Priyanka Tyagi
Arrival in the Hills
The narrow road coiled up like a silver ribbon through the pine-clad hills of Shimla. Cold mist clung to the windows of the taxi as it crawled its way past scattered cottages and sleepy shops. Aanya leaned against the window, letting the chill seep through the glass into her skin. She liked it that way—numb, silent, unbothered. Delhi had become too loud, too fast, too full of ghosts she didn’t want to name. The hills called her like a whisper in the dark.
She adjusted her scarf, watching the fog thicken. The driver, a quiet Himachali man with salt-and-pepper hair, cleared his throat.
“We’re almost there, madam. Villa Rosewood. You sure this is the place?”
Aanya nodded. “Yes. I booked it for a month.”
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Just drove.
Villa Rosewood sat at the end of a lonely lane, flanked by towering deodars and half-eaten by moss. The gate creaked as the taxi pulled in. The building itself was an old British structure—white-washed walls, large verandas, pointed arches, and windows like watching eyes. It was beautiful in an eerie, frozen way.
“No one lives here anymore,” the driver muttered as he hauled her suitcase out. “People say strange things. Lights flicker. Voices travel.”
Aanya gave a thin smile. “That’s what makes it perfect.”
The caretaker, a woman in her late forties named Mrs. Negi, greeted her at the entrance. Her eyes were small and sharp, her smile polite but distant.
“Come in, Miss Verma. Everything is ready. Food is stocked. Generator works. And here’s the emergency phone,” she said, placing a bulky cordless on the side table. “No mobile signals in these parts.”
Aanya followed her through the narrow corridors of the villa. The air inside smelled of cedarwood, old paper, and something faintly floral. Dust floated like memory in the sunlight filtering through the blinds.
“The library is that way,” Mrs. Negi said. “And your room is upstairs. I’ll be here till five. After that, I return home. You’ll be alone at night.”
Aanya simply said, “Good.”
Mrs. Negi gave her a look—half pity, half warning—before disappearing down the hallway.
That evening, Aanya stood on the veranda, sipping ginger tea and watching the mist roll down like a slow wave. The hills were silent except for the occasional rustle of wind through the leaves and the hoot of an owl. There was something sacred in the stillness. For the first time in weeks, she felt like she could breathe.
The night came quickly.
As darkness swallowed the hills, Aanya lit a few candles and made herself a simple meal—rice, dal, and stir-fried beans. After dinner, she wandered into the library. It was a time capsule—rows of worn books, old typewriters, a cracked globe, and velvet chairs that had seen better decades. A fireplace sat at one end, ashes still cold and untouched.
She ran her fingers across the spines of books. One, a leather-bound volume, caught her attention. It had no title, only a silver clasp keeping it shut. She tugged at it, but it wouldn’t open. Oddly, it was warmer than the others.
She set it aside and settled into a high-backed chair, reading a short story collection by Maugham. Outside, the wind began to howl. The power flickered once. Then again.
Aanya stood to fetch her flashlight. But as she did, she heard it—a soft tap-tap on the window behind her. Heart leaping, she turned. Nothing. Just a curtain stirring.
She laughed at herself, brushing it off. “Too many ghost stories.”
She climbed into bed an hour later, wrapping herself in a quilt so thick it felt like armor. But sleep wouldn’t come easily. Her mind kept circling back to the locked book. And the strange cold she felt whenever she stood near the south wall of the library. Like something was watching from behind it.
At 2:13 AM, she woke suddenly.
There it was again—tap-tap, followed by a long creak.
She sat up, every sense alert.
Silence.
Then, faintly, a whisper.
It came from downstairs. A low, indistinct voice, like someone murmuring in the dark. Aanya grabbed her phone—no signal. Of course. She hesitated, then pulled on a sweater and picked up the flashlight. Step by step, she descended the staircase.
The library door was open.
She stepped in. The window was shut tight. The fireplace remained cold. But the leather-bound book now lay open on the floor.
Its pages fluttered despite the still air.
Aanya knelt beside it. The handwriting was cursive, feminine, old-fashioned.
“April 3rd, 1937. I have come to this villa to escape my past. But the hills do not let go so easily…”
She felt a shiver trace her spine.
Whispers in the Walls
Aanya sat cross-legged on the library floor, eyes scanning the faded ink. The diary’s pages were dry and yellowed, the script a delicate dance of words penned by someone from a different era. She read in silence, as if afraid that even her breath might disturb whatever memory the book held.
“April 3rd, 1937. I have come to this villa to escape my past. But the hills do not let go so easily. Even the wind seems to speak his name. I see him in my dreams, in the shadow between the trees…”
Aanya looked up. The library was still. Her own reflection in the glass panes of the window stared back at her, pale and wide-eyed. She closed the diary and held it to her chest for a moment, listening.
