**THE ALLEY OF WHISPERS**
The alley wasn't just dark - it swallowed light whole. Anamika Sharma's sensible flats sank into something wet and viscous with each step, the cobblestones glistening under the sickly yellow glow of a single flickering streetlamp. The air hung thick with the cloying sweetness of rotting marigolds undercut by something sharper, metallic - the unmistakable iron tang of old blood. Her psychology textbooks called this *olfactory-triggered recall*, but no academic term could explain why her skin prickled with the certainty that something in this alley was *breathing*.
*Bhootiya Antiques* loomed suddenly between two crumbling buildings, its rusted sign shrieking on broken chains. The Hindi letters had long since rotted away, leaving only the English words "DEAD MEN'S TOYS" gleaming with unnatural wetness. Anamika's fingers twitched toward her phone's flashlight, then froze. The shadows here moved wrong - pooling too thickly in corners, stretching toward her feet like grasping fingers.
The door groaned open before she could touch it, exhaling a breath of formaldehyde and something older, fouler - the stench of opened graves and forgotten mausoleums. The sound it made wasn't mechanical, but organic; the death rattle of something that had been dying for a very long time.
---
### **THE KEEPER OF CURSED THINGS**
Inside, the shop pulsed. Not with life, but with the slow, arrhythmic throbbing of something preserved yet not quite dead. Dust motes swirled in shafts of jaundiced light that seemed to come from nowhere, illuminating horrors that defied categorization:
- A taxidermied crow with its wings spread in eternal crucifixion, human molars stitched in a grinning rictus where its beak should be. Its glass eyes tracked Anamika's movements with liquid precision.
- Porcelain dolls arranged in a macabre tea party, their eye sockets hollow pits that wept thick, black resin. Their tiny hands ended in razor-sharp fingernails, frozen mid-scrape against their porcelain cheeks.
- A grandfather clock whose hands were frozen at 3:03 AM, its cracked face leaking viscous black fluid that pooled beneath it in shapes that almost looked like screaming faces.
"Looking for something... *special*?"
The voice slithered from the shadows, each syllable dripping with a wet, guttural quality that made Anamika's molars ache. The shopkeeper unfolded himself from the darkness - limbs too long, joints bending in impossible places. His skin stretched parchment-thin over sharp bones, the hollows of his cheeks deep enough to pool shadows. When he smiled, his teeth gleamed - not yellow, but the eerie white of old ivory, each one filed to a needle's point.
*Auditory-tactile synesthesia*, Anamika's mind supplied automatically as his voice made her skull vibrate unpleasantly. But no textbook could explain why her reflection in his black, depthless eyes showed her with empty sockets where her eyes should be.
"Just browsing," she lied, her voice thin and reedy. The words tasted like ash.
His gaze followed her like a physical weight as she moved toward a moth-eaten shroud covering a rectangular object. The shadows beneath the fabric didn't just move - they *twitched*, as if whatever lay beneath was breathing erratically through multiple mouths.
With a convulsive jerk, she yanked the cloth away.
*Tik Tok Too.*
The game board gleamed wetly under the flickering light, its surface carved from what could only be petrified bone - too yellowed and porous to be wood, too deliberately shaped to be natural. The tiles alternated between black so deep it hurt to look at and a red so vibrant it seemed to pulse. The playing pieces were miniature coffins, their lids slightly ajar. From within came a faint, wet *scraping* sound, like fingernails dragging across bone from the inside.
"Not. For. Sale." The shopkeeper's breath carried the stench of腐敗 (fuhai) - the Chinese word for decay that inexplicably surfaced in Anamika's mind. His syllables grated like stone on stone, ancient and guttural.
Anamika threw a crumpled 500-rupee note on the counter with trembling fingers. "Keep the change."
The moment her skin made contact with the box, a jolt of electric cold shot up her arm. The box *thrummed* against her chest as she fled, its vibrations syncing perfectly with her racing heartbeat. *Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.* When she dared glance back, the shop was gone - replaced by a weeping wall of black mold that pulsed rhythmically, like a giant, diseased heart.
---
### **THE INVITATION TO DAMNATION**
**9:47 PM. Anamika's Apartment.**
Ankita Patel sprawled across the couch, her scuffed Docs leaving marks on the coffee table. "Another haunted board game, Amu?" Her smirk faltered as Anamika placed *Tik Tok Too* on the table with ceremonial slowness. "Jesus, where'd you dig this relic up? A tomb?"
Vanshika Joshi reached out instinctively, her amethyst bracelets clinking as her fingers hovered over the board's edge. "It's... *hungry*," she whispered. Where her fingertips nearly brushed the surface, the wood darkened and *hissed*, leaving behind the faint scent of burning flesh.
Sanskriti Rao peered over her cadaver dissection manual, her clinical detachment cracking as she examined the board. "Petrified human bone. See the Haversian canals?" Her finger traced microscopic channels in the material. "This isn't just any bone. It's... it's *sacrum* bone. From the base of the spine." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "Where the soul is said to reside."
Soniya Malik lit her third cigarette with hands that trembled slightly. The flame guttered wildly despite the still air. "And it's not modern," she added, exhaling smoke that curled into strange, knotted shapes above the board. "That patina... this thing's old. *Centuries* old."
Anamika arranged the coffin pieces with deliberate care, each one etched with a name: *Anamika, Ankita, Soniya, Vanshika, Sanskriti.* The letters seemed to pulse faintly, as though written in something more vibrant than ink. "Rules are simple," she said, her voice sounding distant even to her own ears. "Roll the die, move your piece to the center. Winner gets a wish."
