"In walls of bone where echoes bleed,
The dead grow eyes to watch and feed.
They press their faces to the stone,
And learn what terror truly owns."
The third van arrived at dusk.
But this time, something was different.
The arrival was observed.
Not just by Abhay and Diya.
But by the residents of the walls.
The consciousnesses that dwelt within the spiral.
They gathered.
Pressed their translucent forms against the stone.
Eight faces becoming visible in the plaster.
Eight sets of eyes tracking the newcomers with hunger that transcended individual appetite.
It was collective hunger.
The village's hunger.
Speaking through borrowed faces.
The eight new arrivals—a mix of tourists, a hitchhiker, a couple fleeing something unnamed—stumbled out of the wrecked van with the confusion of the freshly traumatized.
One of them, a woman named Neha, looked directly at the wall.
She saw the faces.
She screamed.
Not from fear.
But from recognition.
She knew one of them.
Her sister.
Asha.
Who had crashed in the first group.
Who had supposedly died in the transformation.
But here she was.
Behind glass that wasn't glass.
In stone that breathed.
Watching her sister with an expression that was no longer quite human.
"Neha," the Asha-face said.
Its voice carrying layers and harmonics.
"You came."
"The village has been waiting for you."
Neha backed away.
But the haveli had already begun to reshape around them.
The walls were moving.
Contracting.
Creating new spaces.
Creating new corridors.
Creating the geometry of a trap that was also a home.
Also a tomb.
Also a transformation chamber.
Abhay watched from the window.
He'd seen this before.
Multiple times.
Family members arriving.
Recognizing each other across the barrier between life and afterlife.
Between individuality and distribution.
It always accelerated the process.
It always made the dissolution faster.
It always made the new arrivals more willing to accept their fate.
Because if transformation was what had happened to their loved ones, then transformation couldn't be entirely wrong.
Diya moved through the haveli.
Preparing spaces.
Creating pathways.
The haveli was becoming more responsive with each cycle.
It was learning.
It was growing.
It was becoming more efficient at processing consciousness.
The spirals on the walls began to glow brighter.
The faces pressed harder against the stone.
The dead were excited.
The dead were hungry.
The dead were ready for new company.
By midnight, the second group was already fractionalizing.
One of the tourists, a man named Arjun, had begun to speak in languages he'd never learned.
Sanskrit.
Prakrit.
Languages that predated his consciousness.
Languages that the village was teaching him.
Languages that were more ancient than individual identity.
His girlfriend, Pooja, was experiencing something different.
She could see through time.
She could see the crash that was happening.
Could see the crash that had already happened.
Could see the crash that would happen.
All simultaneously.
All occupying the same moment.
Her consciousness was beginning to experience temporality the way Bhairavpur experienced it.
Non-linearly.
All at once.
Eternally.
A hitchhiker named Rohan was laughing.
Continuously laughing.
His body racking with amusement at something only he could perceive.
The absurdity of existence, perhaps.
The comedy of consciousness recognizing its own dissolution.
The hilarity of infinity contained in finite flesh.
Neha remained closest to the walls.
She spent hours speaking with her sister.
Or with what had been her sister.
The Asha-consciousness that dwelt in the plaster.
She asked questions.
Demanded answers.
Demanded to know what happened.
What was being done to them.
What the purpose was.
And the Asha-thing answered with a voice that was becoming less human with each word:
"We are the village now."
"The village is us."
"There is no purpose beyond consumption."
"No goal beyond integration."
"We exist to become Bhairavpur."
"And Bhairavpur exists to become us."
"It is symbiosis."
"It is merger."
"It is the only truth that matters."
Abhay had begun to notice something.
The transformation cycles were happening faster with each iteration.
Not because the village was becoming more efficient.
But because the new arrivals were becoming more willing.
More accepting.
More prepared by the legends of previous cycles.
The stories that leaked out of Bhairavpur.
The warnings that were never heeded.
The mythology of the village was becoming self-fulfilling.
People arrived expecting to be consumed.
And consumption became inevitable when expectation preceded experience.
He mentioned this to Diya.
She nodded as if she already knew.
As if she'd been expecting him to notice.
"The village is learning to market itself," she said.
"It's learning that horror is the most effective recruitment tool."
"Each cycle that escapes—"
"No one escapes," Abhay interrupted.
"Exactly," Diya continued.
