"When laughter breaks, it sounds like glass,
When silence grows, it will not pass.
A truth too sharp for skin to bear,
Will cut the ones who do not care."
The morning after Diya's strange communion with the wall began with forced normalcy.
The group had split again—partly to explore, partly because being together all the time was starting to grind on nerves like sandpaper on raw skin.
Yashpal and Rohit went toward the fields again, searching for any way out, any path that led back to the real world.
Meghna and Saanvi returned to the temple, claiming they wanted to "document" the architecture but mostly whispering about prayers and old protections.
Kabir and Priya headed deeper into the village with cameras and questions, still chasing the story, still believing that documentation might somehow save them.
Abhay and Diya stayed behind in the old house, tending to the little fire they'd built from dry wood that shouldn't have been dry in a place this damp.
Abhay sat with his notepad, scribbling lines that looked less like notes and more like riddles—or perhaps answers to questions no one had asked yet.
His pen moved with purpose, with knowledge, as if he was recording things rather than discovering them.
Diya sat opposite, her back against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest in the posture of someone making herself smaller.
She watched him write, watched the way his hand moved across the page, watched the expressions that flickered across his face like shadows of thoughts too deep to voice.
The silence between them wasn't uncomfortable.
It was almost expectant.
As if they were both waiting for something to shift, to break, to finally reveal itself.
Finally, Diya broke the silence.
Her voice was soft but steady.
"Do you ever feel like we shouldn't have survived?"
Abhay looked up slowly from his notepad.
His eyes met hers, and in them was something ancient and sad.
"All the time," he said.
Diya studied him carefully, searching for any sign that he was joking, that this was some dark humor meant to lighten the mood.
He wasn't joking.
His face was utterly serious, utterly certain.
She nodded once, as if his answer confirmed something she'd suspected but hadn't dared to voice aloud.
"What do you think happened?" she asked.
Abhay didn't answer immediately.
He looked back down at his notepad, at the lines he'd written, and then slowly closed it.
"Something is keeping us here," he said finally. "And it's not finished with us yet."
Diya didn't ask what that something was.
She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
The First Sign.
It started small.
Around noon, Rohit and Yashpal stumbled back through the village paths, both sweating and pale despite the moderate temperature.
Their clothes were torn at the edges, as if they'd been caught on thorns or branches.
But their skin was unmarked.
"There's no end to those fields," Rohit muttered, collapsing onto a stone seat. His breathing was heavy, panicked. "We walked straight. I swear. Straight. Dead straight for what felt like hours. But it just… bent back."
"Like a circle," Yashpal said flatly, his voice stripped of its usual analytical tone. He sounded defeated. "We were retracing our steps. Same marks. Same broken fence posts. Same dead tree. But I know we didn't turn around."
"Like a trap," Rohit snapped, frustration and fear warring in his voice.
"Not a trap," Yashpal corrected, and there was something in his tone that made everyone listen. "A loop. Something that doesn't want us to leave."
Before anyone could argue, before Kabir could launch into one of his reassurances, Priya and Kabir stumbled in, looking shaken in a way that went beyond exhaustion.
Priya was clutching her camera like a lifeline, her knuckles white against the metal.
Kabir's face was ashen.
"We found something," Priya whispered, her voice barely above a breath.
She powered on the camera with trembling fingers.
The small display screen flickered to life.
On it, footage played back—shaky, amateur, but clear enough to see the truth.
It showed them walking through the eastern houses, their figures small against the crumbling walls.
Pausing at one particular wall, the one that had seemed covered in meaningless chalk drawings.
The camera zoomed in.
At first, the spirals were exactly as Abhay had described—childlike grooves carved into old plaster, meaningless patterns, the obsessive doodling of empty minds.
But as the video continued—
The spirals moved.
Not in real time.
But on playback, faintly, subtly, like time-lapse photography.
They shifted inward, curling tighter and tighter, as though being drawn deeper and deeper by invisible hands that existed in some other dimension, some other layer of reality that the camera could barely capture.
The spirals spiraled within spirals, creating patterns that hurt to look at, that made the eye follow them down and down and down into a depth that shouldn't exist on a flat wall.
"What the hell—" Meghna recoiled, pressing herself back against the far wall. "That's not possible. That's—"
Saanvi interrupted, her voice sharp with nerves, edged with something close to hysteria. "Don't say it's haunted. Don't you dare say it."
But Priya was rewinding the footage, playing it again.
The spirals spiraled.
Again.
And again.
"It's like they're alive," Priya whispered, her eyes fixed on the screen. "Like they're breathing. Like they're—"
"Stop," Abhay said quietly.
Everyone turned to look at him.
He was staring at the camera screen with an intensity that was almost painful to witness.
"Don't watch it anymore," he said. "Some things aren't meant to be seen on repeat."
No one laughed this time.
The laughter had died somewhere between the fields that looped back and the spirals that moved on their own.
The Crack in the House.
That night, they stayed together in the same building—the safest choice, or at least the illusion of safety, which at this point felt like all they had left.
Conversation was minimal, fragmented, sparse as water in a drought.
Even Yashpal, usually loud with data and observations, stayed quiet.
His silence was the most frightening thing of all.
They sat around their small fire, watching the flames without really seeing them, each lost in their own spiraling thoughts.
Then—
A sound.
Craaaaaack.
Not a small sound.
Not subtle or distant.
A loud, urgent sound, like wood splitting under immense pressure, like something breaking apart.
Everyone's heads snapped up simultaneously.
