I took my car and drove down to the station. The brief ride seemed longer than the regular 15 minutes that it was. What appeared to be just an anecdote or maybe a rant of a disgruntled officer had just crept into my life and made space for itself. Esha’s case and the more recent case of Preetika had the commonality of what seemed to be willful self harm. Moreover in a choreographed manner.

  “She was arranged “ the words of that officer echoed in my mind. Till now we had a boy who hanged himself in the presence of witnesses who did not appear to stop him, we had a mutilated girl who appeared to have deliberately walked into some sort of demonic sacrifice, and then there was the recent case with my prints on the body. When I reached the station, one of the constables directed me inside what appeared to be a low budget interrogation room and asked me sit on a wooden chair placed in front of a table.

  “ Sir, he’s here” barked the constable and there he appeared once again. The same officer who shared a ride with me yesterday.

  “ Randhir Ahuja”

  “ Excuse me?”

  “ My name, I figured we pick up from where we left the last time we met, only this time I will be asking the uncomfortable questions” he didn’t seem as excited about the opportunity to put me on the stand as one would expect.

  “ I guess you already spoke to the owner of Anant Vraj”

  “ yes I did. I must say you do have a solid alibi”

  “ There is no possible way my prints could’ve arrived there unless someone planted them.”

  “no one did, and quite frankly I have chosen to let my mind be open to the most dreadfully bizarre things that appear. So how did you do it?”

  “ I did not. I was at the guesthouse last night when this happened. I have never met this girl in my life if hypnosis is what you’re arriving at. And you yourself mentioned that she strangled herself then how did my prints and there? The only place where my prints could’ve been collected is here. Maybe yesterday.”

  “ nothing of that sort happened Divyansh, the first team that reached the crime scene was not aware about your presence here, there are many details that point towards self strangulation.”

  Randhir leaned back in his chair, eyes fixed on me—not with suspicion, but something worse: restrained curiosity. “I’ve been on the force seventeen years, Dutt,” he said slowly, “and I’ve seen my fair share of suicides. Hell, I’ve seen messier ones than this. But this… this was different. Her neck—bruising was symmetrical, the thumb pressure matched perfectly on both sides. No fracture to the hyoid bone, no crushed larynx. The kind of pressure that builds slowly, not violently. That’s not an attack—it’s self-inflicted. The skin under her nails? It was her own. Not yours. No signs of forced entry, no broken nails, no struggle. Just a girl, in front of a mirror, pressing down until her brain forgot how to fight back. All of it tells me she did this to herself. But here’s where it gets twisted.” He leaned forward now, lowering his voice. “We found your fingerprints. On her neck. Perfectly intact. Not bruised-in. No epidermal transfer. Just… present. Like someone placed your hand there after the fact. Or wanted us to think you had something to do with it. So tell me, Divyansh… how do you explain being at two places at once?”

  I ran a hand through my hair, feeling the weight of the accusation that wasn’t an accusation. “You’re looking at this through the right lens,” I said, keeping my voice low. “But you’re missing one layer. I’ve seen cases like this… not often, but enough to know when the body doesn’t just tell you what happened—it shows you what it was made to feel.”

  I leaned in now, tapping the edge of the table. “The absence of struggle, the balance in the grip, the stillness in her muscles—those aren’t signs of peace. They’re signs of override. Something short-circuited her instinct to survive. NLP can do that. Hypnosis under extreme trauma can mimic that. But this? This feels like psychogenic possession. Like her mind didn’t just surrender—it was hijacked. If your forensics found no pre-mortem hesitation, no flinching, no panic… then something bypassed the very instinct to breathe.”

  Randhir’s jaw twitched, just slightly. “So you’re saying something made her do it?”

  “I’m saying,” I replied, “that whoever—or whatever—did this… didn’t need to be in the room.”

  This case was right up his arena and he was all in. He leaned towards me and said “This still doesn’t explain your prints on the body, “

  “ I know it doesn’t but I think you’ve witnessed enough in your time here to give me a little benefit of doubt”

  “Well Can the dead frame the living?” Randhir sighed.

  “What else did you find at the crime scene?”