The house seemed to breathe around her.
The walls groaned as they settled. The wooden floor creaked somewhere to her left, as if someone had stepped gently in the dark. She slowly stood and looked around.
“Just the wind,” she whispered. But the chill in her bones said otherwise.
The next morning, Aanya woke late, her head heavy with broken dreams. She remembered running through the villa in her sleep, hearing footsteps chase her, hearing a voice call her name—not “Aanya,” but “Anamika.”
Downstairs, she found the diary still lying on the floor. She picked it up and this time, turned to the first page.
“To the one who finds this: beware the house that remembers. This villa holds what time tried to bury. I write this so someone might finish what I could not.”
Aanya felt goosebumps rise on her arms.
Over breakfast, she questioned Mrs. Negi.
“Who lived here before?”
The caretaker stirred sugar into her tea slowly. “Many people, miss. Before independence, it was built by a British officer. After that, it changed hands. But no one stays long.”
“Why not?”
Mrs. Negi looked out the window.
“Voices. Dreams. People say the villa chooses who it wants. Or rejects them.”
Aanya raised an eyebrow. “Rejects?”
The woman gave a slow nod. “Some leave in days. Some… never leave at all.”
Later, Aanya explored the house further. She wandered through the upstairs corridor, passing dusty rooms locked or filled with covered furniture. One particular door caught her attention—it was painted a shade darker than the rest and had a brass doorknob that gleamed as if it had been recently touched.
It was locked.
She knelt and peered through the keyhole. The room beyond was dim, but she could make out what looked like an easel. A painting perhaps?
Downstairs again, she searched the drawers of the study. In the lowest drawer of an oak cabinet, she found a keyring. One of the keys was marked with a small red ribbon.
Something told her that was the one.
With the key in hand, she returned to the locked door. The key slid in smoothly. The door creaked open.
The room was filled with paintings.
Dozens of portraits lined the walls. Some were torn, others faded. The smell of linseed oil and damp canvas filled the air. But one painting at the center made her gasp.
It was her.
Or at least someone who looked uncannily like her—a young woman in a cream saree with a gold border, seated in a velvet chair, a wistful expression on her face.
The nameplate read: Anamika Das, 1937.
Aanya stumbled back. Her head spun.
“No way…”
Was it a coincidence? A trick of imagination?
She reached out and touched the painting’s frame. The wood was cold and oddly soft—like something breathing. And then, without warning, the lights flickered.
A whisper slithered through the air.
“You found me…”
Aanya turned sharply. No one.
The wind picked up outside, and the window rattled.
She ran out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
That night, sleep came harder. Every creak of the house made her flinch. The diary lay open beside her bed, as if it had opened on its own.
“May 9th, 1937. They tell me I’m going mad. That there’s no one in the mirror but myself. But I see her. The girl who looks like me but isn’t. She walks through walls, speaks to me in riddles. I think she’s trying to warn me.”
The candle beside her flickered violently, and then died out.
Aanya sat up straight in the darkness, heart hammering.
A faint hum came from the walls. Not mechanical. Not natural.
A song.
Someone was singing.
The voice was faint, a lullaby in another tongue—possibly Bengali? Or maybe a dialect she didn’t recognize. It was haunting and beautiful, and it was coming from behind the south wall of the library.
Aanya took the flashlight and tiptoed downstairs.
The singing stopped when she entered the room.
She ran her fingers along the wall where she had felt the cold spot yesterday. Now, she noticed a slight gap between the panels. Kneeling, she pressed her palm to it.
It clicked.
A section of the wall slid inward—revealing a narrow, hidden passage shrouded in dust and darkness.
Air whooshed out from the opening, carrying with it the scent of old roses and something metallic.
Her heart pounded. She stood at the threshold, unsure whether to step in.
But something compelled her. As if this was all meant to happen.
She entered the passage, flashlight flickering. The stone walls seemed to close in around her. She walked slowly, fingers grazing the damp surface.
The tunnel curved downward. Just when she thought it might never end, it opened into a small chamber.
There, in the middle, stood a trunk.
She stepped closer and opened it.
Inside were dried roses, old letters tied with ribbon, and at the very bottom—a bone-white hand mirror, cracked down the middle.
As she held it up, her reflection stared back.
Only, it wasn’t quite her.
The woman in the mirror smiled.
And whispered, “Welcome home, Anamika.”
The Portrait Room
The air in the hidden chamber was thick—musty with secrets, sharp with old memories. Aanya backed away from the mirror, her breath caught in her throat. The cracked glass showed her face split in two—one side hers, and the other, someone eerily similar yet subtly different. The woman in the reflection had the same eyes, same mouth, but her smile… it didn’t belong to Aanya.
“Anamika,” she had said.
