Fire does not roar the way movies promise. Up close, it breathes.

It sucks oxygen out of a hallway and replaces it with a hot, metallic taste that makes every inhale feel like swallowing pennies. It turns stairwells into chimneys. It hides under doorframes like a living thing waiting to lick your ankles.

Rohan Mehta knew that, because he was the kind of firefighter who didn’t talk about fear. He treated it like a tool. A crowbar. A hose. Something you held properly, something you respected, something you never pretended wasn’t there.

The night he fell, Mumbai was wrapped in late-monsoon humidity, the kind that makes shirts cling to skin before the day even begins. The call came in just before midnight: an old commercial building near Grant Road, nine floors, illegal partitions, cheap wiring, panic stacked on panic. When his unit arrived, smoke was already spilling from windows like black cloth being shaken out.

People screamed from balconies.

Rohan went in anyway.

He climbed past the third floor where the heat began to turn skin into a warning system. Past the fifth where visibility dropped into gray soup. Past the seventh where the radio crackled with overlapping voices, command and chaos stepping on each other’s sentences.

A child’s cry cut through it.

One small sound, impossibly thin, like someone tapping a spoon on glass in a room full of drums.

Rohan found the child behind a toppled file cabinet, curled into a ball, eyes wide with the frozen logic of terror. He wrapped the boy in his own jacket, pinned the child’s face against his shoulder, and started back toward the stairwell.

That was when the floor gave up.

Not dramatically. Not with a cinematic groan. Just a sharp, final crack that sounded like a bone snapping in the dark. The concrete under his boots tilted, and gravity, patient as always, collected its debt.

Rohan fell three stories.

His helmet struck a beam. His body hit a broken landing. His head collided with the edge of a staircase and then, for a moment, nothing had shape. There was only the feeling of falling inside his own skull.

When he woke, he did not wake.

He opened his eyes to a world without doors.

Chapter 1: A Room That Would Not Let Go

Shanti Memorial Hospital was not the kind of place that looked haunted.

It was too busy for ghosts… full story comment below…