Niladri Ghosh
One
The snow-capped peaks of the lower Himalayas glittered like shattered glass under a late October sun as the authors began arriving one by one at The Elmswood Literary Retreat, a secluded luxury property perched above the sleepy town of Mashobra. Surrounded by deodar forests and mountain silence, the Elmswood looked like it had stepped out of a Wes Anderson film—high ceilings, golden oak floors, art-deco lamps, and fireplaces that crackled with designer flame logs. It was Maaya Kapoor who arrived first, stepping out of her chauffeur-driven SUV in a cream pashmina and oversized sunglasses that didn’t quite hide the judgement in her eyes. She took in the vintage brass signage and muttered, “Colonial nostalgia with curated oxygen. Nice.” Close behind her was Rohan Nair, the self-published storm in a teacup, dragging three suitcases full of signed first editions of his own work and an enormous portable scanner, which he claimed could turn any surface into a QR code billboard. They were welcomed by Nima, the no-nonsense retreat manager, and directed to their individual suites—each named after a literary legend. The Agatha Christie suite had gone to Evelyn Grange, naturally, who breezed in shortly after, dressed like she had just stepped out of a 1930s murder mystery herself. By late afternoon, the remaining seven writers had trickled in, each leaving a distinctive imprint in the foyer—Vikram Bhagat’s cologne, Tara Mehta’s BTS stickers on her phone case, Farah Qureshi’s tote bag that said “Justice is Served Warm,” and Imran Bashir’s scowl at the sight of complimentary scented candles. The last to arrive was Rajiv Sinha, who refused help with his bag, checked the Wi-Fi strength in every corner of the property, and then offered unsolicited opinions on the lighting. As the authors settled in with complimentary cider and monogrammed notepads, they were handed their “collaborative challenge”—to co-write a mystery novella titled The Killer Among Us, with a planned plot reveal each day over dinner. The idea was that each author would write a chapter, but as Evelyn dryly noted, “It’s not just a writing exercise—it’s an exercise in diplomacy, sabotage, and caffeine.”
Dinner that evening was a gloved affair in the glass conservatory, where the chefs had gone overboard with beetroot foam and Himalayan salt risottos. The writers, seated in alphabetical order, made polite conversation with blades underneath. Farah praised Tara’s last book but added how “refreshing it is to see teen fiction with punctuation,” while Tara giggled and called Farah “adorably vintage.” Imran interrogated the menu like it was a crime scene, asking for the farm source of the mushrooms, and Vikram live-streamed a selfie with Ananya in the background, misnaming her book as The Monk Who Metaphored His Ferrari. Ananya glared at him like he was an incorrectly used semicolon. After dessert (a suspiciously literary soufflé titled “Death by Chocolate, Literally”), the writers retired to the library for their first group session. There, under the stained-glass dome, the project officially began. Names were drawn from a velvet pouch to determine writing order: Maaya would begin the opening chapter, followed by Vikram, then Ananya, and so on. Some groaned theatrically, others smirked like they’d just drawn the Ace of Spades. Before bed, they each received a mysterious envelope containing a “creative prompt” meant to inspire tension in their chapter. No one knew who had written the prompts—but Evelyn swore the handwriting in hers looked disturbingly like Rajiv’s. That night, the retreat slept under snowfall and sentence drafts, each mind buzzing with plot twists, passive-aggressive compliments, and one shared question none voiced aloud yet: Who would try to outshine whom?
But not all minds were at peace. Somewhere in the dead of night, under the soft hum of vintage heaters and muffled owls, someone moved through the corridor like a misplaced semicolon—quiet, easily missed, but significant in meaning. A door clicked. A mug was carried. A folder changed hands. At exactly 3:13 AM, the antique grandfather clock in the hallway chimed, and a faint cough echoed down the staircase. By morning, the sun streamed onto a gathering storm. The authors met for breakfast at 9 AM sharp—except for one. Rajiv Sinha’s chair sat empty, his signature pen tucked into his napkin holder like a loaded gun. After a few dismissive jokes about “late risers and literary hangovers,” Nima was sent to check. Ten minutes later, she returned, pale-faced, holding a single manuscript page with shaking fingers. The page was stained in a dark brownish ring, and scrawled across the top in slanted, aggressive cursive was the title: The Killer Among Us. Rajiv was found in the armchair of his suite, lifeless, with a cup of tea untouched on the table, and a faint almond scent lingering in the air. Farah dropped her knitting needles. Ananya muttered, “No one writes irony like Rajiv did.” And Evelyn, folding her arms, whispered, “We’re not just writing the mystery anymore, are we?”
