Present-day:
Inspector Vikrant’s wife, Trisha, was brought in for questioning. Vikrant had been missing for nearly two days and there was no clue of his whereabouts. His phone had been switched off for the last sixty hours and his last known location was somewhere just a few kilometers away from his home. Inspector Prayag, the investigating officer, had good reason to doubt the wife.
Vikrant and Prayag were best friends since their training days at the academy. This was personal. He never approved of Trisha, she always seemed odd to him. He knew Trisha was cheating on her husband, something Vikrant confided in him a few days before his disappearance. Time was running out and the only way to find Vikrant was to grill Trisha, make her confess or get some clues. There was some intelligence input about an impending terrorist attack in the city and Prayag had just twelve hours to solve the case.
“What have you done to him?”
“I do not know what you’re talking about.”
“He knew you were cheating on him. We found the evidence. We are bringing in your lover as well.”
Trisha wasn’t expecting this, she always assumed she hid her affair well. In those few seconds, after hearing what Prayag said, everything came back to her. Thousands of thoughts ran through her mind. It was never something serious. Things just happened. She met Dhruv in a party, sparks flew, and one thing led to another. She confessed to the affair.
“I always thought you both had a happy married life. I guess even Vikrant thought the same before he stumbled upon your affair.”
“I never thought he’d find out.”, tears rolling down her eyes.
“But it wasn’t something you did for the first time, right? You were always cheating on him, even before you got married.”
“How did you…”, Trisha asked, her face visibly shocked, her hands shaking.
Prayag didn’t know, but he always suspected that she was fake with his friend. Vikrant had a tragic life, he lost his parents at seventeen, in a fire in an orphanage that they ran. He grew up with the kids in the orphanage and one day, lost all his friends in a blink of an eye. When Trisha came into his life, he was too much in need of love and too blind to see her lies. Prayag kept his doubts to himself for the sake of his friend, lest they be nothing and he ends up harming their relationship.
It wasn’t that Trisha never loved Vikrant. He was everything she had hoped in a partner. But she also never respected their relationship. It was either a pathological need or an aversion to monotony that led her into the arms of one man or another, behind Vikrant’s back. She never thought much of her trysts. In her mind, it was something that felt good and thus justified. It was her drug.
“Trisha, I need to know where my friend is. We know about the pills.”
Four weeks ago:
It was a usual day at the station. Officers were busy filing complaints. Prayag had just finished the paperwork of a recent case, his head spinning after typing on the old CRT monitor. It was close to 12:00 PM when Vikrant arrived at the station, late, as usual, a smirk on his face, like he was proud of it. The routine jokes of his juniors followed, about how he must have been kept busy at night by the missus. ACP Pawar entered and the jokes stopped. He reprimanded Vikrant once more for his indisciplined behavior, Vikrant apologized, promising he’ll be on time henceforth, both men knowing well that wasn’t going to happen.
A pair of constables entered the station, both holding a disheveled man. He was in really poor shape, torn clothes, smelled like a sewer, his teeth black as soot. He was also slightly injured on his right leg. He was pleading with the constables to let him go. He was being accosted towards Prayag’s desk when he pointed them to let Vikrant handle him.
The constables told Vikrant that they caught him after the man was found running on the streets. He then sat in the middle of the road, causing a huge traffic jam. The constables caught him and brought him to the station. Vikrant offered the man a glass of water which he gulped down instantly. He proceeded questioning him.
The man was just mumbling nonsense, continually saying, “wild!!, animal!!, wild!!”. The street where he was found was just a few hundred meters away from the city’s forests. Vikrant deduced the man must have seen a wild animal and got scared. Prayag was hearing everything but was busy working on another case.
The two friends started chatting over tea outside the station as was their daily routine,
“So what about that beggar that was brought in?”, Prayag asked.
“Seemed like a stoner, was mumbling, must have seen some wild animal or a stray dog. It wasn’t worth my time. I let him go.”
“What?! Why?”
“What do you mean why? On what charges should I lock up a scared homeless man? We are anyways full of chain snatchers and pickpockets. I asked the constables to get his leg treated and leave him.”, Vikrant said.
2 weeks ago:
Vikrant was passing through the same locality where the homeless man was found and decided to check on him. He asked people around about the man but not many knew about him.
“Are you talking about an old bearded guy, smells terrible?”, a construction worker working nearby enquired him.
“Yes, do you know where he is?”, Vikrant asked.
“Not sure, haven’t seen him or that lady with him since a few days”, the worker said.
“Which lady?”, Vikrant asked, puzzled. There was no mention of any woman either by the homeless man or the constables who brought him in. He was about to enquire more when his phone rang and he was summoned to the station.
