Chapter 7: It's In Us

Chapter 7: It's In Us

Rohan didn't remember driving home from Zoya's loft. He found himself standing in the middle of his own living room, the key still in the lock, his body trembling with a violent, uncontrollable ague. The image from the mirror shard was burned onto the back of his eyelids: his own face, twisted into a triumphant, predatory grin. It was the face of the hunter, and he was the last prey left on the board.

He tore through his apartment, a man possessed. Every reflective surface was an enemy. He turned the TV to the wall, threw a towel over his dark laptop screen, and avoided the bathroom mirror as if it were coated in poison. He was trapped in a prison of his own making, where catching his own eye could mean staring into the face of pure malevolence.

The group chat was a digital tombstone, a list of names he was too terrified to even look at. Aman. Zoya. Sneha. Kunal. The four of them were gone, consumed by their personalized horrors. Only Pranav remained a question mark, a silent icon of absence since the first night. Rohan clung to that silence, twisting it into a desperate, pathetic sliver of hope. Maybe Pranav had just run. Maybe he’d had the sense to get on a train and never look back. Maybe he was the smart one.

The ring of his phone was so sudden and sharp it made him cry out. He fumbled for it, his heart seizing in his chest. It was an unknown number. He answered with a shaking hand, a part of him praying it was one of them, using a stranger's phone.

"Hello? Is this Rohan Verma?" The voice was flat, professional, devoid of emotion.

"Yes. Who is this?"

"This is Officer Das from the Jayanagar Police Station. I'm calling regarding a friend of yours, Mr. Pranav Joshi."

Rohan’s blood turned to ice. "Pranav? Is he okay? Did you find him?"

There was a clinical pause on the other end of the line. "Sir, I'm afraid I have some bad news. We found Mr. Joshi this morning. He took his own life."

The words didn't register at first. They were just sounds, meaningless syllables. Then they crashed down on him, a physical weight that buckled his knees. He sank to the floor, the phone still pressed to his ear. "No... No, that's not possible."

"I'm very sorry for your loss, sir," the officer continued, his voice softened by rote sympathy. "We found your number in his recent calls. He left a note. It was... brief. We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on it."

Rohan could barely form words. "A note? What did it say?"

Another pause. The officer cleared his throat. "It said, 'I have to go back. He's saving me a seat. I want to go back under the bed.'"

A sound escaped Rohan’s throat, a raw, strangled gasp of understanding. Under the bed. The words echoed with the memory of that greasy, man-shaped shadow scuttling into the darkness of Aman's bedroom. Pranav’s hysterical sobbing that night hadn't just been fear. It had been a summons. The entity hadn't just scared him; it had called to him, offered him a place in its nest of shadows. Suicide wasn't the end. It was the entry fee.

"Sir? Are you there?"

Rohan couldn't answer. He ended the call, the phone slipping from his numb fingers and clattering to the floor.

He was the last one.

The full weight of it settled on him, a crushing, suffocating certainty. He was completely and utterly alone. The group, his friends, his entire social world, had been systematically dismantled and consumed in less than forty-eight hours. The entity had been methodical, a predator picking off the weakest members of the herd first. Now, only he remained. The final target.

That night, sleep was an impossibility. He sat in the dark, huddled in a corner of his living room, watching the shadows twist and writhe. He tasted phantom brackish water in his mouth. He heard the faint, imaginary scritch-scrape of fingernails on metal. He smelled rust and rot and oily hair on the clean air. The haunting was no longer an external event. It was a condition of his own senses. He was marinating in it.

His phone buzzed on the floor where he’d dropped it, the screen casting a pale, ghostly light. He crawled toward it, his heart hammering. It was a notification. A video file.

From Aman.

A jolt of adrenaline, hot and sharp, shot through him. Aman was alive. He was trying to make contact. Rohan’s fingers trembled as he tapped the screen, the video player opening.

The footage was a nightmare.

It was shot on a phone camera, shaky and distorted, the image tearing and glitching every few seconds. It was filmed inside Apartment 5B. The place looked desecrated. The furniture was overturned, the walls streaked with the same black, weeping substance Rohan had seen at Zoya’s. The air was thick with a visible haze, like smoke or spores.

Aman was there, in the center of the frame. He looked like he had been awake for a week. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollowed out and rimmed with black. He was crying, tears carving clean paths through the grime on his cheeks. He wasn't looking at the camera. He was screaming at something off-screen, something in the direction of the bedroom.

"Get out of my head!" he shrieked, his voice raw and broken. "Leave me alone! The mug is empty! I smashed it! You're not welcome here!" His words were a desperate, useless mantra against the encroaching dark.

Then, his frantic gaze snapped to the camera, to Rohan. The screaming stopped. A terrifying lucidity entered his eyes, a moment of pure, horrifying clarity amidst the madness.

"Rohan..." he gasped, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. He stumbled closer to the camera, his face filling the glitching screen. "Rohan, listen to me... It's not the apartment. It was never just the apartment."

He leaned in so close Rohan could see the terror swirling in his pupils, see the reflection of the ruined room behind him. He looked over his shoulder, as if checking for the thing he'd been screaming at, then turned back, his voice a bare, urgent whisper that carried all the weight of a final testament.

"It's in us."

The moment the words left his lips, his eyes widened in sudden, abject terror at something behind the camera. He was yanked backwards, a violent, instantaneous motion, as if hooked by an invisible rope. He let out a single, strangled cry.

The phone tumbled from his grip, the camera spinning wildly, capturing a final, nauseating glimpse of the dark bedroom doorway before crashing to the floor. The screen showed the dirty floorboards for a second, then filled with a wave of digital static.

The video ended.

Rohan stared at his phone, his mind a silent, screaming void. It's in us. The words reconfigured everything. It wasn't a haunting. It was a parasite. It wasn't tied to a place. It was a contagion they had carried out of that apartment with them. It had nested inside Sneha, inside Kunal, inside Zoya's perception, and driven Pranav to seek refuge in its embrace.

He looked at the message details. The video file was still there, but Aman’s name beside it flickered. Then, it dissolved into a string of random, corrupted characters before vanishing completely. He frantically scrolled to his contacts.

Aman’s entry was gone. Wiped clean from his phone as if he had never existed. He had been consumed, and the entity had tidied up after itself, erasing him from the digital world.

Rohan was left alone in the dark, the silence of his apartment absolute. He was the sole survivor and the chronicler of the horror. And he was its final, inevitable victim. The hunt was over. The feast was about to begin.