The House at Black Hollow Bend

Rukmini Sen

The road to Black Hollow Bend curled like a serpent around the pine-draped cliffs of Himachal, treacherous and often drowned in fog. Locals rarely took it after sundown, and those who did returned with silence stitched to their tongues. But Alok Menon wasn’t local. A freelance travel writer with a stubborn streak and a weakness for offbeat locations, he’d come across a footnote about a colonial bungalow long-abandoned, once owned by a British officer who had vanished without a trace in 1913. Intrigued, he packed his Canon DSLR, a few woollens, and a red Moleskine notebook before setting out for what he hoped would be his next viral piece.

The cab dropped him off at a sleepy hill hamlet called Kharota, where stone paths threaded through slate-roofed cottages. It was here that he first heard the name uttered in full. “Kaala Mooh ki Koṭhi,” an old tea-seller told him, spitting the words like poison. The man’s milky eyes narrowed. “Wahan hawa bhi ulta chalti hai. No birds. No dogs bark near it. That house is not right.”

Alok smiled politely and paid for the ginger tea. He didn’t believe in ghosts. He believed in history, in untold stories and neglected archives. Ghosts, to him, were metaphors.

The walk to the bungalow took longer than expected. The path was overgrown and broken, a narrow trail of cracked stone steps leading uphill through whispering deodar trees. The air grew colder as he climbed, unnaturally so, and once he paused, sensing movement behind him. Nothing. Only a twisted tree that looked vaguely human in silhouette.

Then he saw it. The house.

It sat alone in a clearing of dead grass and skeletal shrubs, a two-storey stone structure with weathered green shutters and a wrought-iron balcony that drooped like a frown. The roof was partially collapsed, the door hanging open as if expecting him. Despite years of decay, there was a strange elegance to it, like a veiled widow refusing to shed her pearls.

Alok stepped in.

The air inside smelt of damp wood, old blood, and moth wings. Dust lay in thick sheets over everything—chairs with broken legs, a fireplace lined with charred bones of wood, a grand piano with keys chipped like rotten teeth. He clicked a few photos, voice-noted some initial impressions, then wandered upstairs.

The corridor bent sharply, ending in a locked door. To his surprise, the key was still in the knob, rusted but intact. He turned it.

The room beyond was strangely preserved. A writing desk sat by the window. On it, an oil lamp, dried inkpot, and a stack of yellowing pages covered in cursive writing. A four-poster bed loomed under heavy velvet drapes, still bearing an impression—as if someone had just risen from it.

He sat at the desk and flipped open the top page.

“February 3, 1913. The whispering has begun again. They stand by the trees now. Closer. I dared open the window last night and found bloody handprints on the sill. I have locked the children in the basement. Better madness than what waits outside…”

Alok froze. The ink wasn’t faded. It looked wet. Fresh.

He turned another page. It was blank—except for a single line that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

“You shouldn’t have come.”

Suddenly the temperature dropped. He could see his breath.

A soft creak came from the corridor. Footsteps. Slow. Barefoot.

“Hello?” he called out, voice cracking. “Anyone there?”

Nothing.

Then, the door slammed shut behind him.

He bolted toward it but it wouldn’t budge. He banged, screamed, cursed—but the footsteps had retreated. Silence swallowed the air like a beast.

And then he saw the mirror.

It hadn’t been there before. Hung above the fireplace, it reflected the room perfectly. But in the reflection, he wasn’t alone.

A tall woman in a dark colonial gown stood behind him, face obscured by a veil of black lace, her fingers long and pale as candlewax, her body rigid as a corpse left out in snow.

When he spun around—there was nothing.

But when he looked back at the mirror, she was closer.

And she was smiling.

Alok’s breath quickened, fogging up the glass as he stared at the mirror. The woman behind him—no, the reflection of her—had not moved in real space. Only in the mirror’s world did she edge closer, inch by inch, like oil creeping across silk. Her face remained hidden under that tattered black veil, but her smile—oh god, that smile—was not of joy, but of something far colder, hungrier.

He bolted away from the mirror, forcing himself not to look again. Maybe this was some kind of hallucination—a trick of the light, the air, the altitude. That must be it. He fumbled for his phone to snap a photo of the reflection, some proof to review later. But the screen remained black. Dead.

