Anjali Varma
Chapter 1
The taxi snaked its way up the misty incline, past shuttered tea stalls and damp pine groves, until the silhouette of the Grand Eden Hotel loomed into view—its faded Tudor façade and ivy-strangled balconies exhaling secrets of a time long past. Aanya Mehra leaned forward from the backseat, pressing her hand to the fogged-up window. She had seen photographs of the place—black-and-white postcards tucked into history books and archived reports—but nothing prepared her for the haunting elegance of the real thing. Built in 1893, the hotel was a relic of the British Raj, its corridors having once echoed with the clink of brandy glasses and piano music. Now, it was nearly empty, open only to the occasional off-season tourist or, in Aanya’s case, an investigative podcaster hungry for stories no one else dared to tell. She stepped out into the crisp mountain air, her recorder already tucked into her coat pocket, its red light blinking softly like a heartbeat.
Inside, the hotel was dimly lit and smelled of polished wood, old books, and something else—faint, like lavender long dried. The receptionist, a stiff man with a face carved from disapproval, barely looked up as she signed the guest register. “Room 106,” he muttered, sliding her the key with a metallic clink. Aanya glanced down the hallway. The corridors seemed narrower than in the photos, as if time had pressed the building inwards. Portraits of forgotten generals and stiff-backed memsahibs stared down at her, their painted eyes following her footsteps. When she passed by Room 107, a strange chill gripped her spine. It was locked tight with two rusting latches, the doorframe marked by faint scorch stains—as though someone had tried to erase it from the hotel’s memory. A “DO NOT OPEN” sign dangled from a crooked nail. She lingered, fingers hovering above the brass doorknob, but moved on before the receptionist could notice.
Later that evening, in her room, Aanya clicked her recorder on and began narrating her notes: “This is Aanya Mehra, recording on-site at the Grand Eden Hotel in Shimla, formerly known as the Eden Club during British rule. My investigation centers around Room 107—shut since August 15, 1948—following the mysterious disappearance of Clara Whitmore, daughter of diplomat Charles Whitmore…” Just then, her recorder crackled, spitting out a burst of static. She froze. Rewinding, she played it again. Amid her own voice, a whisper surfaced—soft, brittle, unmistakably feminine: “Don’t forget me.” Aanya’s heart pounded. She hadn’t spoken those words. Outside, the hallway creaked with invisible footsteps, as if the past was pacing just beyond her door.
Chapter 2
The next morning arrived in veils of fog, muffling even the shrill calls of the mountain crows. Aanya stepped out of her room clutching a hot thermos of hotel chai and her ever-ready recorder, its battery freshly charged. As she passed Room 107 again, something caught her eye—on the floor beside the door was a brittle envelope, yellowed and water-stained, with her name scrawled across it in shaky handwriting. No one had seen her arrive except the receptionist, and certainly no one knew her room number—so how had this note reached her? She picked it up cautiously and stepped back into her room, closing the door behind her. The envelope smelled faintly of burnt paper. Inside was a single sheet, folded twice, written in a rushed, spidery hand: “The girl was never found because no one wanted her to be. Don’t knock. Don’t stay too long near the door. And whatever you do, don’t listen at night.” It wasn’t signed. Her heart thudded in her chest—not from fear exactly, but from the thrum of something darker: intrigue.
Later that day, determined to dig deeper, Aanya ventured into the oldest part of the hotel—the west wing, where the carpets thinned into bare wooden planks and chandeliers hung like skeletons of opulence. Near the back garden, past an unused billiards room, she found him: the caretaker. He was a thin, wiry man in his seventies with skin like cured leather and eyes that didn’t blink enough. He sat on a stool sharpening a knife that looked more ceremonial than practical. “Clara Whitmore?” he repeated, not looking up. “Dead. Or worse.” Aanya asked about Room 107. The man finally looked at her then, his eyes watery but sharp. “People think ghosts whisper. They don’t. They scream, miss. But only if you stay long enough to hear them.” He stood abruptly and began to walk away but paused at the doorway. “You’ll find answers in the cellar,” he muttered. “Not the kind you want, but answers all the same. Just don’t go alone. And don’t go after dark.” Then he was gone, as suddenly as he had appeared.
That night, Aanya couldn’t sleep. The wind howled outside like an animal circling a cage, and the shadows in her room stretched longer than they should have. She tried to distract herself by listening to her recordings, scrubbing through the audio from the previous night. At first, it was quiet. Then came the same whisper again, softer but clearer: “Please… find me.” Her breath caught. She turned the volume up and heard another voice layered beneath it—deeper, male, urgent. “No one must know what happened in the cellar.” Her hands trembled. She hadn’t spoken to any man during her stay. Who was this voice? And how had it gotten into her recorder? She glanced at the clock—2:14 a.m.—and then toward her door. This time, the footsteps outside were not imagined. They stopped directly in front of her room, just on the other side of the wood. Then—three knocks. Slow. Deliberate. And then silence.
