Chapter 7: The Man in the Last Carriage
583 Words
The train was gone. Poof. But Narayan Nath’s face—just standing there in the final carriage—wouldn’t leave Ishaan’s head. Burned in. Like, full-on haunting.
Guy hadn’t aged a day.
This wasn’t some dusty flashback or a brain glitch.
This was real. Right now.
So… Narayan’s alive? Still tangled up in this spiral mess.
On Ishaan’s wrist, the red watch thudded once—like a lazy heartbeat. Then again. Then faster, picking up speed.
Coordinates flickered.
Fresh location.
Kolkata Archives Building, South Wing.
It was 2 a.m. Who cares? Ishaan barely paused. Hopped in his car, shot down the city’s empty veins. No blaring horns, no lights, nothing. Kolkata felt like it was holding its breath, waiting for something to snap.
Archives locked, obviously.
He looped around, spotted a sketchy fire escape, rusty but hanging on. Up he went, shoes scraping metal, climbed through a cracked window.
Inside? Dust city. Air thick, almost chewy. Dead quiet.
He followed the numbers, ended up in some forgotten records dump. Behind a half-rotten shelf of old books, he found it—a steel cabinet with a label:
“Project Shesha — Temporal Physics Division — CONFIDENTIAL”
His pulse went wild.
Inside: files. Piles of them.
Plus a photo, black-and-white, dated 1970.
Ravi Nath. Narayan Nath. And a third dude.
No name. Just a code: “V-13.”
Same face as the Faceless Man from the Hour Room—except this time, those eyes. Cold. Dead. Staring right through the paper.
The files? Yeah—they spilled everything.
Turns out, the Nath brothers weren’t just clock nerds. They were scientists—into some weird time stuff.
They found something.
Not a gadget.
Not some math magic.
A place.
A natural crack in time, hiding under the old train tunnels.
The Hour Room.
Supposedly, you could use it to reset your life. Wipe out the bad choices. Undo a regret. But only once. Only for one person.
And the cost? Well, that part was left blank.
Except, scrawled in shaky handwriting in the margins:
> “The traveler forgets.
The loop remembers.
The debt always collects.”
Suddenly, footsteps.
Ishaan jerked back from the cabinet, heart pounding like a jackhammer.
Flashlight beam cut the dark.
A voice.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
Dastoor.
Alive. Beat up, but standing.
He dropped the flashlight a little.
“Figured you would’ve cracked it by now,” he muttered. “Narayan didn’t disappear. He fractured. Used the Room.”
Ishaan squinted. “So why the note? Why drag me into this?”
Dastoor’s mouth twisted. “Because it’s your loop now. That’s how it works. Narayan held it off for years. Ravi tried to fight it. But the Hour Room… it hates being ignored.”
Dastoor handed over one last file.
Inside: blueprints for another watch.
This one was black.
“Only one way out,” Dastoor said, voice barely above a whisper. “The red watch opens the loop. The black one… closes it.”
“Where is it?” Ishaan asked.
Dastoor hesitated, just for a heartbeat.
“Buried with Narayan’s original body.”
Ishaan just stared.
“You mean he’s…?”
Dastoor nodded. “Part of him is. The rest? Living on borrowed time.”
And finally, Ishaan got it.
Narayan didn’t dodge death.
He split it.
Half of him stayed behind.
Half kept moving.
But time? Time remembers every debt.
Outside, all the city clocks hammered out 13:13 again.
The spiral started to close.
- Writer