It had been at eighty percent charge just an hour ago.

Alok tried the door again, pulling so hard the old knob cracked off in his palm. He looked around the room, suddenly noticing details he hadn’t before: scratch marks on the floorboards, as if something—or someone—had been dragged across them. The thick drapes around the bed fluttered slightly, though no breeze stirred the air.

And then came the whisper.

Not from the hall. Not from the window. But from inside the room. Inside the walls.

A child’s voice.

“Don’t let her find you.”

His spine turned to ice. He scanned the room. “Who’s there?” he whispered, voice trembling.

Silence.

Then another whisper. “She took Papa first. Then Mama. I’m still hiding.”

Something scraped beneath the floorboards. A slow, steady movement.

Alok dropped to his knees and pressed his ear to the wood. Beneath him, faintly, someone was breathing.

In a panic, he stumbled back, knocking over the oil lamp on the desk. It shattered, and a trail of smoke rose from the spilled oil—but no fire caught. Just the smell of burning lavender and something more ancient. Something that didn’t belong to this world.

He had to get out. Had to find another way down.

He darted to the window, yanked it open—and froze.

The landscape outside had changed. The trees were gone. Replaced by barren earth, soaked in blood. Dozens of figures stood facing the house—men, women, children. Their eyes were black pits. Their faces expressionless. And in the centre stood the woman in the veil, her arms outstretched like a grotesque welcome.

She raised one finger slowly and pointed—straight at him.

Alok fell back, slamming the window shut, heart hammering. His instincts screamed at him to leave, logic be damned. He searched for anything—anything—to help him break through the door.

Then he remembered the balcony.

He ran to the French doors at the far end of the room and forced them open. The iron railing was rusted but intact. He could see the slope below—steep, but not unclimbable. If he could jump to the lower roof, he might be able to shimmy down.

Without thinking, he swung a leg over the railing and prepared to leap.

But then he heard it again.

The sound of a piano playing.

A slow, haunting melody echoing from downstairs.

He paused. Why would an abandoned house have a working piano? Who was playing?

And why—god help him—did the tune sound familiar?

It hit him suddenly. His grandmother. That lullaby she used to hum in Kochi during stormy nights.

He’d never told anyone about that tune.

Goosebumps prickled every inch of his body. The melody twisted as it went on—becoming darker, dissonant, broken. Notes clanged like metal teeth.

He couldn’t jump. Not yet. He had to know.

Because something inside him whispered that this wasn’t just a ghost story. This house had seen him. Known him. Maybe even called him here.

Alok climbed back over the balcony, returned inside, and descended the stairs like a man walking toward a dream he couldn’t wake from.

The living room lay in eerie stillness. The grand piano sat in its alcove, lid open. No one nearby. But the keys pressed themselves, one by one, playing that twisted lullaby as if invisible fingers danced over them.

He approached slowly. The keys stopped.

And the lid slammed shut with a deafening bang.

Behind him, the front door creaked open.

He turned.

Standing there, dripping from an unseen storm, was the veiled woman.

But this time, the veil was gone.

And Alok saw her face.

And screamed.

Because it was his grandmother’s.

Dead. Pale. Eyeless.

But smiling.

The scream died in Alok’s throat. His body refused to move, his mind locked in a static burst of disbelief. The woman—no, thing—at the door stood motionless, water pooling around her feet though the ground outside had been bone dry. Her face, though disfigured by death, was unmistakably that of his grandmother—Savitri Menon—who had passed away twelve years ago in a quiet room in Kochi, her fingers entwined in his as she took her final breath.

That smile—benevolent once—was now warped by time and death. Her lips stretched too wide. Her head tilted ever so slightly to the side, like a broken doll’s.

Alok stumbled back, knocking into a side table and sending a dusty brass lamp clattering to the ground. The woman took a step forward. Her soaked saree dragged behind her like it was stitched to the shadows.

“No,” he whispered. “No. You’re not her.”

Another step.

“You can’t be—”

She spoke then. Not aloud. But inside his head.

“You left me alone.”