Two
The news of Rajiv Sinha’s death rippled through Elmswood Retreat with the chill of a Himalayan wind slipping through an open window. By noon, the library was no longer a space for quiet contemplation but an impromptu war room of whispers, accusations, and hastily brewed theories. Nima had already informed the local authorities, but with the nearest police outpost down in Shimla and the mountain road blocked by a fresh avalanche warning, help wouldn’t arrive till the next morning. That left the rest of the authors alone—eight potential suspects and one increasingly unhinged Tara Mehta who had already livestreamed a blurry Instagram story captioned: “Plot twist IRL. Pray for Rajiv. Killer vibes everywhere. #TrueCrimeMood.” Imran was the first to break the false civility, standing by the fireplace and declaring that the scene screamed “professional poisoning,” citing the almondy scent as a textbook sign of cyanide. Maaya clutched her tea a little tighter at that, while Farah blanched and backed away from the teapot like it was a bomb. Evelyn, calm as a comma, insisted everyone write down what they remembered from the night before—what time they slept, who they saw, what they ate, and more importantly, what chapter prompt they received. “We are writers,” she said, “and if we can’t write our own alibis clearly, then we deserve to be in a poorly edited prison.”
It was Tara who pointed out the first eerie detail. She remembered Rajiv grumbling during dinner that the story prompts were “juvenile,” and that someone should “teach the young ones what real plotting looks like.” Later, she had seen him take a solitary walk near the pine garden with a leather folder under his arm. That folder was now missing from his suite. Ananya, naturally skeptical, said the prompts were part of the game, but Vikram jumped in, claiming he never got one at all. “Mine was blank,” he said, waving an envelope, “which is totally sus, right?” Evelyn raised an eyebrow. “Blank like your protagonist?” Rohan, meanwhile, had scanned all eight envelopes into his portable scanner and was already running a keyword analysis. “If this is part of the game,” he muttered, “then someone just turned it into a deadly ARG.” The group examined Rajiv’s manuscript page again. It wasn’t just a title—it was the beginning of a scene, written hastily and trailing off mid-sentence. It began with: “The killer writes with poison, not pen ink. Their words are death—dripped slowly, with a smile…” Farah shuddered. “That sounds like something from my third book!” And that’s when the second realization hit—the murder method. It wasn’t just familiar. It was directly lifted from the climax of Farah’s A Cozy Corpse, where the detective kills the villain with a cyanide-laced tea and a typewritten confession. Silence fell like a dropped bookmark. “Are we saying,” Maaya asked coldly, “that someone is copying our own plots… to kill us?”
A new fear took root in the room. If Rajiv was murdered using a scene from a fellow author’s book, it meant one of them had studied the others’ work deeply enough to mimic it—and had planned the attack to frame someone. The writers, once bickering over metaphors and page views, were now characters in a plot none had outlined. Imran began documenting the scene on his voice recorder, pressing others for inconsistencies. Evelyn started mapping connections between books and personalities, while Farah locked herself in her suite and sobbed into her cat-embroidered pillow. Ananya, in a quieter panic, reread her own books to see if they contained any methods that could be used next. Tara filmed everything, delighted and terrified in equal measure, while Rohan updated his blog with a cryptic post: “One author down. Nine left. A plot writes itself.” That night, no one touched the tea. Every room bolted its doors. And in the silent dining hall, beneath a painting of a snowy mountain, someone typed alone on an old laptop with rubber gloves—composing Chapter Two of The Killer Among Us, line by line, just as the prompt had predicted. Because in the story they thought they were writing together, someone else had already written the ending.
Three
By sunrise, a heavy mist had rolled in, swallowing the mountain view and replacing it with an oppressive wall of white. It was as if the outside world had decided to hide itself while the drama within Elmswood unfolded. At breakfast—now reduced to dry toast, instant coffee, and collective distrust—Evelyn tapped a silver spoon against her plate and took charge. “We are not children at a sleepover, and this is not Clue,” she said, looking pointedly at Tara, who had already turned her napkin into a detective’s badge. “Until the authorities arrive, we will proceed with structure, routine, and rigorous attention to narrative.” Imran nodded. “Agreed. We divide into pairs and investigate the property—look for Rajiv’s missing folder, review each other’s prompts, retrace last night’s steps.” Maaya raised an eyebrow. “How democratic of you. Shall we hold hands too?” Despite the friction, the idea took root. Evelyn and Imran took the library. Tara and Farah were assigned the kitchen and dining hall. Vikram and Rohan reluctantly agreed to search the gardens and outbuildings. Ananya insisted on checking Rajiv’s suite herself—“For tone,” she said cryptically—while Maaya locked herself in her room, claiming she would reread all their books and “profile the killer from the prose.” By noon, what had once been a luxury retreat had turned into a crime lab with scented candles.
It was Evelyn and Imran who discovered the first major clue—a torn notebook page wedged behind a row of faux-antique Shakespeare volumes. The page bore Rajiv’s handwriting, unmistakably bold and underlined, but the ink was smudged with what looked like moisture—or tears. It read: “Prompt switch suspected. This isn’t just a game. One of them wants to end the book early. Poison not accidental. Monitor all authors. Start with ‘F.’” Imran snorted. “F for Farah? Or F for fake prompts?” Evelyn didn’t answer. Instead, she quietly removed A Cozy Corpse from the shelf and flipped to the last chapter. The tea-poisoning scene was practically a blueprint. Meanwhile, Ananya returned from Rajiv’s suite with another unsettling discovery—a missing book from his shelf. Not one of his, but one of Vikram’s. “He had all of ours on the shelf, like trophies,” she said, “but Vikram’s Velocity Code is gone.” Vikram, when questioned, laughed too loudly. “Why would I kill a guy who blurbed my last book? He called me ‘Dan Brown with biceps.’ That’s a compliment!” Rohan reported that there were no cameras on the retreat property, but he’d rigged his scanner to detect recent paper movement in the printer room. According to the logs, someone had printed exactly three pages at 3:14 AM—the time Rajiv was presumed dead. But those pages had vanished. “This,” Evelyn said, “is no longer about who had motive. It’s about who understood narrative timing.”
