Chapter 3: Whispers Beneath the Bark
No one told Zayaan how heavy silence could become until it started breathing beside him.
It had been three days since he found the letter. Three days since he last felt real sleep. Time moved differently now—soft, slow, like it was afraid to touch him.
There was no one he could tell. Not Kian. Not his uncle. Not even himself.
He kept thinking about the woods.
They weren't just trees anymore. They were watching.
Ever since that night, something had shifted—not in the world, but inside him. A dull hum at the base of his skull. A whisper just below hearing. A presence that didn't leave, even when he turned on the lights.
And in the quiet corners of the house, the ones no one ever cleaned, he started to wonder:
What if the letter wasn't a warning... but a reminder?
Chapter 3: Whispers Beneath the Bark
The morning after the letter, Zayaan walked to school with his hands in his pockets, shoulders stiff from another night of no sleep. The sky was pale, like it hadn't decided whether to rain or shine. A soft wind followed him, whispering through the trees lining the sidewalk.
He didn't tell Kian anything at first.
But during the second lecture, he couldn't focus. The board was a blur. The teacher's words didn't reach him. He kept hearing the line from the letter.
"He is not like other children."
During recess, he finally broke the silence.
They sat near the edge of the empty basketball court. Kian was eating chips. Zayaan hadn't touched his lunchbox.
"Kian," he said quietly, "I need to tell you something weird."
Kian looked up.
Zayaan spoke slowly. About the attic. The box. The letter from his mother to Mustafa. The woods. The dreams. The photo of her standing under the Chinar tree.
Kian didn't interrupt.
When Zayaan was done, there was silence. Even the wind had stopped.
And then Kian simply said, "We need to figure this out."
Zayaan blinked. "You believe me?"
"Of course, I believe you. I've seen you sleepwalk, mutter things in dreams. I've heard you whisper names you've never said out loud. Something is going on."
Zayaan looked down at the gravel. "I don't know what it wants. Or if it's even real."
Kian leaned forward. "Let's treat it like it is. And if we find nothing—at least we'll know."
After school, they took a detour.
There was a boy named Aarif. Three years older than them. He had dropped out after 10th grade, but he was known for his obsession with the paranormal. He lived in a cluttered room above a shuttered tailor shop. People in the neighborhood called him "ghost boy," half mockingly, half scared.
But Kian knew him.
They climbed the narrow staircase and knocked twice.
Aarif opened the door in a black hoodie, his eyes sunken but sharp. His room smelled of incense and burnt paper. Crystals and books lay scattered everywhere.
He smiled when he saw Kian. "I was wondering when you'd come."
Zayaan's heart jumped.
"You know why we're here?" Kian asked.
"I don't know details," Aarif said, stepping aside. "But something's been...loud lately. In the air. In the trees."
They sat cross-legged on the floor. Zayaan told his story again, this time slower, choosing his words with care.
Aarif listened, unmoving.
When Zayaan finished, Aarif looked at him and said, "You've been marked."
"Marked?" Zayaan frowned.
"Not possessed. Not cursed. Just...noticed. Certain places carry echoes. Especially places like forests. And if something notices you young, it sometimes...waits."
"For what?" Kian asked.
"For the right time to return."
Zayaan felt a chill down his spine.
Aarif stood up and lit a small candle. "Tell me one thing," he said. "When you were six—did something happen in the woods? Something you never told anyone?"
Zayaan swallowed.
"I...don't remember much. Just...I walked too far. I heard voices in the wind. I saw trees that looked alive. I got lost for a while. And then...I woke up in bed."
"No one found you?" Aarif asked.
"My mom did. I think. But she never talked about it. Ever."
Aarif knelt beside him. "Because she knew. Mothers always know. Maybe she saw something she couldn't explain."
Zayaan looked at him. "And now? What should I do?"
Aarif took a long breath. "You don't need to run. You need to understand. Sometimes, when places remember people, those people need to remember the place too."
He pointed to Zayaan's chest. "This isn't just about the woods. It's about you. Your past. Something inside you is calling itself home."
"Can you help us?" Kian asked.
"I can try," Aarif said. "But not here. I need time. I'll look into the history of the area around Nani's house. Those woods. The Chinar trees."
