Rishabh Sen
Episode 1 – The Key in the Dust
The old mansion on College Street stood between two bookstalls like an unwelcome intruder in a crowded marketplace. Its façade leaned as though tired of holding its own weight, blackened with soot and rain. Once it must have been a proud colonial house with verandahs, high arched windows, and a tall iron gate. Now, the gate sagged on its hinges, its bars eaten by rust, and the windows wore shutters nailed from the inside. Even in the middle of the afternoon, when the book market throbbed with students shouting for secondhand copies of Aristotle or cheap guides for the civil service exams, the mansion remained strangely aloof, as if it stood in a separate world, listening but refusing to answer.
Sohini Mukherjee paused at the gate, clutching her handbag closer. She was thirty-two, editor at Ananta Publishing, a new house trying to make its mark in Kolkata’s competitive literary scene. When her director announced they had bought the old Hargreaves Mansion to convert into a bookstore-café, everyone clapped politely. Only Sohini had felt a chill creep up her arms. She had passed the place many times in her student years, always quickening her steps as though shadows from inside might reach for her. Yet now, she was to be the project’s point person.
The caretaker, an old man from the neighborhood, shuffled to the gate and fumbled with a lock that looked older than himself. “Be careful, didimoni,” he muttered. “This house doesn’t like visitors.” He gave her a look too sharp to dismiss as harmless superstition.
Inside, the courtyard was layered in dust thick as carpet. Dead leaves lay in corners, and the air smelt of iron and old paper, though there were no books to be seen. A wooden staircase spiraled up to the first floor, the steps creaking as though whispering each footfall. Sohini set her notebook down on a window ledge and walked slowly through the hall.
Her shoes disturbed patterns in the dust. She noticed faint lines across the floorboards, as though someone had dragged furniture not long ago. Impossible, she thought. No one lived here for decades. The walls bore marks too: thin chalk strokes—alphabets in English, some broken Bengali words beside them. A lesson left unfinished.
The caretaker cleared his throat. “I’ll wait outside. Call me if needed.” He slipped out quickly, shutting the gate with a clang. Sohini felt suddenly alone, the silence pressing heavy.
She tried the main door to the inner hall. Locked. Another door, the same. She pulled at handles until her hand brushed something metallic half-buried in dust by the skirting of the staircase. A brass key, dark with age but surprisingly heavy. She picked it up, wiping the grime on her dupatta.
The moment she held it firmly, the nearest locked door gave a groan and swung inward, though no wind had stirred. Sohini froze, pulse hammering. Dust motes spun in a shaft of sunlight as if applauding her trespass.
Beyond the door lay a drawing room, its furniture draped in torn sheets. The smell of ink grew stronger here, like an abandoned printing press. On a writing desk sat a cracked porcelain inkwell. The nib of an old fountain pen rested across it, as if waiting for a hand to return.
She touched the pen. A sudden flutter filled the room, as if hundreds of pages had been turned at once. She spun around. The furniture covers trembled though her hands had not brushed them. Somewhere, faint but unmistakable, came the sound of pages rustling—an empty library breathing.
Her mouth dried. She backed into the corridor, clutching the key so tightly the edges cut into her palm. The sound stopped the instant she stepped out, leaving only the drone of College Street traffic beyond the windows.
She wanted to laugh it off. Old houses made strange noises. Dust falling, rats scurrying, wood contracting in heat. But her hand was wet. She opened her palm: a fine line of blood where the key had dug into her skin. The brass gleamed oddly, almost alive, as if the house itself had offered her a pact.
On impulse she slipped the key into her bag. She didn’t know why. Perhaps because she felt if she left it behind, the house might change its mind and lock her inside forever.
When she stepped back into the courtyard, the caretaker stared at her bag and asked, “Did you take anything?” His voice was sharper now, almost accusing.
“No,” she said quickly, though she felt the weight of the key pressing against the fabric.
The caretaker shook his head. “Then don’t stay long. Evening shadows are not kind here.”
Outside, College Street blazed with ordinary life—hawkers shouting, students bargaining, rickshaws clanging their bells. Yet as Sohini walked away, she felt the house watching her through its shuttered windows. Inside her bag, the brass key burned faintly warm, as though eager to open many more doors.
That night, when she returned to her flat in Lake Gardens and emptied her bag onto the bed, the key rolled out by itself. She swore she had zipped the bag. It lay gleaming under the yellow light, pointing towards her bookshelf. And though her windows were shut, she heard—just for a moment—the unmistakable sound of a page turning.
Episode 2 – The Phantom Readers
The following morning, Sohini returned to the mansion with two contractors. They were hired to begin cleaning the place before the publishing team could even think of shelves and counters. The men carried brooms and long rods, their faces already drawn with reluctance.
“It will take at least a week to clear this dust, madam,” one of them said. “And rats. God knows how many.”
Sohini nodded briskly, hiding her unease. The key sat inside her bag again, heavy against her hip. She had tried leaving it at home, but somehow her hand had reached for it before stepping out of the flat, as though it was no longer hers to discard.
The contractors began sweeping the main hall. Each thrust of the broom released clouds that hung in the air like ghostly curtains. Sohini wandered towards the inner room she had entered the day before. The door opened at her touch now, no longer locked.
