding to simulate a haunting. It keeps investigators trapped in perception loops."
Chakraborty closes her eyes briefly.
"A crime scene disguised as a ghost story."
Moksh looks at the frozen frame again — the smiling reflection that isn't hers.
"And the person behind that reflection… is still alive."
Outside the Room
As the team steps out of the analysis chamber, the corridor lights hum with faint static.
Meera glances back at the darkened projector room. For a split second, she swears she sees movement inside — Sana's camera light flickering, still recording.
But when she looks again, it's gone.
Only silence.
And the soft echo of a memory pretending to be a ghost.