Zayaan stood up, unsure whether he felt better or worse.
As they left, Aarif said one last thing.
"Zayaan—next time you dream, don't run. Listen."
Outside, the wind had returned, gentle but strange.
Kian looked at him. "Still think this is nothing?"
Zayaan shook his head.
"No. I think it's only beginning."
Chapter Three — Whisper Beneath the Bark
The school corridors had never felt this cold.
Zayaan walked in silence, his bag slung low on his shoulder, his steps unusually slow. The walls seemed to press inward, and the laughter of students sounded too distant—as if wrapped in glass. He noticed something strange as he reached his classroom door: a small chalk symbol drawn near the frame. It wasn't there the day before. It looked like an eye carved within a triangle, but rough, shaky, like it had been drawn by someone in a rush… or under duress.
He stepped in.
The room was half-filled. Kian waved at him from the back. Zayaan took his seat but couldn't shake off the image of the symbol. Something about it gnawed at him, like a memory refusing to surface.
During English class, just as the teacher turned to write on the board, Zayaan felt a soft brush of air against his ear.
A whisper.
It was a voice—his mother's?
"Don't let them in."
He turned. No one. Not even a breeze. Just the low hum of the ceiling fan above.
After class, he pulled Kian aside, dragging him to the library stairwell where no one usually came. "Bro, something's wrong. I don't know how to say it but… things are not okay."
Kian stared at him for a moment, then leaned in, voice low. "Did something happen last night?"
Zayaan told him everything—about the letter, the photo, the voice in the wind, and now the symbol near the door. As always, Kian didn't laugh or dismiss it. He listened. That was Kian—grounded, but not blind.
"I know someone," Kian said. "Not officially, but he's into this stuff. Paranormal, metaphysical, call it what you want. He's a freak, but he's smart. If something's messing with you, he might give us something."
They met the guy—Aahil—after school. He was sitting by the canteen's outer wall, hunched over a torn book, doodling strange geometric patterns. He wore round glasses, his fingers ink-stained, and had a laugh that always came half a second too late.
Zayaan didn't want to speak first, but Kian started. "Aahil, you ever see something that's not supposed to be real? Like… something following someone?"
Aahil grinned. "You mean like a presence? Or a pattern?"
Zayaan pulled out the photo of the symbol he snapped near the classroom door.
The smile dropped from Aahil's face.
He leaned in. "Where did you see this?"
"Outside our class door."
"That symbol," Aahil said slowly, "is called a threshold mark. It's used in old village rites to either bind something within a place—or to warn people not to cross it. Depends who drew it."
Zayaan felt his chest tighten. "What if I crossed it?"
Aahil looked directly at him. "Then it's already watching you."
That night, the wind returned.
But this time, Zayaan didn't dream of being six.
He dreamed of being inside the woods, under a blood-orange sky. The trees weren't trees anymore—they were tall silhouettes with faces, hollow and crying. He was running, barefoot, through leaves that whispered in voices too old to belong to the living.
Then he saw her.
His mother, standing at the edge of a clearing, her back to him, her long dupatta trailing like mist. She turned slowly—not with her usual warmth, but with sorrow.
Her lips didn't move, but Zayaan heard her voice in his head.
> "They're waking."
> "Don't go where I couldn't follow."
He tried to run to her, but the ground cracked beneath him. The woods opened up like a mouth, roots curling into jagged teeth. He fell. Deeper. Faster.
He woke up screaming.
The room was dark, but his window was open.
He never left it open.
A cold gust moved the curtains. And on the floor… were three dried leaves.
Chinar leaves.
Zayaan picked them up slowly, his fingers shaking. There was something written on one, in faded black ink.
> "Come back to where it started."
He clutched the leaf to his chest, heart pounding. The woods weren't just haunting him. They were summoning him.
And the question grew louder than ever in his mind:
What happened ten years ago... that no one ever told him?
Chapter Three – Scene Two: Beneath the Chinar's Shadow
The leaf hadn't moved from his pocket. Zayaan had checked a dozen times since the night it appeared by his window. It felt like it pulsed with something — not life, exactly, but presence.