As the day wore on, suspicions shifted like plot twists. Farah, normally cheerful, had grown visibly agitated, constantly clutching her mug of plain water and murmuring about motifs. Tara was certain the killer was “layering meta commentary” and had started referring to everyone by archetype—“Grumpy Cop” for Imran, “Ice Queen” for Maaya, “Red Herring” for Vikram. When Maaya heard this, she simply said, “Call me ‘Final Chapter’ if you must.” Ananya, taking it all in with the detachment of a film critic, sat quietly by the window and wrote in her notebook. She seemed less interested in solving the crime than in understanding how it was being told. That evening, a second manuscript page appeared mysteriously on the conservatory piano. This one was typed and unsigned, but its contents chilled them all: “The first death was a draft. The next will be a final edit. Some characters are never meant to see the ending.” The air thickened. The tea remained untouched. And behind the silence, a story none of them wrote was continuing to write itself. Because somewhere among them, a real author was scripting a perfect crime—and this retreat had just become the rough draft of their next bestseller.
Four
By the fourth day, Elmswood Retreat had the atmosphere of a doomed novel—claustrophobic, overpopulated, and on the brink of collapsing under its own convoluted subplots. The snow had thickened, cutting off mobile signals and reducing electricity to a flicker. The generator growled like an impatient editor, and the grand library now served as a war room, complete with printed timelines, highlighted manuscripts, and Evelyn’s makeshift “Murder Board” composed of character profiles and motives. After the threatening second manuscript page, paranoia reached its natural climax. Tara began sleeping with a flashlight under her pillow. Rohan carried around a printout of his Goodreads rating chart, declaring that his popularity offered him “narrative immunity.” Vikram volunteered to be frisked “for alpha transparency,” then promptly got into a shouting match with Imran over the definition of the word “foreshadowing.” Meanwhile, Maaya and Ananya entered an eerie cold war of subtext, trading barbed literary compliments laced with suspicion. Evelyn maintained composure, though she was now visibly scribbling in a leather notebook marked “Private Notes: For the Memoir, if Survive.” Tensions exploded during the afternoon debrief when Farah, distraught and sweating despite the chill, snapped. “You think this is all clever and cute? We’re in someone’s twisted outline!” Then she did something none expected—she produced her prompt envelope, previously thought to be sealed, and revealed it had been replaced with a page from A Cozy Corpse, her own book. The exact murder scene. Highlighted.
That revelation shattered what little calm remained. “So we have a killer with access to our rooms, our work, and our fears,” Ananya said, voice steady but eyes narrowed. “Someone who’s turning this into a metafictional murder machine.” The writers began sharing their original prompts—some generic, some oddly specific. Imran’s had a riddle about betrayal. Evelyn’s simply read, “Your knowledge of endings is what makes you dangerous.” But none were as disturbing as Vikram’s. His envelope, which he swore had been blank, now contained a folded sheet tucked in its lining. It was a scene he hadn’t written but one that mirrored his own writing style so precisely it was unsettling: a macho detective poisoned mid-confrontation, dying in dramatic slo-mo. “I didn’t write this!” he insisted. “But it’s… weirdly good?” Evelyn examined the page and confirmed it was typed in the same font Rajiv preferred. Imran concluded someone had premeditated not just the murder, but its literary echoes. “It’s not about silencing someone,” he muttered. “It’s about making the narrative airtight. The perfect book murder.” Just as suspicion reached boiling point, a scream sliced through the silence—Farah’s. They raced to the hallway to find her slumped against the staircase, dazed but alive, a shattered teacup beside her and a red welt on her temple. “Someone pushed me,” she whispered. “I was headed to the reading lounge… and someone pushed me from behind.” But the hallway had been empty. Or so it seemed.
The near-attack threw everyone into crisis mode. Nima, trying to maintain sanity, locked away all cutlery, isolated the minibar, and banned room service. But what rattled everyone most wasn’t Farah’s fall—it was what she’d been carrying at the time: a crumpled page she had found behind a loose brick in the fireplace. The page was written by Rajiv. In it, he detailed a theory: that someone at the retreat had been preparing this entire setup for over a year, possibly by attending conferences, befriending certain authors, and even influencing Elmswood’s guest list through an unnamed sponsor. “They wanted a closed room with open plots,” the note ended. That night, Evelyn declared an emergency gathering and proposed a shocking plan: continue writing The Killer Among Us as intended—chapter by chapter. “If the killer wants a story,” she said grimly, “then let’s write it—but on our terms. Each of us writes a chapter, not to entertain, but to expose. Whoever deviates, reveals too much, or mirrors the murder method again, will give themselves away.” It was either the boldest strategy or a fatal invitation. Outside, the snow swallowed the last hint of signal towers. Inside, one author began typing Chapter Five—knowing very well it could be their last.
