Ishani Varma
Part 1: Arrival at St. Elora’s
The jeep rattled up the winding path as mist bled through the pine trees like a silent ghost. Ananya Roy pressed her forehead to the cool windowpane, watching the outline of the valley shift and disappear. Below, the Nilgiris rolled in endless folds of green-grey, but up here, only fog and silence reigned. The driver, a man of few words named Murugan, grunted as the tyres scraped a patch of gravel and caught again. “St. Elora’s ahead,” he said without turning. “Ten minutes.”
She nodded, fingers curled around the worn leather strap of her satchel. Inside were blueprints, letters of approval from the restoration committee, a half-read paperback novel, and a sense of doubt she’d carried since Bangalore. Ananya had restored temples, mansions, and even an opium warehouse. But never a school that had been closed for over forty years — and certainly not one with a death toll.
As they turned a bend, the main building loomed out of the mist — tall, granite-faced, with steep gables and wooden shingles weathered by decades of monsoon. The facade bore the British signature: arched windows, rosewood balustrades, and wrought iron gates sealed with rust. A weathered nameplate read St. Elora’s Residential School for Girls, Estd. 1892. Moss clung to every stone like time itself had decided to rot here.
Murugan stopped the jeep. “I’ll bring your things inside. You talk to caretaker.” He pointed at a figure standing by the entrance — a wiry, hunched man in a shawl and slippers, face partially hidden by the rim of his monkey cap.
“Good afternoon,” Ananya offered, stepping out. “I’m Ananya Roy. The architect from the Historical Preservation Board.”
The man stared for a moment longer than necessary. Then, with a voice dry as old paper, he said, “I know. You’re the first one since 1981.”
She forced a smile. “Well, I hope I won’t be the last.”
He turned and shuffled toward the wooden steps. “My name’s Ravi. I keep the place from crumbling. The forest would’ve taken it back if not for me.”
Ananya followed, taking in the scent of mold, wood, and something faintly metallic. Inside, the school was a cathedral of silence. High ceilings, broken fans, and broken memories. Lockers lined the hallway, their names faded. One was still etched with white paint: D-17: Rashmi Banerjee.
“Is there electricity?” she asked.
“Generator. Solar backup doesn’t work. Your room’s upstairs, second on the left. I cleaned it yesterday.” Ravi paused at the base of the wide staircase. “Don’t wander after dark. Things echo here.”
She blinked. “Things?”
He didn’t answer. Just turned and vanished into the East Wing corridor, his footsteps eaten by the carpet of dust.
Ananya’s room had a bed, a desk, and a square window through which mist poured in like breath. She unpacked slowly, lining up her pens and markers, flipping open the blueprint set she’d printed. The building plan was simple — three wings: East (dormitories), West (classrooms), and the Central Hall (administrative). Seven doors gave access to different wings and rooms: one main entrance, four classroom entries, two dormitory gates. All marked. All documented. But one part of the East Wing remained smudged on every print.
She pulled up a document — the 1949 architectural log — and traced her finger down to a scribbled note: “Wing E-3 sealed. No further renovations to be attempted beyond Door Seven.”
No explanation. No photograph. No eighth door.
As dusk fell, the valley turned ink-black. Ananya sat at the desk, her lamp flickering with each gust of wind. She noted wood damage in the North corridor, missing beams in the library, and fungus along the ceiling of the prayer room. Yet it wasn’t the decay that bothered her. It was the feeling that the building — despite the rot — was somehow watching her. As if its walls breathed.
At 8:12 PM, a soft knock startled her.
She opened the door.
No one.
She looked both ways. A faint gust came from the right — from the supposedly sealed East Wing.
The hair at the back of her neck stood up. She stepped into the corridor, barefoot on wooden floorboards that creaked like old bones. As she approached the end of the hallway, a mirror on the wall caught her eye. Cracked and clouded, it seemed ordinary — until she noticed something: in the reflection, a figure stood behind her.
She spun around.
Empty hallway.