Kian met him at the edge of the schoolyard, where the trees shook without wind.
"Anything new?" Kian asked.
Zayaan nodded and held out the leaf.
Kian looked at it for a moment, then flipped it over again, even though they'd done that so many times the edges had started to brown.
"'It's closer than you think.'" Kian muttered the phrase again. "That's what it said. But what is it?"
Zayaan shook his head, but something flickered behind his eyes. A quiet memory. Distant. Faint. Like breath on a mirror.
They had planned to visit Aahil that day, their strange, eccentric friend who took pleasure in decoding symbols and theorizing about spirit dimensions and "thin veils."
But before they could leave the school grounds, Zayaan froze.
Right by the science block's back wall, under the peeling mural of the solar system, was something he hadn't noticed before.
A symbol.
No, the symbol. The same one from his dream.
Roughly etched in chalk or something paler, almost like ash. It was a circle with broken lines trailing out like limbs — the threshold.
"How long's that been there?" Zayaan whispered.
Kian blinked. "That wasn't here yesterday."
Neither of them touched it.
Zayaan's fingers itched with unease. His breath felt shallow, like something unseen was drawing it out of him.
Then, something happened.
The sunlight shifted. Or maybe the shadows did. For a moment, the wall behind the symbol seemed to ripple, as if the stone remembered something. And in that ripple, a sound.
Not real.
Internal.
But loud.
A child's voice — young, barely six — echoing in his skull:
"Mamma, what's that noise in the woods?"
Zayaan staggered back, heart hammering. His vision blurred. And before he could steady himself, the flashback swallowed him whole.
---
Flashback – Nani's House, Ten Years Ago
It was late summer. The air smelled like ripe apples and chimney smoke. Zayaan, six years old, sat beneath the Chinar tree, legs muddy, drawing spirals in the dirt with a stick.
In the distance, the woods hummed — soft at first, then louder, like breathing. His cousins were playing nearby, laughing.
But he heard something else.
Whispers.
Like air saying his name.
He turned his head sharply. The woods… they moved. Not the trees — but the space between them.
"Mamma, what's that noise in the woods?" he had asked.
His mother, standing in the kitchen doorway, pale and thinner than usual, only smiled weakly.
"Don't go near them, jaan. Some places aren't meant for little boys."
That night, he couldn't sleep. And something — something not wind — brushed against the window.
He remembered sneaking out. Barefoot. Shirt loose, heart wild.
The woods opened for him.
The trees leaned inward.
And deep, deep inside, the voice — like a choir of breathing leaves — said:
"You're not supposed to be here yet. But you will return."
---
Back to Present – Outside the Science Block
Zayaan gasped and fell to his knees.
"Zayaan?" Kian was already crouching beside him.
He nodded, dazed. "I saw it again. But more this time. I remembered my mom warning me. I think… I think she knew I'd go back."
"To the woods?" Kian asked.
Zayaan nodded.
They didn't speak again until they reached Aahil's place, a small flat behind his father's dusty workshop. Aahil was waiting, notebook in hand, eyes shining with the thrill of danger.
As Zayaan described the symbol on the wall and his latest flashback, Aahil turned grim.
"That's not just a symbol," he said. "It's a marker. A gate. Something wants you to cross again."
Zayaan swallowed hard.
Then Aahil added, voice lower, serious:
"And Zayaan… once a symbol appears here, in the real world — it means the veil between dreams and waking is starting to break."
Zayaan said nothing.
But the word echoed in his skull:
Break.
"Dust Between the Shelves"
It was the last period. A dull, stretched hour that felt like it was dragging the sun down by the ankles.
Zayaan and Kian had skipped class again — not out of rebellion, but curiosity. The strange symbol they'd found near the school grounds had etched itself into Zayaan's head. Aahil's warnings echoed too loud to ignore.
They found themselves in the old archive room, behind the library. Dust clung to everything like mold. Files stacked like forgotten stories, thin light leaking through a cracked window.
"We're looking for past renovation maps," Kian mumbled, pushing a drawer that groaned like it hadn't been opened in years. "Maybe something hidden. Or someone hid something."