"And the loser?" Ankita picked at her chipped black nail polish, her nonchalance forced.
The footnote at the bottom of the rules burned itself into Anamika's vision: *"The loser... feeds the game."* The letters weren't printed - they were *carved*, the grooves filled with something dark and flaking that might have been old blood.
"Edgelord bullshit," Ankita snorted too loudly, but her fingers trembled as she reached for the die.
The box emitted a low, hungry hum in response.
# **THE FIRST SACRIFICE**
Sanskriti snatched up the die before anyone could protest - a yellowed, porous cube that left a greasy residue on her fingers. "Let's get this over with." The die felt disturbingly warm, like something recently extracted from living flesh.
It clattered across the board with an unnatural echo, landing on **6** with finality.
Her coffin piece *jerked* forward of its own accord, screeching like nails dragged across slate. The sound set their teeth on edge, vibrating through their bones in a way that felt *personal* - as if the noise existed solely for them.
Then the lights died.
"Not funny, Amu!" Ankita barked into the sudden darkness, but her voice cracked with something more primal than annoyance.
A child's giggle cut through the black - low, wet, ending in a gurgle that suggested a mouthful of blood. The temperature plummeted so rapidly their breath fogged in the suddenly arctic air.
When the lights flickered back on, Anamika's chair sat empty. Her half-finished chai still steamed, the cardamom scent now undercut with something metallic.
"AMU?!" Sanskriti launched to her feet, knocking the board askew. The pieces didn't budge - they were somehow *fixed* to their positions.
Vanshika's tarot cards lay scattered across the floor, though no one had seen her drop them. The Tower and Death stared up with unsettling prominence.
"Did you hear that?" Vanshika pressed her palms against her ears, her voice shrill. "It's saying *Aśuddha. Aśuddha.*" The Sanskrit word for "impure" dripped from her lips like a curse.
Soniya stared at her own hands like they belonged to someone else. "This is like the ER," she whispered. "When patients code. That *smell*—" She gagged suddenly, covering her nose.
The scent of rotting lilies and burnt hair filled the room.
The board *gurgled* in response.
---
### **THE GAME AWAKENS**
Black ooze seeped from the red tiles, thick and clotted like old blood. It moved with purpose, slithering across the floorboards to form words that glistened wetly in the dim light:
***ADD A PLAYER. OR JOIN HER.***
A sharp knock at the door shattered the silence.
Ankita went rigid. "Harsha? No—*no*—"
The door burst open before anyone could move. Her younger brother bounded in, earbuds dangling, his usual lanky enthusiasm filling the space. "Mom said you're playing without me? Not cool, Di!"
The group stared in mute horror.
In the reflection of the darkened TV screen, Harsha's jaw hung slack, his throat a gaping maw from which black beetles poured in a ceaseless, clicking stream.
The die rolled to his feet with a series of deliberate *click-click-clicks*, as if guided by invisible hands.
---
### **THE FIRST DEATH**
"Sweet! Let's play!" Harsha scooped up the die without hesitation.
It landed on **9** - a number that didn't exist on any standard die.
"Wait, this thing's rigged—" His laughter strangled in his throat.
A sickening *crack* echoed through the room as his fingers fused with the die, the skin splitting like overripe fruit. Black veins spiderwebbed up his arms with terrifying speed, pulsing beneath his skin like living things.
"Di...? *Di, it h-hurts—*"
His eyes liquefied first - viscous, milky fluid streaming down his cheeks in thick rivulets. The shadow beneath the table *twitched*, then unfurled into something with too many joints and gleaming, needle-like teeth.
"HARSHA!" Ankita lunged forward, but it was too late.
A wet *crunch* filled the air, followed by absolute silence.
The board reset itself with a series of ominous clicks. Harsha's coffin piece now oozed a dark, viscous fluid, a single molar wedged in its tiny hinge. The walls pulsed rhythmically around them - *lub-dub, lub-dub* - matching the terrified hammering of their hearts.
---
### **THE UNRAVELING**
The silence that followed was more terrible than any scream.
"Nonononono—" Sanskriti clawed at her hair, her medical textbook splayed open to an illustration of dissected lungs. "This isn't real. Sleep deprivation. Mass hysteria—"
Soniya stared at her hands with growing horror. "These... these aren't mine," she whispered. "I'm left-handed. *Why am I right-handed?!*"
Vanshika chanted Sanskrit prayers under her breath, her kohl-streaked tears dripping onto the Tower card at her feet. The image of a crumbling spire seemed to warp and twist beneath her tears.
Ankita threw herself at the door with a strangled cry. The lock held fast despite her frantic rattling.
The die levitated suddenly, glowing with an eerie inner light like a burning ember. It seared itself into Ankita's palm with a sizzle of burning flesh.
***YOUR TURN.***
The words weren't spoken aloud - they *unfolded* inside their skulls, in a voice that was all wrong.
"No. *NO!*" Ankita thrashed, but her traitorous hand moved with mechanical precision—*click-clack*—the die rolled of its own accord.
Her coffin lurched onto a tile etched with a screaming mouth, its lips peeled back in eternal agony.
Somewhere in the distance, faint but unmistakable, came the pawn shop owner's laughter—dry and rattling, like bones shaken in a tin can.
---
**END OF CHAPTER 1**