THE RAINBOW PROJECT : A Real Time Travel project by TESLA & EINSTEIN

THE MIDNIGHT CALL

 

Mumbai never sleeps. Neither does Ayan, or so it feels lately. The blaring of traffic, the neon lights flickering outside his window, and the incessant noise of a city bursting with life keeps him awake even after his late-night shift at the call center.

At 22, Ayan’s life feels like it’s on autopilot. He works the graveyard shift for a sprawling international telecom company in the heart of the city. His job? Handling irate customers from across the globe who need help with their internet or phone services. It’s a routine—clock in, field calls, try to resolve problems, clock out. Rinse and repeat.

Most nights, Ayan spends his downtime staring at the rows of cubicles, each occupied by weary-eyed workers tethered to their headsets. The office is a sterile place—fluorescent lights, stale coffee, and the hum of computers working as hard as the people they serve. His co-workers have their own stories, dramas, and secrets, but Ayan keeps mostly to himself. That changes the night he receives the first call.

It was past 3:00 a.m., during one of the rare lulls in the night when the phone lines quieted. Ayan’s personal phone buzzed on his desk, an unknown number flashing across the screen. He frowned, picking it up out of curiosity.

“Hello?” he answered, his voice cautious.

The reply came quickly, too quickly. “I’ve been watching you, Ayan.”

Ayan’s pulse quickened, his hand tightening around the phone. The voice was male, calm but unsettlingly direct. He scanned the room instinctively. His colleagues were busy with their own work. No one seemed to be paying attention to him.

“Who is this?” Ayan demanded, trying to sound authoritative.

“Closer than you think,” the voice said, ignoring his question. “I know everything about you. The route you take to work. What you had for dinner last night—biryani, wasn’t it? How long you’ve been sitting at your desk, staring at that clock, waiting for the shift to end.”

Ayan froze. His mind raced. His first instinct was that this had to be a prank. But there was no humor in the voice. No laughter. Just cold, clinical knowledge about his every move.

“I don’t know who you are,” Ayan snapped, trying to regain control of the conversation, “but you’re not scaring me.”

“I’m not trying to scare you. Not yet,” the voice replied, and then there was a click. The line went dead.

Ayan put the phone down slowly, his heart thumping in his chest. He looked around again, half-expecting someone nearby to start laughing and reveal it was all a joke. But no one did. His colleagues were too absorbed in their own worlds.

Ayan shook his head, convincing himself it had to be a prank. Some bored co-worker trying to liven up the night. He tried to shrug it off, but the unease stayed with him.

The next few nights passed uneventfully, but Ayan couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched. He started noticing little things—people glancing his way, hushed conversations whenever he entered the break room. His paranoia mounted until, a week later, at 3:00 a.m. sharp, his phone rang again.

This time, he hesitated before answering. But the curiosity, or perhaps the need for answers, got the better of him.

“Hello, Ayan,” the voice greeted him like an old friend. “How’s the shift tonight?”

Ayan’s grip on the phone tightened. “Who are you?”

“You know, your colleague Rahul has been lying to his wife about those late meetings. I wonder how she’d react if she found out.”

Ayan’s stomach turned. He knew Rahul. A family man, always talking about his kids. Could it be true? Before Ayan could respond, the voice continued.

“And Meera. She’s been falsifying her performance reports. Inflating the numbers to get that promotion she’s been bragging about. Funny, right?”

Ayan felt dizzy. He knew Meera too, ambitious but seemingly honest. The voice wasn’t just targeting him anymore; it was creeping into the lives of his co-workers.

“Stop this,” Ayan said, his voice barely steady. “Whatever game you’re playing, just stop.”

“This isn’t a game,” the voice replied softly. “You’ll see soon enough.”

And just like that, the line went dead again.

For days, Ayan couldn’t focus on his work. The caller had slipped into his head, nesting in his thoughts. His interactions with his colleagues became awkward, stilted. He couldn’t look at Rahul without wondering if the affair was real. Every time he saw Meera proudly talk about her achievements, he questioned whether it was all a lie. The walls were closing in, and Ayan felt trapped.

But nothing could prepare him for what happened next.

Three nights after the second call, one of Ayan’s colleagues, Amit, didn’t show up for work. No one thought much of it at first—people missed shifts all the time. But the next day, the news broke. Amit had been found dead in his apartment, the result of a supposed accident. According to the news reports, he had slipped and fallen in his bathroom, hitting his head on the edge of the sink. But Ayan didn’t believe it.

The voice had mentioned Amit two nights before, casually dropping that he had been involved in a hit-and-run that never got reported. The connection felt too strong to ignore. But how could a voice on the phone know so much? Ayan felt the paranoia gripping him tighter. The police ruled Amit’s death an accident, but Ayan couldn’t shake the feeling that someone—maybe even the caller—was responsible.

The calls continued, each time revealing more secrets about his co-workers. Ayan’s mind reeled with the weight of it all. He tried to talk to his colleagues, but each time he attempted to share what he knew, something stopped him. Fear. Guilt. Doubt. Who would believe him? The calls came from an untraceable number, and even the police had dismissed his concerns.

Soon, Ayan started doing something he never thought he’d do—he began spying on his colleagues. In his paranoia, he needed to know if the voice was telling the truth. He followed Rahul one evening after work, tracking him to a bar where he saw him meeting a woman who wasn’t his wife. The confirmation made Ayan’s blood run cold. The voice wasn’t lying.

As the days passed, Ayan’s obsession deepened. He started recording conversations, documenting every suspicious interaction. He even stayed late at the call center, combing through old reports and security logs. What he found only fueled his paranoia—years of similar complaints about mysterious calls, each ending with a death or disappearance.