Five
By now, the writers had ceased to see one another as colleagues and began regarding each other as suspects camouflaged in character tropes. Breakfast was served silently in a room that once hummed with witty banter. No one dared pour tea anymore—Nima replaced it with instant coffee sachets and pre-sealed juice boxes, which somehow felt more sinister. That morning, Evelyn presented the schedule: the collaborative mystery, The Killer Among Us, would resume—with each writer composing a chapter to both continue the story and bait the killer. The catch? Each chapter had to include a clue or confession based on real observations. Vikram volunteered to go first, perhaps to dispel suspicion or to control the tone, and by evening he produced a 4-page scene where a body was discovered in a locked wine cellar, the clues including a monogrammed cufflink, a half-written script, and a phone call to a dead contact. It was pulp fiction at its best—or worst—but it contained veiled references to Rajiv’s ego, Ananya’s obsession with grief, and Imran’s dictaphone. “This isn’t a chapter,” Ananya hissed after reading it, “it’s a roast with blood spatter.” Evelyn allowed it, but warned, “The next writer won’t have the luxury of fiction.” The document was stored in a locked flash drive in the conservatory’s safe, password protected by a quote from Rajiv’s last published book.
That night, something strange occurred—an old laptop, once used only for communal workshop sessions, began flickering in the reading room. Nima confirmed it had been disconnected for months. Yet at midnight, the screen glowed with a Word document titled: “The Ending Has Already Been Written.” By the time anyone arrived to see it, the file had vanished. Rohan, furious and sleep-deprived, scanned the machine but found no trace. “This is like a ghostwriter with bloodlust,” he muttered. Meanwhile, Tara, newly terrified, suggested the killer might be using a hidden device—“like an old-school typewriter or a disconnected keyboard. Something analog.” Farah, recovering from her fall, murmured about “patterns”—that each chapter now mirrored a classic trope, almost as if the killer was parodying the genre itself. Chapter One had the classic opening murder. Chapter Two was the reveal of suspicion. Chapter Three—the red herring. Chapter Four—a failed second murder. “So what’s next?” she asked, voice trembling. “The betrayal?” Evelyn only nodded. And that’s when the betrayal arrived. Late that night, Ananya’s notebook was stolen from her locked drawer. In it were not just her observations—but an alternate outline she’d been secretly sketching of The Killer Among Us. And according to its contents, she had correctly predicted Farah’s fall before it happened.
The notebook’s reappearance in the fireplace—burnt at the edges but still legible—shook the group to its core. “It wasn’t a prediction,” Maaya snapped. “She staged it to look prescient. That’s a writer’s vanity at its worst.” Ananya denied it, accusing Maaya of orchestrating the whole retreat selection with an ulterior motive. “You knew who’d be here,” she accused, “You knew Rajiv hated you. And your publicist works with Elmswood’s sponsor.” Maaya smiled without warmth. “If I wanted to kill Rajiv, darling, I’d have waited until he published his memoir.” Tension cracked the group like a poorly edited subplot. And in the eye of the chaos, Vikram found something no one else had noticed before—a sticky note, fallen between pages of Evelyn’s leather notebook. It was just one line, written in jagged ink: “The narrator always lies.” Evelyn denied writing it. Imran said it sounded like a chapter title from her earlier books. Farah whispered, “Maybe we’re not the narrators.” That night, as Chapter Six was prepared in secret by Ananya, the authors locked their doors tight. Because the killer wasn’t just rewriting the story anymore. They were writing the writers into it—line by terrifying line.
Six
The next morning, the retreat awoke to silence—the kind that didn’t merely fill the rooms but pressed against the windows like an unseen fog. No arguments at breakfast. No underhanded literary digs. Only a sense of dread so thick that even Tara skipped her usual morning video diary. Ananya’s Chapter Six had been submitted just before dawn, slid beneath Evelyn’s door in a sealed envelope with no sender. She hadn’t signed it. She hadn’t spoken since. Inside, the chapter was structured as a confession—clever, indirect, and haunting. It described a character named “The Editor,” who curated stories not to tell the truth, but to erase the parts that were too real. As the group read it aloud in the library, the implications settled like ash. “She’s not writing about a killer,” Evelyn said slowly. “She’s writing about someone who thinks murder is… revision.” But as they turned to ask Ananya about the meaning, they realized something chilling: she was gone. Her room was empty, her bag still on the chair, and her scarf on the hook, but no trace of the writer herself. Panic erupted. They checked every room, the gardens, the attic. Even the old wine cellar, still locked since Vikram’s fictional chapter, was opened—nothing. Then Rohan found a message carved faintly into the condensation on the inside of a windowpane: “I am the one rewritten.”