Zayaan's fingers brushed a register with brittle paper. As he pulled it, a faint laugh echoed from behind the bookshelf — casual, familiar.
He froze.
Then another voice — lower, with a mocking tone.
"That's still not how it works, idiot. You're drawing it wrong."
Zayaan stepped closer. His heart didn't pound, it paused.
He peered through the open slit between shelves and saw two boys leaning over an old desk — sketching something.
A symbol.
The same one.
And the boys?
Wizz. Yuwin.
A heartbeat passed before Wizz looked up — like something invisible had whispered to him.
His eyes met Zayaan's through the dust-speckled gap.
He blinked. "Zay?"
Yuwin turned sharply, wide-eyed.
"No... freaking... way."
The silence that followed wasn't awkward. It was heavy — like something had shifted beneath the floorboards of fate.
Kian stepped up behind Zayaan and whispered, "You know them?"
Zayaan nodded. "Too well."
He stepped into the room.
"What are you two doing here?"
Wizz held up the paper like it explained everything.
"We were drawing this. Found it carved into a desk a few weeks ago. Didn't know what it was."
Zayaan walked closer. "We've seen the same. We went to Aahil."
Yuwin raised an eyebrow. "The wannabe ghost hunter? He told us the same thing. Said others were noticing it."
Wizz stared at Zayaan longer, the smile gone from his face.
"He said... this thing follows people. But only ones who've been near it before."
Zayaan didn't respond.
Because suddenly, it wasn't just about catching up with old friends.
It felt like all of them had been dragged back into something they never escaped.
The symbol.
The woods.
The dreams.
And now, each of them had seen it.
Maybe none of this was new.
Maybe it was just... returning.
"The Rock Remembers"
The evening was dull — not dark yet, but colorless, like everything was holding its breath.
They didn't talk much on the way. Each of them knew something had changed since the last time they were all together. Now they weren't just friends walking through an empty park — they were looking for something. And somehow, they all knew where they had to go.
The Chenar Rock.
Three towering Chinars stood like ancient watchers above the quiet park. Their leaves whispered in a language only memory could understand. A moss-covered rock, wide and flat like a forgotten table, still sat between them — their usual spot.
Kian and Zayaan used to sit there for hours — escaping school, family, life. But now, the place felt different. Not smaller… stranger. Like the land itself had been listening all these years.
"This place always creeped me out," Wizz muttered, scanning the trees.
"It's peaceful," Yuwin said. "Too peaceful. Like... pretending."
Zayaan stepped onto the rock. The air around it felt heavier than before — like it didn't want them there.
"It always starts here," he said quietly.
"What do you mean?" Kian asked.
Zayaan crouched and ran his fingers over the stone. "Before she died, mom used to bring me here. We'd sit under that tree. She told me once... this place has memory. That it keeps things."
He pointed to a faint etching on the rock's surface — a mark no one had noticed before. A small Chinar leaf, carved unnaturally deep into the stone, and next to it…
The same symbol.
All four froze.
Kian leaned closer. "This wasn't here last month."
Yuwin stepped back. "It's following us."
"No," Wizz said. "It's ahead of us."
Kian turned to Zayaan. "You think this place is part of it?"
Zayaan didn't answer. He was staring at the carving, lost.
Because suddenly, he remembered something — not a memory, but a feeling. A moment from his childhood. The way the trees would sway without wind. The way shadows moved in wrong directions. The whispers at the edge of the woods, where the light always seemed off.
He looked up slowly at the trees.
"Something was always here," he said. "We just didn't know what we were sitting on."
A chill ran through Wizz. "Or it let us sit... until now."
Then Yuwin spotted something.
A thread of red cloth, tangled in the bark of the middle Chinar.
He pulled it down, and a scrap of paper came with it — nearly disintegrated. The ink had faded, but one word stood clear in the center.
"Threshold."
Silence fell again.
Zayaan stared at the paper.
"Threshold to what?"
No one answered.
But somewhere nearby, a breeze picked up, pushing through the Chenars, circling the rock like an unseen current. It didn't feel cold. It felt like something... testing them.
Zayaan looked at his friends.
"We need to go deeper."
"Where?" Wizz asked.
