"The air was still, the lamps were lit,
But truth walked quiet, never fit.
Two wandered where the echoes hum,
To places where the lost ones come.
They searched with eyes, but not with sight
For not all wrong is seen in light."
The morning haze over Bhairavpur gave the village a golden sheen. Smoke curled from rooftops. Bells from a temple echoed faintly through the air. The kind of morning that begged to be photographed, posted, and captioned with something poetic.
But Kabir wasn't thinking in captions.
He hadn't slept well.
There were whispers in the night.
Not words—just the idea of sound, right at the edge of sense.
And more than once, he'd thought someone was standing at the window. When he opened the curtain, there was nothing but fog and the crooked branch of an old neem tree.
The group had agreed to split up. Yashpal and Rohit went to explore the fields. Meghna and Saanvi went to visit the temple. Abhay—who had become weirder than usual—stayed back with his little notepad and theories no one cared about.
Kabir, naturally, teamed up with Priya.
"You better not be dragging me around just for haunted selfies," she warned, slinging her camera over her shoulder.
Kabir grinned. "Only if we find a ghost with good hair. Otherwise, strictly journalism."
They started with the abandoned schoolhouse—a structure the locals said was closed for "structural damage," though the walls looked perfectly intact.
"Strange," Priya whispered, brushing her hand over a nameplate carved into stone. "This place looks too clean to be abandoned."
"Too clean is creepy," Kabir said. "Like someone's hiding something."
The door creaked open with barely a push. Inside, it smelled like chalk, old wood, and damp secrets. A faint layer of dust coated the floor, but no cobwebs. No rodents. Not even termites.
Priya knelt near an old desk and brushed away the dust. There were scratch marks.
Letters.
Not English. Not Hindi.
Just circular carvings. Spirals. Like a child's drawing of eyes, over and over again.
Kabir stood near the blackboard. Something was faintly written in chalk—erased, mostly, but still there if the light hit it just right.
They watch through the walls.
He turned to Priya. "I think this is where the real research begins."
"You thinking ghost sightings?"
"No. I think this place was never abandoned. I think they just wanted people to stop asking questions."
Priya nodded. She had the camera ready now, voice soft. "This might be our story, Kabir."
But neither of them noticed the curtain behind the teacher's desk flutter—
—though the windows were all closed.
They stepped out sometime later and wandered toward the eastern edge of the village, where few houses stood. The soil here was dry, cracked, and strangely warm to the touch.
A single well sat in the center of the path. Its bricks were blackened with age, the rope pulley broken. A board leaned against it:
"Closed. Unsafe."
"Should we?" Kabir asked.
Priya gave him a look. "Do I look like someone with common sense?"
Together, they peered down into the dark. The air inside was unnaturally cold.
Kabir dropped a small rock in.
They waited.
Waited.
No splash.
Just a faint metallic hum that shouldn't exist in any well.
"Okay, I'm officially unsettled," Priya muttered.
"Same. Let's log this. We'll come back with the others."
As they turned back, an old woman stood quietly by the edge of a tree.
She was draped in a faded green sari, her back bent, a large rust-colored mole just beneath her left eye. She didn't blink when they greeted her.
"Don't go down," she whispered.
"It never gives back what it takes."
Kabir and Priya froze.
"Sorry, what?" he asked.
But the woman was already walking away.
No limp. No sound of feet on dry leaves.
JUST GONE
Some places pretend to rest.
Some eyes do not blink.
And some wells do not give echoes
Because they are already too full.