Except the window. The jharokha window on the upper right was open. Not ajar — open. And the singing was coming from there.
Nidhi listened. The melody — if you could call it that — was hypnotic in the clinical sense. It bypassed the analytical brain and went straight to something older, something limbic, something that predated language and logic and lived in the part of the brain that had evolved to detect predators. It wasn't unpleasant. It was worse than unpleasant. It was beautiful in a way that felt dangerous, the way a deep river is beautiful — serene on the surface, currents underneath that could kill you.
She grabbed her audio recorder — a Zoom H5, professional grade, capable of capturing sound at frequencies the human ear could barely detect — and held it toward the window. The levels jumped. The singing was real. Not a hallucination, not a half-sleep artifact. A real voice, from a real location, at 3:17 AM.
She recorded for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds. Then the singing stopped — not faded, not trailed off, but stopped, mid-note, as if someone had pressed pause on a playback device. The silence that followed was the loudest thing she'd ever heard.
The window of the Pandey house was closed again. As if it had never been open.
Nidhi played back the recording. The waveform was there — clear, defined, a voice in the frequency range of a mezzo-soprano. But when she pressed play, what came through the headphones was not what she'd heard.
It was breathing. Not singing. Breathing. Long, slow, deliberate inhalations and exhalations, recorded at a quality so high she could hear the moisture in each breath. No melody. No notes. Just someone breathing into the microphone from a distance that should have been too far to capture.
She played it again. Same result. Breathing. Close, intimate, as if the person were standing directly behind the recorder — behind her.
She turned around. The room was empty. The charpai, the table fan, the whitewashed walls. Nothing.
But on the wall opposite her bed — the wall that had been blank when she'd gone to sleep — there was something. A mark. Small, dark, at about waist height. She walked to it and shone her phone's flashlight.
It was a handprint. A small handprint, the size of a woman's hand, pressed onto the white wall in something that was too dark to be paint and too consistent to be dirt. The fingers were delicate, well-defined, and the thumb had a particular angle — turned slightly inward, as if the hand had been pressed against the wall while reaching for something. Or reaching from somewhere.