Zayaan looked toward the woods in the far distance. Not the trees in the park. The real woods.
"The place in my dreams."
Chapter 3: The Trees Remember Faces
The sun had just begun to lean westward when the four of them—Zayaan, Kian, Yuwin, and Wizz—stood once again at the old Chenar Park. The air was thick with silence, broken only by the soft rustling of leaves as a breeze passed through the three ancient Chinar trees that cast long, flickering shadows across the clearing.
The park had changed little over the years, but somehow, it felt...different. Not aged—altered. Like time had touched it, but instead of wrinkling it, had rearranged something subtle, something invisible.
They reached the flat stone—their stone. Where so many childhood memories had been carved in laughter. But now, the laughter was gone. The rock, once a throne for daydreams, now stood like an altar.
"Let's check around," Kian said, his voice lower than usual. "See if anything else has changed. Or maybe there's more here than we remember."
Wizz and Yuwin started circling the trees. Zayaan stood still, staring at the weathered carving etched into the tree trunk—the symbol. The same one from his dreams. The Threshold.
His hand moved toward it slowly, uncertain, as if touching it would trigger something irreversible.
And then—
"Hey!" Yuwin shouted, crouching near one of the roots that bulged from the earth like the veins of a sleeping beast. "There's something here. Buried."
They all rushed over. Wizz helped claw at the dirt while Kian stood guard, eyes darting around nervously.
After a few minutes of diging, a small tin box emerged. Rusty, dented at the corners, yet intact. Zayaan's heart began to pound.
They opened it.
Inside was a tiny, decayed woolen rabbit—stuffed and once white, now stained brown with time. A broken pencil. A folded piece of paper.
Zayaan reached for the paper.
He unfolded it slowly, hands trembling. It was a drawing. A child's drawing. The trees. The symbol. And a little boy—standing alone at the edge of the woods. Behind him, a dark, massive shape—like a shadow with fingers.
At the bottom of the page, a name was scrawled in childish letters:
Zayaan.
"Did you draw this?" Wizz asked, incredulous.
Zayaan couldn't answer. He didn't remember. And yet, his hand knew that paper. His bones remembered.
His fingers brushed the symbol on the tree again.
Suddenly, the world around him flickered—
And everything went quiet.
---
He was six again.
A summer evening. Nani's house. A warmth in the air that didn't feel like summer—it felt like safety.
He saw himself. A small boy, chasing butterflies across the field, giggling, his mother watching from the porch with tired eyes but a glowing smile.
Then the woods began to whisper.
At first, it sounded like the breeze playing games with the leaves. But then—
"Come here... Zayaan..."
The voice slithered through the grass, weaving through the air like silk on fire.
He turned.
The trees were breathing. Pulsing. The edge of the woods shimmered with an unnatural calm.
And he walked.
Feet small and sure, carrying him forward. Step after step into the growing hush.
When he reached the first tree, the air turned cold.
A gust of wind blew sharply, whispering directly into his ear:
"You are not like the others."
The trees seemed to lean in.
"You are watched. You are known. You are followed."
A presence pressed down on his chest. Not heavy. Intimate. Like fingers brushing over his heartbeat.
From within the trunk of the largest tree, a voice echoed—not loud, but vibrating inside his skull:
"Something bad is going to happen."
The dream shattered.
---
Zayaan gasped, stumbling backward as Kian caught him.
"You okay, man? You blanked out for a second," Kian said, eyes wide.
Zayaan couldn't speak. He turned the paper over.
On the back, in childlike writing, almost faded:
"Don't go where the trees remember you."
Yuwin took the paper and studied it.
"This is serious. I think this isn't just dreams anymore. I think... you went there. And maybe you brought something back."
Zayaan looked back at the tree.
The Threshold symbol pulsed faintly in the dusk light. Almost... breathing.
And somewhere deep in his gut, he felt it again.
The woods hadn't stopped watching.
They were waiting.
"The Voice That Knew Her Name" –
The four of them—Zayaan, Kian, Wizz, and Yuwin—stood beneath the fading orange light of the setting sun, the shadow of the three Chenars stretching far into the field like fingers of some ancient, sleeping thing.
