Eight Seconds Between Footsteps
Night had folded itself over the sleepy hill town of Marayoor, muffling its cardamom-scented air. In a hollow near the old forest check-post sat an abandoned government bungalow, once used by botanists who mapped the shola groves. Over thirty years the roof tiles had slipped into crooked smiles and the verandah planks had sprouted white mushrooms that glowed faintly after rain. Local tea pickers swore that the place breathed on misty evenings, but nobody bothered to prove or disprove that claim because the front door was chained shut with a rust-eaten padlock. Nobody, that is, until Amala reached the gate one September afternoon. She was a postgraduate researcher from Ernakulam, tasked with cataloguing archival field notes rumored to be languishing inside the bungalow. Those notes belonged to Dr Varghese, a vanished botanist whose last expedition never made it back to town. The department had sent three interns in the past decade to retrieve his materials, yet the gate had always def...