The ceiling beam above them—the thick wooden support that held the roof—had split down the center.
The wood was splintering as though something impossibly heavy pressed from above, something that wanted to crush them, wanted to bring the whole structure down on their heads.
Dust rained down in thick clouds, choking, blinding.
"Shit! Get out, get out!" Kabir shouted, his voice cutting through the panic.
They scrambled into the open air, not bothering to grab supplies or belongings, just moving, just running, desperate to get away from the collapsing building.
They burst out into the village square and kept running until they'd put distance between themselves and the house.
They turned back to look.
The house creaked ominously behind them, wood groaning as if in pain.
But it didn't collapse.
It just stood there, held up by will alone, by something that wanted them alive to see this, to experience this.
The crack remained, a wound in the wood, a wound in their certainty that they understood anything about this place.
And from inside, faintly—
A child's giggle.
High and bright and impossibly cheerful.
Everyone froze.
The world seemed to stop.
"There's no one inside," Priya whispered, her voice shaking so badly it was barely audible.
They had counted.
They had accounted for everyone.
All eight of them were standing in the square.
No one was inside the house.
But the giggle continued, echoing from the darkness, echoing from the walls, echoing from somewhere that had nothing to do with the physical building.
Diya gripped Abhay's arm, her fingers digging in so hard they left marks.
"It doesn't want us to leave," she said, and it wasn't a question.
Her eyes were fixed on the house, on the crack in the ceiling that shouldn't still be there.
But when they turned to look, when everyone looked back at the building—
The crack was gone.
The ceiling beam looked whole again.
Perfect.
Unmarked.
As if nothing had happened at all.
Only the dust on their clothes, only the fear in their eyes, only the echo of that child's giggle in their ears proved that it had been real.
Abhay walked forward slowly, his movements deliberate, controlled.
The others called out for him to stop, but he ignored them.
He approached the beam that had split, reached up, and pressed his palm against the wood.
Only he could see the faint outline still etched into the wood—the ghost of the crack, the memory of what had happened.
He ran his finger along it.
It was warm.
Impossibly, unnaturally warm.
Like the wood was still alive, still in pain, still processing the violence of the split.
He looked back at Diya.
Their eyes met across the distance.
And in that moment, she understood: Abhay knew things about this place that went beyond observation.
He knew things that couldn't be known.
Tension.
Later, around their fire—rebuilt in a different location, at a safe distance from any house that might decide to betray them—Yashpal finally snapped.
His voice broke like glass.
"This is insane. We're trapped in some cursed playground. Fields don't end, walls breathe, beams laugh at us. What the hell are we waiting for?"
No one answered.
"We should leave," he continued, his voice rising. "Right now. Tonight. We should take our chances with the forest. Anything is better than this."
"And go where?" Meghna asked softly. "We don't know which way is out. We don't even know if there is an out."
"There has to be," Yashpal insisted, but his conviction was cracking.
"For what?" she said. "Always morning."
"What if morning never comes?" he shot back, his eyes wild now, desperate.
"It always comes," Saanvi whispered, though her eyes darted nervously toward the horizon, as if checking to see if the sun would actually rise tomorrow, as if she no longer trusted the basic laws of nature.
Kabir said nothing.
He was replaying the spiral footage again on his camera, zooming in frame by frame, watching those impossible patterns move in ways they shouldn't move.
His knuckles were white against the camera body, bloodless from the force of his grip.
He was looking for answers in that footage.
Answers he wasn't going to find.
Priya sat beside him, quieter than usual, her lips pressed tight, as if she was afraid of what might come out if she opened her mouth.
Her social media persona had shattered somewhere between the well and the cracking beam.
There was no caption for this.
No hashtag that fit.
No way to package horror into something consumable and likeable.
And Diya—
Diya watched them all with an intensity that was almost unsettling.
She said nothing, but she kept her back against the wall, palm flat against the stone, like she was listening to something, like the village was speaking to her in a language only she could understand.
Only Abhay noticed her lips move silently.
As though answering something no one else could hear.
As though having a conversation with the very walls themselves.
The Shadow.
The night was nearly calm again—or as calm as it could be when none of them truly believed in safety anymore—when Kabir jolted upright.
His eyes wide, his body rigid.
"Did anyone see that?"
They all froze.
Even breathing seemed to stop.
"See what?" Priya hissed, her voice sharp with a fear that was now constant, that lived in her all the time.
He pointed toward the far side of the square, where the lamplight barely touched, where the shadows were darkest and deepest.
A figure.
Tall.
Still.
Not moving.
It wasn't one of them.
It wasn't the driver—they'd all seen the driver dead in the van, or thought they had.
It wasn't a villager—the villagers moved with that strange, synchronized ease, that off-time quality.
It was something else entirely.
Something that shouldn't be there.
Something that existed just outside the boundary of what they understood as possible.
It watched them.
They could feel it watching.
They could feel the weight of its attention like a physical thing, like hands on their skin, like breath on the back of their necks.
And then, as quickly as it appeared—
Gone.
Like it had never been.
Like it was only visible in the corner of your eye, in the space between perception and awareness.
The group didn't move for a long time.
No one spoke.
No one breathed.
Finally, Abhay whispered what everyone was too afraid to say aloud.
His voice was barely audible, barely more than breath.
"It's watching us."
"It's been watching us the whole time."
"We just finally saw it."
Diya's hand found his in the darkness.
And this time, she didn't let go.
"A shadow waits where silence grows,
It does not ask, it only knows.
And those who see, but dare not speak,
Will find their voices gone and weak."