Alok clutched his head. “That’s not true! I was there—until the end—I never left—”

But her mouth opened wider than should have been humanly possible. And from it came a sound—not a voice, but the buzzing of hundreds of insects, crawling words that clung to the inside of his ears.

“You forgot the promise.”

Alok backed into the fireplace, his fingers scraping against the cold stone. Fire. He needed fire. He grabbed the broken brass lamp, still slick with old oil, and flung it toward her.

It hit the ground near her feet.

A flare of orange light erupted—brief, flickering. The oil caught.

She vanished.

Gone.

Only the door remained open now, night pressing in, thick and sentient.

He didn’t wait. He bolted through it, out into the bitter cold, down the crumbling stone path lit only by a pale, indifferent moon. But the road had changed again. Trees stood where they hadn’t before. Shapes moved just beyond the edges of sight.

He kept running until he tripped on a root and tumbled hard onto a patch of grass.

Someone caught his shoulder.

He screamed.

“Whoa, bhai! Easy!”

It was a man, about his age, holding a flashlight. His breath misted in the cold air. “You alright? I saw your light from the road. Thought maybe a hiker was lost.”

Alok blinked, trying to make sense of it. “Who… who are you?”

“Sameer. I run the homestay down in Kharota. Thought I’d take a night walk.”

Alok tried to respond, but his teeth were chattering. “The house—did you see the house?”

Sameer frowned. “What house?”

“The bungalow. The one at Black Hollow Bend.”

Sameer stared at him, puzzled. “There’s no bungalow here anymore. Burned down in the ’70s. People say it was cursed. That anyone who goes looking for it ends up mad… or dead.”

“No,” Alok said weakly. “It’s there. I saw it. I went inside. There were rooms. A woman…”

Sameer put a firm hand on his shoulder. “You need rest. Come. I’ll take you back. Let’s not talk here. The woods listen.”

Alok nodded, too drained to argue. But as they walked back, he glanced once over his shoulder.

There—through a break in the trees—he saw it again.

The house. Standing tall. Waiting.

And in the upstairs window, the veiled woman stood watching.

Only this time, she wasn’t alone.

Beside her was a child.

A boy. With Alok’s face.

Alok couldn’t sleep that night. Sameer had insisted he stay in one of the spare rooms of his homestay—a modest stone cottage with patchy Wi-Fi and walls lined with postcards from past visitors. But none of it soothed Alok’s nerves. He lay on the thin mattress, staring at the wooden beams overhead, listening to the whispering wind, and replaying the vision from the window over and over again.

The boy had his face. Not just a resemblance—his exact face, as if pulled from a childhood photo. But something in the eyes had been wrong. Hollow.

By morning, he was already packing. His journal was still smeared with the oil stains from the shattered lamp, but the camera had started working again. Its memory card showed all the photos he’d taken—except for one.

The mirror shot. The one with the woman behind him. It was gone.

He scrolled furiously. All the others remained—faded furniture, cracked walls, even a photo of the child’s scribbled journal on the desk. But not the mirror.

Sameer came in holding two steel cups of chai. “Sleep okay?” he asked.

Alok shook his head. “Tell me again,” he said. “The house… it burned down?”

Sameer sat down across from him. “My grandfather told me about it. British bungalow, built in the late 1800s by an officer named Charles Whitmore. After the Anglo-Tibetan war, he came here to ‘recuperate.’ But locals say he brought something back with him. Something from the mountains. A spirit, a curse, no one really knows. His wife died under strange circumstances. His children disappeared. And then he—well, he went mad. They say he wrote letters to people who’d been dead for years. Talked to the mirror more than to anyone else.”

Alok swallowed. “The mirror…”

“Ah,” Sameer said. “Yes. The infamous Black Hollow mirror. It was said to show not your reflection, but the shadow of what haunts you most.”

Alok looked up sharply. “Is that… is that just legend?”

Sameer shrugged. “You came back in one piece. I’d call that lucky.” He paused. “But sometimes, people don’t come back at all.”

Alok left Kharota before noon, taking the last shared cab down to the nearest town with mobile coverage. The hills receded behind him, wrapped in mist. But the weight of what he had seen, and what he had felt, stayed heavy in his chest.

Back in Delhi, the city swallowed him in noise and smog. But even among honking cars and chai stalls, Alok found no peace.