That name again.
Aanya dropped the mirror with a gasp. It landed on the stone floor with a soft thud, the sound swallowed by the velvet darkness. She turned and ran—back through the tunnel, past the shifting shadows, back into the library where the air felt marginally safer.
The panel slid shut behind her with a low groan. She leaned against the wall, clutching her chest.
“Okay,” she whispered aloud, trying to steady her breath. “This… is not just an old house.”
Later that morning, after a sleepless night and far too much coffee, Aanya returned to the portrait room. It was as if the painting had summoned her.
She stared again at the woman in the saree—Anamika Das, 1937. The name felt strangely familiar now, as if it had always lived inside her.
She walked along the room’s perimeter, studying each portrait.
There was an elderly man in military uniform—Reginald Carpenter, 1933.
A young girl holding a violin—Ishita Das, 1944.
A woman seated in a garden, reading—Mira Carpenter, 1936.
Some wore expressions of melancholy, others of defiance, but none had the peculiar resonance of Anamika’s.
And then Aanya noticed something else.
The wall behind Anamika’s portrait had faint outlines around the frame. She leaned in and tapped the wooden edges. Hollow.
Gently, she lifted the portrait off the hook. It was heavier than expected. Behind it, the wall bore an inscription carved directly into the wood, faded but legible under the flashlight:
“She who remembers must choose. Love or truth. Flesh or soul.”
Beneath the words was a symbol—a circle divided by a serpent biting its own tail.
She quickly sketched it in her journal.
With questions piling up, Aanya took a walk to the nearby market that afternoon, craving both fresh air and connection. The streets were quieter than she remembered from her last visit to Shimla years ago. Perhaps it was the season. Or perhaps the villa had changed something in her perception of time.
At a small bookshop, she met an old man named Mr. Basu who ran the counter. Rows of vintage books lined his shelves. The place smelled of ink, sandalwood, and rain-damp paper.
“I’m staying at Villa Rosewood,” she said cautiously, watching his expression.
Mr. Basu looked up sharply. “People still rent that place?”
“I do,” she said. “Do you know anything about its history?”
He folded his hands. “More than most. That house belonged to Colonel Reginald Carpenter during the British Raj. Rumor is, he fell in love with an Indian woman—a local painter. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Some say he murdered her. Others say she took her own life.”
Aanya’s fingers tingled.
“Was her name Anamika?”
The man looked at her, startled. “Yes. That’s what the journals said. Anamika Das. She used to paint for the officers’ club. Some believed she dabbled in occult art. Her final painting was never found.”
Aanya felt her mouth go dry.
“Did anyone ever claim to be related to her?”
He shook his head. “She was said to be orphaned. Lived with her aunt. No surviving family that anyone knows of.”
Aanya left with a borrowed book on colonial Shimla and a mind spinning with unease.
Back at the villa, the weather turned sharply cold. Clouds crept in like silent intruders, and the wind keened through the trees outside. Aanya wrapped herself in a shawl and returned to the portrait room.
She sat facing the painting, diary open in her lap.
“June 14th, 1937: Reginald is not the man I thought he was. He speaks of power. Of keeping me here, forever. I think he’s found the book—the one my mother warned me about. The one that binds time and flesh.”
The book?
Could it be the same leather-bound volume Aanya had found in the library?
She pulled it from her bag and opened to the bookmarked page. This time, a page had appeared that hadn’t been there before.
“If you are reading this, it means the house has chosen you. Do not trust the mirrors. Do not sleep in the southern room. And never say your true name aloud after midnight.”
Aanya’s pulse quickened. This wasn’t just a diary—it was a guide. A warning.
Suddenly, a sound behind her.
Rustle.
She turned quickly. The curtain had moved, though the window was shut.
She approached it cautiously.
Behind the curtain, she found a wall panel ajar. Inside it, a hidden drawer. She pulled it out and found a letter.
It was written in Anamika’s hand.
“To whoever sees her face in mine—
You are not me, and yet you are. If blood remembers, then you are my echo. The villa binds us both. I tried to end it, but failed. You must go where I could not. Beneath the stairs, under the floorboards of the blue room. That’s where the painting sleeps. And with it, the curse.”*
Aanya folded the letter slowly, her hands trembling.
Blue room. Beneath the stairs.
She knew the room.
It was the locked one at the end of the eastern hallway.
The key she used earlier had other shapes. Maybe one of them fit.
That night, just after midnight, Aanya stood before the blue room.
She slipped in the key.
It turned with a satisfying click.
Inside, the room was bare. The walls were painted a faded sky blue. The only object in the room was a small rug at the center. She knelt, lifted it.
Wooden floorboards.
And beneath them—something wrapped in thick, dark fabric.
She pulled it free.
A painting.
