Rajesh Kapoor was craving comfort food. After a long day, he found himself scrolling through his favorite food delivery app, picking out dishes that warmed his soul. He barely registered the name of the delivery person, Aman Singh, whose face flashed on the screen along with a timer estimating the delivery time at 35 minutes. With a sigh of contentment, he hit “Place Order.”

As he sat waiting, a cool breeze swept through his living room. Rajesh glanced at his watch. The app showed Aman’s progress on a map, a small dot speeding through the city’s narrow roads. For some reason, Rajesh felt a pang of unease. He tried shaking it off as anticipation.

Just then, the delivery status read “10 minutes.” Curious, he watched the dot moving at a dangerously rapid pace. The icon was tearing through winding roads, zigzagging through junctions, and darting through red lights. Rajesh blinked. Was Aman in some sort of rush? He hoped the young man would be careful—no meal was worth risking one’s life over.

The countdown hit “5 minutes,” and he heard a distinct rapping at the door. Confused, Rajesh opened it to find Aman standing there, holding the food bag. The delivery timer still ticked away on his phone, showing Aman was somehow ahead of time. Rajesh felt a strange shiver as he took in the boy’s disheveled appearance. Aman’s face looked hollow, his eyes shadowed as if sleep had been an alien concept to him for days. The air around him was ice-cold, so much so that Rajesh could see his breath form in the dim hallway.

Aman silently handed over the food, giving a strange smile—a pale, lifeless twist of his lips that didn’t reach his eyes. Rajesh accepted the bag and muttered a thanks, his hand brushing against Aman’s. The skin was cold. Deathly cold.

“Are you okay, kid?” Rajesh asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Aman didn’t respond. He simply stared, expression blank, then turned and walked away without a word. Rajesh shut the door quickly, his heart racing, and checked the food bag in his hand. Everything was there, just as he had ordered. But something was wrong; he could feel it like an itch at the back of his mind.

As he set his food on the table, his phone buzzed. He picked it up, expecting some promotional notification, but the message displayed on his screen was chilling.

“Dear customers, we regret to inform you that one of our delivery personnel, Aman Singh, was involved in a tragic accident and lost his life on the way to his last delivery. We offer our deepest condolences to his family.”

Rajesh’s hand froze, his pulse spiking as the reality of the message sank in. He reread it, his brain trying to make sense of it. Aman Singh had died on the road? No, that couldn’t be true. Aman had just been at his door, handing over the food—right on time.

He looked at the food bag, suddenly filled with a deep, consuming dread. What had he seen? Who had he spoken to? He forced himself to take a deep breath, then walked to the front door, yanking it open and peering into the dark hallway. Empty. There was no sign of Aman or anyone else.

“Maybe I imagined it,” he muttered, his voice shaky. But something about that explanation didn’t sit right. With his heart hammering, he decided to check the security footage on his building’s surveillance system. He made his way downstairs to the security room, where he was lucky to find the guard.

“Can I see the footage for tonight?” Rajesh asked, barely concealing the urgency in his voice.

The guard raised an eyebrow but obliged, rewinding the footage to a few minutes before Aman’s supposed arrival. Together, they watched the screen, focusing on the front entrance and his floor’s hallway. Rajesh watched himself opening the door, reaching out to accept the bag. But there was no one standing in front of him. He was reaching into thin air.

“No… no, that can’t be right,” Rajesh whispered, feeling his stomach drop.

The guard looked at him, concern etched on his face. “Are you okay, sir?”

Rajesh couldn’t respond. He stumbled back to his apartment, locking the door behind him and looking at the food bag on the table as though it might bite him. A heavy sense of dread settled over him, thick and suffocating.

Later that night, Rajesh couldn’t sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Aman’s face, the cold, empty gaze, the chilling smile. Desperate for peace, he decided to call the food delivery company the next morning, hoping to find some rational explanation.

A polite customer service agent answered, her voice warm and welcoming. Rajesh recounted the strange incident, his voice trembling. “Please, just tell me… did someone else complete the delivery on Aman’s behalf?”

There was a pause. Then, the agent replied softly, “Sir, I’m afraid no one completed the delivery after Aman. The system shows the order as completed by him, but… he passed away in the accident. No one else was assigned.”

A wave of nausea rolled through Rajesh. “Then how…?”

“I’m not sure, sir,” she replied, her tone laced with discomfort. “Sometimes, strange things happen in our line of work, but we never interfere.”

After the call ended, Rajesh couldn’t bring himself to eat the food. He left the bag untouched, sealed like a cursed object. Days went by, and he couldn’t shake the feeling of dread. It clung to him, haunting his every step. Worse, he began noticing something unsettling.

Every evening around the same time, there was a knock on his door. And every evening, he would open it, half-expecting to see Aman’s vacant gaze staring back at him. But each time, there was only the empty hallway, silent and still. He started to dread nightfall, knowing the knock would come as sure as the sun setting.

Then one night, the knock came, louder, more insistent. Rajesh froze, heart pounding. Trembling, he approached the door and looked through the peephole. What he saw on the other side made his blood turn to ice.

Aman was standing there, his body twisted unnaturally, his eyes hollow and lifeless, the same vacant, deathly stare. He lifted one hand and rapped on the door, the sound echoing through the empty hallway. “Your order, sir…” Aman’s voice was a cold, hollow whisper.

Rajesh backed away, pressing his hands over his ears as the knocking grew louder, harder, relentless. It echoed through the apartment, reverberating through his mind, the steady drumbeat of death itself.

The next morning, neighbors found Rajesh’s apartment door ajar. Inside, they discovered the untouched food bag on the table and, lying cold and pale on the floor, Rajesh himself—eyes wide open in a frozen scream, his face forever marked by the horror of Aman’s final delivery.