The Roy mansion did not like being explored.
Mihir felt it the moment he crossed the threshold from the courtyard back inside—an almost imperceptible resistance, as though the air thickened around him, weighing down his limbs. Old houses, he knew, were territorial. Anthropologists wrote about it all the time: lived-in spaces accumulating memory, ritual residue embedded into architecture.
But this felt personal.
"Don't rush," Arjun said behind him.
Mihir turned. "I wasn't."
"You are," Arjun replied mildly. "The house notices."
That should not have made sense. It did anyway.
They stood in the central hall, a long rectangular space with a ceiling so high it vanished into shadow. Wooden beams crossed overhead, darkened by centuries of oil smoke. The floor beneath their feet was cool stone, worn smooth in certain paths—routes taken again and again by the same kind of feet, the same kind of lives.
To Mihir's left hung the family portraits.
He had avoided them earlier.
Now, he didn't.
The first portrait showed a man seated stiffly in colonial attire, eyes sharp, mouth unsmiling. A small banyan leaf had been painted into the corner of the frame, almost hidden.
"Raghunath Roy," Arjun said. "The first."
"The first what?" Mihir asked.
Arjun glanced at him. "The first to listen."
Mihir moved closer, examining the painting with professional interest. The pigment was old—natural dyes, mineral-based. Tantric households often used such materials deliberately. Believed to bind intention into matter.
The man's eyes followed him.
"That's impossible," Mihir muttered.
Arjun said nothing.
They moved down the line.
Every portrait bore the same subtle motif: banyan leaves, ash markings, red thread tied around a wrist or throat. The faces grew more familiar as generations passed—features echoing forward through time.
Until—
Mihir stopped.
"That's my grandfather," he said.
The man in the painting looked barely thirty.
"He disappeared when I was six," Mihir continued quietly. "They said he drowned."
Arjun's voice was low. "He didn't."
Mihir turned sharply. "What do you mean?"
Arjun studied the portrait. "He stayed too long."
A chill crept up Mihir's spine. "Stayed where?"
Instead of answering, Arjun gestured toward a narrow corridor branching off the hall.
"Come," he said. "You should see the rest."
The corridor smelled different.
Less dust. More oil. Camphor. Something metallic beneath it all.
"This wing was sealed for years," Arjun explained. "The villagers refused to clean it."
"Why?"
"They said the walls still listened."
Mihir swallowed. Animistic belief, his mind supplied automatically. Sacralized domestic space. He recorded the thought even as his pulse quickened.
They passed a series of small rooms—bedchambers, prayer alcoves, storage spaces. Each had its own quiet wrongness. In one, the floor bore faint circular stains that looked suspiciously like dried blood, scrubbed repeatedly but never fully erased.
Tantric ritual circles.
In another, iron nails had been driven into the doorframe in deliberate patterns—bhuta-bandhan symbols, used to prevent spirit movement.
"Who lived here?" Mihir asked.
"The women," Arjun replied.
That stopped him. "Women weren't usually permitted—"
"—to practice openly," Arjun finished. "Yes. Which is why this room mattered."
He opened a low wooden door.
Inside, the air was thick and stale, as though the room had been holding its breath for decades. Clay lamps lined the walls. A small stone platform sat in the center, etched with yantras Mihir recognized instantly—Kali bija mantras, death-aspect invocations, blood-binding sigils.
"This isn't folk tantra," Mihir whispered. "This is left-hand practice. Smashan sadhana."
Cremation-ground tantra.
Arjun watched him carefully. "You know it."
"I've studied it," Mihir said. "Academically."
"Of course."
The faintest hint of amusement colored the word.
Mihir circled the platform. There were grooves carved into the stone—channels meant to guide liquid somewhere specific.
Blood.
"This was done in-house," he murmured. "Not at the ghat. That's… that's deliberate concealment."
"Yes," Arjun said. "Your ancestors were very careful."
Mihir turned. "Careful of what?"
"Of losing what they bound."
The words echoed unpleasantly.
They continued deeper into the mansion.
The servants' quarters were abandoned now, but evidence of life remained: a half-broken clay cup, a child's wooden toy, red sindoor stains pressed into doorframes. Arjun paused at one room.
"This was Shanta's," he said.
"Who?"
"The cook. She stayed the longest."
"What happened to her?"
Arjun's gaze drifted to the floor. "She started hearing breathing at night."
Mihir's stomach clenched.
"Did she—"
"She left before the tree called her name."
Mihir stared. "It calls names?"
Arjun looked at him.
"Yes."
They reached the back of the house, where a door opened directly toward the forest. This threshold was different—marked with vermilion handprints layered over one another, some small, some large, some smeared in panic.
Arjun did not cross it.
Mihir noticed.
"You don't go outside from here," Mihir said.
"No," Arjun agreed. "This door is not for me."
"For whom, then?"
Arjun's gaze softened, unsettlingly intimate. "For the Roys."
A sound drifted in through the cracks—a slow rustle, leaves brushing against leaves.
Breathing.
Mihir hugged his notebook to his chest. "You keep saying you're the caretaker. What exactly are you taking care of?"
Arjun stepped closer.
"The house," he said. "The land. The seal."
Mihir's breath caught. "Seal?"
Arjun reached out and, for the first time, touched him properly—two fingers resting lightly against Mihir's wrist, where his pulse raced.
"So it doesn't open too soon," Arjun murmured.
Something about the touch made Mihir dizzy. Cold bled into warmth. Fear tangled with a strange, unwanted comfort.
"Arjun," Mihir said slowly, carefully. "How long have you been here?"
Arjun smiled.
Not fully.
"Longer than the house," he replied.
A loud knock echoed through the mansion.
Both of them stiffened.
Arjun withdrew his hand instantly, expression shuttering.
"That will be the priest," he said. "And the ojha."
"The exorcist?" Mihir asked.
"Yes."
"Why are they here?"
Arjun met his gaze steadily. "Because you've been seen."
Another knock. More insistent.
From outside, the banyan exhaled.
Mihir realized, with a sick twist in his gut, that the house was no longer resisting him.
It was watching.