Chapter Two: The Man in the Rain

The light, when she found it, turned out to be nothing at all.

It took Naina almost twenty minutes to work up the nerve to follow the yellow glow she had seen from outside, and when she finally did, moving room to room through the ground floor with her phone's torch cutting a thin white path ahead of her, she found only a small brass lamp on a side table in what must once have been a sitting room, its bulb still faintly warm, its switch flipped to on.

There was no one in the room. There was no one in the room beside it, or the dining room beyond that, its long table set with a fine grey coat of dust, or the kitchen at the back, where a single steel cup sat upside down on the drying rack as if someone had washed it and left it there that morning and not, as logic demanded, some weeks or months ago.

She told herself the lamp had simply never been switched off. Old wiring, Suraj had said, playing tricks. She told herself the smell of smoke was old smoke, trapped in the walls the way old smells get trapped in old houses, and that she had imagined it growing fresher the longer she stood in the doorway.

She did not go upstairs that first night.

She slept, or attempted to, on a narrow bed in a ground floor room that still held a faint trace of someone else's talcum powder, with the door propped shut by a chair and the rain going on and on above her like something with a great deal to say and no intention of finishing.