Arjun's fingers trembled as they brushed the cracked leather cover. He told himself he would only look at one page, just enough to understand what kind of madness he had stumbled into, then leave and never come back.
He opened the diary.
The handwriting was neat, hurried, the ink faded to brown in places but still perfectly legible.
29 September 1971
Finally the letter I waited for arrived. The blood-sucker's nest in Calcutta is confirmed. Leaving tomorrow. Packing tonight.
30 September 1971
Everything is ready. Anirudh Shinde and Karthikeyan Moorthy will meet me at Howrah. Three rifles, silver ammunition, the usual wards. This one has killed twelve already. It ends this week.
20 October 1971
Twenty days of hell. We cornered the creature in an abandoned jute mill. Anirudh took a bad wound across the ribs but will live. The blood-sucker burned well. One less monster for ordinary people to fear.
27 October 1971
Father's letter came today. Hey sixty-five and finally retiring. I am proud. He hunted his whole life so the world could sleep. I hope one day I make him half as proud.
Page after page of the same calm, tired voice. Cities Arjun knew only from railway timetables: Shillong, Trichur, Bhusawal, Nagpur, Guwahati. Names of things whispered in his village to scare children into finishing dinner: chudail, pishach, rakshas, vetala. Each entry ended the same way: the thing was tracked, cornered, destroyed. Sometimes alone, sometimes with two or three companions whose names recurred like brothers.
He turned to the final section.
17 January 1973
The witch in Kerala has evaded every hunter for nine years. They have called me. I leave tomorrow at dawn.
That was it. No more pages. The pen had simply stopped.
Arjun closed the diary. The small thud of the cover shutting echoed in the cavernous room like a coffin lid.
He understood now, with a clarity that made his stomach turn inside out.
This was not a thief's hideout.
This was not black money or smuggler gold.
This was a hunter's lair, built two floors beneath the earth and hidden behind a false-bottom Godrej because the man who used it could not risk ordinary people finding what he kept.
Vikramaditya Shinde (the tall man in every photograph) had spent his life killing things that should only exist in stories. And in 1973, somewhere in the green darkness of Kerala, something had finally killed him.
Arjun turned back to the wall of pictures.
Now that he knew the name, he saw the same unsmiling face in almost every frame: sharp cheekbones, calm eyes, pathani kurta, kirpan at the waist. In one photograph from 1953 he stood beside a charred corpse the size of a bus, skin split open like burnt paper, ribs glowing red. Another, dated 1961, showed him and two companions holding up a severed head the size of a buffalo's, tusks curving like scimitars, eyes still open and shining. A third, in colour, 1969: Vikramaditya alone in a moonlit graveyard, torch in one hand, a flaming bottle in the other, something pale and eyeless rearing behind him.
Each picture carried the same quiet pride, the same exhaustion.
And every single one of them was staring straight into the camera, straight through fifty-two years, straight at Arjun.
He felt the weight settle on his shoulders like cold iron: the weight of all those sealed boxes, all those things that should never be free, all those lives the hunter had saved by doing work no one else would do.
His phone showed 11 % battery.
Arjun stood up so fast the chair scraped backwards.
He would leave.
He would climb the staircase, roll down Shutter 81, buy the strongest lock in Greater Noida tomorrow, and never speak of this place again. Gupta-ji would get his godown. The witch in Kerala had won. The duty was over. He was just a boy from a village with a sick father and two little sisters who needed school fees. This was not his war.
He placed the diary exactly where he had found it, aligned the stack of five books the way they had been.
He turned his back on the racks, on the photographs, on the small wooden table that had waited half a century for someone to sit in its chair again.
He walked to the steel door, pushed it open, stepped into the tunnel.
The cold followed him like a hand on his shoulder.
Twenty-five rungs up, lungs burning, he emerged into Shop 81, rolled the shutter down, and stood in the moonlight listening to his own ragged breathing.
"I'm not coming back," he whispered to the dark. "Never."
He meant it with every cell in his body.
He locked the broken almirah with a piece of wire, swept his footprints from the dusty floor with a scrap of cardboard, and walked away.