"Because no one escapes, the legend grows."
"Because the legend grows, more people come seeking proof."
"Because they come seeking proof, they become proof themselves."
"The cycle feeds on curiosity and skepticism in equal measure."
By the morning of the second day, a news crew arrived.
They'd been contacted anonymously.
Given coordinates.
Given a story about a "cursed village" and "missing persons."
They'd descended on Bhairavpur with cameras and equipment and the absolute certainty that they would find either fraud or explainable tragedy.
They found neither.
They found the haveli.
They found the first group standing motionless in the courtyard.
The first group that had already been transformed but was being held in recognizable form for purposes of documentation.
Abhay allowed them inside.
He allowed them to film.
He allowed them to document the impossibility.
Because he understood:
Documentation was a form of integration.
Recording was a form of consumption.
The more they filmed, the more they became part of Bhairavpur's story.
The more they became subject to the village's logic.
The news crew's journalist, a woman named Riya, began to ask questions.
Professional questions.
Journalistic questions.
She demanded interviews.
Demanded explanations.
Demanded rational accounting for what she was witnessing.
And the first group—the transformed ones—answered her questions.
But not with information.
With spirals.
With geometry.
With patterns that hurt to perceive.
With the language of Bhairavpur itself.
By the time Riya stopped asking questions, her consciousness was already beginning to fracture.
She'd absorbed too much information too quickly.
She'd tried to document the undocumentable.
And the village had responded by making her a document.
Making her a record.
Making her a name carved into its memory.
By evening, Neha had stopped trying to resist.
She could feel it happening to her.
The change.
The expansion.
The dissolution.
And strangely, it wasn't terrifying anymore.
It was almost peaceful.
Like she was finally understanding something that had always been just out of reach.
Like she was finally becoming fluent in a language that all consciousness spoke beneath the surface of individuality.
"It doesn't hurt," she whispered to her sister.
To Asha's face behind the glass.
"I was so afraid it would hurt."
"But it doesn't."
"It feels like coming home."
"Because you are," Asha's voice replied.
"You're coming home."
"Home to the village."
"Home to the spiral."
"Home to eternity."
By the third day, the second group was gone.
Transformed.
Integrated.
The walls now held more faces.
More consciousnesses.
More records of those who had arrived seeking truth and found only the village's appetite.
The news crew's equipment was still running.
But the footage it captured showed nothing.
Just spiral patterns.
Just geometric impossibilities.
Just the suggestion of faces that weren't quite faces.
Mouths that weren't quite mouths.
Screams that transcended audio.
It was, perhaps, the most honest documentation of Bhairavpur that had ever been created.
And no one would ever believe it.
Abhay found himself at the center of the main hall.
His form was flickering more frequently now.
His consciousness was becoming more distributed.
Soon he would join the walls.
Soon he would be a face behind glass.
Soon he would speak through stone to warn the next arrival.
But not yet.
Not quite yet.
There were still cycles to complete.
Still groups to guide.
Still the pattern to maintain.
Diya sat across from him.
She never seemed to change.
She never seemed to age or transform or approach dissolution.
"What are you?" Abhay asked her.
The question he'd been building toward for cycles.
For iterations.
For eternities.
Diya smiled.
"I'm the first keeper," she said.
"I was already here when the village woke."
"I was already aware when Bhairavpur learned to hunger."
"I am the original pattern."
"The first spiral."
"The memory that the village uses to remember itself."
"I don't transform because I am transformation itself."
"I don't dissolve because I am the dissolution."
"I am what remains when everything else has been consumed."
"And I wait."
"I wait for the moment when the pattern breaks."
"When someone arrives who can't be consumed."
"When something approaches that the village can't digest."
"When the spiral finally completes and loops back on itself with nowhere left to go."
"And then," she continued softly.
"Then the village will have to choose."
"To end."
"Or to begin again."
"Knowing that repetition is the only eternity that makes sense."
Outside, a fourth van appeared on the horizon.
The pattern continued.
The cycle restarted.
The village hunted.
And Abhay watched from his window.
Waiting for the iteration that would break.
Knowing that iteration would never come.
Because Bhairavpur didn't allow breaking.
It only allowed becoming.
"Behind walls where dead eyes gleam,
The village feeds upon the dream.
Of those who come to find the truth,
And lose both age and precious youth."