She turned back. The mirror was blank.
She went cold. Turning quickly, she hurried back to her room and shut the door, bolting it. She laughed to herself. “Nerves,” she whispered. “Just nerves and bad lighting.”
But that night, Ananya couldn’t sleep. Because somewhere between dream and waking, she heard it.
A creak. A sigh. Then, a voice like dry leaves brushing past her ear.
“Eight. Not seven. Eight.”
Part 2: The Smudge on the Map
The morning came cloaked in silver fog. Ananya sat on the verandah steps with a thermos of chai, the warmth seeping into her palms as she looked out over the wet courtyard. Beyond the mist-shrouded trees, a broken iron swing creaked lazily in the wind. It hadn’t moved the night before. Or had it? She shook her head.
Last night had been strange. That voice. That mirror. She’d barely slept, the words “eight, not seven” looping like a prayer. Or a warning.
She sipped again and unfolded the original blueprint of the school from her folder. The East Wing was clearly marked, but something about it always irritated her — the area beyond the dormitory was never labeled properly. Every copy she had, whether scanned or printed from archives, had a strange smudge over a rectangular area adjacent to Dorm D. As if the ink had wept, or the section had been physically rubbed away. But why would only that part remain unmarked, unbuilt, or erased?
She set the chai aside and walked back inside, blueprint in hand. The corridor toward the East Wing was darker than the rest. It was flanked by closed wooden doors marked in faded brass plaques: Dorm D1, D2, D3, and D4. She counted them silently.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Seven dormitory rooms. Seven doors. Just as the plans showed.
At the end of the hall, a heavy wooden cabinet sat oddly out of place, shoved into a recessed corner. It looked newer than the rest of the furniture, though still weathered. On instinct, Ananya ran her hand along the wall behind it. Something about the plaster felt… uneven. She tapped lightly.
Hollow.
She pulled the cabinet aside with effort, revealing a blank section of wall. But there, just barely visible beneath layers of paint and mold, was the outline of something rectangular. A doorframe — sealed up.
She stepped back.
Eight.
Not seven.
Ananya scribbled a note and took a photo on her phone. Just then, the hallway bulb flickered and popped. Darkness swallowed the corridor for a second before emergency light bathed it in dull orange.
A distant creak echoed through the hall — like a door opening slowly.
But all the doors were closed.
She turned sharply, heart pounding.
“Hello?” she called out. “Ravi?”
No answer.
She returned to her room, unsettled. Something told her that if she forced open that eighth door now, she wouldn’t like what she found. Not yet.
Instead, she turned to the school’s archives. Stored in the central office, the files were in dusty trunks with frayed strings. Class lists, teacher notes, financial ledgers. But it was the year 1978 that caught her attention — the year of the fire, the last operational session of St. Elora’s.
One leather-bound attendance book listed names by dorms. Dorm D housed senior girls. The final list read:
1. Rashmi Banerjee
2. Nandita Bose
3. Alka Sharma
4. Priya Dasgupta
5. Rupa Sen
6. Divya Thomas
7. Leela Iyer
8. [Blank space]
She blinked. There was a number 8. But no name.
She flipped back to other years. Only seven girls per dorm. Only seven names per list.
Why eight in 1978?
Down the margin, a teacher had scribbled a single note in red ink: “Spoke during roll call. No assigned student. Investigate.”
She stared at that line for a long time.
Later, she found Ravi in the courtyard fixing a rusted pipe. “Do you know anything about the eighth dormitory room?” she asked.
He stopped hammering. Slowly, he stood up and wiped his hands. “No eighth room, madam. Just old stories.”
“There’s a wall that’s been sealed off. And the 1978 roll calls mention eight girls in Dorm D.”
Ravi’s eyes darted toward the building, then back at her. “Sometimes, a place remembers what people forget. But not everything that breathes is alive.”
She frowned. “Excuse me?”
He sighed and picked up his toolkit. “You came to restore the school, not its ghosts. Some doors were closed for a reason. Best you leave them closed.”