Inside, the light slanted across the draped chairs. The inkwell on the desk glimmered faintly in the beam. For a long while she stood, listening. At first there was only the scraping of brooms from the hall. Then, as she laid her hand gently on the desk, the faint flutter returned—the sound of pages turning.
She spun around. The sheets covering the chairs lifted slightly, as though stirred by invisible readers shifting in their seats. The air thickened with the rustle of paper, hundreds of sheets being turned at once.
“Hello?” Her voice cracked against the stillness.
No answer. But the rustling grew stronger, like a tide swelling. It seemed to come from the walls themselves. She noticed, for the first time, faint chalk marks on the plaster—rows of alphabets, jagged and broken, as if written by many hands in haste. A, B, C… ক, খ, গ… English letters mingling uneasily with Bengali script.
The contractors appeared at the doorway, alarmed. “Did you hear that?” one asked.
Sohini hesitated. “It’s just… wind.”
But the men backed away, muttering, refusing to set foot inside again. One crossed himself, though he was clearly Hindu. “Not wind. This house is cursed.” They insisted on working only in the courtyard, leaving the inner rooms untouched.
Left alone, Sohini felt the weight of the silence return, heavier than before. She placed the key on the desk. The rustling softened, almost like a sigh of satisfaction. On impulse, she opened her notebook and began to scribble. The pen moved oddly smoothly, as though guided. The words formed themselves:
We are here. We are always here. Read us.
Her breath caught. She dropped the pen. The words gleamed wetly on the page though she had not written them with ink.
Snatching her notebook, she fled into the hall. The contractors stared at her pale face, then exchanged glances and packed up early, muttering excuses about other work. By evening, Sohini was alone again, standing in the courtyard as shadows lengthened.
She looked around. The shutters were nailed from inside, yet she had the strangest sensation that eyes peered through them—scores of unseen readers studying her as one might study a difficult text. College Street beyond roared with students bargaining for books, but here time seemed locked, the house breathing with its own rhythm.
When she finally turned to leave, something scraped against the floor. A torn page had slid across the dust towards her shoe. She bent to pick it up. The paper was brittle, yellowed, the ink smudged, yet the handwriting was careful, almost elegant.
It read:
Professor Hargreaves instructs us again. We must repeat until perfect. He says the words bind us. He says the book never ends.
The page trembled in her hand though the air was still. A voice whispered, very close to her ear—male, accented, yet strangely broken in rhythm:
“Read it aloud.”
She spun around. No one stood there. The courtyard was empty.
She stuffed the page into her bag and walked quickly out of the gate. The caretaker, leaning against the wall, did not meet her eyes. He only said, “They’ve found you already. Careful, didimoni. A house that reads you never forgets.”
That night, in her apartment, Sohini tried to dismiss the experience as stress. She poured herself tea, switched on the fan, and opened her laptop to draft a project report. But when she pulled out her notebook, the page she had written earlier had changed.
The words were no longer We are here. Now, in thick, uneven scrawl, it read:
We are waiting, Sohini Mukherjee.
Her hand shook so violently she nearly spilled her cup. She looked towards her bookshelf. The key, lying on the table, gleamed with a faint golden sheen.
And then—though all her windows were closed—every book on her shelf shivered, their pages fluttering at once, like an unseen audience turning to the same chapter.
Episode 3 – Ink on the Hands
The next morning, Sohini awoke with a start. Her bedsheet was smeared with black. For a second she thought it was blood, but as she sat up in panic, she realized her palms were stained with ink. Thick, oily lines ran along her fingers, as though she had spent the night correcting manuscripts. But her desk lay untouched, and her laptop had gone into sleep mode exactly where she had left it.
She scrubbed her hands raw at the basin, but faint smudges clung to her skin like old bruises. A smell of iron and paper followed her through the day. Even her tea tasted faintly metallic, as though the ink had seeped into her tongue.
By noon she was back at the mansion, driven by a strange compulsion she could not name. She told herself she needed to supervise the contractors, but in truth she was pulled by the whisper of pages, the unfinished alphabets that had haunted her dreams.
The caretaker opened the gate reluctantly. “Why so early again, didimoni? One should not visit a house like this daily.”
“I need to inspect,” she said curtly. He muttered something under his breath but let her in.
Inside, the rooms were quieter than before. The contractors had not returned. Dust still clung to every surface, disturbed only by her own footprints from yesterday. She climbed the staircase slowly. On the landing, sunlight filtered through cracks, painting pale bars on the floorboards.
That was when she saw it—scattered across the corridor, a trail of papers. Not printed books, but handwritten manuscripts, their edges singed, as if they had been rescued from fire. She knelt and lifted one. The ink was faded brown, the script elegant, signed at the bottom: Edward M. Hargreaves, 1933.
A sudden image leapt into her mind: a tall, bearded man in a professor’s coat, hunched over a desk, writing feverishly by lamplight. His eyes glowed not with inspiration but with obsession. She blinked and the image vanished, but her heart pounded as if she had intruded on a secret.
Carrying the manuscript, she pushed open a nearby door. The room inside was lined with shelves, bare of books but thick with dust. Yet the smell was unmistakable—the dry, musty perfume of a library. On one shelf, she noticed faint indentations, like shadows where books once stood. She ran her fingers along them, and suddenly her palm flared wet.
She pulled back in shock. Dark ink streaked her skin, dripping as if she had plunged her hand into a fresh bottle. The drops fell onto the manuscript in her other hand. The words beneath the stains seemed to come alive, sharpening into clarity. She read despite herself:
The pages must be fed. Words alone do not last. Ink must be renewed with flesh, with voice, with memory. Only then shall the book remain eternal.
