"A list is a promise the hand makes to time;
erase the strokes and the promise becomes a hunger."
The day after the split felt like a bruise.
Dull, aching, and impossible to ignore.
The small finds from each pair lay on the table in the haveli's main room like evidence on a mortuary slab.
The ledger from the market.
The child's locket from the field.
The photographs with spirals over smiling faces.
Meghna's torn page from the temple ledger.
Each object hummed in the quiet.
As if it carried a small, private complaint.
A whisper.
A warning.
They started by laying everything out and trying to speak like people who believed language could still bind reality.
Like words still had meaning.
Like language was a tool and not a weapon being used against them.
Yashpal methodically set the items in lines.
His need for order a thin comfort.
A shield against the encroaching chaos.
"If we cross-reference dates and photos, we can make a timeline."
His voice was measured, careful, controlled.
"It'll either be human-made or it'll be nonsense."
He paused, scanning faces.
Looking for confirmation.
Looking for agreement.
"But there's pattern here."
"Spirals. Names. Repetition."
Priya thumbed through her images until her fingers cramped.
Until the screen blurred.
"There's overlap we didn't notice."
"Same background pattern in three frames."
"Same splinter marks on window ledges."
She swallowed hard.
"It's like the village is copying itself."
"Like it's remembering itself into existence."
"Like it's rewriting its own history."
Kabir ran a hand over the ledger's cover.
It felt warm under his palm.
Impossibly warm.
As if it had just been handled.
As if someone had been reading it moments before they arrived.
He looked at the group.
At the faces that had grown gaunt.
At the eyes that had learned to see things they shouldn't be able to see.
"We either burn it, or we understand it."
His voice carried the weight of a man making a decision he would have to live with.
"I don't like burning unknown things."
"It might be the only thing keeping us here."
"It might be the only thing keeping us alive."
Rohit snorted.
A sharp, bitter sound.
"And I don't like being catalogued like someone else's museum piece."
He shoved a chair back.
The sound echoed in the room.
"If this is alive, it will fight back."
"I say we get out."
"I say we burn it and run."
Meghna closed her eyes.
As if closing them might help her see more clearly.
Might help her perceive the truths hiding behind the veil of normalcy.
"If we leave, we take nothing but what we remember."
"And memory here is already mistrustful."
"The village alters what we see."
"Why wouldn't it alter what we remember?"
Diya didn't say much.
She watched everyone.
Then reached for a small notebook someone had kept.
Just a cheap, softbound thing.
The kind you could buy at any train station.
They had used it to note injuries.
To track who had what scratch.
To maintain a baseline of what was real and what was happening to them.
They had joked about making a "reality ledger" of their own.
A counter-measure.
A spell.
A way to fight back.
Now the joke was a plan.
A desperate, fragile plan.
But a plan nonetheless.
They agreed to make the notebook their record.
A small map of themselves.
A way to check what the village altered.
A way to know if they were still themselves or if the village was rewriting them.
One by one they wrote:
Kabir—cut forehead (left temple), bruised shoulder, limp right wrist.
Saanvi—sprained ankle (right), two scratches on shin.
Rohit—rib contusion, split lip.
Yashpal—forehead bruise, minor concussion symptoms.
Meghna—wrist sprain, dust in lungs.
Priya—temple cut, hair with glass flecks.
Diya—nothing visible, small nausea at night.
Abhay—no cuts, no bruises.
Abhay wrote his entry himself.
Precise and calm.
As if documenting a fact rather than making a confession.
As if his unmarked body was the most natural thing in the world.
They signed and dated the page.
A brittle ritual of ownership.
This was their truth, they said aloud.
Clumsy and fragile.
Like they were teaching a language no one was meant to speak.
Like they were writing in a code that was already being deciphered.
They placed the notebook on the table, under the lamp, and each took turns guarding it through the day.
If anything changed on that page, they agreed—if a word shifted or an injury vanished or a name transformed—then something had crossed the line into their possessions.
Then the village wasn't just watching anymore.
It was rewriting.
Evening pressed down with a merciless clarity.
The village's small kindnesses—water, cooked dal, a bowl of rice—felt like offerings placed before an altar whose rules they could not parse.
Food that tasted of nothing.
Water that was somehow both bitter and sweet.
Rice that seemed to move in the mouth without being chewed.
At dusk the houses seemed to lean inward.
Listening.
Learning.
Taking notes.
The laughter of children came and went in patches.
Sometimes behind the walls.
Sometimes down a laneway.
And then impossibly close again.
Close enough to touch.
Close enough to smell—that strange smell of earth and rot and something sweeter, something like perfume made from flowers that had died a hundred years ago.
They made a second plan:
Stay together that night.
No splitting.
All eyes open.
Everyone would take turns awake in pairs.
Two keeping watch while the rest tried to sleep in the main room.
The ledger and the notebook would remain under constant sight.
A camera was placed to photograph the notebook page every hour.