That night, the wind howled around the eaves like a wounded thing. Ananya couldn’t stop thinking about the blank name. About the red ink note.
Around midnight, she took her flashlight and went back to the East Wing.
The hallway was colder than before. Her breath fogged in front of her as she approached the hidden frame. The cabinet still stood off to the side. The wall was silent.
But when she touched the old wood, she felt something pulse behind it.
A heartbeat.
Then, she heard it again — the voice, a whisper so close it brushed against her spine.
“You are late. We’ve already begun.”
She staggered back, nearly dropping the torch. The hallway was empty, but the air felt charged — like just after lightning.
As she ran back toward her room, her phone buzzed once.
A new photo had appeared in her gallery.
It was the picture she had taken of the hidden wall.
Except now, in the image, the door wasn’t sealed.
It was slightly ajar.
And a hand was reaching out from the dark.
Part 3: The Hand in the Photo
Ananya sat bolt upright in bed, the glow of her phone screen burning into her eyes. She zoomed into the photo, heart hammering, breath shallow. The hand was pale — almost grey — with long, skeletal fingers curled mid-reach. No visible face, just the dark sliver of the door and that impossible hand. Her fingers trembled as she tapped the screen, trying to assure herself it was a glitch, a lens flare, a trick of the shadows.
But it wasn’t. She checked the metadata. The photo had been clicked at 12:41 AM — the exact time she’d returned from the corridor. She hadn’t taken it. She hadn’t even unlocked her phone.
She put it down, stood up, and paced. Her room suddenly felt too small, too silent. The walls closed in like watchers. She pulled the curtains aside — outside, the mist clung stubbornly to the courtyard, moving as if it were alive. In the distance, the broken swing was swaying again.
“Okay,” she whispered to herself, “maybe there’s a rational explanation.” Her breath hitched. “I need help.”
Morning took its time arriving. When it did, Ananya marched straight to the old library, a cavernous hall with books rotting on shelves, their spines curled and flaking. She climbed up to the loft area, where she’d spotted the school’s yearbooks earlier. They were stacked in a wooden trunk labeled Elora Memories. She flipped past volumes — 1970, 1972, 1974 — until she found 1978.
The cover was cracked blue leather, embossed with a sun and a mountain. Inside, photos of smiling students, elocution competitions, sports day, the music choir.
Then came the Dorm D spread.
Seven photographs. Names printed beneath each.
Rashmi Banerjee. Nandita Bose. Alka Sharma. Priya Dasgupta. Rupa Sen. Divya Thomas. Leela Iyer.
The eighth space was blank. A gap in the layout. No picture. No name.
But the background of that eighth spot — just the wall — had a faint, almost imperceptible figure in the far left corner.
Not a girl. Not fully.
A shadow. Barely visible. Eyes like burn marks in the paper.
Ananya closed the book, hands clammy.
“Excuse me,” came a voice behind her.
She whirled around.
A man stood there — mid-40s, tall, with a warm smile and a backpack slung over one shoulder. “Sorry to scare you. I’m Rayan. Local historian. Ravi told me you might be needing some help.”
She exhaled, pulse still racing. “Yes. Architect. I’m documenting the restoration. You said you’re a historian?”
“Specifically oral folklore of the Nilgiris,” he said, stepping closer. “I’ve been researching St. Elora’s for a decade.”
She showed him the eighth-door photo.
Rayan looked long and hard at the image. “You shouldn’t have found this.”
“That’s not helpful,” she snapped. “What is this place?”
He sat down on the dusty bench beside her. “There’s a legend. Not official history, of course. But among old tribes here — Toda and Badaga elders — there’s mention of a ‘time-pocket’ or ‘shadowskin’ that certain colonial buildings were built over. Places where memory folds, and the walls become more than just brick.”
Ananya stared. “Like a… dimensional glitch?”
“Or a ritual scar,” he said. “The East India Company did strange things in these hills. There’s one consistent pattern: places that had an eighth room — not listed, not planned, just appeared. And always in girls’ schools or orphanages. Always sealed after a tragedy.”