Her breath caught. The manuscript trembled, as though reacting to her presence. She dropped it, but it did not fall—it fluttered in the air like a bird before settling back onto the floor.
A whisper rose around her, many voices overlapping—students reciting, men chanting, a professor intoning in harsh English. The walls seemed to throb with the echo of classrooms that no longer existed. She covered her ears but the sound came from inside her head.
She stumbled into the corridor, slamming the door behind her. But the manuscripts littering the floor had changed. Their pages were no longer blank or faded. They brimmed with ink, words bleeding into each other, stories written in desperate, uneven hands. Names appeared, one after another: Anil Chatterjee, Haripada Dutta, Jiban Das… Bengali students’ names, scrawled like signatures in blood.
Sohini gasped. She recognized some surnames—common, but tied to stories her grandmother once told, of boys taken during protests, never to return.
Her phone buzzed in her bag, startling her. She fumbled it out. A message blinked on the screen from an unknown number:
Don’t let him write you too.
The phone went dead instantly, battery drained though she had charged it overnight. Her reflection on the black screen looked alien, her eyes rimmed with exhaustion, fingers still stained with stubborn ink.
By evening, she sat alone in the courtyard, the manuscripts stacked at her feet. The caretaker refused to come inside, but through the gate he called, “Didimoni, leave them. Nothing good comes from touching their words.”
Sohini wanted to obey. Yet when she looked at the stack, she felt them breathe, each page fluttering like a trapped lung. If she left them, they would follow. She was certain of it.
So she stuffed as many as she could into her bag, the brass key clinking against them. The bag weighed far more than it should have, almost dragging her shoulder down.
That night at home, she tried locking the bag inside her cupboard. She even draped a shawl over it to hide its outline. But as she lay in bed, she heard the faint rustle of pages turning. Not from the cupboard. From under her pillow.
She reached with trembling fingers and found a single loose sheet lying against her cheek, words freshly written across it:
Your hands are already ours.
Her palms burned. She looked down—black ink was seeping again from her skin, curling into letters across her veins.
And the words, when strung together, spelled her own name.
Episode 4 – The Students Who Never Left
By the fourth day, Sohini had stopped pretending she was merely supervising renovations. The contractors no longer returned, inventing excuses about urgent work elsewhere. Even the caretaker lingered only at the gate, refusing to step past the courtyard. That left her alone with the mansion and its restless silence.
The bag with the manuscripts seemed heavier each morning. She tried leaving it at her flat, but the pages turned up again—on her desk, beneath her pillow, once even inside her refrigerator. Wherever she went, the house followed. It was no longer a building; it was a presence that had fastened itself to her.
On a humid afternoon, rain threatening above College Street, she returned to the house. The brass key was warm in her hand, almost eager. She climbed the staircase, determined to face whatever hid behind the whispers.
The corridor smelled faintly of burnt oil lamps. The manuscripts she had taken were gone from her bag, scattered once more across the floor as if they belonged here. When she bent to pick one up, her vision swam. She was no longer in a dusty mansion but in a classroom.
Wooden benches stretched before her, students in dhotis and khadi kurtas hunched over their notebooks. The ceiling fans whirred lazily. At the blackboard stood a man with sharp cheekbones, chalk clutched like a blade—Professor Hargreaves. His voice rang out, clipped and impatient.
“Repeat after me: Liberty is obedience to law.”
The students echoed the line, though their voices quivered. Sohini realized with horror that none of them looked older than nineteen. She blinked, and the vision flickered. The room was again dusty and broken, but faint outlines of the boys remained, seated on chairs that no longer existed, their lips moving silently.
She whispered, “Who are you?”
One of the students turned. His face was pale, eyes hollow yet burning with unspent defiance. His lips formed a name: Anil. Then he vanished, leaving behind the sound of chalk scraping furiously against wood.
Sohini stumbled back, heart pounding. She tried the door at the far end of the corridor. It opened into another room, and here the illusion was stronger. She saw lanterns glowing, pamphlets strewn across the floor—Quit India, Down with Imperialism. A group of students whispered urgently, their faces lit with fear and fire.
The scene blurred, then shifted violently. Policemen stormed in, lathis raised. The students screamed. One tried to run, but a blow cracked his skull, blood splattering across the wall. The lanterns overturned. The papers caught fire.
Sohini gasped. She clutched the doorway as the vision dissolved, leaving behind only scorched marks on the plaster. Marks that looked too real, too fresh.
She staggered into the courtyard, desperate for air. The caretaker looked at her face and shook his head. “You saw them, didn’t you? The boys who never left.”
“Who were they?” she asked, her voice hoarse.
“Freedom fighters,” the old man said. “Students from Presidency, Sanskrit College, even Medical. They hid here when the police came hunting. Hargreaves gave them shelter—or so they thought.”
Sohini’s skin prickled. “And then?”
The caretaker spat on the ground. “And then he betrayed them. Called the police himself. Those who weren’t killed on the spot were dragged away. No one knows what became of them. Their families still wait.”
Sohini closed her eyes. The faces she had seen—young, terrified, yet burning with courage—seared themselves onto her mind. She felt suddenly ashamed, standing here in her neat kurta, carrying a bag full of their voices while she still had the freedom they had been denied.