Chapter 3
Morning brought no comfort. The hotel’s silence had thickened, the usual creaks and groans now replaced by an eerie stillness, as though the building itself was holding its breath. Aanya hadn’t slept. The knocks still echoed in her mind, as did the voices from the recorder. When she stepped out, the corridor was empty. The receptionist avoided her gaze this time. Even the guests she had glimpsed the day before had vanished. Her instincts, honed by years of chasing forgotten stories, screamed that she was no longer just researching a mystery—she was inside one. Determined not to retreat, she headed toward the west wing, her footsteps dull against the faded rug. Near the old service hallway, behind a stack of rusting luggage trolleys, she found the door the caretaker must have meant. It was smaller than expected, reinforced with iron brackets, and painted the same dull brown as the wall to blend in. There was no lock, just a chain hanging loosely—as if someone had opened it recently.
The air inside was cold and damp, the scent of mildew thickening with each step down the stone stairwell. Her flashlight flickered as she descended. The cellar wasn’t a single room but a maze of tunnels—some leading to storage racks filled with cobwebbed wine bottles, others ending in locked gates. But it was the farthest corner that drew her attention. There, behind a stack of wooden crates, she found something entirely out of place: a child’s porcelain doll, its left eye missing, its dress singed at the edges. Tucked underneath it was a journal—half-burnt, its leather cover cracked and flaking. She opened it carefully. The pages were in two hands: the early entries were Clara Whitmore’s—flourished, romantic, describing parties, piano recitals, and secret meetings with someone she only referred to as “R.” The later pages were panicked, disjointed: “He knows. I saw the papers. I was never meant to hear what they said. I think they’ll come for me tonight. I must hide in the cellar.” The final entry was a single line: “If anyone finds this, please forgive me.”
Aanya’s breath misted in front of her face, though she hadn’t noticed how cold it had become. She looked up—and froze. At the edge of the cellar stood a woman in white, barely visible in the beam of her flashlight. Pale, unmoving, her face obscured by shadow. Aanya blinked. The woman was gone. No footsteps. No sound. Just the overwhelming pressure of a presence. Heart hammering, she backed away, the journal clutched in her hand. As she reached the stairs, her recorder—unprompted—clicked on in her coat pocket. She yanked it out. It was already playing something pre-recorded: a man’s voice, urgent, angry—“She betrayed them. She heard the signal. She knows about the codes.” Then, static. Aanya staggered into the light of the lobby, every hair on her body raised. Someone didn’t just want Clara’s story buried. They had buried her alive in it.
Chapter 4
Aanya sat cross-legged on the creaky hotel bed, Clara’s half-burnt journal splayed open in front of her, her laptop blinking with open tabs—archived newspapers, scanned letters, declassified British documents—all downloaded during the night as sleep evaded her. There was something more than just a girl’s disappearance in 1948. Clara hadn’t merely vanished—she had discovered something, something powerful enough to scare diplomats and silence hotel staff even seventy-five years later. One entry kept tugging at her thoughts: “He told me the signal would go live on the fifteenth. That it could change everything. But it was never just about the radio waves. It’s about who hears them.” Aanya typed “British signal operations Shimla 1947-1948” into the search bar and stumbled upon a mention in a nearly forgotten memoir of a wireless operator named Rudyard Hayes—R. Could this be Clara’s secret lover? The memoir noted he was reassigned suddenly, and the station was shut down within weeks. There were whispers of rogue transmissions—coded messages sent to Delhi and beyond, possibly intercepted. The deeper Aanya looked, the clearer it became: Clara had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And someone had ensured she never had the chance to speak.
Needing fresh air, she walked down to the garden courtyard. The fog clung to the hedges like cobwebs. An elderly guest, wrapped in shawls, watched her from a stone bench. As Aanya passed, the woman said softly, “Are you the girl from 106?” Aanya nodded. “Then be careful. They always come for the ones who listen too closely.” Before she could ask who ‘they’ were, the woman turned her face fully into the sunlight—and Aanya gasped. Her left eye was glass. Just like the doll in the cellar. She stepped back, but the woman only smiled gently, as though she had said too much and was waiting for the winds to carry the rest. That night, Aanya took the journal, her recorder, and a new notebook back to Room 107. She needed to know what Clara had heard. She needed to be closer to whatever secret still pulsed behind that locked door. She sat on the floor, back against the wall separating 106 and 107, and pressed her recorder firmly to the wooden skirting board.
