Twenty-five rungs.
Arjun counted them under his breath, the cold steel biting through the thin soles of his slippers. The head-lamp's beam jittered with every step, throwing long shadows that crawled up the concrete wall like black fingers. When his boots finally touched solid floor, the silence hit him so hard he swayed.
He was in a narrow tunnel.
Smooth concrete on every side, ceiling so low he could press his palm against it without stretching. Two parallel lines of old conduit pipes ran overhead, and between them a single rusted rail with cracked ceramic insulators: some forgotten wiring system from before Independence. A row of frosted glass bulbs was fixed above the rail, but there were no switches, no pull-chains, no life. Dead for decades.
The air was ice-dry and perfectly still, as though it had been waiting since 1967 for someone to breathe it again.
He started walking.
Fifty steps. Sixty.
The tunnel went straight, featureless, swallowing the beam of his head-lamp long before it reached the end. The only sounds were the soft crunch of grit under his feet and the thud of his own heart.
Then the light struck metal.
A heavy steel door, matte grey, no handle, no keyhole. Just a hair-thin seam down the middle and two small magnetic plates at shoulder height. The kind of door built to survive riots, bombs, or things far worse.
Arjun placed a palm on each plate and pushed.
The door parted inward without a creak, swinging on hidden hinges that moved like they had been oiled yesterday.
A rush of even colder air rolled over him, carrying a faint smell of old paper and something sharper: gun oil, maybe, or temple incense long gone cold.
He stepped through and froze.
The room was vast. His head-lamp was useless here; the beam scattered into darkness before it could find a single wall or the ceiling. Only the floor was visible: polished concrete stretching away like the parade ground of some underground fortress.
To his immediate left, starting right at the doorway, rose the first of countless metal racks: battleship-grey, floor to invisible ceiling, spaced with military precision. On every shelf sat glass boxes, each the size of a large shoebox, each sealed with yellowed tape, each labelled with a small card in neat Devanagari handwriting.
He moved to the closest one.
Inside lay a steel dagger, short and wicked, the blade covered in etched symbols that seemed to shift when he wasn't looking straight at them.
The card read:
City – Bangalore
Owner – Rikit Rao
Year – 1941
This dagger shows the living as flayed and screaming.
The bearer will feel compelled to complete the skinning.
Seven confirmed deaths.
If you touch it bare-skin, you become its owner.
Ownership passes only after twenty-one days of no contact or death of owner.
Do not touch.
His hand rose half an inch, then snapped back as if the glass were red-hot.
The next box held something small, curled, and leathery that had once been alive.
City – Delhi
Owner – Mangat Singh
Year – 1939
Preserved squirrel leg.
Grants impossible luck while it touches living skin.
The instant contact is broken, all fortune reverses.
Death follows within one lunar month.
Do not separate once bound.
Row after row of racks marched away into the dark. Hundreds of boxes. Thousands, maybe. The scale of it made his stomach turn.
He forced himself forward, repeating the same sentence inside his head like a mantra: I will not touch the glass. I will not touch the glass.
On the far side of the doorway, past the endless shelves, stood a line of plain wooden crates stencilled FILES in peeling black paint. He gave them a wide berth, afraid even to let his shadow fall across them.
Another ten steps and the head-lamp finally found a wall.
Photographs. Hundreds of them, pinned in overlapping rows with rusted drawing pins. Black-and-white, sepia, a few early colour prints already fading. A tall man in his thirties: sharp cheekbones, pathani kurta, long kirpan at his waist, standing beside things that had no right to exist outside nightmares. Dates scrawled beneath in red ink: 1947, 1953, 1961, 1969…
Directly in front of the photograph wall stood a small wooden table and a single wooden chair.
On the table: a brass table-lamp with a cracked green glass shade, two dried ink bottles, a wooden pen stand carved into a roaring lion, and a stack of five thick, leather-bound books.
The topmost book had the word DIARY embossed in flaking gold.
Arjun's legs felt suddenly unplugged. He stood in front of that dead man's desk, two floors beneath a forgotten godown, surrounded by sealed boxes full of cursed things, and understood for the first time that some doors are not meant to be opened by accident.