  “ Nothing much that would point towards the source of all this. Just some regular personal belongings”

  “ Was this girl involved in any sort of ritualistic activity?”

  “you mean witchcraft or voodoo? Not that the other people at the PG know of. Although there is something…”

  “What? “

  “ You’re still a possible suspect , I shouldn’t be discussing this with you.”

  “ Your suspicion is understandable. I know a part of you thinks I could be behind orchestrating this entire show.” That made him uneasy, probably because he still wasn’t sure who to trust.

  “ I’ll have a moment of honesty with you officer. Ever since I stepped into that guesthouse things haven’t added up. A room that stays unaffected during an earthquake. A random paperback from a deadbeat vendor that for some fucked up reason makes people lose it. And now this.

  The officer was staring into my eyes as I was explaining myself.

  “ I didn’t choose do be a part of this but apparently that ship has sailed. Whatever is happening has already made me a part of it and me stepping out of the loop won’t avoid it.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  You chose to let me in on those details that day didn’t you? You also believe that somewhere down the line I do have a role to play in this.” I took a brief pause. Both Anashya and Randhir were carrying secrets which they wanted me to stumble upon without them being in the wrong for letting the cat slip out of the bag.

  “ What do you know about that book?”

  “ The one that made the old woman go nuts?”

  “ that’s the one”

  “ what does it have to with or case?”

  “ Did Anashya tell you that she tried to destroy it last night?”

  “ She wouldn’t “

  “ What makes you so sure? How are you two related in this?”

  Randhir stood up and threw his chair to the side.

  “ Enough, you want details don’t you, all of a sudden you think you deserve the entire truth, well guess what you are a part of this now and there’s no changing that..”

  “Then tell me what I wish to know”

  “I hope you have someone who can mourn your absence, because over the past three years I have buried three officers. Three. One slit his wrists after staring at a wall for six hours. Another walked into a lake and never came out. And the third, well I still don’t know what happened to him, it’s like the earth swallowed him whole”

  This was new. Clearly there was something that was getting rid of anyone who got close to unearthing its true nature.

  “ Let’s start with Preetika’s crime scene shall we”

  Randhir took a slow breath, as if preparing to say something he wasn’t quite sure he believed himself. “You know, it wasn’t just the way she died or what I saw at the scene that shook me, Divyansh. It was the way she lived those final days. The neighbors at her PG—three of them, in fact—reported that Preetika had started acting strange about a week before her death. Not just withdrawn. That’s common. This was… different. They said she would spend hours in front of the mirror in the hallway—just standing there, sometimes humming, sometimes mouthing things like she was rehearsing a conversation with someone they couldn’t see.”

  He paused, gauging my reaction, then continued. “One of the women, her next-door neighbor, told us that Preetika had begun—this is her exact phrasing—‘admiring her own neck.’ She would touch it slowly, trace the line of her jaw down to her collarbone like it was something sacred. Sometimes she’d even whisper things to it. Compliments. ‘So delicate. So perfect. So easy.’ That’s what she said once. Like she was flirting with her own vulnerability.”

  He leaned forward now, voice lowering. “On the final night, the PG’s cook caught a glimpse of her in the reflection of the hallway mirror. She wasn’t just looking anymore—she was smiling. A wide, vacant smile. She kept murmuring something about ‘finally becoming what I am’… and then—this was caught on the surveillance camera outside her door—she stopped, looked straight into the camera, and said, ‘He’ll see me now. He’ll know I’m ready.’”

  Randhir’s hands curled slightly as he spoke. “We found drawings in her notebook. Irregular shapes that no one could decipher. Spirals. Dozens of them. But not normal spirals—each one was inked inward, tighter and tighter, like something was pulling her into itself. And right in the middle of the last one, just four words: He knows me now.”

  He looked up at me, the weight of it hanging in the stale interrogation room air.

  “This wasn’t depression. This wasn’t psychosis. This was submission. The kind that doesn’t come from inside you—but from something that’s been watching long enough to know where you break.”

  That explained a lot. Complete submission could come from many sources. The feeling of being powerless and helpless could be one. A strong feeling of guilt or remorse could render someone humble enough to submit to a supposedly higher moral ground. We weren’t sure if this was the doing of a really skilled professional or was there something really unexplained that was forcing its hand upon these victims. In the previous two cases there was evidence of few other individuals being present as enablers of the arrangement. Here the victim was alone.