Because every time he looked into a mirror—any mirror—he saw the boy.

And the boy saw him.

It started with small things.

His bathroom mirror would fog over on its own, and once cleared, reveal handprints. At night, the antique shaving mirror in his room would tilt slightly, reflecting parts of the wall that weren’t really there.

Then, one morning, he awoke to find his own reflection not copying him.

He moved his left hand. The image moved its right.

He blinked. The image stared.

And then smiled.

He smashed the mirror.

But when he turned around, the shards on the floor still held the boy’s face.

Alok became a recluse. Friends’ calls went unanswered. Assignments were postponed. He didn’t dare write about Black Hollow Bend—somehow, the story refused to come to life on the page.

One night, desperate for answers, he returned to the journal he had picked from the house. The child’s scrawl remained on the first page he had read.

But there was now something else, freshly written.

A map.

A crude drawing—lines, trees, a trail, and an “X” at the bottom of what looked like a slope.

Beneath it:
“Where she sleeps. Where I remain. Come home.”

Alok’s fingers trembled as he traced the path.

It wasn’t over.

He knew what he had to do.

Return.

To the house.

To the mirror.

To the child.

Alok’s train back to Himachal was slow, winding like a reluctant memory through the plains and hills, each hour thick with dread. He barely slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he dreamt of mirrors—fragments of himself blinking independently, rooms folding in on themselves, a lullaby that played backward and bled.

When he reached Kharota again, the village looked unchanged, almost oblivious to what it guarded in its woods. Sameer was nowhere to be found. The homestay was shuttered. A neighbor told him Sameer had left for a cousin’s wedding in Kinnaur.

Maybe that was for the best.

Alok didn’t want witnesses to what he might become.

He waited till dusk, then followed the map. This time, he didn’t take the old path. He went around, toward the slope marked with the X. The forest grew denser. Roots snagged his ankles. Owls hooted in long, lonely notes.

Then he found it.

A sunken depression in the earth, surrounded by black stones. In its center, a rectangular slab of crumbling granite lay half-buried. Someone had once carved a name into it, but the letters had eroded into lines.

This was a grave.

Beside it, a metal ring jutted out from the soil—a handle.

He knelt and yanked it up. A trapdoor groaned open, revealing narrow stone steps descending into the dark.

The air below smelled like old cloth, iron, and dust.

He lit his phone flashlight.

The steps led into a cellar. At the far end stood a large object covered by a red velvet cloth.

The mirror.

Alok knew it before he saw it.

He stepped closer, heart hammering. His breath fogged in the cold. With a trembling hand, he peeled the cloth away.

The mirror was ancient—gilded, cracked along one corner, and unnervingly tall. As his reflection appeared, he gasped.

The boy stood beside him.

Only this time, he wasn’t a ghostly presence.

He was real.

A small boy, maybe nine, barefoot and bruised. Dressed in old-fashioned knickers and a moth-eaten sweater.

His face was Alok’s, yes—but softer, sadder.

“Why did you take so long?” the boy whispered.

Alok’s throat was dry. “Who are you?”

The boy stepped forward. “I was you. I am you. The part that stayed when she took the rest. I’ve been locked here since the day you left her to die.”

“That’s not possible,” Alok said. “I didn’t—”

“She begged you,” the boy interrupted. “You promised you’d stay. But you got scared. You ran. You forgot.”

Memories flared—Alok, six years old, hiding under a bed while his grandmother screamed in the next room. A knock at the door. A black-veiled woman with no eyes. A whisper: “Come with me or stay behind.”

He had run.

“Oh my god,” he whispered.

“You left me behind,” the boy said. “She fed on me for years.”

Alok fell to his knees. “I didn’t know. I was a child.”

“She doesn’t care,” the boy said. “She just wants the rest of you. The one who got away.”

Suddenly, the mirror darkened. A shape emerged—taller than either of them. The veiled woman.

She stepped through the glass.

Not a reflection. A crossing.

Her arms reached out—not violently, but gently, like a mother pulling her son into an embrace. Her mouth opened.

Alok rose slowly. “No,” he said. “You don’t get to have me.”

He grabbed a broken shard of stone from the ground.