The silence stretched. Then, ever so faintly, came music. A piano melody, wavering, delicate—like a lullaby played underwater. It couldn’t be coming from another room; the floor below was abandoned, and there were no guests on either side. She leaned in. The melody stopped. Static buzzed. And then a deep voice crackled through the recorder: “You shouldn’t be here.” Aanya jumped to her feet. The doorknob on 107 rattled violently for a second, then fell silent again. She stared at it, chest rising and falling, and whispered into her recorder, “Clara, if you’re still here, I’ll find out what they did. Even if it kills me.” From the other side of the door, faintly—almost gently—came a reply, a childlike whisper: “Then hurry.”
Chapter 5
The next morning, Aanya awoke to the sound of hammering. Groggy and disoriented, she pulled on a sweater and opened her door to find two men boarding up Room 107 with thick wooden planks. “What are you doing?” she demanded. One of them—a burly man in overalls with a nervous expression—barely met her gaze. “Manager’s orders, madam. Room’s being sealed permanently. Structural issues.” Aanya scoffed. “It was fine last night. You people just want it hidden.” The man looked uneasy. “It’s for everyone’s safety. Last week a tourist tried to enter—disappeared for two hours. When he came back, he was crying and speaking in voices. Three at once.” Aanya blinked. “What?” He paused, lowering his voice. “He said he saw a ballroom in ruins… a woman with no face… and music that came from the walls. But we don’t talk about that, madam. Not anymore.” With that, they hammered the last plank over the door, cutting off any view inside. Aanya stood there for a long moment, the recorder clutched in her coat pocket like a talisman.
Frustrated but undeterred, she turned to the only ally she hadn’t yet approached: the local archives. Shimla’s public records office was housed in a colonial-era bungalow buried under stacks of forgotten files and moldy registers. After hours of sifting through microfilm and government gazettes, Aanya found what she needed: a guest ledger from 1948 listing Clara Whitmore and a British engineer named Rudyard Hayes staying at the Grand Eden under assumed names. That wasn’t the surprise. The shock was a red-stamped addendum to the page: “Guests transferred to Intelligence Custody. Hotel instructed to erase evidence. Incident classified under Act 31B.” Intelligence Custody. She leaned back, chills rippling across her neck. Clara and Rudyard weren’t victims of a haunting—they were part of a secret operation, one someone had buried with the weight of an entire government.
Returning to the hotel after dusk, Aanya found her key card didn’t work. The receptionist, stiff as ever, informed her she had been checked out “for her own good.” “We’re not responsible for what the building does,” he said, expressionless. “It… remembers.” Her bags were already packed, but the journal was still with her. She sat on the stone bench outside, considering her options. She couldn’t leave—not yet. She circled the building until she reached the back fire escape and climbed silently, each step creaking underfoot. She had one plan left: get onto the terrace, lower herself into 107 through the old balcony that had once faced the ballroom. But as she reached the iron railing, she stopped cold. The door to 107, fully boarded earlier, now stood slightly ajar.
She slipped in. The room was dim, coated in dust and heavy with memory. Faded wallpaper peeled like shedding skin. The bed was untouched, the mirror cracked. But on the floor, carefully laid out, were papers—blueprints of an old radio tower, symbols she didn’t understand, and a torn photograph of Clara and Rudyard, holding hands in front of the ballroom window. Aanya picked it up, heart pounding. Just then, the walls began to hum. The mirror shimmered—not with reflection, but with moving shadows, as if another time bled through. And in that moment, as the floor beneath her pulsed with energy, she understood what the caretaker had meant. Room 107 wasn’t haunted. It was unfinished. A loop. A room where time itself had fractured—and was waiting to be made whole again.
Chapter 6
The air inside Room 107 had changed. It wasn’t just cold now—it vibrated, like the moment before a thunderclap, thick with unseen voltage. Aanya crouched beside the scattered blueprints, her fingers grazing the edges of something that felt more ritual than design. The schematics of a defunct radio tower were marked not just with technical annotations, but strange spiral patterns and mirrored numbers, as if someone had tried to encode something ancient into something modern. Clara’s journal was open beside the blueprints now, though Aanya didn’t remember removing it from her bag. The page it had fallen open to read: “He said the machine would bridge what time broke. That we wouldn’t need to escape if we could rewind.” Suddenly, the faint sound of piano keys reached her ears—soft, hesitant, but very real. It came not from the walls or a distant room, but from directly beneath her. She dropped to the floor, pressing her ear to the warped wooden planks. The music was clearer there, a lullaby in ¾ time. Beneath Room 107, the ballroom still sang.