Not Anamika’s.
This one was violent—chaotic red strokes, a serpent wrapping around a bleeding heart, an eye painted at the top that seemed to stare directly into hers.
She stumbled backward.
The air thickened.
And in the corner of the room, a shadow began to take shape.
It whispered, “You’ve found it. Now finish what she began.”
Ghosts of the Past
The shadow in the corner thickened, not merely a blur but a defined silhouette—tall, lean, masculine. Aanya stepped back, her foot hitting the edge of the open floorboard. The strange painting she had just uncovered lay at her feet, pulsing faintly in the candlelight as if it were alive.
“You’ve found it,” the voice whispered again, deep and hoarse, barely more than a breath. “Now finish what she began.”
Aanya’s fingers trembled. The air around her was electric, as if charged with something old and unfinished. The figure in the corner began to move closer, one slow step at a time.
“Who are you?” she asked, voice cracking.
“I am the promise,” it said, “and the prison.”
Aanya turned and fled—out of the blue room, down the corridor, her bare feet echoing against the wooden floor. She didn’t stop until she reached her bedroom. She slammed the door, locked it, and collapsed against it, gasping for breath.
That night, the dreams returned.
In her dream, Aanya was not Aanya. She was wearing a cream saree with a golden border. Her hands were stained with red—paint or blood, she couldn’t tell. The villa around her was brighter, newer. Lanterns lit the halls, voices echoed from distant rooms. She walked through the corridors, calling a name.
“Reginald?”
A door creaked open ahead of her, and a man emerged. Tall, with a regal mustache and green eyes too sharp to trust. He smiled at her, but there was madness beneath it.
“I told you I’d keep you here,” he said. “Forever.”
“You don’t love me,” she said softly.
He reached into his coat, pulled out something—an amulet. A serpent eating its tail.
“I love the power,” he said. “And so will you.”
She ran, but the halls twisted around her, becoming endless. Her screams were swallowed by the house.
Aanya woke up screaming.
The next morning, sunlight streamed through her window like nothing had happened. Birds chirped. The snow was melting slightly, leaving behind fresh dew.
But the painting remained in the blue room.
She returned to it after gathering herself, wrapping her shawl tightly. This time, she brought gloves. Touching the painting directly had felt… wrong.
She laid it flat on the floor, examining it again. The eye in the center was strangely human—almost photographic. Around it, the serpent’s body looped in the same symbol she’d seen behind Anamika’s portrait.
A circle. A binding.
She noticed now that the painting wasn’t signed. No name, no date.
But in the bottom right corner, under a thin layer of grime, were four words painted faintly in red:
“Vive, mori, renasci iterum.”
She pulled out her phone and looked it up. Latin.
“Live, die, be reborn again.”
By late afternoon, Aanya was determined to find answers. She returned to the bookshop and found Mr. Basu still at his desk.
“I found the painting,” she said without preamble.
He looked up, frowning. “What painting?”
“The one Anamika hid beneath the floorboards.”
At the mention of the name, his face turned pale.
“I didn’t tell you everything last time,” he admitted, glancing around the quiet shop. “There were rumors—strange ones. About a group that used to meet in the villa. A secret society.”
“What kind?”
“Occult. They believed the house was built on a leyline. That it was a crossing point between worlds.”
Aanya’s blood ran cold. “Do you believe that?”
He sighed. “I believe some houses remember. And some people carry memory in their bones.”
She told him everything—the diary, the mirror, the passage, the painting.
When she finished, he stared at her for a long moment, then said quietly, “You need to go to the church.”
“What church?”
“St. Peter’s. There’s a graveyard beside it. Look for Anamika’s name. You might find something left unfinished.”
The sky was beginning to darken when Aanya reached St. Peter’s Church. The small colonial-era chapel was tucked into a hillside, surrounded by tall pines and the silent hush of the mountains. Snow lay like forgotten lace around its gates.
The graveyard was quiet.
She walked row by row, searching headstones, brushing off the snow.
Then she found it.
Anamika Das
1911–1937
“Beloved, Betrayed, Unforgotten.”
Something lay on top of the grave—a small tin locket.
She picked it up.
Inside was a tiny sketch—Anamika, holding hands with a child.
But no child had ever been mentioned in the journals.
As she turned to leave, a voice echoed behind her.
“She didn’t die alone.”
Aanya spun around. An elderly woman stood at the gate, wrapped in layers of wool.
“I’m Sister Helena,” the woman said. “I was a novice when Anamika died. I remember her screams.”
Aanya stared. “You knew her?”
“I knew of her. And I saw what the house did to her. She tried to destroy the painting, you know. She said it was cursed. That the man she loved had bound her soul to it.”
“She painted it?”
