The message appeared at 3:17 AM, lit up against the cracked screen of Mira’s phone. No contact name. No profile picture. Just five words typed with surgical precision:
“I have the video proof.”
Proof of what?
Her hands trembled. The silence in her apartment suddenly rang loud, as if something unseen had just entered with the message. She looked toward the window. The curtains swayed though the air was still.
She hadn’t left the apartment in days. Not since Neha’s funeral. Not since the police had ruled her sister’s death a suicide. Not since she had stood by her grave, tongue dry, guilt clinging to her ribs like vines.
But now this.
Someone knew.
The next message came an hour later:
“You lied at her funeral’”
She dropped the phone. It skittered under the couch. But she could still hear the vibration—buzzing, persistent, like a fly crawling under her skin.
She barely slept that night. At dawn, she found a printed envelope taped to her door.
No postage.
Just her name.
And inside, a still image.
A rooftop.
Two figures.
One at the edge.
Her.
And Neha.
The grain of the image looked like CCTV, but she had checked, there were no cameras on the rooftop. None. She had made sure.
Mira stuffed the photo in her coat pocket and ran. Out of the building, down the alley. The air buzzed louder now. Every person she passed looked too long. Every shadow stretched too far.
At the metro station, she saw her.
Neha.
At the other end of the platform.
Mira shouted. No one turned. The figure boarded a train and vanished. Her hair, the same jet black braid Neha always wore. The same red scarf from the night she died….
Mira didn’t go home that night. She followed the shadows instead. She walked until her feet blistered, until the city dimmed into silence. She saw signs.
A flickering billboard:
‘Guilt is a loop’
A street mural:
Neha’s face…….
She stared until someone shouted at her. She ran. She didn’t stop until she collapsed in a rusted playground behind her childhood school.
That’s where the voice first spoke.
“You always wanted her gone,” it hissed.
She turned. No one. Just a swing creaking slowly, gently, back and forth.
At sunrise, she found a new phone in her coat. Not hers. Sleek. Locked. Only one message visible on the screen:
“Come to where it ended.”
Mira returned to the rooftop. Her shoes slipped on the dew-slick concrete. The wind here always sounded like whispers. And now, a figure stood near the edge.
Neha again. Her scarf flapping. Still. Waiting.
Mira screamed, ran forward. But it wasn’t Neha.
It was a mannequin.
Its face was painted crudely to resemble her sister’s.
In its hand, a small USB.
Taped to its chest, a note:
“Confess or we show the world’
She plugged the USB into a library computer an hour later. The video showed the rooftop again. Her and Neha. The fight. The push.
Mira’s own face. Twisted with fury.
She slammed the laptop shut.
But when she looked again:
Nothing.
No USB in her pocket.
No mannequin.
No note.
~That evening ~
The police station smelled of steel and stale paper. Mira burst in, shouting. Ranting. She demanded to speak to an officer. Told them everything. About the video. The mannequin. The messages. Neha’s ghost.
They looked at her with a mixture of pity and caution.
“Ma’am,” the officer said slowly, “Your sister Neha Maheer… she died ten years ago. Hit by a drunk driver.”
“No. No..she fell. I was there. We fought. I pushed her!” Mira replied, still trembling and crying.
“Your file says you were 14 when she died. You were in therapy for years. You were diagnosed with severe dissociative psychosis. Do you remember any of that?” The officer replied softly.
Mira backed away. The lights buzzed overhead. Her ears rang.
“No,” she whispered. “She… she sent me the messages.” Mira said with confused tone.
“We checked your phone. There’s nothing on it. No calls. No texts. Just… these.”
He handed her a sheet of paper.
Pages and pages of scribbled messages. All in Mira’s handwriting. All sent to herself.
And at the top of each one:
‘I have the video proof.’’
“I have the video proof.”
She was placed under psychiatric hold later that evening.In the padded quiet of her new room, Mira stared at the wall.
Sometimes, she saw Neha’s face in the patterns of the ceiling tiles.
Sometimes, she swore the doctors were whispering secrets into their stethoscopes.
Once, she woke up to find her pillow soaked—not in sweat, but red.
She still writes messages every day. On the walls. On her arms. On scraps of torn paper.
The nurses don’t stop her. They read them, sometimes.And they always say the same thing:
An unexpected message changed everything’
I have the video proof.
Back story: when Neha died, Mira’s parents never forgave themselves for it and never forgave Neha either.
Well because :
That very morning, she had an argument with Neha in which she very bluntly said: “I wish you were dead.”
Maybe that’s what haunts her?
Or maybe because Neha was the good child, the one without trauma, the one who listened.
But there is no video.
No sender.
No sister.
Just Mira.
React