She whispered, “What kind of tragedy?”
Rayan tapped the yearbook. “1978. They called it an accidental fire. But some students’ bodies were never recovered. Rumor says they were never in the physical world to begin with when the blaze began.”
She shivered.
He handed back her phone. “If that door opens — don’t walk through. Don’t even knock.”
That night, Ananya sat awake, staring at the corner where the wardrobe stood. Her door was bolted. Every light was on. Yet the atmosphere was charged — electric, humming, like a premonition with breath.
She opened her journal and wrote: What if buildings are memory? What if architecture is ritual in stone?
At 2:03 AM, her phone buzzed again.
New image.
This time: the same door. Open wider. The hand visible up to the wrist. And in the corner of the frame — a girl’s face, half-shadowed, mouth slightly open.
Not screaming.
Smiling.
She dropped the phone.
The lights flickered and went out.
The swing in the courtyard began to creak.
Something was walking down the hallway.
Not hurried.
Just… arriving.
Part 4: The Girl Who Smiles
The darkness in her room was thick, not just the absence of light but the presence of something else. Something watching. Ananya didn’t move. She sat frozen on the edge of her bed, fingers pressed against her thighs, every breath calculated. Outside, the creaking of the courtyard swing had stopped. But now—there were footsteps. Soft. Slow. Wooden floorboards flexing under pressure. They were not Ravi’s. These were lighter, barefoot.
Then the smell arrived. A faint scent of something burning — not wood, not cloth. Hair. Burnt hair.
Ananya reached for her phone in the dark and activated the flashlight. The sudden cone of light sliced the room, illuminating dust motes that danced like nervous insects. The room was empty. But the footsteps continued — just beyond her door. They stopped outside.
A knock.
Gentle. Once.
Then a voice. Young. Feminine. Amused.
“Open it. Just a little.”
Ananya’s breath caught. Her mouth went dry.
She backed away from the door, flashlight trembling in her hand. The voice came again, whispering now.
“We were waiting. We were always waiting.”
She didn’t reply. Couldn’t.
The silence that followed was worse. She stood still for what felt like hours, heart thudding in her ears. When she finally cracked open the door, there was no one there. Just a folded paper on the floor — yellowed and soft, as if left decades ago.
She picked it up and unfolded it with shaking hands. In spidery writing, it read:
“I remember my name now. Do you remember yours?”
– L. I.
She sat down hard on the floor. L. I. — Leela Iyer. One of the seven names from the 1978 dorm list. But why was she writing? She was one of the real students. She had a picture. A face.
Unless… she was the last to see the eighth.
The next morning, Ananya met Rayan in the library again. She shoved the paper across the table. “This was slipped under my door.”
He read it, jaw tightening. “Leela Iyer was the only girl who survived the fire. She was pulled out unconscious. No burn marks. But she never spoke again. Spent the next twenty years in a sanatorium in Mettupalayam. Died in 2001.”
“So how the hell did she leave me a note?” Ananya snapped.
Rayan was quiet for a moment. “There are two possibilities. Either someone is playing a very cruel joke… or the door is no longer fully closed.”
They both stared at the blueprint on the table. The sealed wall. The erased records.
“What happens if someone walks through?” she asked.
“Then,” Rayan said slowly, “they don’t walk back.”
Ananya rose. “I need to see the inside.”
He grabbed her arm. “No.”
“I’m not planning to open it. Just… look. Maybe there’s a structural gap, a trapdoor, something.” She paused. “I have to know if it’s real.”
That evening, they returned to the East Wing together. Ananya brought a hammer and a chisel, Rayan a solar torch. The light flickered on the sealed plaster, illuminating fine cracks. The wall was real, but old — poorly patched.
“I’ll chip just a little,” she whispered. “Just enough to see what’s behind.”
Her first tap echoed strangely. The second one sent a crack spiraling across the paint. On the third, a piece of plaster crumbled and fell.