The disappearance fractured whatever unity the group had tried to construct. “She ran,” Vikram said, pacing. “That chapter was a goodbye.” “No,” Maaya muttered, scanning the window with a forensic eye. “It’s a trap. She’s baiting us again. Or someone wants us to think she’s baiting us.” Imran, increasingly gaunt and grim, pointed out the date—exactly 72 hours since Rajiv’s death. “Three days. First murder. Then an attempted second. Now a vanishing. This isn’t escalation. It’s choreography.” Farah, now mostly silent and pale, suddenly asked: “What if this is a novel being written by someone who isn’t one of us?” Everyone stared. “Think about it,” she whispered. “We’re all authors. What if one of us didn’t come here to write… but to direct?” Tara gasped. “Like… an invisible author?” Rohan called it nonsense until Evelyn made a quiet observation: “We’ve been so obsessed with who’s doing the killing, we’ve forgotten to ask—who planned the retreat itself?” Nima, startled by the scrutiny, admitted she was hired only a month ago. The real event was curated by someone who called themselves “E. Veritas”—a pseudonym that had no online footprint, no agency, no trace. “The payment came from a publishing trust,” she added. “But the instructions… they were handwritten.” That revelation cracked open an entirely new theory. What if someone here wasn’t a writer at all?
The day spiraled into speculative madness. Everyone began re-interrogating their fellow guests—not just for motive, but for authenticity. Evelyn was suddenly too perfect. Vikram’s rise too fast. Maaya’s publishing deals too clean. Rohan’s digital paranoia too convenient. Every alibi now felt staged. Every compliment retroactively became manipulation. And amidst all this, Chapter Six continued to haunt them. The words “The Editor rewrites the living” were scrawled in bold at the bottom of the final page. That night, no one wrote a chapter. No one spoke after dark. The fire was left cold, the wine untouched. In the middle of the night, Evelyn sat alone in the library, rereading Ananya’s books with a magnifying glass and a growing suspicion. At exactly 3:13 AM—the same time Rajiv had died—someone knocked on her door. When she opened it, no one stood there. Only a folded page, typed in Courier font, with one line: “Your chapter begins now.”
Seven
The morning after Evelyn received the mysterious note, the retreat awoke to find her already in the library, dressed immaculately in her navy shawl and reading glasses, sipping what she announced—rather loudly—was instant coffee she made herself. On the table before her sat a single page, the latest installment of The Killer Among Us, typed cleanly and centered. But she hadn’t written it. No one had. And that terrified them more than anything yet. The page picked up directly from Ananya’s chilling Chapter Six, continuing the metaphor of the “Editor” as a specter who removed inconvenient characters from the story—“clean margins, sharpened endings, bloodless revisions.” The final paragraph described the Editor watching someone read their own fate on a printed page moments before death. Rohan, finally losing his techno-cool, shouted that it was AI-generated and stormed off to his scanner, only to return an hour later pale and sweating. “There’s no digital footprint,” he said. “No source. No metadata. The page doesn’t exist. It just… appeared.” Tara, now terrified into silence, stared at everyone as if they were already ghosts. “Someone here,” Evelyn said, standing slowly, “is writing ahead of us. They’re scripting our reactions before we have them. They aren’t reacting to the story—they’re controlling it.”
That afternoon, Nima finally reached the local authorities via a satellite phone, only to be told the avalanche had blocked even the backup access road. Help would come in two days—maybe. Until then, Elmswood was its own closed circuit. Imran proposed a radical solution: to go off-script. “Let’s do something unpredictable,” he said. “Let’s scatter, write our own separate stories, break the narrative line. We’ve been following the killer’s plot structure like obedient characters.” But Evelyn disagreed. “The only way to win,” she said, “is to finish the story before they do.” The next writer assigned was Rohan, who had initially refused but now looked like a man on the edge of collapse. He submitted a 3-page confession that wasn’t a confession at all—it was a reverse-whodunit written in second person, describing the killer as *“you”—*as in the reader. It described everything that had happened at Elmswood so far… in perfect detail. Every clue. Every page. Even Farah’s fall. When asked where he got the information, he just blinked. “I thought I made it up.” Evelyn examined the margins and found, for the first time, a watermark: a stylized quill, bleeding ink. No one recognized the symbol. That evening, someone set fire to the original prompt envelopes in the fireplace, and as they burned, a folded page fluttered out—untouched by flame. On it, typed in red ink, was a new title: “Chapter Eight: The Author Must Die.”
Night fell like a blackout curtain. The writers split into watch groups, rotating shifts with kitchen knives and brass letter openers as weapons. Farah kept muttering prayers from her books. Tara stopped recording videos altogether. Vikram accused Evelyn of writing everything—“Who else but the woman with the monocle and a typewriter fetish?”—and was punched in the face by Maaya before he could finish the sentence. Imran began documenting every hour by voice, timestamping the paranoia. But at 2:59 AM, the retreat’s power flickered—and at 3:13, the generator shut off. In the silence, a laptop screen glowed in the corner of the library. On it was Chapter Eight. Unlocked. Waiting. As Evelyn approached, she saw the cursor blinking, waiting for her keystroke. But before she could touch it, the screen turned black. A message appeared instead: “You’re not the protagonist. You’re the next page.” Somewhere upstairs, a scream rang out. The lights surged. And someone vanished.