“No. He did. Colonel Carpenter. Obsessed with immortality. He studied ancient rituals, tried to trap her soul in the painting so she could never leave him. He thought if he bound her, she’d live with him forever—through centuries.”
Aanya felt faint.
“He failed, didn’t he?”
Sister Helena looked grave. “Did he? You’re here, aren’t you?”
Back at the villa, night had fallen.
Aanya sat in front of the painting once more.
She thought of the locket. The child. The whisper in the walls.
“Live, die, be reborn again.”
She lit a candle, took the diary in her hands, and began to read aloud the last entry.
“I see her now. The girl with my face. She has come to finish the circle. I could not destroy the painting. But maybe she will. If she has the courage to burn what must not survive.”
Aanya rose.
She carried the painting to the fireplace.
As she brought it close to the flames, the house groaned. The walls trembled. Wind howled through the chimneys.
The eye in the painting blinked.
And a voice said, “If I burn, you burn with me.”
Aanya hesitated.
But then she whispered, “I am not yours. I never was.”
And she dropped the canvas into the fire.
It screamed.
Not the painting—the house. The very walls seemed to cry out as flames licked the edges. Shadows writhed and vanished into smoke. The eye melted. The serpent unraveled.
The portrait of Anamika—back in the other room—fell from the wall with a crash.
Silence followed.
The fire died down.
And the villa exhaled.
Ashes and Echoes
The next morning, Villa Rosewood stood quieter than it had in weeks—no creaking staircases, no disembodied whispers, no cold drafts curling beneath closed doors. Aanya wandered its hallways barefoot, half-expecting the walls to groan or the mirrors to flicker with spectral faces. But the house was… calm.
The painting was gone. Burnt to ashes.
And yet, the silence wasn’t comforting. It felt like the eye of a storm.
In the portrait room, Anamika’s picture still lay on the floor where it had fallen. The frame was cracked, the canvas slightly torn along one edge. Aanya approached cautiously.
She crouched beside it and noticed something she hadn’t seen before—behind the tear in the canvas was another layer. She peeled it back gently.
Another painting.
Beneath Anamika’s serene face was a completely different portrait—of a child. A girl, maybe five or six, with dark curls and solemn eyes.
Her heart skipped.
The child from the locket.
But the expression in the child’s face unnerved her—it was hauntingly familiar.
Like looking into a mirror.
She touched her own cheek. No. It couldn’t be.
Could it?
That afternoon, she made her way to Sister Helena once more.
The nun listened quietly as Aanya described the second painting.
“You knew there was a child,” Aanya accused gently.
Sister Helena looked away. “We were told never to speak of it. The church didn’t want scandal. Anamika gave birth alone in the villa, under the care of her aunt. The colonel refused to acknowledge the child. Said she’d cursed him. The villagers say he saw the girl in every mirror until the day he died.”
Aanya’s mouth went dry. “And the child?”
“She was hidden away. Sent to an orphanage in Kalka. Then adopted. No one ever connected the dots.”
“But I… I think I might be her descendant.”
Helena studied her with a knowing look. “You’ve always felt drawn to places like this, haven’t you? Strange dreams, strange memories. That’s how blood remembers. It echoes.”
Aanya sat down heavily on a bench beside the chapel.
“If Anamika’s soul was bound… what about mine?”
The nun’s voice was soft. “Maybe that’s why the house brought you. To finish what she couldn’t. To break the line.”
That evening, Aanya returned to the villa with fresh determination. She began packing her things—journals, sketches, the old locket. As she gathered the ashes of the painting from the fireplace into a small jar, the flames flickered briefly—just for a moment—as if something passed through them.
A final goodbye.
She carried the jar outside, into the snowy garden behind the house. The air was crisp, the twilight sky dusted with gold. She scattered the ashes into the wind.
“I free you,” she whispered.
There was no voice in reply. No shimmer of ghosts.
Only silence.
And then—soft footsteps.
She turned.
A man stood at the edge of the path. Late thirties, rugged, holding a travel bag.
“Aanya?” he asked.
She blinked. “Yes?”
“I’m Karan. The caretaker’s son. You left a message for someone to come help close the place?”
Right. She had emailed the property agency in a daze the night before, saying she would be leaving early.
Karan smiled awkwardly. “My father spoke of this place like it was cursed. I didn’t believe him. Still don’t, really.”
Aanya chuckled, the first true laugh in days. “It was cursed. But not anymore.”
He looked at the villa with a raised brow. “You sure? Looks like the kind of place where secrets linger.”
She nodded. “They do. But some secrets are tired of hiding.”
The two of them spent the next few hours closing shutters, locking doors, covering furniture. The process felt ceremonial. A cleansing.
Later, over tea, Karan asked her, “What brought you here anyway?”
“Memory,” she said. “Not mine. Someone else’s. But it found me anyway.”