A second camera, set on a tripod, trained on the ledger.
They tried to make themselves science.
Tried to believe that observation could protect them.
That documentation could save them.
That if they simply recorded what happened, they could understand it and therefore control it.
Night arrived like a held breath.
Like the village inhaling.
The first hours passed with small terror and brittle humor.
Rohit telling a joke that died in the dark.
His punchline swallowed by silence.
Kabir counting loudly.
Numbers like a prayer.
Like a spell to keep the darkness at bay.
Priya trying to fold a blanket with calm fingers.
The fabric refusing to fold correctly.
Slipping away from her hands.
Mockingly.
Abhay sat still for a long time.
Staring at the tripod as if its presence were an accusation.
As if he knew what it would record.
What it would capture.
What secrets it would preserve.
Diya kept close to the notebook.
Fingers drumming a steady rhythm on the cover.
Like she was keeping time.
Like she was counting down to something.
Near midnight, when the guards changed, a sound started in the walls.
It was faint at first.
A low, sucking breath.
That might have been the house settling.
That might have been wood aging.
That might have been nothing at all.
Then it became deliberate.
Like someone walking slowly within the plaster.
Toeing the beams.
Testing their weight.
It moved around the room.
A measured step now near the kitchen.
Now behind the bedroom panel.
The walls seemed to breathe.
In and out.
In and out.
Like a living thing.
Like the haveli itself was a body and they were inside it.
Saanvi, on watch with Yashpal, stood and placed her palm flat against the nearest beam.
It felt warm.
Then cooler.
As if something rolled beneath the grain.
As if something was traveling through the wood toward her hand.
The hair along her arm rose.
Prickled.
Reached toward something unseen.
"Not natural," Yashpal whispered.
He lifted the hour-list photo from the camera and studied the timestamp.
The image showed the notebook.
The page clear and written.
With the time exactly marked.
Both exhaled with a small, vicious relief.
Until they compared it to how the page looked now.
By one in the morning, Rohit on the next shift, checking the camera feed, realized a picture had been taken between the hourly shots.
An unauthorized image.
A photograph they didn't take.
The image showed the notebook.
But the ink near the middle had changed.
A line that had been a name was fainter.
The letters thinner.
As if someone had stolen the ink one letter at a time.
As if someone had been carefully, patiently, deliberately erasing them.
Panic flared.
Spreading through the group like fire.
They dug the notebook out under the lamp and passed it around in silence.
In shock.
In horror.
Everything on the page was there.
Except one thing.
The scrawl that had marked Diya's entry was crisp and unbothered.
Dark and certain.
Exactly as they had written it.
Other names looked blurred at the edges.
Some letters smeared.
Some words reduced to illegible smudges that hadn't been there before.
Puddles of nothing.
Water stains on paper.
A light halo of shadow ringed the page as if heat had kissed it.
As if something hot had been pressed against the names and burned them away.
The signatures were still legible.
Barely.
Except where blotches had smoothed into blank paper.
Blank space.
Erased identity.
"No," Meghna breathed.
Her voice breaking.
"We wrote this."
"We signed it."
Her finger trembled as she pointed.
"We were awake while we signed, right?"
They had been.
They had watched each other sign.
Yashpal checked the timestamps on the camera.
The photos confirmed:
The signatures had been made.
Documented.
Photographed.
Preserved.
But between the photos and the live page, something had erased.
Something had gone through and carefully, methodically, removed them.
They stared until the night seemed to push against their eyes.
Until the darkness became physical.
The hum in the walls turned into a thin laugh.
That could have been wind.
That could have been teeth.
That could have been the village finding its voice.
At dawn they compared again.
Under merciless light.
The same result:
The notebook showed only one name with clarity.
Everything else had been reduced to smears and pale ghosts.
Pages that used to say Kabir, Saanvi, Rohit, Yashpal, Meghna, Priya, Abhay.
Were now smudged and unreadable.
Erased.
Unmade.
The only name that remained crisp, ink dark and certain, was Diya.
Diya's name gleamed on the sheet like a coin left when the purse had been emptied.
Like a single light remaining in a world that had gone dark.
Like the last word in a language that was dying.
For a long moment no one spoke.
The lamp guttered.
A single moth banged against its glass.
Frantic.
Desperate.
Trapped.
Kabir finally swallowed and said the only thing that seemed to stand on its own in that heavy morning:
"We recorded ourselves."
"We tried to keep a truth."
"The village chose what it remembers."
Diya's hands went cold where they lay on the table.
She did not smile.
She did not shout.
She did not celebrate.
She only touched the name as if to see whether it would smudge under her palm.
It did not.
The ink held.
Dark and permanent.
Real.
Outside, the well that never echoed seemed to hum once.
Low and satisfied.
Like it was laughing.
Like it was applauding.
Like it had always known how this would end.
"One name outlasts the night;
the rest dissolve like wet ash.
When the book forgets a life,
the silence begins to laugh."