The Silverbrook Resort sat at the edge of a hill town nobody really remembered the name of. That was the point, the brochure said. “Come to forget.”

Rajan had booked the trip alone.

5 days. No calls, no emails, no explanations to anyone. Just him, the fresh mountain air, and a swimming pool that looked, in the photos, like a rectangle of melted sky.

He arrived on Monday, 3^rd Feb 2025.

He entered the lobby and found it a bit strange that even though the lobby was quite spacious, nothing much was kept to beautify the space. Limited furniture, one painting and a large cactus plant placed right behind the front office. He found an odd stillness in the air maybe because there was no lobby-music and since it was a summer afternoon, no birds chirping either.

The receptionist, a woman, in late 40s maybe, with very still eyes, handed him a key card and said, “You’re in Room 214. The pool closes at nine.”

She continued, “Your room is booked until, 7-Feb-25 Friday”

Rajan – “Yes, but I’ll decide by Thursday if I want to extend my stay,” Rajan replied.

She paused. “Most guests don’t stay past Friday.”

He found her response a bit weird, but he didn’t ask what she meant. Maybe he was too tired to ask anything.

The pool was everything the photo promised. Cool and blue and silent in the mornings, before the other guests trickled out. Rajan could swim forty laps before the breakfast; something he hadn’t done since college. The water had a way of pressing thought out of him. He liked that.

On his second morning, he noticed a man.

He was sitting on a poolside chair, dark blue trousers, a mandarin-collared white shirt; watching Rajan swim. Not casually watching. “Tracking”. His eyes moved with each lap.

When Rajan climbed out, the man stood and walked over with the confidence of someone who had never been told to wait.

“You swim like you’re running from something,” the man said. He smiled when he said it, which made it worse somehow.

He introduced himself as Feroz, a tailor employed part-time at the resort. He also ran a small shop in the town about 500 m away from the resort. He came to the pool every morning, he mentioned, but he never swam. “The water and I have an understanding,” he said. “I don’t enter it. It doesn’t pull me in.”

Rajan laughed. Feroz did not.

By Thursday, they had fallen into a strange routine. Breakfast together. Long walks along the ridge. Feroz talked, and Rajan listened. Feroz had a way of speaking about other people, the guests, the staff, strangers he would spot from a distance as though he had read their entire lives in a single glance.

“That couple at Table 6,” Feroz said one morning, nodding across the dining room. “They’re not here on holiday. They’re deciding something. Watch how they don’t look at the menu. People who are distracted generally don’t look at the menu.”

Rajan looked. He couldn’t tell if Feroz was right or if he simply wanted him to be.

That evening, Feroz invited him to his shop in town. “I want to make you something,” he said. “Consider it a gift. I make one for every guest I find interesting.”

The shop was narrow and warm, walls lined with rolls of fabric in every shade. Feroz moved around Rajan with a measuring tape, calling out numbers to himself that he never wrote down.

“You have uneven shoulders,” Feroz said quietly. “Left sits higher. Old injury?”

“Football,” Rajan said. “Years ago. College team. I took a fall.”

Feroz nodded slowly, as if this explained something larger than a shoulder.

On a shelf behind the cutting table, Rajan noticed a row of framed photographs. Men, mostly. Standing exactly where Rajan was standing now, in the middle of that small shop, being measured. Some were smiling. Some were not.

“Old customers?” Rajan asked.

Feroz looked at the photographs for a moment longer than felt natural. “Interesting guests,” he said. “Like I told you.”

Thursday morning, Rajan went to the front desk to extend his stay by two days. The same receptionist was there. When he gave his name, something shifted in her expression; not alarm exactly, but a kind of careful attention.

“I would like to extend my stay until Sunday.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but stopped. She bit her upper lip for a second before saying, “I am sure you liked our hospitality.”

“I’m not quite sure about the hospitality,” Rajan said, “but I have made a good friend in Feroz.”

While she was typing something, she suddenly stopped. “Did you say Feroz?”

She looked at him directly. “Mr. Rajan Singh. When did you meet him exactly?” in a changed tone.

“Wednesday. At the pool.”

She stopped typing. “Sir, are you sure”

“I even visited his shop, right past the food truck.”

“Sir, the tailor’s shop in town has been closed for renovation since 20^th of last month. There’s no one working there.”

Rajan felt the sentence land somewhere strange in his chest. “I was there last night. He measured me. I saw the shop, I saw Fe—”

“Which shop did you go to Mr. Singh?”

He described it. The narrow entrance. The rolls of fabric. The photographs on the shelf.

The receptionist, after a few keystrokes on the keyboard, turned her monitor to face him. On it, was a local news article, dated 25-Jan-2023. The headline read:

TAILOR FOUND DEAD IN HILLSIDE SHOP. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED.

The photograph in the article showed a man he recognised.

Rajan’s mouth went dry. “That’s not possible,” he said. “I had breakfast with him. I spoke to him.”

“Many guests report seeing him,” she said, “Particularly guests who book alone.”

Rajan went back to his room and sat on the bed for a long time. His mind kept returning to the photographs on the shelf. People on the way to the shop, him being measured. He tried to remember their faces. Tried to remember if any of them looked like they knew what was coming.

Then he remembered something else.

The night before, when he had stood in the shop and Feroz had circled him with the measuring tape Rajan had checked his phone. He had taken a photograph of a roll of fabric he liked, thinking he might ask for the name of the material.

He opened his photos now.

There was the fabric. Rust-red, with a fine check pattern.

But in the background, where Feroz had been standing, there was only a measuring tape.

Hanging in the air.

By itself.

Rajan checked out that afternoon itself, a day early. He drove down the hill without stopping. He didn’t even look in the rearview mirror. Not once.

He only allowed himself one thought, and he repeated it like a small, necessary prayer:

The measuring tape was hanging from a hook. There was a hook on the wall. I just didn’t notice the hook.

He told himself this all the way home.

He almost believed it.

But that evening, when he pulled his jacket from his bag, something fell on the floor.

A folded slip of paper. The kind tailors use.

On it, in neat handwriting, were his measurements.

And below them, a single line:

Come back when you’re ready for the fitting.