Behind it — darkness.
She peered in with the torch. A small cavity, just a few inches. Lined with wood. Like a tunnel.
Then something moved inside.
A faint scratching.
Ananya froze.
“Back up,” Rayan said sharply, pulling her away. “Now.”
She stumbled back, breathing hard.
But before they could leave, they heard it again.
The voice.
From inside the wall.
“You chipped away my silence. Come now. Just a little further.”
Rayan backed out of the hallway. “We’re leaving. Now.”
They didn’t speak again until they were outside, under the clearing sky.
“I think it’s feeding on attention,” Ananya said finally. “The more we look, the more it opens.”
Rayan nodded grimly. “It wants to be remembered. But not all memories deserve resurrection.”
That night, Ananya did not sleep.
She sat with her journal, writing down everything she’d seen, heard, felt.
At 3:22 AM, the lights flickered again.
This time, when she looked up, the mirror across the room wasn’t reflecting her desk.
It was showing a hallway.
The East Wing.
And in that hallway, a girl stood — in a charred school uniform.
Her skin was cracked like old porcelain, mouth curved in a grotesque smile.
In her hand, she held Ananya’s blueprint.
And she whispered, though no sound came out:
“You forgot me. But I never forgot you.”
Part 5: The Name That Was Erased
Ananya tore her gaze away from the mirror, heart pounding. Her reflection had returned — desk, chair, walls — all normal. But her skin was slick with cold sweat. She staggered to the sink, splashing water on her face, gripping the edges like they were the only solid thing in the world. This place is crawling inside me, she thought. It knows who I am.
The blueprint had been in the girl’s hand. The girl who smiled. The same one from the photo, the corridor, the shadow in the yearbook. She was no longer just a ghost — she was growing bolder, hungrier. Her presence was shaping the physical world.
Ananya didn’t go back to sleep.
By morning, her mind was set.
She needed the original records. Not the Board’s sanitized copies. The ones that predated the fire, before anything had been scrubbed.
She found them in the smallest room of the old principal’s quarters — a forgotten filing cabinet behind a shelf of warped encyclopedias. Inside, she discovered yellowed registers bound in fading red cloth. One was labeled “Admissions 1978 – Term I”.
She turned to Dorm D.
The names matched the list from the yearbook.
But then—an anomaly.
A torn page had been clumsily glued over another. The glue had browned and peeled at the edges. With surgical care, she lifted it.
Beneath it, handwritten in a different ink and far more elegant script, was the name:
Lakshmi E.
No surname. No origin. No date of admission. Just two words. And a series of strange notations beside it: “Do not house alone. Avoid mirrors. No photographs. Room to remain locked if incident recurs.”
There was a final line, barely legible: “Reassignment denied. Contains persistent anomaly. Subject requires surveillance.”
Ananya sat back, blood draining from her face.
She had a name now.
The erased girl.
Lakshmi E.
Later, she found Ravi in the courtyard, hammering loose nails back into the prayer hall doors.
She didn’t ask him if he knew.
She told him. “Her name was Lakshmi E. The eighth girl. She was in this school.”
Ravi didn’t look up.
“I saw her,” Ananya continued. “In the mirror. She’s still here.”
Only then did Ravi straighten. He looked older than he had before, as if some unseen weight had finally crushed through his bones.
“They buried her twice,” he said. “Once in the fire. Once in the records. But she wasn’t meant to be here at all. They brought her because she had no family, no origin, no claim. Just a face that didn’t match any document.”
“Where was she from?”
“No one knew. The British brought her from one of the old hill orphanages in 1968. Or maybe earlier. She never aged. Some said she could be in three rooms at once. She never spoke when spoken to. But she whispered at night.”
“Whispered what?”
Ravi finally met her eyes. “That she came from the other side of the door.”
He dropped the hammer and walked away.
Ananya stood alone with the name echoing in her head: Lakshmi E. Lakshmi E.