The breaking point came when Ayan received the call that would change everything.

It was 3:00 a.m., just like every other night, but this time, the voice sounded different. Colder. More deliberate.

“You’ve been busy, Ayan,” it said, almost amused. “Following people. Watching them. Just like I’ve been watching you.”

Ayan felt his throat tighten. “Who are you?”

“I told you,” the voice replied, “I’m closer than you think. Much closer.”

Suddenly, the voice shifted, becoming unnervingly familiar. It was his own. Ayan froze, his mind struggling to process what was happening.

“I know your secret, Ayan,” the voice—his voice—continued. “Remember what you did when you were 17? That night you thought no one saw?”

Ayan’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t told anyone about that night. No one. The mistake he had buried deep, the guilt he had tried to forget. How could the caller possibly know?

“You’re no different from the others,” the voice whispered. “And now, it’s your turn.”

Ayan dropped the phone, his hands shaking uncontrollably. The truth slammed into him with brutal clarity—there was no caller. There had never been. The voice, the paranoia, the suspicions—it had all come from him. He had been unraveling, driven to madness by his own guilt, his own fears.

In the final moments, as Ayan stared at his phone in horror, the real twist became clear: He had been making the calls all along.

Ayan’s body trembled as the weight of realization pressed down on him. He couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. The voice on the other end of the phone—his voice—was like an echo from the darkest corners of his mind, forcing him to confront something he had buried deep within himself for years.

He staggered back, the phone slipping from his sweaty palm and clattering onto the cold office floor. His reflection stared back at him from the large glass window near his desk, but it wasn’t just him anymore. It was something darker, something fractured. He had been making the calls. He had been the one tormenting himself all along, playing a twisted psychological game as his mind unraveled under the pressure of his own guilt and paranoia.

The mistake from his past—the one he had pushed so far down he had almost convinced himself it never happened—surfaced in his memory like a rotting corpse dragged from the depths.

He was seventeen. It was a late night, much like this one. He had been driving his father’s car when he hit someone. The roads had been quiet, and no one had seen. In a panic, he had fled, leaving the victim behind. No one ever traced the accident back to him, and over time, he forced himself to forget. But his subconscious hadn’t. It had been gnawing away at him, feeding off the lies he told himself, poisoning his mind bit by bit.

Ayan staggered to the restroom, splashing cold water on his face, trying to clear his head, but the voice—his voice—echoed in his mind.

“You can’t run from this, Ayan. Not anymore.”

His phone rang again. It was as if it never stopped ringing now, like a buzzing reminder of his fractured reality. He didn’t want to answer, but his shaking hand reached for it nonetheless. The screen flashed, but the number was scrambled, unreadable—just like all the previous calls. He lifted it to his ear, his heart pounding in his chest.

“Ayan,” the voice said again, but this time there was no menace. It was full of eerie calm. “You’re next.”

His vision blurred, the walls of the office closing in on him as memories and nightmares collided. He could barely hold onto his grip on reality. He stumbled out of the restroom and into the open office space, hoping to find someone—anyone—to help. But it was past 3:00 a.m., and the office was nearly empty. His only company was the glow of computers and the droning hum of machinery.

Ayan’s head spun as he made his way to the break room, looking for water, for relief, for some kind of escape from the psychological horror that had been unleashed inside him. But then he froze, his blood turning to ice.

In the break room, illuminated by the dim overhead light, was his desk phone—the one he had been using to take calls all night. It was off the hook, the receiver dangling loosely, as if someone had just been speaking into it.

His hands trembled as he approached the phone, dread pooling in the pit of his stomach. The call logs on the screen blinked, showing a familiar pattern. Every call he had received… had been made from this very phone. His phone.

In a moment of sheer terror, Ayan realized the truth: He had been calling himself. Each and every night, he had unknowingly walked to this very phone, made the anonymous calls, then returned to his desk and answered them, all without conscious memory of his actions. His mind, fractured by guilt, had split in two—one part of him the caller, the other part the victim.

He clutched the edge of the desk, feeling the ground sway beneath him. His reflection stared back at him from the glass once more, but now he saw the broken man he truly was—haunted not by some outside force, but by his own mind.

A sudden noise snapped him out of his trance. Footsteps. He turned quickly, his eyes darting toward the entrance of the office. A figure stood there, silhouetted against the faint light from the hallway.

“Rahul?” Ayan called out weakly, his voice cracking, desperate for a lifeline, for some sort of explanation.

But the figure didn’t respond. It stepped closer, into the dim light, revealing its face. It was him. Ayan.

No—it couldn’t be. He blinked, but the figure remained. It was an exact replica of him, down to the last detail. His twin—his other self. His mind had manifested a version of him that had become the watcher, the caller, the punisher. The figure smiled, a twisted grin that sent chills down Ayan’s spine.

"You can’t run anymore," the other Ayan said in a voice that was identical to his own. "It’s time to pay for what you did."

In a moment of pure, soul-crushing terror, Ayan finally understood. The calls weren’t about his co-workers, his job, or even the mysterious deaths at the call center. They were always about him. The guilt that had festered inside him had created this nightmare, and now, it was claiming him.

The figure stepped forward again, raising a hand toward Ayan. The air around him seemed to grow colder as the doppelgänger whispered one final phrase: “You can’t hide from yourself.”

And just like that, the lights in the office flickered and went out, plunging Ayan into complete darkness.

The next morning, when the day shift arrived, they found Ayan’s desk empty, his phone hanging off the hook. His belongings were still there, but he was gone—vanished without a trace. His co-workers assumed he had walked off in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by stress.

But no one could explain why the phone at his desk continued to ring, night after night, at exactly 3:00 a.m., with no one on the other end of the line.