And threw it at the mirror.

The glass shattered.

The woman screamed—a sound like a thousand banshees wailing in chorus. Light burst from the cracks. The boy shrieked, covering his ears.

The cellar trembled.

Alok grabbed the boy’s hand. “We’re leaving!”

They ran up the stairs as the earth shook. Behind them, the mirror burned in silent fire.

They emerged into the night—panting, wild-eyed, cold.

The woods were silent again.

The grave had caved in. The handle gone.

Alok looked at the boy.

But he was fading.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “For remembering me.”

And then he was gone.

Not violently. Just… peace. Like mist evaporating in morning sun.

Alok stood there, alone.

But lighter. Whole.

For the first time in years, he didn’t see anything behind his reflection.

Only himself.

Alok returned to Delhi changed—not just in mood or mind, but in the strange quiet of his bones. Something inside him had unclenched. He slept through the night without waking in a sweat. He walked past mirrors without hesitation. No voices echoed from within walls.

But peace is never permanent in stories like these.

It started subtly. A crack on the bathroom mirror that spidered overnight despite no impact. A pigeon dying on his balcony, blood pooled under its wings in a shape that looked like an eye.

And then came the knock.

Three soft taps on the door at 3:13 a.m.

He opened it without thinking. No one there. But on the doormat was an envelope. A yellowing one, tied with a black thread. No stamp. No return address. Just his name in red ink.

He opened it with shaking hands.

Inside was a single photograph.

The house.

Standing in perfect daylight.

Only—Alok frowned—he could see himself in the image. At the top floor window. Smiling.

And behind him stood the veiled woman.

Alive.

He turned the photo over.

One line, scrawled in cursive:
“You broke the mirror, but not the memory.”

The photo burst into flames in his hands. No smoke. No burn marks. Just vanished.

He screamed into the silence of his apartment.

The boy had thanked him. The mirror had shattered. The grave had caved in.

So why wasn’t it over?

He decided to call Professor Arvind Deshmukh—a semi-retired folklorist who had once guided Alok through a story on haunted shrines.

Deshmukh picked up after three rings. “Alok?” His voice was grave. “I was hoping you wouldn’t call.”

“What do you mean?”

“I dreamt of you. Last week. You were standing in front of a house of glass. And something… older than gods was whispering your name.”

Alok explained everything. The house. The boy. The mirror. The woman.

When he finished, Deshmukh was silent. Then:

“There’s a pattern in Himalayan folklore,” he said. “Entities that don’t just haunt places—they infect memory. They use trauma as a mirror. Shattering the glass doesn’t destroy them. It frees them.”

Alok’s blood ran cold. “Then what do I do?”

“You need to contain the memory. Ground it. Bury it in truth. Write it down. Finish the story. Don’t let it live only in your head, or it’ll keep feeding.”

“I tried,” Alok whispered. “But every time I write, something goes wrong.”

“You have to finish it.”

Click. The line went dead.

Alok stared at the silence of his screen.

Fine.

He opened his laptop.

Opened a new Word document.

Typed the title: The House at Black Hollow Bend.

And began.

But as he typed the first sentence, blood trickled from his nose.

His reflection on the screen blinked when he didn’t.

He kept typing.

The walls of the apartment closed in slightly.

The lights dimmed.

And then—behind him—he heard the piano.

The lullaby again.

The one from his childhood.

But now, the final note was missing.

Like an unfinished ending.

And the mirror across the room began to hum.

The mirror across Alok’s room had started to hum—a low, vibrating sound that felt less like a noise and more like a pressure inside his skull. He turned slowly, the laptop screen flickering behind him, the cursor blinking mid-sentence.

The mirror stood innocently, rectangular, cheap, bolted to the wardrobe. But now its surface rippled gently, like water disturbed by breath. His reflection wasn’t blinking. It just stared—cold, unyielding, and impossibly still.

He stood. Took one cautious step forward.

In the reflection, he did not.

Instead, the other Alok tilted his head. Not like a curious mimic. But like a predator studying its prey.

And then it smiled.

“No,” Alok whispered, stepping back.

The lights in his flat began to flicker. The air thickened. His phone rang once and shut off before he could reach it.