He didn’t press her further. Just sipped quietly, then offered, “If you ever want to come back, I know someone who’s thinking of turning this place into an artist retreat. It’s still beautiful. And peaceful now.”
She looked around. The house was still. The shadows were just shadows again.
“I think I’ll come back,” she said. “But not as a seeker. As a storyteller.”
That night, she left Villa Rosewood.
As the car drove down the winding roads toward Shimla town, Aanya looked back one last time.
The villa stood tall, veiled in mist, regal and ruined—but no longer haunted.
She touched the locket hanging around her neck, the sketch of the child nestled inside. Hers now. Her history reclaimed.
Somewhere in her mind, she heard a voice.
“Thank you.”
A faint whisper. Not sad. Not afraid.
Free.
The Whispering Hills
The winding road out of Shimla gave way to rolling hills bathed in soft twilight. Pine trees lined the curves like silent sentinels, their needles catching the last gold of the sun. Aanya sat in the backseat of the taxi, her forehead against the cold window, her thoughts drifting like mist.
The villa was behind her now—its secrets unearthed, its pain released. But Aanya couldn’t shake the feeling that something still lingered.
Not in the house.
In her.
Back in Delhi, the transition to normal life was jarring. The sound of traffic, the swarms of people, the monotony of city living—it all felt distant and hollow, like she was walking through someone else’s life.
She resumed teaching at the art college. Her students noticed something had changed in her work. The colors were deeper. The strokes more intentional. And every canvas she painted seemed to whisper something old and sacred.
One afternoon, as she stood in front of a fresh canvas, brush in hand, she painted without thinking. Her fingers moved with a rhythm she didn’t recognize as her own. When she stepped back, chills ran down her spine.
It was the child again. The girl from the locket.
And behind her—a shadow. Not dark or menacing, but vast. Ancestral. Watching.
She couldn’t sleep that night. The image from the painting haunted her, not because it was frightening, but because it felt like a calling. Like an invitation.
She rummaged through her drawer and pulled out Anamika’s journal again. Though she had read it multiple times in Shimla, something compelled her to open it once more.
This time, something was different.
A page near the end had darkened faintly, the ink bleeding through in the candlelight. She hadn’t seen it before.
The entry was short.
“If the house falls silent, the hills will speak. They always do. Go to the place where the stones sing.”
Aanya frowned. “The stones sing”? A metaphor?
She turned to the map of Himachal Pradesh she kept on her study table and began scanning for possible places near Shimla where Anamika might have traveled.
One name stood out.
Chail.
Chail was a short drive from Shimla, perched higher in the hills, quieter and older. It was a town built for solitude—forests, temples, abandoned palaces.
And near the edge of it, she found what she was looking for.
A grove of standing stones.
They weren’t marked on tourist maps. The locals didn’t speak of them much, except in whispers and folklore. But when Aanya arrived—guided by a hiker who knew the area—she felt the shift in the air.
The stones were tall, weathered, arranged in a spiral. At the center was a flat altar-like slab of slate. Moss covered the edges, but faint carvings remained.
Serpents.
Eyes.
And in the center: the same Latin phrase.
“Vive, mori, renasci iterum.”
Live. Die. Be reborn again.
Aanya’s breath caught.
This wasn’t just a ritual place. It was the origin of the spell that had trapped Anamika.
As she stood there, wind rustling through the trees, something ancient stirred in the grove. The pines whispered.
She heard a voice.
Not one, but many.
Whispers layered over each other—men, women, children—soft, chanting.
She closed her eyes.
And then saw it.
A vision.
Anamika standing in the same grove, arms outstretched, chanting words she couldn’t understand. A man behind her, holding a scroll. The colonel.
He pressed something into her palm—a ring.
Then darkness.
The vision faded.
Aanya opened her eyes, breathless.
At her feet was a patch of freshly disturbed earth. Her hands moved without thought, fingers digging into the soil.
There, beneath the moss and roots, she found it.
A rusted iron box.
Inside: a ring, its gem long lost, the band etched with the symbol of the serpent.
And a note, ink faded but legible.
“If you are reading this, you are the last of us. Burn the ring under the moonlight. Set us free. All of us.”
That night, under the full moon, Aanya built a small fire in the grove’s center.
She held the ring for a long moment before casting it into the flames.
The fire flared high—unnaturally bright. A gust of wind circled the grove, kicking up leaves and ashes. The stones hummed, a deep sound from within the earth.
And then silence.
A silence filled with peace.
No screams. No shadows. Only the rustle of pine.
She knew in that moment: the ritual was undone.
Not just for Anamika.
For everyone.
On her return to Delhi, Aanya felt lighter. Her sleep was dreamless for the first time in years. Her new paintings bore themes of rebirth, light emerging from darkness, serpents uncoiled into birds.