Eight
It was Vikram who screamed. And when the lights returned and the writers stormed into his room, they found him slumped beside his bed, bleeding from a gash on his forehead, half-conscious, and surrounded by scattered printed pages. “It wasn’t just me,” he gasped. “Someone… was already in here.” On the carpet lay multiple versions of Chapter Eight—different fonts, different phrasing, but all leading to the same ending: Vikram’s death. In one version, he was poisoned; in another, bludgeoned; in yet another, he was pushed down the stairs. But what chilled everyone to the bone was the page that lay across his chest—it was blank, except for the words: “Make your death count.” Evelyn was the first to react, demanding Nima seal off the room and take Vikram to the downstairs infirmary. The wound was shallow, not fatal—but symbolic. “It’s a rehearsal,” she muttered. “Whoever’s behind this is testing finales. Trying drafts.” Imran examined the printed pages and noted they were produced on Elmswood’s old printer—the one in the unused office behind the wine cellar. When they checked the room, they found it unlocked for the first time. Inside was a small writing desk, a typewriter, and pinned to the wall was a sprawling storyboard titled Elmswood Project—Draft 3: Ending Variable. At the center was a single label: E. Veritas.
Now everything became a spiral of doubt. Evelyn, once the figure of authority, was now firmly in the crosshairs. “You wanted us to keep writing,” Maaya snapped. “You pushed for chapters. You locked away clues. That story structure in the cellar—it reads like your outline.” Evelyn denied it with icy precision. “If I had planned this, I wouldn’t be sharing a room with mold and canned soup.” Imran, who had begun cross-referencing the story chapters with the published books of every guest, made a startling discovery: The Killer Among Us wasn’t just copying their work—it was a mosaic. Every paragraph contained a sentence lifted, mirrored, or twisted from someone’s backlist. Even Rohan’s self-published novella, Deadlines and Death, had lines in the fake Chapter Eight. “It’s a patchwork,” he whispered. “Someone’s been building this for years. Tracking us. Studying our style. It’s not a story. It’s a weapon made of our words.” Meanwhile, Tara began to lose her grip. She claimed to see Ananya’s reflection in the library mirror. “She’s not gone,” she said. “She’s in the margins now. She became the story.” Farah retreated fully into silence, her hands raw from clutching her prayer beads. And Rohan attempted to burn the remaining chapters but found the paper wouldn’t catch fire—“coated with something,” he said. “Like wax. Or maybe irony.”
That night, Evelyn did something unprecedented. She gathered everyone—minus Vikram, still sedated—and told them the truth: she had, years ago, once used the pseudonym E. Veritas. It was a persona for anonymous manuscript consulting, “ghost-editing stories too awful to publish.” She swore she hadn’t used the name in over a decade. “But someone else picked it up,” she said, voice low. “Someone has made me a red herring in my own life.” That confession didn’t clear her. If anything, it made her more dangerous. Imran began to shadow her. Maaya quietly made a list of writers who had been reviewed harshly by Evelyn over the years. Rohan took the old typewriter from the cellar and locked it in his suite. And then, just past 3:00 AM, Evelyn’s door creaked open. She was asleep. No one entered. No footsteps. Just a folded page slid under her door. Typed. Dated. Titled: “Chapter Nine: The Final Rewrite.” At the bottom was one line: “The story ends when the last writer breaks character.”
Nine
By the ninth day, the retreat resembled the final act of a Shakespearean tragedy—except with Wi-Fi outages, psychological warfare, and too many first-person narrators. The weather had turned feral. Sheets of white swallowed the windows, isolating the mansion in a storm that felt no longer meteorological, but deliberate—like punctuation falling in place before a final paragraph. Vikram remained sedated, the gash on his head slowly healing, though he kept murmuring chapter titles in his sleep: “The Unreliable Narrator,” “The Plot Hole,” “The Twist You Deserve.” Rohan refused to leave his room, his digital paranoia now bordering on full psychosis. He had taped pages over his mirrors, erased all drafts, and kept his phone in the fireplace. Tara sat in the hallway with a handbell and a typewriter ribbon wrapped around her wrist, convinced Ananya was whispering her dialogue through the floorboards. Evelyn, unshaken on the surface, had begun reading her own published novels aloud to the group—searching them for possible embedded clues or foreshadowing she might have left unknowingly. Farah remained silent. Maaya took to sketching diagrams in lipstick on her mirror, mapping names, themes, and betrayals like an author preparing to sue her own plot. Imran had set up his own investigation board using coffee filters, voice memos, and old ink cartridges—insisting that the entire mystery had to hinge on an unpublished manuscript someone here had buried years ago. But above all this chaos hovered the latest horror: Chapter Nine had arrived. And no one had written it.
