chapter-0.1 The Night Call

The phone rang at 2:37 a.m.

It was the kind of sound that doesn’t belong in the middle of the night — sharp, electric, wrong. I opened my eyes to the darkness of my apartment, to the faint hum of the refrigerator and the steady rotation of the ceiling fan slicing the air. For a moment, I thought it was part of a dream.

It wasn’t.

...----------------...

“Detective Arin Dev?”

“Yes.”

“There’s been a homicide. Sector 12, near the old riverbed."

...----------------...

The line went dead before I could reply.

The world outside my window was drowned in mist. Streetlights glowed like dying embers, and the rain was caught between wanting to fall and wanting to freeze. I poured black coffee into a cracked mug, took a sip that burned my tongue, and stared at my reflection in the kitchen window. For a second, I thought the reflection blinked before I did.

It wasn’t fear. Not yet. Just recognition.

Something old was stirring.

...ΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩΩ...

By the time I reached the scene, the city had swallowed its own voice. Only the sound of water dripping from the branches and the click of the forensic team’s boots broke the silence.

The body lay beneath an ancient banyan tree — the kind that grows roots like hands reaching for lost souls. The woman’s face was pale, lips painted in blood-red lipstick, stretched into a smile that was too wide, too knowing. Two rusted coins covered her eyes, glinting faintly under the flashlight beams.

Her right hand held a candle stub, its flame trembling but never dying despite the damp

air.

And there — written across the stone wall behind her — was a single thing.

Not a word. Not a symbol.

A year.

1987.

At first, it meant nothing. Just a number. But something inside me twisted. A faint echo from another life — a file I’d buried, a case that still bled in dreams I never spoke of.

The Sundarpur Ritual Murders.

Four victims.

Coins. Candles. Smiles.

Unsolved.

Back then, I was a rookie — all logic and adrenaline, no fear. I thought monsters were men who could be caught. I was wrong.

“Looks like ritual killing, sir,” said the constable beside me.

I nodded but didn’t answer. I crouched beside the body, tracing the outline of her hand without touching. There was no struggle. She’d been placed, not dropped. Arranged.

Everything was deliberate — the position, the symbols, the eerie calm of it all.

In my head, the map began forming.

That invisible web I see when the world starts to break apart.

Coin — left: mark of passage.

Coin — right: silence.

Candle — flicker of life, snuffed.

Lipstick — same shade as 1987 victims: “Crimson Ghost.”

Number — a link, a message.

...----------------...

The threads began to connect in my mind — thin, white lines stretching from clue to clue, looping back to faces I could barely remember. I saw the original victims flash before me like ghosts in an old photograph.

Same arrangement.

Same handwriting.

Same calm.

But that case was closed. Officially. Files burned in a department fire ten years ago.

So why now?

Why her?

---

A sudden movement in the dark caught my attention — a flutter between the roots of the banyan. I turned sharply, gun half-drawn, flashlight beam cutting through mist and shadow.

Nothing. Just fog curling against the bark.

But then I saw it — a scrap of paper pinned to the trunk with a small brass pin. I pulled it free carefully. The page was torn from an old ledger. On it, written in smeared ink, were five words:

“To see the pattern again.”

I felt something cold slip through me, like water finding a crack in stone.

By dawn, the forensics van took the body away, and the site was taped off.

I stood alone under the tree long after everyone left. The candle was still burning.

I watched the wax melt slowly into the mud and thought of how fragile patterns are — how they hide in everything we can’t understand. A murder is never just a killing. It’s a message written in a language only the broken can read.

And I was fluent in it.

---

When I got back to my apartment, I pinned the evidence photos on my wall — the coins, the candle, the number, the message.

Then I drew the first line connecting them.

1987 to 2025.

Same ritual.

Same silence.

Same fear crawling up the spine.

This wasn’t random.

It was a return.

And if the pattern was truly repeating, then somewhere in the city, someone else was already marked.

As I turned off the lights, my reflection in the window smiled back at me — just slightly off-sync, as if it knew something I didn’t.