"A village keeps two faces — one that smiles for strangers,
and one that studies the soles of their shoes."
The morning after the cracked beam and the shadowy figure, the courtyard felt smaller. The sunlight had the brittle quality of a thing that had been used up already, but the group gathered there as if proximity alone might stitch fraying nerves back together.
They moved with an exhausted deliberation. Bandages were checked, cameras batteries swapped, and everyone, at some point, pretended not to notice how the walls around them seemed to fold the light differently. The spiral footage hovered between them, unspoken but large — an accusation that what they saw could not be simply explained away.
Kabir rubbed at the temple of his head and said, more businesslike than bravado, "We can't wander blind. We split, cover more ground. Bring back anything that looks like a clue." He glanced around the circle. "Pairs. Regroup before dusk."
No one protested. The decision felt like the one sensible thing they could do. They divided into four pairs:
Kabir — Diya — to revisit the schoolhouse and the edges where the carvings had been strongest.
Abhay — Meghna — to the temple ruins and the shrine houses where prayer offerings had been left too neatly.
Rohit — Saanvi — to the far fields and closed wells, where the land itself had started to feel wrong.
Yashpal — Priya — through the empty lanes and shuttered homes, to see what the village hid behind closed doors.
They set off like a careful, awkward army, each pair pulling a thread of curiosity through the village's tangle.
Kabir and Diya moved toward the schoolhouse first. The spirals were there again — etched deeper now, and warmer to the touch as if someone had pressed a palm into stone minutes ago. When Kabir wiped the dust away, he discovered not just spirals but tiny handprints set into plaster, so small they could have been child-sized impressions left as a dare. Diya knelt and listened — not with the same trembling fear the others had shown, but with a strange patience.
"Do you feel it?" Diya asked quietly.
Kabir swallowed. "Like the room is waiting for a story to finish."
She tapped the stone. The touch sent a faint vibration up her arm. "It remembers hands," she said. Her voice was too steady. That steady tone made Kabir glance at her differently for a second — not leader and follower, but co-conspirators in something neither of them fully understood.
Abhay and Meghna reached the small temple by noon. The smashed deity's fragments had been gathered into a neat pile and wrapped in a faded cloth as if someone had tried to hide the crime by tidiness. On the altar, old prayer beads lay threaded and oddly warm, as though recently held. Meghna traced marks in a ledger tucked beneath the linen — names scrawled in a looping hand, then crossed out one by one.
The ledger's ink had bled in ways that suggested tears. Meghna read aloud the first name, and the act of speaking seemed to bruise the air: "—and then they stop writing." She closed the book with shaking hands.
Abhay, standing slightly back, ran a finger along the rim of a bronze bell. It sang, not with a ring but with a low thrum — the same hum that had come from the well. He felt the sound inside his teeth and nearly dropped the bell. Meghna's look was unsteady. "We should take this," she whispered. "Not the idol. Just… the ledger. Proof."
They wrapped the ledger in cloth and slid it under Abhay's jacket like contraband. He said nothing, only tucked the weight of names close to his chest.
Rohit and Saanvi walked the fields that had fooled Yashpal earlier — the paths that bent back on themselves. Today the ground seemed to breathe beneath their soles. They followed a narrow track until it opened on a shallow pit covered with broken earthenware. When Rohit lifted a shard, he found a child's locket, its glass clouded, a dried strand of hair inside.
Saanvi's laughter died when she saw it. "That was someone's child," she said. "They don't disappear without people looking." She turned, expecting a sympathetic nod from Rohit, and only met the horizon. The field felt suddenly enormous, and their smallness in it made the air close.
They marked the spot with a smooth stone and moved back faster than they had come, like runners heading toward shelter.
Yashpal and Priya went down lanes where shutters sagged and where the air smelled of spices — the kind of smell that lingered like a shadow. Inside one house, Priya found a row of photographs pinned to a lintel. Faces smiled, a decade long ago: moms, fathers, children, birthdays. Someone had scratched out a single person's face in each frame — not with neat crosses, but with tiny spirals etched into the paper, as if the same hand that carved spirals on walls had found these faces and tried to make them unwelcome.
Priya snapped photos despite the tremor in her fingers. On review, the images held an odd blur at their edges — a soft eclipse that made everything look as though it belonged to a memory. Yashpal, who lived by data and proofs, swallowed and said, "We need to catalogue. Connect. If these are the same spirals, they're not decoration. They're a system."
As afternoon slid toward the thin orange of evening, the pairs returned to the courtyard. They carried small tokens: a ledger wrapped in cloth, a shattered child's locket, photographs with spirals etched through smiles, fresh handprints set into plaster. Each object was a shard of something bigger and worse — proof that the village had catalogued lives and then stored their absence like a cupboard full of quiet.
They laid the objects in the fountain's basin as if making an altar to what they could not yet name.
"We went everywhere," Kabir said. "But we found the same language." He tapped a spiral etched on the ledger's cover. "It's like the whole place agreed to speak through marks." He looked around the group. "We need to make sense of it before the night takes us again."
Diya's hand brushed his as she reached for the ledger. For the first time since the crash, she let her guard fall just enough to lean in. "Maps aren't only paper," she said. "This place has maps drawn in people. We're walking on them without knowing."
Rohit tried to be jocular and failed. "So we're literally walking on other people's old problems. Great."
Abhay kept his hands in his pockets, the weight of the ledger near his ribs. He said nothing. His silence folded into the group, not heavy, not light — simply unreadable. No one singled him out. No one needed to.
Beyond the houses, where the light thinned and the village inhaled the coming night, a dark figure stood for a second under a mango tree and then slid away before anyone could point. When someone finally did look — no one was there.
They slept poorly that night, each dream threaded with spirals and child-sized handprints. The ledger lay between them on the floor like a sleeping thing.
They had spread across the village and returned with the same quiet answer: Bhairavpur kept its stories carefully, marking what it wanted remembered and erasing what it chose to feed the dark.
"The more they mapped, the more the village's lines traced them back."