That evening, back in her flat, she laid out the manuscripts on her dining table. The pages rustled faintly as if breathing. One sheet in particular caught her eye. It bore the same neat handwriting she had seen earlier, but this time the words were desperate, jagged:
We marched. We chanted. We believed. Then he smiled. He told us to wait. The door locked. The air thickened. We read until we bled. We read until we died.
As she traced the lines with trembling fingers, the ink spread, curling across her skin. Letters coiled around her wrist like shackles. She yanked her hand back, but the marks remained, black against her flesh.
A sudden knock rattled her door. She froze, heart hammering. No one visited her at this hour. When she dared to open it, the corridor outside was empty. Only a faint sound lingered—the steady shuffle of feet, as if a group of students were marching past in silence.
She shut the door quickly, bolting it. The manuscripts rustled louder, a rising chorus. The faces of the boys hovered at the edge of her vision. They were not at peace. They were trapped, condemned to recite lessons for a professor who had sold their voices to the empire.
That night, as she drifted into uneasy sleep, Sohini dreamed she was seated in that ghostly classroom. Chalk screeched across the board. Hargreaves’ voice rang out again, merciless and eternal:
“Repeat after me: A story unread is a life unlived.”
And beside her, the students turned their hollow eyes towards her, lips moving soundlessly, demanding that she join them.
When she woke, her bedsheet bore fresh chalk marks, the words smeared across the fabric. She touched her palms and found them wet again—not with ink this time, but with tears that were not her own.
Episode 5 – Blood in the Margins
The storm broke over College Street without warning. Clouds, thick and bruised, burst open, and rain hammered the tin roofs of bookstalls until the whole market sounded like a single restless drum. Inside the mansion, Sohini stood with three laborers who had reluctantly agreed to resume clearing the hall. Their nerves showed in the way they moved—fast, careless, as if desperate to finish before nightfall.
One of them, a wiry man named Bapi, laughed too loudly. “Ghosts? Come on, madam. This is just an old house.” He kicked a broken chair aside. “See? Dust, termites, nothing more.”
But as the rain lashed harder, a strange smell spread through the hall—iron, bitter and raw. Sohini recognized it instantly. Blood.
She tried to steady her voice. “Do you smell that?”
The others shook their heads uneasily, but Bapi sniffed, smirked, and swung his broom harder. He reached the far corner where an old bookshelf leaned. As he jabbed at the wood, his cry ripped through the air.
Sohini rushed forward. His forearms were suddenly streaked with crimson lines—not scratches, but words. Letters carved themselves into his flesh, raw and dripping. The others dropped their tools and fled shrieking into the courtyard. Only Sohini remained, staring in horror as the words deepened.
They were sentences, written in shaky English:
> We are pages. We bleed to be read.
Bapi collapsed, writhing. Blood flowed down his arms, soaking the manuscripts scattered on the floor. As the droplets touched the brittle paper, the words on the pages sharpened, letters blooming fresh and black as though newly printed. Sohini watched, frozen, as forgotten diaries came alive beneath his blood.
The rain outside thundered harder. A lantern flickered though no one had lit it. The manuscripts rose slightly, trembling like living things. And then the voices came—students reciting, chanting, crying, their tones layered like a broken choir.
Bapi gasped. “It’s writing on me!” He clawed at his arms, but the letters only multiplied, crawling up to his shoulders, his chest. His voice cracked into a whimper, then silence as he fainted.
Sohini dragged him to the doorway, half expecting the house to resist, but the door swung open easily. She pulled him into the courtyard where rain sluiced over his wounds, washing the letters into pink streams. The caretaker appeared, alarm widening his eyes.
“I told you not to bring men inside!” he barked.
“He’ll die!” Sohini cried.
The old man bent over the laborer, muttering prayers. To her relief, the cuts began to close, the letters fading like erased chalk. Bapi stirred weakly, whispering incoherent words—phrases from textbooks, slogans from rallies, all jumbled. His lips moved as though he were still reciting in a ghostly classroom.
Sohini shivered. She returned to the hall, compelled. Inside, the manuscripts lay glistening, their pages no longer faded but bold and new, shining with dark wetness. She picked one up. The ink was fresh, but the words were jagged:
Professor commands. Our stories will not fade. We give our blood. You give yours.
Her hand trembled. She dropped the page, but it clung to her palm, suctioned by invisible force. She pulled harder. At last it tore away, leaving a streak of red across her skin.
She staggered back into the courtyard. The caretaker caught her arm, his grip surprisingly strong. “Listen to me, didimoni. The house is not haunted by ghosts alone. It is hungry. It feeds on readers, on writers, on words given in pain.”
“Then why me?” she whispered.
“Because you are an editor,” he said grimly. “You give shape to words. It recognizes its own.”
That night, Sohini sat by Bapi’s hospital bed. He lay pale, mumbling in sleep. Doctors claimed exhaustion and dehydration, dismissing the wounds as some “psychological episode.” But Sohini knew better. The words carved into his flesh had been too precise, too deliberate.
She pulled out her notebook. The page where she had once written “We are here” now bore new lines she had not written:
Blood is ink. Ink is memory. Memory is never free.
Her palms itched. When she lifted them to the light, faint letters shimmered beneath her skin, curling up her veins like roots waiting to surface.
