Contents PROLOGUE Chapter I: The First Lie Chapter II: Greyveil House Chapter III: We Heard Her Chapter IV: Marks of the Unseen Chapter V: The Hand in the Dark Chapter VI: You Can’t Leave Chapter VII: Kabir Isn’t Gone Chapter VIII: That Isn’t Kabir Chapter IX: Run Chapter X: The Night We Lost Someone WWW.OVORDS.COM
PROLOGUE — Read This Before You Continue If you’re reading this, there are only two possibilities: either I’m already dead, or you’re about to wish you had never opened this book. I know how that sounds — dramatic, exaggerated, like cheap horror trying too hard to be unsettling. That’s exactly what we would have thought too. That night. Before the laughter. They’ll tell you it was an accident. A tragic trip. Young people, bad luck, wrong place, wrong time. A story so ordinary it becomes forgettable. But accidents don’t whisper your name when nobody is standing behind you. Accidents don’t knock from inside locked rooms. And accidents certainly don’t laugh… long after you’ve buried someone. We were six when this began. Now? Well… you’ll understand soon enough. But there’s something you need to know before you go any further, something the newspapers never printed and the police never discovered: None of this started when someone died. It started when we laughed. And if you’ve ever laughed at something you shouldn’t have… then you already understand more than you think.
CHAPTER I HENRIETTA MITCHELL The First Lie The first lie we told wasn’t to the police. It wasn’t to our families, or the reporters, or anyone else who would later try to piece together that night like a puzzle missing its most important pieces. The first lie we told was to ourselves. “We’re fine.” Raghav said it three hours after we watched Meera fall. There was no dramatic scream tearing through the air, no desperate cry for help, nothing that matched the cinematic tragedy people imagine in moments like that. She just slipped. One second she was there, laughing at something Kabir had said, and the next she was gone — swallowed by fog and distance so quickly that my brain refused to process what my eyes had already seen. Real horror, I would later learn, is rarely loud. It’s quiet. Disorienting. Your mind scrambles to soften reality, to reshape it into something survivable. Because accepting the truth in its raw form would shatter you instantly. “We’re fine,” Raghav repeated, though his trembling hands and bloodless face betrayed him. Behind him, the valley stretched into a depth none of us dared to measure. The mist coiled slowly upward like something breathing.
HENRIETTA MITCHELL No one moved. Moving meant acknowledging. Acknowledging meant accepting. And accepting meant facing the unbearable possibility that Meera — our loudest, brightest, most alive friend — was now nothing more than a broken shape somewhere far below. That’s when Kabir laughed. It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t cruelty. It was the kind of fractured, nervous laugh that escapes when terror has nowhere else to go. A reflex. A mistake. But the moment that sound echoed into the silence, something shifted. The air felt different. Heavier. Listening. And from somewhere behind us, deep within the forest lining the cliff — Something laughed back. Soft. Distant. Not human. Yet unmistakably there. For a few seconds, none of us breathed. My skin prickled with a cold that had nothing to do with the night wind. Every instinct screamed that what we had just heard did not belong to the world we understood. “That was just an echo,” Raghav said quickly. And that became our second lie.
Greyveil House By the time we finally gathered the courage to move, the fog had thickened. It rolled across the ground in slow, silent waves, wrapping itself around our ankles as if trying to hold us there. No one said it aloud, but we were all thinking the same thing: leaving the cliff felt wrong, yet staying felt impossible. Fear had settled into us like something physical. Heavy. Cold. Patient. --The house waited at the end of a narrow stone path, barely visible through the mist. From a distance, it had seemed abandoned — just another decaying structure forgotten by time. But as we approached, unsettling details began to emerge. The gate hung open, creaking softly though there was no wind. Lights flickered behind the curtains. Warm yellow light. Alive light.
--- HENRIETTA MITCHELL “That’s… not possible,” Nisha murmured. Her voice sounded smaller than usual, stripped of its usual confidence. “This place was supposed to be closed.” --Raghav didn’t respond. He walked ahead of us with stiff determination, like someone who had decided that logic must exist if he simply refused to acknowledge anything else. “We just need shelter,” he said. “We’ll figure everything out in the morning.” Morning. Such an innocent word. --The closer we got, the more the house began to feel… aware. Its windows reflected distorted versions of us — stretched, blurred shapes moving through fog like ghosts already rehearsing their afterlife. The wooden walls were dark with moisture and age, veins of rot crawling along the edges like slow disease.
HENRIETTA MITCHELL And yet… The front door stood slightly open. --Kabir stopped walking. “I swear,” he whispered, “this wasn’t open when we first saw it.” --Ayaan exhaled sharply. “Stop. Please. Not now.” But even he avoided looking directly at the doorway. --Something about that gap of darkness made my chest tighten. It didn’t feel like an invitation. It felt like a pause — like the house had opened its mouth mid-sentence and was waiting for us to step closer to hear the rest. --“We’re not seriously going inside, right?” Kabir asked. No one answered. Because we all knew we were. ---
HENRIETTA MITCHELL The moment Raghav pushed the door, it swung inward without resistance. No dramatic creak. No cinematic groan. Just a smooth, effortless movement that felt disturbingly intentional. The air inside was warmer. Still. Carrying a faint smell I couldn’t immediately place. Something between damp wood… and something metallic. --The living room looked frozen in time. Furniture coated in a thin film of dust. A chandelier hanging crooked from the ceiling. Curtains drawn halfway, as though someone had left in a hurry and never returned. But the lights were on. --“How does an abandoned house have electricity?” Ayaan muttered. His voice tried to sound skeptical.
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