The chapter wasn’t printed. It was carved. The words appeared overnight, etched into the retreat’s mahogany dining table with surgical precision. No one heard it happen. No cameras. No creaking floorboards. Just twelve lines. One for each writer—describing how they would meet their end. Rajiv’s was accurate. Vikram’s too. Then came Farah’s—“The one who writes for warmth will die in silence.” Evelyn read hers aloud—“The final reader never closes the book.” Rohan’s line was: “You’ll leave a note the killer will edit.” Maaya’s? “The queen never survives the second climax.” The rest were equally cryptic. The final line simply read: “The last page has already been printed.” That morning, they searched every room for a hidden printer, a person, a pattern. They tore through Elmswood’s archives, broke open the attic, dug through the garden shed. But all they found was a single torn journal page stuffed inside a snow boot in the coat closet. On it was a different name—Ananda Rao—a failed thriller writer whose only book had been reviewed viciously by Evelyn under the name E. Veritas. The book had been rejected across every major publisher. He’d vanished from the literary circuit years ago. No one remembered him. But he remembered them.
The realization spread like ink in water. Ananda Rao had attended writing workshops under aliases. He’d infiltrated critique groups. He’d followed careers, mirrored styles, and waited. “What if he didn’t die a failed author,” Maaya whispered. “What if he became a successful ghost?” His revenge wasn’t to publish—but to weaponize narrative structure itself. Every death, every scare, every missing chapter—they were beats in a grand novel he was writing with them as characters, and against them as collaborators. “We’ve been improvising in someone else’s outline,” Evelyn murmured. That night, they made a pact. No one would write the final chapter. No one would open any doors after midnight. They would sleep in the conservatory—together. But the storm outside answered back with a howl. At exactly 3:13 AM, the lights blinked out. A fire alarm screeched. And when they counted heads—one was missing. Farah’s chair was empty. In her place sat a page, wet with snow, with the words: “Chapter Ten: The One Who Tried to Write an Ending.”
Ten
Farah’s disappearance shattered the last illusion of structure. Up until now, they had tried—foolishly—to manage the unraveling with logic, pacing, character arcs. But this wasn’t a novel. It was an erasure. They searched every corner of Elmswood with the frenzy of people no longer trying to solve a murder, but to prevent becoming footnotes. The conservatory windows were cracked, the snow disturbed, and on the ice-laced veranda lay Farah’s scarf—twisted into the shape of a noose. Rohan refused to believe she was dead. “She’s the redemptive arc,” he insisted. “The quiet one who dies halfway through is too cliché.” Maaya snapped. “We passed cliché four chapters ago.” Evelyn gathered the group, now whittled down to six—herself, Maaya, Rohan, Tara, Imran, and a barely lucid Vikram—and made a final declaration: “We end this. Now. Together. No more pages. No more chapters.” But it was already too late. Chapter Ten had appeared. Pinned to the typewriter that Rohan had locked in his suite. The lock was unbroken. The ribbon untouched. The page? Perfectly typed, with all their names. This time, it wasn’t threats. It was instructions.
Each character—yes, character—was given a choice: Reveal your secret, or be removed from the story. The page ended with a line that haunted them more than any before: “The twist isn’t who dies next. It’s who started the story.” The implication boiled every theory they had into one brutal possibility: one of them had been involved from the beginning. Perhaps even unknowingly. Evelyn admitted she once mentored a young writer named Ananda Rao—back when she worked anonymously as E. Veritas. “He was… ambitious. Obsessed with structure. He said character flaws weren’t weaknesses—they were chapter seeds.” Imran revealed he’d received anonymous fanmail that quoted his unpublished manuscript—the same phrases now appearing in The Killer Among Us. Tara broke down and confessed: she’d ghostwritten content for a mysterious “literary retreat planner” who had paid her to plant lines in her earlier books. Even Maaya faltered—she had hired a freelance editor once, someone named “Rao,” who gave feedback eerily similar to what was now being staged around them. All the threads pointed to the same orchestrator. And yet… the writing continued. At 3:13 AM—again—the lights flickered, the typewriter clanged once, and a printed page emerged without a hand touching the keys. It read: “Chapter Eleven: The Betrayal in the Mirror.”
No one slept that night. They sat in a semicircle in the library, exhausted, shaking, reduced to silhouettes of the literary giants they had once been. Evelyn whispered the only truth left: “The story wants to finish itself.” And that’s when Vikram finally woke, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide with clarity. “It’s not Ananda,” he said. “Not just him.” He fumbled through the torn pages and journal scraps and held up a piece no one had noticed—an Elmswood guest ledger. There, scrawled in fading ink, was the name E. Veritas—listed not under “organizer” or “sponsor”—but under “Author-in-Residence.” The retreat hadn’t been created to host authors. It had been designed to trap them. “Ananda was the bait,” Vikram said. “But someone else… is writing from inside.” As a final storm howled against the windows, Evelyn stood, turned to the mirror above the fireplace, and saw something she hadn’t seen in nine days. Her own face—aged, calm, certain—reflected back not as victim, not as sleuth, but as the narrator. And behind her, a flicker of movement. A shadow with a pen.