At dawn she walked again to College Street. The rain had cleared, leaving the pavements slick and shining. Students crowded the stalls as usual, bargaining loudly, flipping through books. To them the mansion was just another ruined house, an eyesore between stalls. But to Sohini it loomed taller, darker, watching her approach.
As she stepped inside, she heard the rustle begin again—stronger this time, insistent. The walls themselves seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with the rhythm of unseen pages. And over it all, faint but steady, came the whisper of chalk on a board:
Write. Write. Write.
Sohini clutched the brass key until it cut her palm, the wound blooming red. A drop of her blood fell onto the dusty floor. Immediately, a phrase spread across the boards in ink-black letters:
Welcome back.
Episode 6 – The Forgotten Library
The next evening, after another sleepless night, Sohini returned to the mansion. She had begun to feel like a trespasser in her own life—her apartment no longer felt safe, her notebooks filled with words she hadn’t written, her palms prickled with faint letters beneath the skin. The only place that seemed to recognize her now was this ruined house on College Street, as if it had claimed her.
The caretaker was not at the gate. The lock hung open, swaying in the breeze. She pushed it aside and entered. The courtyard lay in shadow, though the afternoon sun still glowed outside. The moment she stepped inside, the house exhaled—a long, low rustle like a sigh of relief.
The brass key felt warm in her pocket, guiding her steps. Instead of climbing the stairs, she followed a faint draft along the eastern corridor. The air here was damp, the walls sweating with moisture. Behind a stack of broken planks, she noticed something odd—a door flush with the wall, its outline faint, almost invisible beneath peeling plaster.
Her hand trembled as she slid the key into a small, rusted hole. The lock clicked too smoothly, as though it had been waiting. The door creaked open, revealing a narrow staircase spiraling downward into darkness. A smell of mildew and ash rose to meet her.
She descended slowly, her phone torch cutting a thin beam through the gloom. The stairs ended in a vaulted cellar. And there, to her astonishment, stood row after row of shelves—an underground library.
But the shelves were filled with blank books.
Hundreds of them. Thick volumes bound in cracked leather, spines brittle, pages pale and untouched. She pulled one out, flipping it open. The pages stared back at her, utterly empty. No words, no ink, not even a watermark.
The silence of the cellar was suffocating. Yet she felt the weight of voices pressing against her skull, as though the books were not empty but gagged. She placed her palm flat on a page. At once, her skin tingled. Black stains oozed from her veins, soaking into the sheet. Letters began to form, curling across the paper like vines.
She snatched her hand away in horror, but the words remained. They were not hers. They were a diary entry in desperate Bengali script:
We hid in the professor’s cellar. He promised safety. He said these books would guard our stories. But when we wrote, the pages swallowed our words, and we felt our lives drain with them. We are still here, inside these bindings, waiting to be freed.
Sohini staggered back. She opened another book. Its pages too remained blank—until she nicked her finger against the edge. A single drop of blood fell, spreading like ink across the paper. Words bloomed again, in English this time:
You are our reader. Read us aloud. Only your voice can tear the bindings.
The air thickened. A murmur filled the cellar, swelling into overlapping whispers. Sohini clutched her phone like a talisman. Her torch beam flickered, revealing pale faces hovering between the shelves—young men, their eyes hollow, their mouths moving silently. The same students she had seen in her visions.
They pointed at the books. Their gestures were frantic, pleading. Sohini’s throat dried. She wanted to run, but her feet refused. She picked up the first volume again, holding it close. “What do you want from me?” she whispered.
The chorus answered, though their mouths never moved: Read us.
She licked her dry lips, raised the book, and began to read the words aloud. Her voice echoed strangely, bouncing against the stone walls. As she spoke, the cellar vibrated. The faces brightened, their outlines clearer, almost flesh. Some wept silently. Others looked up as if tasting air for the first time in decades.
But the more she read, the heavier her chest grew. Each sentence was a wound. She felt their pain bleeding into her lungs, their memories flooding her veins. The ink on the page grew darker, thicker, until it dripped onto the floor like fresh blood.
She stopped, gasping. The voices wailed in unison. Do not stop. If you stop, we remain.
Her head spun. She flung the book aside. Instantly, the pages slammed shut with a crack, the voices silenced. The faces blurred and faded into the shelves again. The silence returned, heavier than before.
Shaking, she stumbled back up the stairs, slamming the hidden door behind her. In the corridor, her breath came ragged, her heart racing. Yet the books’ words pulsed inside her skull, as if etched into her brain.
Outside in the courtyard, she found the caretaker waiting. His eyes narrowed when he saw her face. “You went down, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
He sighed. “Now you cannot unhear them. Once you read, you are bound. They will follow you until you finish their stories.”
Her voice cracked. “And if I finish?”
The caretaker looked away. Rain began to fall again, thin needles through the darkening air. “Then you will set them free. Or you will join them. No one knows which.”
That night, when she reached her flat, she found a blank book lying on her desk. It had not been there before. Its pages glowed faintly in the lamplight. On the first sheet, in her own handwriting though she had not written it, a line appeared:
Episode One: The Reader Arrives.
Her hands shook. She flipped through. More words scrawled themselves across the blankness, curling into sentences: Episode Two: The Phantom Readers. Episode Three: Ink on the Hands. Episode Four: The Students Who Never Left. Episode Five: Blood in the Margins. Episode Six: The Forgotten Library.