Compelled beyond reason, Aanya retraced her steps to the cellar, the journal now tucked tightly against her chest. She followed the humming path—down a service stairwell, through rusted grates, to a narrow passage hidden behind broken wine casks. At its end, a door waited: not locked, but barred with a single iron rod etched with the letters “CW/RH”. As she removed the rod and stepped inside, she found herself in a subterranean chamber lined with dusty radio equipment—dials, switches, meters long dead. But in the center of the room stood something impossible: a piano, covered in a white sheet, untouched by time. She pulled the sheet away, revealing yellowed keys and burn marks along its side. Clara’s name was carved faintly into the wood. When Aanya touched a key, a light snapped on overhead—not electric, but ethereal, as though the room had momentarily awakened.
The moment she pressed record on her device, the piano began to play on its own. Not violently, but with aching intention. With each note, images filled the room—flickering like film reels projected onto the stone walls. She saw Clara at the piano, crying, while Rudyard twisted a dial on a transmitter beside her. “The signal,” he kept saying. “It can reverse it. They said it could…” Then came voices—others—shouting, a door slamming, Clara screaming. The final image froze on Clara’s tear-streaked face as soldiers burst into the room, the piano abruptly silenced. And then, darkness. Aanya stumbled back, heart pounding. The piano stood still again. But in her recorder, something new had appeared—data, a strange low-frequency tone looping underneath the static. She knew this wasn’t audio; it was a code. Something Rudyard had left behind. The pulse of a message trying to reach someone—perhaps Clara. Or maybe Aanya.
She rushed back to her room, uploaded the recording into her laptop, and ran it through every audio decoder she knew. Nothing worked—until she filtered the bass frequencies through a spectrogram. Slowly, an image emerged in the waveform: a map. Not of the hotel, but of a hidden sub-basement beneath the west wing, one not shown in any original blueprints. At the center of it was a symbol—two rings interlocked, labelled only “Mirror Gate.” As the screen glitched and flickered, a line of text appeared beside the map in Clara’s handwriting: “He said it would let us return. But only if both of us play the final note.” Aanya stared at the message, the piano’s melody still echoing in her ears, and whispered, “You weren’t just trapped here, Clara. You were trying to finish something… weren’t you?” Behind her, the light in Room 107 dimmed. And the whisper came again—closer this time. “Come to the ballroom.”
Chapter 7
Night bled across the mountains, swallowing the town below in flickers of amber and shadow. Within the Grand Eden Hotel, the walls groaned like restless sleepers and the floorboards under Aanya’s feet creaked with the memory of too many footsteps. She stood in the west wing, at the farthest end of a corridor long abandoned, staring at a wall that wasn’t supposed to exist. According to the decoded spectrogram, behind this decaying plaster was the entrance to the sub-basement Clara had called the Mirror Gate. Aanya pressed her palm to the damp wall—and it gave. Not entirely, but enough to reveal a narrow seam. She pushed harder. With a low, reluctant moan, the false panel slid inward, revealing a staircase that twisted downward in a tight spiral. No dust. No cobwebs. Just the thick scent of rain-soaked earth and something sharper—ozone, like the air before lightning strikes.
Torch in hand, recorder tucked into her jacket, Aanya descended. The steps narrowed the deeper she went, the walls sweating, the silence growing heavy. Finally, the passage opened into a cavernous room unlike anything else in the hotel. The walls were lined with polished obsidian panels, each reflecting her in fractured, delayed movements. At the center was a platform with an antique radio console and a matching piano—both identical to the ones she had seen in the projection, yet somehow… newer. Untouched. Behind them, mounted into the wall like a stage backdrop, was a circular mirror framed in bronze, its surface rippling faintly, not with reflection, but movement—as if it led somewhere beyond. This was the Mirror Gate. Clara and Rudyard hadn’t just believed in it. They had built it.
As Aanya approached the console, the mirror shimmered. Her recorder clicked on again by itself. Through the static, Clara’s voice emerged—no longer panicked, but clear, strong. “We were trying to go back, to stop the message from being heard by the wrong ears. But we were interrupted. Only one of us made it through. And now, the loop has started again.” The radio crackled, and a mechanical hand on the dial began to turn of its own accord. Aanya backed away, heart pounding. The piano, silent until now, played a single note. Then another. And another. A tune was forming—tentative, like a memory being pieced back together. Aanya understood: she wasn’t just here to observe. She had been drawn in to finish the sequence. To be the second player.