ACP Pawar was briefing the officers about a tip of a possible terror attack in the city. Every other case that the officers were working on needed to be put on hold. The tip had come from the highest agency in the country and it was necessary that the entire team starts combing operations in their jurisdictions.
The next day, both Vikrant and Prayag were leading separate teams searching for any potential terrorists in the vicinity. As was the case with such operations, they mostly came across false alarms or caught someone selling drugs instead of making bombs. Both their teams converged over the same time and took a break for tea.
“Did your team find any clues?”, Vikrant asked, sipping a hot cup.
“No man, just some small-time weed peddlers. We really need to do something about these guys. My informer says they are switching up to coke and other shit nowadays”, Prayag said, almost complaining.
“Yes, but bombs kill people faster, so I guess that’s what we’ll need to deal with first”, Vikrant quipped.
“You look a bit tensed”, Prayag asked him.
“It’s just the damn bomb search.”, Vikrant said, looking the other way.
“Dude, I’ve known you long enough to know you’re lying. These kinds of operations always give you a high. You lit up like a Christmas tree when Pawar said there are terrorists hiding in our part of the city”, Prayag told him jokingly.
“It’s not the bloody terrorists, it’s Trisha!”, Vikrant said, anger visible on his face.
“What about her? Is she fine?”, Prayag asked worryingly.
“She’s cheating on me. I don’t know since when”, Vikrant told him.
Vikrant found out about the affair only a week ago. He saw her mixing something in his nightcap, she always made his drink for him. He threw the drink away that day and acted like he was asleep. She left home after an hour. He saw her leave in their car, stopping at the gate and handing what looked like five hundred bucks to the security guard to keep his mouth shut and not tell anything to her husband if it ever comes to that. He found the sleeping pills in the kitchen cabinet. Those pills kept him knocked out well into late morning. He checked her phone the next morning and realized the lies and the betrayal.
Prayag was both shocked and sad after hearing his friend’s plight. He knew how much he loved Trisha and what she meant to him. He asked Vikrant to confront her in a calm manner and told him that he was there for him no matter what. The two friends hugged, almost teary-eyed.
60 hours ago:
Vikrant had not yet spoken to his wife about her affair. The detective that he was, he wanted to first collect enough evidence before confronting her. It was also his way to delay the eventual wreckage that his life was going to become. Every night, he would count the number of pills left in the bottle and inferred that she was increasing the dosage bit-by-bit.
“Is she planning to kill me?”, he thought to himself.
He decided it was time to finally bring it to an end and catch her red-handed with Dhruv. The usual shenanigans followed, she made her drink, he threw it away without her noticing, acted of falling asleep. She left after getting ready, in a cab. She was told that their car was at the mechanic’s shop for some fault in the gear. Vikrant left soon after to trail her. He had lied to Trisha and parked his car outside the building in the back lane and exited by climbing over the back wall. He suspected that the guard that his wife was bribing would inform her if he saw Vikrant leaving from the front gate. He carried his gun with him.
Dhruv’s place was on the other side of the town and the road there ran through the borders of the city’s forests. A hundred things ran through his mind. He was going through each and every possible scenario that can happen once he finds them both together. For all that she had done with him, he would not harm her in any way. The gun was, at most, to scare them, if necessary. With all this chaos in his mind, he forgot to charge his phone and it died just five minutes after he started from home.
He was driving towards his wife and her lover when he suddenly saw the same homeless man who was brought to the station about a month ago. Seeing him reminded Vikrant about the lady that was mentioned by the construction site worker. He saw the man running towards the forest. It was almost midnight and nobody, even a half-brained homeless guy would venture into that forest at that time. Vikrant almost abandoned the idea of following the man when he saw that his hands were bloodied with no visible sign of injury anywhere else on his body.
The policeman in him couldn’t avoid a smoking gun like that, no matter how fucked up his own personal life was. He almost instinctively decided to follow the man into the forest instead of pursuing his wife.
Present-day:
All the evidence that Prayag and his team were able to gather pointed at foul play by Trisha. She was not just giving him sleeping pills but also planning on increasing his dosage day by day. She confessed it, without confirming any role in her husband’s current disappearance. Vikrant was showing signs of adapting to his regular dosage and she thought increasing it would make him sleep longer.
Prayag was growing impatient with the interrogation and asked her to just tell where his friend was. Trisha said she didn’t know anything about it. Tired of her constant denials, Prayag decided to trace the last few hours before Vikrant’s disappearance. It was almost 10:00 PM and he only had a few hours before Pawar’s deadline to solve the case. The terror case that they were working on was still going on and every team in the city was asked to be on high alert. As much as they wanted to solve one of their own officer’s missing case, saving the city was more important.