It had been Kian's idea to revisit the place again, the stone in the park where they used to sit. But this time, it wasn't about memories. It was about clues.
Something strange was happening. The dreams. The whispers. The symbols. And now, after days of chasing threads, Zayaan had told them everything. Even the letter from his mother. Even the voice in his last dream that didn't just speak to him—but seemed to know him.
They had all agreed: the answers were tied to the woods.
They sat in silence for a while, the wind rustling the leaves above, as if the trees were whispering just low enough to stay hidden in the background.
Yuwin broke the silence. "This whole thing… it's not just your grief, Zayaan. I mean, look at the signs. That symbol on the wall in school? The one Aahil called a 'threshold sigil'? That wasn't a prank."
Wizz nodded slowly, but something was off in his expression. He hadn't spoken much since they arrived.
Kian pulled out the sketchbook Zayaan had been using to record the symbols and dreams. He opened it to the page with the latest entry—three interlocked circles surrounded by branching lines, almost like roots or veins.
"Do you remember this?" Kian asked. "You drew this after your dream. But… Wizz saw something like this when he got lost near the woods two years ago. Remember?"
Wizz blinked, and for a second, his face twitched like he didn't quite know where he was.
"I… yeah," he said, voice flat. "But it didn't look like that."
"What do you mean?" Zayaan asked.
Wizz's eyes glazed over a little, staring past them. "It was moving. Breathing. On the tree bark. I touched it… I think it was warm."
There was a silence. Even the wind stopped for a moment, as though nature itself leaned in to listen.
"Wizz," Kian said carefully. "You never told us that."
"I didn't remember… until now."
Something shivered inside Zayaan, not just fear, but a rising certainty. These weren't coincidences. The dreams weren't random. The symbols weren't art. They were warnings.
Zayaan stood, walked a few steps toward the edge of the trees, where the orange light met the growing night.
And then, he heard it again.
A soft wind passed through the trees, brushing against the back of his neck. But it wasn't just wind.
It was words.
> "Aamira…"
Zayaan froze.
That was his mother's name. Whispered in a tone so delicate and knowing it chilled him to his spine. He turned back to the others. "Did you hear that?"
Kian looked confused. "Hear what?"
Wizz, however, looked straight at Zayaan. "It's her. She saw too much. She paid the price. And now... it's your turn."
His voice was distant. Cold.
The others stared at Wizz, shocked.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Yuwin asked.
Wizz blinked again, then snapped out of it, rubbing his eyes. "I... I don't know. What did I say?"
"You don't remember?" Zayaan asked, heart pounding.
"No. I just felt dizzy for a second."
Yuwin pulled him back gently. "You need to sit. You're pale, man."
But Zayaan wasn't listening anymore. His eyes were on the woods. Something inside him burned—an old instinct he hadn't known he had. A thread connecting him to something ancient, maybe even beyond time.
He reached into his pocket, fingers wrapping around the Chinar leaf he had found two days ago. The one with a faint line drawn across it in ink.
Only now, under the twilight, he noticed something new.
The ink had bled—revealing not a line but a word, almost invisible unless you tilted it just right:
> "RETURN."
His breath caught. The leaf, the dream, the voice, the letter. Everything was leading him back to the woods. But not just back. Deeper.
He walked back to the group. "Something's happening," he said. "Wizz said something about my mom. About paying a price. But he doesn't remember saying it. Something's inside this."
Kian looked uneasy but determined. "Then we keep going. We look deeper. We don't stop."
Yuwin nodded. "If we go in, we go together."
But Zayaan wasn't sure. Some doors, once opened, don't shut the same way. Some truths can't be unseen.
And yet...
He looked toward the trees again. A faint glimmer of light moved between them—like someone holding a lantern far into the distance. It disappeared almost as quickly as it came.
And in his chest, something stirred. A knowing. A calling.
The wind picked up again, carrying one final whisper into his ears, a voice neither male nor female, but somehow familiar:
> "She left it behind for you. Beneath the roots. Beneath the silence. Come find what she buried."
Zayaan blinked. The moment passed.
But he knew one thing now:
The woods didn't just remember.
They were waiting.
---
End of Chapter 3