Chapter 5: The Hair in the Drain

Chapter 5: The Hair in the Drain

Rohan drove with the windows down, the cold night air doing little to scour the images from his mind. The glistening, pulsating sac on Sneha’s bed. The eternal, silent scream locked in her eyes. He had left her parents with a mumbled, useless apology, fleeing before they could ask him questions he couldn't possibly answer. What could he say? Your daughter was visited by a parasitic shadow entity that feeds on sanity and left a biological horror-token under her pillow?

He gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. The entity wasn't just haunting them; it was curating their torment. Aman, the proud host, was trapped in his own corrupted fortress. Sneha, bright and talkative, had her voice stolen. He had been forced to taste its essence, that foul, brackish water a violation of his senses. The attacks were intimate. Personal. They were trophies taken by a predator.

His phone, resting on the passenger seat, remained ominously silent. No word from Aman, Zoya, or Pranav. Only Kunal was left in the shrinking circle of the unaccounted for. Rohan’s thumbs flew across the screen in a desperate text barrage.

Rohan: Kunal, ANSWER ME. You need to get out of your apartment. Go somewhere public. A hotel. Anything. Don't be alone. Rohan: KUNAL. PLEASE.

He was about to try calling for the tenth time when his phone screen lit up. It was Kunal. Relief washed over him, so potent it left him light-headed. He snatched the phone and answered.

"Kunal! Thank God! Are you okay?"

The sound that came through the speaker was not a voice. It was a wet, violent retching, a terrible, guttural sound of a body trying to expel something that wouldn't come out. It was followed by a choked, desperate gasp for air.

"Kunal? What's wrong? What's happening?" Rohan yelled, his voice cracking with panic.

"Rohan..." Kunal’s voice was a ragged whisper, shredded by the force of his heaving. "Help... me..." Another wave of violent gagging erupted, punctuated by a raw, agonized sob. "It's... it's in me..."

"What is? Kunal, talk to me!" Rohan slammed his foot on the accelerator, weaving through late-night traffic, his destination now seared into his mind.

"The hair..." Kunal choked out between retches. "Oh god, Rohan, the hair..."

The line was filled with the sounds of his friend's suffering. Rohan could hear something hitting the porcelain of a toilet bowl, a wet, heavy slap that didn't sound like liquid. He stayed on the line, listening to the horrifying sounds, whispering useless words of encouragement until he screeched to a halt in front of Kunal's apartment building. He didn't bother finding a proper parking spot, leaving the car half on the curb.

"I'm here, Kunal! I'm coming up!" he shouted into the phone before hanging up and sprinting into the lobby.

He took the stairs two at a time, his own lungs burning, his mind a whirlwind of terror. The hair. The long, stringy, oily black hair of the figure in the parking lot. The image superimposed itself over Kunal’s agonized sounds, and a new, more visceral layer of horror presented itself. The entity wasn’t just leaving tokens behind anymore. It was putting parts of itself inside them.

Kunal’s apartment door was unlocked. Rohan burst in to find the living room a wreck. Cushions were torn from the couch, a lamp was overturned, and a framed poster was shattered on the floor, as if Kunal had been thrashing in a violent fit. The retching sounds led him to the bathroom.

The scene was far worse than anything he could have imagined.

Kunal was on his knees, hunched over the toilet, his body convulsing in violent spasms. His face, reflected in the mirror, was streaked with tears and sweat, his eyes bloodshot and wild with terror. He coughed, a deep, rattling cough, and leaned over the bowl, spitting.

Rohan’s stomach turned. Lying in the toilet bowl, floating in the clean water, were thick, sickening clumps of wet, black hair. It was impossibly long and greasy, coiled like dead snakes. It was the exact same oily, stringy hair he’d seen on the hunched figure in the parking lot. He was vomiting pieces of the Seventh Guest.

"Kunal," Rohan breathed, rushing forward and grabbing his friend's trembling shoulders.

Kunal flinched, looking up at him with eyes that were drowning in horror. "I can't stop it," he rasped, his throat raw. "It just... keeps coming."

As if on cue, his body seized again. He turned back to the toilet and heaved, a thick, ropey strand of the black hair, glistening and impossibly long, dangling from his lips before falling with a soft splash into the water below. He collapsed back against the wall, sobbing and shivering, a man utterly broken by a biological invasion he couldn't comprehend.

"I called a doctor," he whimpered, his gaze unfocused. "An ambulance came. They did an endoscopy... X-rays... they found nothing. Nothing! They said it was psychosomatic. They gave me a sedative and told me to get some rest." He let out a laugh that was more like a scream. "They think I'm crazy."

Rohan’s blood went cold. Of course they found nothing. A doctor's instruments couldn't detect a reality-bending parasite. The entity was playing by its own grotesque rules, rewriting their biology at will. He knelt beside his friend, trying to offer some useless comfort, his hand on Kunal's shaking back. He felt helpless, a spectator to his friend's defilement.

He handed Kunal a glass of water, and as Kunal sipped it with trembling hands, a new sound entered the small, sterile space.

It was faint at first, easily mistaken for the hum of the building's pipes or the distant rumble of traffic. A soft, rhythmic friction.

Scritch. Scritch. Scrape.

Rohan froze, his head tilting. "Did you hear that?"

Kunal stopped drinking, his eyes widening. He nodded slowly, his terror finding a new, immediate focus.

The sound was coming from below them. From inside the bathroom itself.

Scritch... scrape... scritch.

It was a dry, insistent sound. The sound of fingernails—or something harder—clawing against metal. Rohan’s gaze was drawn downwards, to the small, circular chrome grate of the drain in the center of the tiled floor.

The sound was coming from there. From deep within the pipes.

Rohan leaned closer, his ear hovering over the drain, his breath held tight in his chest. The sound became sharper, more distinct. It wasn't random. It was a desperate, rhythmic scratching. The sound of something trying to claw its way up from the filth and darkness below. Something trying to get out.

A sudden, foul smell, the scent of rot and rust and damp, greasy hair, wafted up from the small holes in the grate. The same smell that had clung to the larval sac. The same smell that had tainted the black water in his sink.

He looked up at Kunal. His friend’s face was a mask of pure, unadulterated horror. The vomiting had stopped. The shivering had ceased. All his focus was now on that small metal circle on the floor.

The hair wasn't materializing from nothing. It wasn't a psychosomatic illusion. It had a source. And that source was down there, in the plumbing of the building, a hidden network connecting them all. It had pushed a part of itself up into Kunal, and now, it sounded like it was trying to claw its way back up to retrieve it. Or perhaps, to join it.

The scratching grew louder, more frantic.

SCRITCH. SCRAPE. SCRITCH-SCRITCH-SCRAPE.

It was close. So horrifyingly close. Just a few feet of pipe and a thin metal grate separating them from the thing that was tearing their lives, and their bodies, apart.