Hands trembling, she sat at the bench. Clara’s tune flowed from her memory—an old waltz, melancholic and unfinished. As she played the final measures, the mirror began to pulse with light. The obsidian panels reflected not her image, but Clara’s—watching from the other side, mouthing words Aanya couldn’t hear. The final chord echoed. The radio screamed to life. Lights flashed. The mirror split open in the center, revealing a corridor lined with flickering lamps and a grand ballroom beyond it—identical to the Eden’s, but pristine, as it must have been in 1948.
Suddenly, the door behind Aanya slammed shut. She turned—and standing there, face sunken, eyes wild with fury, was the hotel’s receptionist. But his uniform had changed. It bore insignias not of the present, but of colonial intelligence. “You should never have come this far,” he hissed. “The Gate was never meant to open again.” He raised something from his coat—a transmitter, glowing ominously. “Clara’s betrayal cost lives. You think you’re reviving truth? You’re reviving chaos.” The radio flared. The mirror pulsed violently. And Clara—on the other side—held out her hand. Choose, her eyes pleaded. Come through. Or stay and fight. Aanya’s breath caught. Behind her, time cracked open. Before her, the past waited. And all around her, the Gate sang with impossible possibility.
Chapter 8
Aanya moved before she could second-guess herself. With the receptionist lunging toward the radio console, she grabbed Clara’s journal and sprinted for the mirror, the piano’s final chord still resonating in her chest. The mirror’s surface felt like chilled water—fluid, but with resistance, like memory itself didn’t want her to pass. Behind her, the room trembled. “You have no idea what you’re unleashing!” the man bellowed, but his voice fractured as she crossed the threshold. The Mirror Gate swallowed her whole. And then—stillness. The air changed. Dust vanished. Light warmed. Her ears rang with silence so profound it felt sacred. She stumbled forward into a grand ballroom bathed in golden sunlight, chandeliers glinting above rows of polished chairs, and a string quartet softly playing near the dais. It was 1948. The Grand Eden as it once was. People milled about in colonial finery, unaware of the seam in time that had just been torn open in their midst.
Aanya’s breath caught as she saw her—Clara Whitmore. Alive. Dressed in white. Standing by the piano, clutching a telegram. Their eyes met. A ripple passed between them—recognition without explanation. Clara blinked, then crossed the room slowly. “You found the notes,” she whispered. “And you came.” Aanya handed her the journal. “You left the trail. I just followed it.” Clara’s eyes filled with tears. “I tried to warn them. But Rudyard… he was taken before we could finish the transmission. We were building a signal to stop a coup—not just political, but temporal. They wanted to change the course of India’s independence, erase the transition, rewrite the narrative in Britain’s favor.” Aanya shivered. “And they used you.” Clara nodded. “But the signal’s only half-activated. That’s why the hotel loops. Why I’ve been stuck in that room for decades. You finishing the melody opened the gate, but now we must end the code.” She pointed toward a wireless transmitter hidden behind a velvet curtain. “One final message. We rewrite the end. Not for power—but for closure.”
Together, they approached the console. Clara adjusted the frequency, and Aanya hit RECORD. They spoke not in code, but in truth—naming names, identifying files, dates, plans. Clara’s voice trembled but never faltered. When they finished, she reached for Aanya’s hand. “Now burn it,” she said. “All of it. That’s the only way it stays buried forever.” Aanya hesitated—years of journalistic instinct recoiling at the idea. But she understood. This wasn’t just history. It was a wound that would fester if reopened. She dropped the journal, the tapes, the blueprint into the ballroom’s hearth. The flames caught fast. Behind them, the Mirror Gate flickered once more. “This time, when you cross back,” Clara said gently, “it’ll close for good.” Aanya turned to her. “What about you?” Clara smiled, tears shining. “I was never meant to leave. But you were.”
Aanya stepped through. Light roared. Her body jolted—and she woke up in Room 106, lying on the bed, sunlight streaming through the curtains. Her recorder sat beside her, silent. The walls were still. The corridor outside bustled with guests and housekeeping staff. Room 107? No longer boarded. No longer there. Just a gap in the wall, as if it had never existed. She checked out an hour later, the receptionist now a different man altogether—young, polite, with no memory of her stay. As she walked down the winding path from the hotel, she passed an old portrait in the lobby: Clara Whitmore at the piano, smiling, dated August 14, 1948. Below it, a new plaque: “In memory of stories lost and found again. The Grand Eden thanks those who listen.”
As Aanya stepped into the sun-drenched morning, she held the recorder tight, not to publish, but to remember. Some stories weren’t meant for headlines. Some stories were echoes—meant only to be heard once, and let go.
End