The villa in Shimla remained untouched. Karan told her someone had offered to buy it—a historian. They planned to restore it as a museum for local folklore.
Aanya gave them Anamika’s journal and the locket.
“She deserves to be remembered,” she told Karan.
“She will be,” he replied. “Thanks to you.”
One evening, as she walked through Lodhi Gardens in Delhi, Aanya saw a little girl sitting by a tree, sketching. She paused, watching quietly.
The girl looked up and smiled. “Hi.”
Aanya knelt beside her. “What are you drawing?”
“A dream I had,” the girl said. “About a house in the mountains. And a lady with sad eyes who became happy again.”
Aanya smiled gently. “Did she say her name?”
The girl nodded. “Anamika.”
The Final Portrait
Aanya couldn’t stop thinking about the little girl in Lodhi Gardens.
The ease with which she had spoken Anamika’s name… It didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt like a thread—delicate but unbreakable—connecting generations, stories, souls. Aanya had spent months unraveling the past, but maybe the past wasn’t something to unearth.
Maybe it was something to accept. To paint.
Back in her studio, Aanya brought out a fresh canvas—larger than she normally used. She sketched lightly at first: a woman standing on a mountaintop, hair flowing in the wind, arms raised toward the sky. Behind her, the Villa stood framed in golden twilight, not haunted but alive—its windows glowing like eyes filled with memory.
This would be the final painting. The one that tied everything together.
She titled it The Return.
As she painted, the room grew still. No distractions. No phones. Only the quiet whisper of bristles on canvas and the faint sound of wind outside, as if Shimla’s pines had followed her to Delhi.
Each stroke of the brush felt like a step toward closure—not just for Anamika, but for herself.
She no longer dreamed of the villa. Instead, her sleep was filled with quiet meadows and birdsong, sometimes the laughter of a little girl she hadn’t met before that day in the park. And always—always—the voice of a woman saying, “You have done well.”
A week later, she received an unexpected invitation.
The historian who had purchased the villa, Professor Samar Rajput, was hosting a private preview. The restoration was complete. The villa had been transformed into a heritage museum dedicated to forgotten women of Himachal’s past—folklorists, healers, rebels.
At the heart of the collection: Anamika.
Aanya’s painting The Return had been selected as the centerpiece.
She accepted the invitation without hesitation.
The journey back to Shimla was surreal. The same misty roads, the same bend where the mountains opened like a secret. But this time, there was no dread. No haunted shadows lurking in her mind.
Villa Rosewood stood gleaming in the mountain sun. Its walls were freshly lime-washed, its roof repaired, its windows no longer boarded up but wide open, like lungs breathing again after years of suffocation.
Inside, the museum was tasteful—old letters framed, sketches of colonial-era Shimla, accounts from women like Anamika who had vanished from official histories.
And there, in the grand hall, stood Aanya’s painting.
Mounted on a dark wooden frame, illuminated by soft yellow lights, The Return drew people silently toward it. Some cried. Others simply stared.
A woman beside her whispered, “It feels… familiar. Like something I’ve seen in a dream.”
Aanya smiled. “Maybe you have.”
Professor Rajput approached her later.
“You’ve given the villa something none of us could—soul,” he said. “And closure.”
“I only followed what was already there,” she replied. “Anamika told her own story.”
He handed her a folder. Inside were scanned pages from an old ledger. “We found this hidden in the wall behind the grand staircase. It’s the colonel’s personal journal.”
Aanya felt her breath catch.
The final pages were erratic. Scribbled with ink blotches, filled with guilt.
“She haunts me not because she is angry—but because she waits. And I am too much of a coward to answer.”
He had known. All those years. And yet he did nothing.
At the bottom of the last page, in shaky handwriting:
“If redemption exists, may she find it in the eyes of one who carries her name.”
That night, Aanya stood once more in the villa’s garden.
The stars stretched endless above. The pine trees whispered as they always had—but now the whispers held no warning. Only memory.
She closed her eyes.
“I’ve told your story,” she said softly. “Not to trap you. But to set you free.”
From somewhere deep in her chest, a weight lifted.
The ring. The grove. The ashes. The child.
It was all one story.
And it was complete.
The next morning, she wandered into the portrait room again. It had been repurposed into a gallery—portraits of unknown women, their stories recovered by local historians. Among them was the original portrait of Anamika, carefully restored.
She looked different now.
Peaceful.
The eyes no longer burned with defiance or sorrow. They shimmered with quiet strength.
And in the corner of the frame, freshly inscribed:
“Anamika: the unnamed, now remembered.”
Aanya left the villa just before sunset.
Karan was there again, helping with guests. As he walked her to the gate, he asked, “Do you think she’s gone?”