It was her own life—each moment written down like a chapter. The last page was still empty, but space remained for many more.
She slammed the book shut. But the ink kept spreading, even on the cover. It spelled out her name.
Episode 7 – The Betrayal of Hargreaves
Sohini could not sleep. The blank book she had carried back from the mansion lay on her table, its spine pulsing faintly as if it had a heartbeat. She tried locking it in her cupboard, even burying it under piles of clothes, but at midnight she heard the unmistakable sound of pages fluttering. When she opened the door, the book was lying in the middle of the floor, its cover gleaming in the dark.
By morning, her resolve broke. She knew she had to understand who Hargreaves was, why his name haunted the manuscripts. The caretaker’s half-whispered warnings were not enough. If the past had trapped her, she needed to meet it head-on.
She walked to the National Library of India in Alipore, a place she had often visited during her editorial research. The scent of old paper here was different—less oppressive, more human. She requested records from the 1920s and 1930s, specifically on foreign professors posted at Presidency College.
The librarian, an old woman with sharp spectacles, raised an eyebrow. “Ah. Professor Edward M. Hargreaves. Many stories about him. Some say he was brilliant. Others say he was a madman.”
Sohini leaned forward. “What do you know?”
The librarian pulled out a brittle file. Inside were letters, newspaper cuttings, and even a faded photograph. Hargreaves looked stern, bearded, his eyes hollow behind round spectacles. His students had nicknamed him Kala Saheb—the black master—for his cruel methods of teaching.
One letter, addressed to the British Education Department, caught Sohini’s breath. It detailed Hargreaves’ proposal for a “special colonial curriculum,” in which rebellious students would be disciplined through intensive reading sessions under his supervision.
Another clipping reported mysterious disappearances of young men during protest marches near College Street. Though the police denied involvement, whispers spread that a professor was offering “safe rooms” for the boys. Few returned. Those who did were changed—silent, listless, unwilling to speak of what they had seen.
Sohini’s fingers trembled as she turned the pages. One document in particular felt heavier. It was a torn diary, allegedly recovered after Hargreaves vanished in 1934. The handwriting matched the manuscripts she had seen in the mansion. The entry read:
The students are fire. To control fire, one must contain it. Words are chains. I offered them pages, and they obeyed. When blood spilled, the ink deepened. They thought me their savior. I was their reader, their jailer, their executioner. Better they remain in books than in the streets.
Sohini slammed the diary shut, bile rising in her throat. Betrayal. Hargreaves had pretended to shelter freedom fighters, only to deliver them into silence. Not only had he betrayed them to the police, he had bound their very souls into his cursed library.
As she left the National Library, the wind turned warm, almost oppressive. In her bag, the blank book shifted on its own. She pulled it out. New words had appeared across its first page, in a hand unmistakably his:
You read my diary. Now I am reading you.
Her skin crawled. People bustled around her on the street, oblivious, while she felt her pulse thrum in rhythm with the book’s heartbeat.
That evening, she confronted the caretaker at the mansion. The old man was seated on a stool, smoking a bidi, his eyes shadowed.
“You knew,” she accused. “You knew he betrayed them.”
The caretaker did not meet her gaze. “We all knew, in whispers. My grandfather worked in these lanes. He saw boys walk into that house and never return. But who would dare speak against a sahib then?”
Sohini clenched her fists. “Their voices are still trapped. They want me to read them out, to free them.”
The caretaker spat. “And what then? Do you think freedom is so simple? Ghosts do not vanish like smoke. Once bound, they hunger for justice. If you free them, their rage will not stop at Hargreaves. It will consume everything.”
“But leaving them bound is worse,” Sohini shot back. “He turned their courage into a prison. He fed on them. I can’t allow that.”
The old man looked at her long, his eyes watery but sharp. “Then be ready, didimoni. If you open their books, you open his too. And Hargreaves is not a man who ever left quietly.”
That night, back in her flat, Sohini dared to open the blank book again. New writing crawled across the page as she watched:
I chose you, Editor. You understand the weight of words. They are not free. They bind, they cut, they kill. Read them, and they are mine. Refuse them, and they are still mine. There is no escape from the text once you enter.
The lights flickered. A figure shimmered at the edge of her room—tall, gaunt, wearing a professor’s coat. His face was indistinct, but the gleam of round spectacles was unmistakable.
She whispered, “Hargreaves.”
The figure inclined its head slightly, as though acknowledging a bright pupil. And then it was gone, leaving behind only the smell of chalk and iron ink.
Sohini sat on the floor, her breath shaking. The betrayal was no longer history. It was present, alive. The man who had locked voices in pages was now unlocking her.
And for the first time, she realized the house had never been haunted by ghosts alone. It was haunted by its master, who had never left his classroom.
Episode 8 – The Book That Writes Itself
Sohini no longer carried the blank book in her bag—it carried itself. No matter where she placed it, she would find it beside her by dawn. Once she even tried leaving it on a park bench near Rabindra Sadan, thinking perhaps the city itself might swallow it. But when she returned home, there it was on her dining table, open to a page she did not remember writing.
The words were chillingly precise:
At six twenty-two in the evening, she leaves the book on a bench. At nine fifteen, she unlocks her flat and finds it waiting. At nine sixteen, she screams.
The ink was still wet.