Eleven
The line between fiction and memory finally dissolved. That night, as the fire cracked and the final storm howled through the valley like a rejected manuscript screaming into the void, Evelyn stood alone in front of the library mirror. Her reflection held steady—but something in it didn’t belong. Not just her aging face, but the tilt of her mouth, the softened jawline, the eyes that no longer blinked in sync. Then it blinked—and she didn’t. She stepped back. The others, drawn by the eerie silence, gathered around her. Rohan clutched a fire poker. Tara whimpered into her collar. Imran looked ready to run. Maaya just crossed her arms and whispered, “You knew.” Evelyn turned, her voice brittle as paper. “I didn’t. I thought… I had buried it.” The room waited. Evelyn stepped toward the mirror, hand trembling, and spoke like she was dictating to a page: “Once, there was a young author. He was brilliant, erratic, invisible to editors. But I saw him. I offered to fix his story, his style. I didn’t realize he’d never forgive me for rewriting him.” And then she said his name aloud for the first time: Ananda Rao.
But even as she spoke, Imran pulled a sheet from behind the mirror—stuck with faded tape, browned by age. A cast list. Typed. Ten names. All theirs. With roles beside them: The Cynic. The Climber. The Romantic. The Orphan. The Ghost. The Betrayer. The Editor. The Witness. The Follower. The Final Chapter. “This isn’t just a story,” Rohan muttered. “It’s a ritual.” The mirror wasn’t just a mirror—it had been double-sided glass, hiding a tiny chamber behind. They broke it open. Inside was an old desk, a melted candle, a typewriter… and bones. Human bones. Small. Curled. As if someone had died hunched over their own ending. In the desk drawer, a final manuscript. The cover read: “The Killer Among Us – By Ananda Rao and E. Veritas.” The first line: “This is a book that ends in murder. But only if it is believed.” Evelyn dropped the pages. “He was here. All along.” Maaya knelt beside the bones. “This isn’t just writing. It’s… invocation. A story built so precisely, so structurally perfect, that it became reality.” Outside, the wind dropped suddenly. A silence fell. The final storm had ended. But inside, a new one had begun.
They burned the manuscript that night—each person tossing in one page, one fear, one lie. But the final page refused to burn. It was the epilogue. Typed in crimson ink. Not on regular paper, but bound human skin. It read: “To end a story, the narrator must die. To die, the narrator must admit they invented it.” Everyone looked to Evelyn. But she only smiled faintly. “We all invented it. Every betrayal. Every twist. We wrote him. We fed him with our fear.” Then she stepped forward, into the fire, and pressed the epilogue into the flames. This time, it caught. The flames howled—not red, but violet-blue—and for a moment, the room shuddered as if exhaling a decade’s worth of dread. Then silence. Real silence. No pages falling. No knocks at 3:13. Just quiet. Vikram stirred in his sleep and muttered, “The chapter’s over.” Maaya closed her eyes. “No. The story is.” And behind them, the mirror shattered—on both sides.
Twelve
Three months later, the snow melted and the world, unaware of the literary war that had unfolded in Elmswood Retreat, moved on. The headlines mentioned a tragic accident—“Storm-Stranded Writers Escape Death in Avalanche Horror”—but no one outside the publishing world knew the real story. The survivors went their separate ways, refusing interviews, declining podcasts, and vanishing from festivals. Tara deleted her social media and moved to a small hill town in Himachal, where she taught creative writing with blank syllabi. Rohan founded a start-up that produced AI tools for detecting plagiarism—ironically, one of his tools flagged The Killer Among Us as “entirely original.” Maaya published a memoir in limited circulation, but with no marketing, no ISBN, and no ending. Vikram took a vow of silence for forty days, then broke it to tweet: “I was nearly rewritten. I’m back in draft.” Imran returned to academia and was last seen researching folklore around unfinished manuscripts and haunted ink. As for Evelyn? She vanished entirely. Her last recorded action was canceling a twelve-book contract with her publisher. The email read simply: “The story is done. Leave it that way.”
But stories rarely stay buried. Months later, in an independent bookstore in Kolkata, a leather-bound copy of The Killer Among Us appeared on a shelf. No barcode. No publisher stamp. Just a crimson bookmark embedded in the spine, and a dedication: “To those who wrote, bled, and broke for a story.” The owner swore they didn’t stock it. The book contained twelve chapters. The first eleven mirrored what had occurred at Elmswood. The final chapter was something else entirely—a description of the reader. Not the authors. Not the killer. The reader. It detailed someone standing alone, at night, flipping through pages nervously, drawn toward an ending they couldn’t resist. It predicted their room, their expression, their breath hitching on the final line. And then the book would go blank. Not with paper—but with reflection. Mirror pages. So that the reader saw only themselves at the end. Beneath that reflection, in tiny ink, a message: “You finished it. Now begin.”
Some say the book disappeared the next day. Others say copies appeared in university libraries, cafes, retreat centers. Each one slightly different. Each one unfinished. But the legend held—if you read to the last page and saw your own face, the story wasn’t over. It was rewriting you. And on quiet nights, when the wind rises like pages fluttering in a draft, some writers report strange dreams: of a mirror, a typewriter, and someone whispering just behind them, “What if the narrator lies?” They wake, heart pounding, only to find a fresh page on their desk. No header. No name. Only five words:
“The sequel has already begun.”
-End-