  Preetika seemed to display a what scientific literature would term as body focused paraphilia- —a fixation so specific, so intimate, it bordered on ritual

  “Does this have any similarities with the previous cases you mentioned” I asked, Randhir had opened the door to more mystery with the mention of the three officers who seemed to take their own lives in similar fashion.

  “People who sense something more powerful involved in these cases are usually not that willing to share, we can’t interrogate them at will without any concrete evidence that they might know something” said Randhir in despair. The man had clearly knocked a thousand doors for answers just to get them slammed on his face.

  Preetika was in isolation before she died. But Esha was at Anant Vraj. During her final moments at the guest house she must’ve displayed some unexplained random and erratic behavior.

  “Tell me about those three officers “

  “Not much to tell there, the department closed it off as post traumatic tendency”

  “Were these officers with you during the investigations of these cases”

  “This particular category, yes”

  “how long has it been since the last officer died?”

  “two and a half years”

  “how much gap between the three deaths?”

  “first it was a month, then a week”

  “So they couldn’t survive but somehow you did, and I am assuming that you were the one who started this while they just followed.”

  “Isn’t it obvious Divyansh, it wishes to hurt me the most. The pain of watching close ones die and living with the guilt until I succumb which god knows, might just be a matter of time.” Randhir sighed, he was hurt to the extent where he had made peace with the possibility of an untimely, unexpected death. He was determined to find the truth before he met his fate. And as far as this unholy presence was concerned, it seemed to understand the concept of pain and suffering deeply.

  “Did these officers not show any signs?”

  “I tried to keep them distant from the investigations ever since I saw what the consequences were, didn’t meet them for a while after that. But when you’re already in the middle, it never really leaves you alone, you know a bit or two about that I’m sure.”

  He was right, we certainly had one thing in common. We had seen the morbidly grim side of reality. Somehow we were drawn to it. Like a willing moth to the hottest flame. The only difference was that Randhir was nearer to the consequences and the aftermath given the pre-requisites of his profession. One couldn’t expect him to find any sort of misguided humor in any situation like I so casually did. But there was one trait in him that I could recognize the moment I saw him. The temptation to unearth. To find answers. I had opened many forbidden doors and so had he. This door seemed far more dangerous than anything and maybe that’s why fate had introduced us to each other. Two broken souls looking to fix something far more broken. To willingly volunteer for something like this, one had to be like that. Cold, distanced yet bold and torn enough to not tolerate the malice anymore.

  Randhir’s phone rang, he received it and had a brief conversation. I disconnected it and turned towards me. “we do not have enough reason to keep you in a cell,…. Means your alibi is strong” he said the latter part after he came close enough to whisper in my ear.

  “I need to report this up the ranks, if you come across anything useful”

  “You’ll be the first to know” I said reassuringly.

  “ok then, as of now you’re free” he said

  I stood up and started walking outside the room where we are having our little spooky talk. Before I walked out, I turned around and asked “ How are you related to Anashya?” it was a valid question considering that he seemed to get a little defensive when I accused Anashya for what happened the previous night. That mention alone was enough to provoke an interrogation for her as well, but Randhir wasn’t willing to do it clearly.

  “We umh…..dated for a while,” he replied reluctantly.

  “will you call her in as well?”

  “I will do whatever the investigation needs me to do, I hope you both will cooperate” he said firmly. He was aware of the equation I had with Anashya and was probably hoping I would find the truth about what she knew.

  I knew one thing for certain. Anashya had seen what this force was when it was in action and she was the with Esha on her last day. No one could’ve been more close to it than her. She was keeping it under wraps to ward its impact away but my arrival had seemed to bring it back.

  I thought walking out of that station would feel like relief. Instead, it felt like stepping deeper into a room with no doors. I wasn’t free—I’d just been invited further in. And now, the only person who might hold a piece of the truth was the one I no longer knew how to trust.

  Maybe the truth wasn’t waiting to be discovered. Maybe it was daring me to ask the wrong question.