Her first instinct was denial. She convinced herself it was some elaborate trick, her imagination feeding on fatigue. But as she read further, her denial fractured. The sentences described her movements exactly—each pause, each sip of tea, even the tremor in her hands as she typed half-hearted emails to her publishing team. Every detail was there, written in that crisp, measured handwriting that was not her own.
One night, unable to bear the suspense, she sat with the book open in front of her and waited. At first the pages were blank. Then, slowly, letters began to crawl across them, line by line, keeping pace with her thoughts.
> She stares at the book. She tells herself she will not look at the words. But she looks. She cannot help herself. She reads this very sentence and feels her stomach twist.
Her throat closed. She slammed the cover shut, but the sound echoed too loudly, as though the walls had joined in.
The following morning, she returned to the mansion, determined to confront it. Rain washed over College Street, plastering the bookstalls in damp posters and soggy paperbacks. Students bargained louder to rise above the storm, their voices strangely muted to her ears.
Inside the mansion, the silence was worse than thunder. She climbed to the first floor, the blank book tucked under her arm, though it felt heavier with each step. The corridor stretched longer than she remembered, as if the house had expanded overnight.
At the end, the door to Hargreaves’ study stood ajar. She pushed it gently. The room inside was dim, the old desk positioned like an altar. The cracked inkwell still sat there, waiting. She placed the book on the desk. Immediately, the pen inside the inkwell rose, scratching across the open page by itself.
She watched, frozen, as the nib dragged jagged letters:
Episode Eight: The Editor Surrenders.
“No,” she whispered. “I haven’t surrendered.”
But the pen continued, relentless:
She tells herself she has not surrendered. That is how surrender begins.
Her vision blurred. She staggered back, but the air thickened, pulling her closer. The chair behind the desk screeched back as though inviting her to sit. Against her will, she lowered herself into it. The pen trembled, then placed itself into her hand.
The moment her fingers closed around it, her mind split open. Images poured in—students bound to benches, their mouths forced open to recite lines; pages absorbing their cries; Hargreaves watching, satisfied, as their souls etched themselves into ink.
Sohini gasped. The pen dug into her palm, cutting skin. Her blood mingled with the ink, staining the page. Words bled onto the sheet in her own handwriting:
I am writing now. My story is no longer mine.
Her breath came ragged. She tried to drop the pen, but her fingers refused to unclench. The pen guided her hand, dragging letters that spilled truths she had never spoken aloud—her loneliness, her buried grief at her father’s death, her secret doubts about her own worth. The page filled rapidly, exposing her inner self.
“Stop!” she screamed, flinging the pen across the room. It clattered against the wall and fell silent. The book pulsed, furious. The words on the page twisted, rearranging themselves:
Do not resist. Resistance is already written.
The voices rose again, the phantom students chanting. This time their words were not lessons, but demands: Read us. Read us. Finish us. Their faces shimmered in the air, crowding the study, eyes hollow, lips moving in desperate unison.
Sohini clutched the book to her chest. “What happens if I finish?”
A new line appeared instantly across the open page:
She asks what happens if she finishes. The answer is this: she will become the ending.
Her throat tightened. She stumbled into the corridor, clutching the book like a curse she could neither keep nor discard. The house shuddered around her, doors banging, dust raining from the ceiling. The caretaker’s voice drifted faintly from below, though she could not see him:
“Don’t let him write you, didimoni. Don’t let him!”
She ran down the staircase, but the walls seemed to lean inward, forcing her closer to the book. The letters shifted under her gaze, forming a new sentence with mocking calm:
She thinks she is running away. She is only running to the next chapter.
Outside, the storm had eased, but in her ears the rustle of pages grew louder than rain. She realized then that her life was no longer unfolding freely. It was being inscribed, moment by moment, into a text authored by hands unseen.
And she feared that soon she would stop being the reader—and become only the story.
Episode 9 – The Burning Pages
For three nights Sohini kept the cursed book locked inside a trunk. But the sound of rustling pages never stopped. It seeped through her dreams like water through cracks. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw words curling across her skin, sentences tattooing her veins. By dawn she felt less herself, more manuscript.
On the fourth night she made her decision. If the house had imprisoned voices in paper, then only fire could set them free. Books had power, yes—but books also burned.
She returned to the mansion carrying a can of kerosene and a box of matches. The caretaker, hunched at the gate, shook his head slowly. “You think fire is stronger than memory?”
“It’s the only way,” she replied. Her voice was hoarse but steady. “If I don’t burn them, they’ll finish me.”
He looked at her long, then turned away, as though refusing to witness her choice.
Inside, the house seemed to anticipate her. Doors opened too easily. The staircase groaned in rhythm with her heartbeat. The air in the corridor throbbed with voices, chanting, pleading, reciting. When she reached the hidden cellar door, the brass key slid in without resistance, as though the lock had already agreed.
The underground library was waiting. Row after row of blank books shimmered in the torchlight. But tonight they were not empty. Words bled faintly across the pages, half-formed, trembling like larvae. Faces hovered above the shelves, students gazing at her with hollow eyes.
She set the can down, uncapped it, and began splashing kerosene across the shelves. The liquid soaked quickly, releasing its sharp sting. The students’ faces rippled in agitation. Some wept. Some nodded. Some reached out their transparent hands as if blessing her, others as if warning.
When she struck the first match, the library gasped. The flame wavered in her grip, a single fragile tongue of orange. She touched it to the nearest shelf. At once the wood roared alive. Pages curled, blackening, words twisting into smoke.