Rayan arrived that evening with something in his hands — a worn cassette tape, labeled in scrawled writing: “Elora – Interview, April 1978.”
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“My father was part of the original investigation. He never published anything, but he kept this. It’s the only known voice recording from the school just weeks before the fire.”
They played it in the library on an old tape player scavenged from a broken AV room. The audio was grainy, muffled, but voices could be heard.
A teacher was speaking. “State your name, please.”
A pause. Then, a girl’s voice. Soft. Measured.
“Lakshmi.”
The teacher: “Full name?”
A longer pause.
“The rest was taken from me.”
Ananya and Rayan exchanged glances.
The tape continued — the teacher pressing, the girl giving cryptic answers.
Then a chilling line:
“When the eighth door opens, the mirror becomes a mouth. And mouths must feed.”
The tape crackled violently. Then silence.
That night, Ananya didn’t sleep in her room. She sat in the prayer hall with Rayan, books and candles scattered around them. It felt like the only place untouched by her — Lakshmi. Maybe because it had no glass. No mirrors. No reflections.
“I think she’s trying to come back,” Ananya whispered.
Rayan nodded grimly. “She never left. The eighth door isn’t just a place. It’s a cycle. Every few decades, someone reopens her memory. And then… she remembers us.”
A gust of wind howled through the open corridor.
From somewhere deep inside the school, they heard a door unlatch.
Then a soft, deliberate creak.
One.
Two.
Three.
The eighth door had opened.
Part 6: The Mouth in the Mirror
It was unmistakable — the sound of a door swinging open. Not a gust, not a creak of old wood settling, but the thick-lidded, slow sigh of something that had not moved in decades surrendering to air. Ananya and Rayan froze. The prayer hall flickered with candlelight, every flame bending as if pulled toward a deeper breath.
“She’s inside now,” Rayan said softly.
“No,” Ananya whispered. “We’re inside her.”
They didn’t move for several minutes, the silence thickening until the building itself seemed to hold its breath. Then, a faint sound from the corridor — not footsteps, not voices — but the unmistakable sound of water dripping onto stone. Steady. Measured. Like a clock ticking underwater.
“I need to see it,” Ananya said.
Rayan turned. “You’re not thinking clearly. That door has been sealed for a reason—”
“She’s already unsealed it,” Ananya snapped. “We’re past the threshold. Now I need to know what’s behind it. I need to face her.”
He hesitated. “If you go in—”
“I won’t go in,” she said. “I’ll just look.”
But they both knew that was a lie.
They made their way down the dark East Wing. The corridor was colder now, the wood slick under their feet, the walls beaded with moisture as though the school had begun to sweat. As they approached the old plastered section, they saw it: the wall was gone. Not broken. Not torn. Just… gone.
In its place, a narrow door.
Wooden. Painted black. No handle. No hinges. Just a thin slit between reality and something darker.
And it was ajar.
Ananya stepped forward.
The air changed. The sounds around her grew muffled, like cotton had been stuffed into her ears. Behind the door, there was no hallway, no room — just a darkness so complete it looked like it could swallow sound.
Inside, something breathed.
“Don’t,” Rayan whispered.
But she was already inside.
The room was small — maybe ten feet across. The floor was black stone. No light fixtures, no windows. But she could see. Somehow.
The walls were covered in mirror shards.
Each shard reflected not her face, but versions of her — a child, a teenager, an old woman she had never been. One shard showed her asleep in her room. Another showed her standing where she was now — except in that version, she was screaming.
In the center of the room was a pedestal.
And on it, a single mirror.
Whole.
She stepped toward it. The moment she looked in, her stomach clenched.
Because her reflection did not match her body.
It was Lakshmi.
Smiling.
But not with joy.
With hunger.
The mirror began to warp, its surface rippling like disturbed water. Her own face disappeared. The room dimmed. The other mirrors began to hum — a low frequency that vibrated her bones.
Then the mouth opened.
In the center of the mirror — a slit appeared. Vertical. Wet. Breathing.