He turned again to the mirror—and saw the veiled woman standing directly behind his reflection.

She wasn’t in the room. Only in the glass. But closer than she’d ever been.

And in her pale hands… she held a quill. Dripping black ink.

She lifted it slowly to the reflection’s face and began to write on his skin.

Letter by letter.

“Y-O-U”

Alok stumbled back, heart pounding.

Then came the knock.

Not at the door.

But at the mirror.

A loud, hollow thud.

And then another.

“Stop it!” he screamed, grabbing a heavy paperweight from his desk. He hurled it at the mirror.

It shattered into a hundred pieces across the wooden floor. Silence.

Breathing hard, Alok collapsed to his knees. But when he looked at the broken shards, they didn’t reflect the room.

They reflected the house.

Each fragment was a window—into Black Hollow Bend. The dusty hallway. The grand piano. The flickering chandelier. The boy.

The woman.

The mirror.

Each shard was a door.

And then he heard the lullaby again. Not from the mirror. From behind his bathroom door.

Someone—no, something—was inside.

He picked up his phone again. Still dead.

His laptop screen was now blinking wildly, lines of text filling up by themselves.

“You can’t leave the story unfinished.”
“She is the story.”
“She wrote you first.”

Alok slammed the lid shut.

He stepped toward the bathroom. His hand trembled as he reached for the knob.

The humming stopped.

Silence.

He opened it.

The lightbulb burst instantly.

Darkness.

But he could see. Dimly. With the kind of clarity that doesn’t come from light.

The mirror inside was fogged over. But something had written on it in the steam.

“Finish it, and we’ll let you go.”

The fog cleared.

And the reflection in the bathroom mirror wasn’t his.

It was the boy again.

Now older.

Now identical to him.

Now waiting.

The reflection in the bathroom mirror—his double, grown now, full-bodied and breathing—stood in perfect mimicry, yet Alok could feel the truth vibrating through the glass: this was not just an echo. It was something else. A version of him that had never left the house. A soul that had stayed behind to rot and remember.

Alok backed away from the mirror slowly, but the figure in the glass didn’t move.

Instead, it whispered.

“You left her unfinished. Now finish me.”

The door slammed shut behind him. Trapped.

He reached for the doorknob but found only damp, oozing wood. The walls of his bathroom had begun to peel, bleeding wallpaper like skin. The mirror’s surface rippled again, and this time, the other Alok stepped forward—and through.

No sound. No burst of light. Just a silent crossing, like ink sliding off a page.

Alok stumbled backwards as his twin took a single, barefoot step onto the tiled floor.

His double’s eyes were black. Pupil, iris, sclera—pure obsidian. They bore no hatred. Only hunger. The hunger of being forgotten.

Alok clenched his fists. “What do you want?”

The other smiled. “I want to be the one who finishes the story.”

And with that, he lunged.

They crashed into the sink. Glass exploded. The real Alok struggled, grabbing a shard and slicing through the twin’s cheek—except no blood spilled. Only ink. Thick, dripping ink that stained the floor like spilled memory.

The twin hissed and threw him across the room. Alok hit the wall hard. Dazed, he crawled for the door, pulling himself through with bloodied hands.

He burst into the bedroom. The laptop sat on the desk, still open. The screen glowed bright white now—blinding, pulsing.

The story was still being written.

Lines poured across the screen:

“He tried to escape, but the story had already been told. Long ago. Before he was born. The woman had written it. The boy had lived it. The man was only here to complete it.”

And then, one blinking line:

“To rewrite the ending, he had to return to where it began.”

Alok’s mouth went dry.

Back to the house.

Back to Black Hollow Bend.

The twin stepped into the room, dragging something behind him.

The red velvet cloth.

From the mirror’s frame.

Alok stood. He backed toward the door.

“I’ll finish it,” he said. “But on my terms.”

The twin tilted his head. “Hurry. She’s almost done writing yours.”

Alok fled the apartment. The twin didn’t follow.

The air outside had turned strange. Dim. Like the light was being filtered through grief.

The train to Himachal felt slower this time. Every window reflected not his face, but the boy’s. Every whistle sounded like a lullaby.

When he reached Kharota again, it was twilight.

But the house was no longer hidden.