And the voices screamed.
The cellar filled with a cacophony—hundreds of students crying, chanting, howling. The sound shook the shelves, the ceiling, her own bones. For a moment she faltered, clutching her ears. Were they grateful? Were they in agony? She could not tell.
The fire spread hungrily, leaping from book to book. Ink hissed and dripped onto the floor like molten tar. The flames glowed blue, then green, unnatural, as if feeding on more than paper. Through the smoke she saw shapes rising—students stepping free of the shelves, their bodies flickering with fire, their mouths open in endless chants.
She stumbled backward. The heat seared her skin, but still she kept throwing matches, feeding the blaze.
On the central desk lay the cursed blank book—the one that had followed her. It trembled violently, its pages flapping like wings. Letters scrawled across it faster than fire could catch:
She burns the library. She thinks this frees them. She does not understand. Freedom is another prison.
Sohini grabbed the book and hurled it into the flames. For an instant, the fire dimmed, as though the book had swallowed it whole. Then it erupted higher, licking the ceiling, rattling the iron beams.
The faces of the students surged closer, circling her. Some bowed in gratitude. Others glared with eyes like burning coals. One voice rose above the rest, shrill with fury:
You have no right! Our words were not yours to erase!
Another countered, gentle but broken: At last. At last we are ash.
The voices clashed, overlapping in chaos. Sohini dropped to her knees, coughing, the smoke scalding her lungs. The floor shook as though the house itself was enraged. Cracks split across the walls. Plaster rained down.
Through the roar, a deeper voice cut clear—the professor’s. Calm, cold, authoritative.
Books do not die in fire. They are only rewritten.
A figure emerged through the smoke: tall, bearded, spectacles glinting, coat smudged with ink. Hargreaves. He walked unburnt through the flames, the cursed book cradled in his hands, restored, untouched.
Sohini’s scream tore her throat raw. She stumbled to her feet, rushing for the staircase. But the fire leapt before her, forming a wall. She turned, trapped, the cellar collapsing around her. Students’ faces swirled in smoke, some reaching upward, some dragged downward by unseen chains.
She saw one boy—Anil, the first she had glimpsed—step forward. His face was both burned and luminous. He pressed his hands together in silent plea. Then, with a cry, he hurled himself into the flames, vanishing into ash. The others followed, one by one, each dissolving in the fire’s maw.
The cellar blazed brighter, yet emptier. The shelves crumbled, books collapsing into cinders. The voices fell silent, leaving only the professor’s laugh—low, satisfied, echoing.
Sohini forced her way toward the staircase, shielding her face with her arm. The brass key seared against her skin in her pocket, branding her hip with heat. Somehow, she stumbled up the steps, bursting into the corridor above just as a violent crash split the cellar. Smoke surged behind her.
She staggered into the courtyard, collapsing on the wet ground. Rain drenched her, cooling her burning skin. For a moment she thought she had escaped. But when she opened her eyes, the blank book lay beside her, dry despite the rain. Its cover gleamed, untouched by fire.
She picked it up with trembling fingers. On the first page, a new line had already written itself:
Episode Nine: The Editor Burns the Library. Episode Ten: The House That Remembers.
Her tears mixed with the rain. She realized then that fire had not ended anything. It had only turned the page.
Episode 10 – The House That Remembers
The fire had scarred her lungs. For days afterward Sohini coughed black phlegm, her chest aching as though the smoke still lived inside her. The doctors called it bronchitis. But she knew better. She hadn’t inhaled mere smoke; she had swallowed words.
The publishing house abandoned the project. “The building is unsafe,” her director announced. “Renovation funds wasted. We’ll look elsewhere.” The contractors refused to return, claiming the fire was unnatural. The caretaker vanished, his stool empty by the gate, as though he had dissolved into the crowd of College Street.
But Sohini could not leave. The mansion haunted her like a lover she hated. Every night, the blank book appeared beside her, each page inscribing itself further. It wrote her life with merciless precision:
> She wakes at seven, coughing. She avoids her reflection in the mirror. She tells herself she will not go back. At nine she begins walking toward College Street.
And she always did.
The house loomed larger each day, its soot-black walls like ribs of a carcass. Though part of the cellar had collapsed, the structure still stood, defiant. Students hurried past without looking. Hawkers set up stalls right against its gate. Life bustled on around it, ignoring its hunger. Only Sohini could hear the low breathing of its walls.
One evening, exhausted, she placed the blank book on her desk and forced herself to read aloud. The words told of her own actions—the fire, the screams, the students’ release and rage. But as she read further, something changed. The sentences no longer described her. They described the city.
College Street trembles with footsteps. Booksellers shout, unaware of the ash drifting through their lungs. Students laugh, not knowing their voices echo others who never left.
She shivered. The book was expanding, feeding on more than her life. It was rewriting the city itself.
That night she dreamed of Hargreaves. He stood at the blackboard again, chalk scraping harshly. But this time the students’ benches were filled not with boys in dhotis, but with present-day faces—girls with backpacks, young men in jeans, a thousand restless eyes. He pointed the chalk at her.
“Read them. Or I will.”
She woke with a scream, sweat soaking her sheets. The blank book lay open on her chest. Across its pages, in thick letters, was written:
Tomorrow at dusk she will return. Tomorrow at dusk she will finish the lesson.
End