Looking into Vikrant’s phone location records, Prayag figured that he might have finally decided that night to follow Trisha and confront her along with Dhruv. His last known location was also pointing towards the same. He decided to proceed towards Dhruv’s house from his friend’s apartment. While driving he found himself on the same road bordering the forest area as his friend. Prayag too knew about the old homeless man and his friend did mention to him about the missing lady. He decided to drive slowly on that patch of road. The forest provided a good cover to hide a body if his friend had actually met that fate. It was again midnight.
He finally noticed something, tire marks going inside the forest. They were fresh and made by a car the same size that Vikrant had. He decided to follow them. It was too dark and the headlights along with the moonlight provided whatever little light they could provide. He followed the path the tires made. He went on inside the forest for fifteen minutes when finally he found Vikrant’s car. The car was unlocked with the keys still inside.
Prayag took the flashlight from his car and found three different footsteps going towards the entrance of a sewer that used to empty in a small canal at the edge of the forest. The sewer smelled exactly like the homeless man. He decided to enter it, fearing what he might find there. A few meters inside it and the smell of rotting flesh overpowered the smell of sewage. He walked a bit more and stumbled upon what felt like a human leg. He flashed his torch over it and almost puked at the sight of what he saw.
It was his friend’s severed leg, along with his head with no sign of his torso or other limbs. The head was damaged beyond recognition, but he identified Vikrant’s leg. He had marks from a burn injury on his left leg. He had foolishly tried to rescue his parents and friends from the orphanage fire that killed them. The forensics team arrived along with other cops and ACP Pawar who asked Prayag to take the rest of the night off and resume work in the morning.
To Prayag, in spite of his doubts, it seemed that Trisha had killed her husband after drugging him and some wild animal may have eaten the dead body. ACP Pawar, in his rush to solve the case and get Prayag involved in other urgent matters, had already filed charges against Trisha and her lover for her husband’s murder. Trisha never used to carry her phone when she used to meet Dhruv, so her last known location was not traceable. The three different footsteps found going inside the sewer coincidentally matched Trisha and Dhruv’s foot size.
After learning what Pawar had done, Prayag tried arguing in vain that the case needed more investigation. His senior disagreed. As they were arguing, an alert came in of a possible bomb in the city’s biggest market. Pawar and his team were asked to immediately reach the spot. While they were on their way, Prayag got a call from one of the doctors in the forensics team. He told him that the blood collected on the site was from three different people and none of them were Trisha or Dhruv.
That night:
Vikrant was now pursuing the old man inside the forest. Part of him wanted to go back, home and sleep, and part of him couldn’t let a potential murder suspect get away. The man was just a few meters ahead of him, his palms bloodied. He must have been aware that Vikrant was following him in his car. It was as if he was giving the cop a chase. The old man entered the sewer and Vikrant was forced to pursue him on foot. It was dark and eerie. He had never been to this side of the forest, especially so late and with no moonlight in the night sky. His flashlight too was running low on battery and illuminated only at one fourth its normal capacity. He left his keys in the car, not risking losing them in the dark. He noticed the footsteps, two distinct ones, one of them looked like a woman’s.
“Did the man kill the woman in the sewer? Was he hiding her body? Is she just hurt and the madman is hiding her here instead of taking her to a hospital? Where did the blood on his hands come from?”, Vikrant kept thinking.
He could hear the old man’s footsteps splashing the sewage water and decided to follow the sounds. His flashlight was flickering, too frail to fight the darkness of the rotten world he was walking inside. He was pretty much inside the sewage tunnel when he got a whiff of a terrible smell. It was the smell of flesh. He walked towards it, sniffing it in the air. The sound of the footsteps had stopped but the stench was getting stronger.
He then heard the old man, mumbling something, the same nonsensical stuff he murmured at the station, only this time it seemed like a chant. His torch was only able to cover a few meters ahead of him and in that faint light, he saw legs of a woman, lying down but moving as if someone was moving them. He thought he heard a shriek when the old man crept up behind him and pushed him. His flashlight went off while he fell.
“Was this a trap? Is the old man a serial killer? Is there someone else here?”, he thought to himself, scared, probing for his flashlight on the ground when he heard the old man murmuring.
“I don’t want to be food, so you are food.”, the man continued chanting.
Vikrant found the flashlight and switched it on. His heart felt like it froze after what he saw in those dark lights. It was devouring the flesh of the woman he entered the cave to search for. It was something, like human, but not human. Hairless, its skin was shining with sewage water, with thin and long limbs. Its fingers were sharp, like knife, like they were meant to slice flesh. The creature turned towards him. Vikrant tried getting up and stood up on his knees. Its chest was bloody and had spikes. The monster caressed his face with its sharp fingers as if taunting him. He saw the big razor-sharp teeth protruding out of its mouth.
Vikrant, with whatever courage was left in him, decided to look his fate in the eye. It had none.