It stood proudly at the top of the ridge. Newly restored. Doors open. Curtains dancing.

Waiting.

The path to the house was no longer crumbling. No broken stones, no gnarled roots. Just a perfect trail of white gravel that crunched softly under Alok’s shoes. The trees on either side stood unnaturally still, as though holding their breath.

The house looked alive again—its walls no longer moss-covered, but pristine. Lights glowed softly from the upstairs windows. The iron gate at the front creaked open on its own, swinging with slow ceremony.

Alok stepped through.

Inside, the house had changed. Everything was restored—the polished floorboards gleamed, the chandelier sparkled like diamonds. The piano in the drawing room stood untouched, its lid closed, as if waiting for hands that remembered how to play.

He walked slowly through the corridor. No dust. No cobwebs. Only the tick of an unseen clock and the faintest trace of lavender in the air.

A sound drew him upstairs.

Not footsteps.

Pen on paper.

Scratching.

Persistent.

He reached the room where he’d first found the diary. The door was ajar.

Inside, the veiled woman sat at the desk. But now, her veil was gone.

Her face was not monstrous. Not twisted.

It was… his mother’s.

Or at least, a version of her.

The version that had died in her sleep when he was twelve.

The woman looked up. “You came back,” she said, her voice soft but dry, like leaves crumbling.

Alok swallowed. “What are you?”

She smiled. “I am the author of what you forgot. The memory you buried.”

“You’re not real.”

“Does that matter?” she asked. “You’ve read the pages. You’ve heard the music. You’ve seen your reflection fracture. The story has always been yours. I just… helped you remember it.”

She slid a single page toward him. A pen lay beside it.

“Finish it.”

Alok stepped forward, hands shaking. The paper was blank—except for one line at the top:

“The boy who was left behind…”

He picked up the pen.

Behind him, he heard a familiar breath.

The boy.

The child version of himself. Standing by the door, smiling faintly.

Alok sat. He began to write.

“…was not abandoned, but forgotten. He grew up in shadows, in silence, until one day, he remembered his name.”

The pen moved faster. His heartbeat steadied. The walls of the room seemed to expand with each sentence.

“…and when he remembered, he walked back into the light, and the house let him go.”

He stopped.

The paper was full.

The woman—his not-mother—smiled. “Good.”

The boy walked to the desk. Placed his hand over Alok’s.

“I’m ready,” he whispered.

Alok closed his eyes.

When he opened them, the boy was gone.

So was the woman.

The room was empty.

Dusty. Broken.

The house had collapsed back into ruin.

But outside, the first light of dawn touched the trees.

And Alok—truly, finally—felt free.

Alok walked down the mountain path as the sun rose like a breath held too long finally exhaled. The fog was lifting. Birds chirped again—first one, then a hesitant chorus. The road beneath his feet no longer twisted like a snake but felt solid, known. Real.

He passed the tea-seller’s shack. It was still shuttered. But outside, resting on the bench, was an old red thermos and a chipped cup. A silent offering. A quiet welcome.

He didn’t stop.

Not until he reached the edge of Kharota and looked back.

There was no house. No silhouette. Only trees. Only sky.

The House at Black Hollow Bend had finally let go.

Weeks later, back in Delhi, Alok sat at his desk once again. The lights didn’t flicker. The mirror didn’t whisper. His reflection was his own, every time.

He had written the story. All of it. Every line, every scream, every song the house had sung into his ear. He’d titled it honestly: The House at Black Hollow Bend. And this time, the file saved. No vanishing. No corrupted drive.

He sent it to an editor he trusted. The reply came the next morning.

“Terrifying. Brilliant. Personal. We’ll publish it exactly as it is.”

He stared at those words a long time.

Because he knew.

It wasn’t his story. Not entirely. It belonged to every version of him that had walked into that house—curious, grieving, afraid. It belonged to the boy. The mother. The mirror.

But now it was out. In the world.

And the house, which had been feeding off silence, was silent at last.

That night, Alok lit a small diya and placed it at his window.

Not for protection.

For gratitude.

For memory.

And when the flame danced slightly in the still air, he didn’t flinch.

He smiled.

Because the story was over.

And sometimes, survival itself is the exorcism.

—The End.