Aanya looked back at the house one last time.
“She’s not gone,” she said. “She’s here. Just not trapped anymore.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “So what now?”
She smiled. “Now I write. Now I paint. Now I live.”
That evening, she sat by her hotel window, watching the sky turn gold over the hills.
She opened her notebook and wrote the title:
A Mysterious Villa in Shimla
Then, beneath it:
By Priyanka Tyagi, for the women whose voices were never meant to disappear.
She began to write.
And the hills whispered back.
The Hills Remember
The book was finished.
Three months after returning from Shimla, Aanya sat in the back row of an independent bookstore in Delhi as a quiet crowd gathered for her book launch. On the cover of A Mysterious Villa in Shimla was her painting—The Return—Anamika framed by twilight, the hills breathing around her.
It wasn’t just a ghost story.
It was memory.
It was healing.
It was a testimony.
The audience was a mix—students, artists, professors, wanderers. Some had read the serialization online and followed Aanya’s journey from city to hills and back again. Others were here out of curiosity, drawn by the title, the rumors of a haunted villa now transformed into a museum.
Aanya stood on stage, calm but reflective.
“I didn’t write this book to uncover a mystery,” she said. “I wrote it to remember a woman the world forgot. And through her, to remember a thousand others like her.”
A hush followed. In that silence, it felt like the hills themselves were listening—pines swaying, stones humming softly beneath ancient soil.
After the reading, an old woman approached her. Dressed in a woolen shawl, her hair silver but eyes sharp.
“I lived in Chail when I was a child,” she said. “We used to hear stories about Anamika—the lady of the storm. They said she’d come in the fog and sing to the trees. People were afraid. But I always thought it sounded… sad. Like someone looking for home.”
Aanya smiled, heart swelling. “She found it.”
The woman placed a wrinkled hand over Aanya’s. “Because of you.”
That night, back in her apartment, Aanya couldn’t sleep.
She stepped onto the balcony, letting the warm spring air wrap around her. The city stretched beyond her like a painting of lights and movement—but her heart was still in the hills.
And then something happened.
A breeze passed her. Cool. Gentle. But scented with pine.
She looked up.
The sky was clear, but in the distance, just past the rooftops and wires, she saw something shimmering faintly—a vision, brief as a blink.
Villa Rosewood, surrounded by mist. A woman standing at the window. Anamika.
She smiled.
And vanished.
Over the following months, A Mysterious Villa in Shimla became more than a book.
It became a movement.
Tourists flocked to the villa, not for ghosts, but for history. Young women sent letters to Aanya—thanking her for telling a story that felt like their own. Art students began sketching Anamika’s portrait from memory, adding symbols of their own trauma and healing.
The villa hosted writing retreats, open-mic poetry nights, even workshops on folklore and forgotten women of the hills.
It was no longer haunted.
It was alive.
On the first anniversary of the villa’s reopening, Aanya returned.
She walked up the same gravel path—but this time, she wasn’t alone. She brought a group of young writers with her, students and friends who had found meaning in her story.
Inside, the museum had expanded. A new wing was being constructed, titled: The Silent Histories.
In the portrait room, her painting remained untouched. And beside it, a plaque now read:
“She came unnamed. She left unforgettable.”
—In memory of Anamika, and all who live through art and truth.
That evening, as the sun dipped behind the hills, Aanya walked out into the pine grove behind the villa—the same place where she’d once scattered ashes, where voices once whispered in the trees.
It was quiet now.
Not hollow.
Full.
The stones stood tall and mossy, but in their silence was a knowing—a memory embedded in the land, not needing to speak anymore.
Aanya touched one of the stones and closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The wind stirred. A soft laugh echoed in the breeze—not ghostly, not eerie.
Warm. Familiar.
She left the grove with a new idea burning in her mind. Not about the past, but the future. About stories waiting to be told. New voices, new names.
She no longer needed to chase ghosts.
She was ready to guide others through their own shadows.
A few days later, a letter arrived.
From the little girl she had met in Lodhi Gardens.
Written in crayon and careful print, it read:
Dear Aanya Didi,
I read your book. I liked the part where the lady is not sad anymore.
Sometimes I dream of her again. She says she’s not scared now. She says thank you.
Also, I started painting! My mom says maybe I was her in another life. Do you think that’s true?
Love, Anvi.
Aanya smiled and wrote back:
Dear Anvi,
Yes. I do.
And now it’s your turn to tell her story.
With love,
Aanya
Epilogue:
Somewhere in the hills above Shimla, Villa Rosewood still stands.
The wind still moves through its halls. The pines still whisper. The stones in the grove still hum when the moon is full.
But the house is no longer bound by sorrow.
Now, it sings.
Because the hills never forget.
They remember.
Always.
The End