A mouth.
With no teeth. No tongue. Just depth.
And it began to whisper.
“You remembered me. So I remember you.”
Ananya backed away, heart slamming into her ribs. “What do you want?” she whispered.
“You named me. You restored me. Now I must complete the symmetry.”
Behind her, the door began to close.
“No—” she ran for it, but the air was thick now, her legs slower than her panic. The pedestal trembled. A mirror on the wall shattered.
A voice echoed from the shards.
“Every place has a secret. Every secret has a face.”
She reached the door just before it sealed.
Rayan yanked her out.
They collapsed in the hallway, both gasping.
He stared at her. “What did you see?”
“Her,” she said. “Me. All of us. She’s not a ghost, Rayan. She’s a structure. A design. She reflects us until we become her.”
Rayan swallowed. “The mouth?”
“She feeds on memory. She takes your image, wears it, stores it. She isn’t one girl. She’s all the ones who were forgotten.”
Silence stretched.
Then Ananya looked up and whispered, “She said I restored her. What if… that’s why she needed me?”
Rayan was pale. “What do you mean?”
“I’m an architect,” she said. “But what if she didn’t want the building restored? What if she wanted herself reconstructed? And now I’ve done it. Piece by piece.”
At that moment, the lights across the building flared on.
Then died.
In the glass of the corridor window, Ananya saw her reflection.
Except it didn’t blink when she did.
It smiled instead.
Part 7: The Architect’s Shadow
The reflection stood frozen in the glass — smiling, unmoving, wrong. Ananya took a step back, her breath fogging the windowpane. Her body trembled, but the reflection didn’t mimic her anymore. Instead, it lingered, watching her like she was the one trapped behind the glass. Then, in one fluid blink, it was gone. The glass cleared, showing only the foggy schoolyard beyond.
Rayan put a hand on her shoulder. “We need to leave.”
“No,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, but steady. “She’s not done.”
“You’ve done enough,” he snapped. “You opened the room. You gave her a name. You fed her story. She’s awake now.”
Ananya turned slowly. “Exactly. Which means she’s vulnerable. Ghosts need stories. But stories need endings.”
Rayan shook his head, pacing. “You think you’re going to reason with her? This isn’t a girl anymore, Ananya. It’s an echo shaped like grief.”
But Ananya wasn’t listening. Her mind was racing through everything she’d seen — the mirrors, the journals, the erased name. She pulled out her notebook and flipped to the list of seven students. She circled each one.
“Do you remember what Ravi said?” she asked. “That Lakshmi never had a surname? That she had no place in the records?”
Rayan nodded. “So?”
“So maybe that’s how she survives. She slips between names. Between faces. Like… mold in a wall. If you don’t patch it completely, it comes back.”
“And what’s the patch?”
“Me,” Ananya said. “Or whoever remembers her. She’s latching onto memory, feeding off it.”
Rayan frowned. “You think forgetting her will make her vanish?”
“No. But restoring her fully might.”
He stared. “That’s insane.”
“She’s been fragmenting herself for decades. A hand here, a smile there. What if we show her the whole of herself — force her into one shape again? Trap the pieces back in one body. Then maybe… maybe we can end this.”
“And how do you do that?”
Ananya looked toward the East Wing. “We bring her out of the mirror.”
That night, they prepared a ritual of sorts — not with incense or mantras, but with intention. Ananya set up mirrors along the prayer hall, seven of them, each representing one of the other girls. She wrote their names on paper slips, placing them at the base of each mirror. At the center, on the floor, she placed the eighth — a large, intact oval mirror — and wrote Lakshmi E. beneath it.
Rayan watched in tense silence.
“She wants to be remembered,” Ananya said. “Let’s show her what she became.”
As midnight neared, the air grew heavier. Wind howled down the corridors, slamming doors open and shut. The swing outside spun in wild circles. The floor beneath them began to hum — a low vibration that felt like the ground was purring.
Then, in the main mirror, she appeared.
Lakshmi.
Blackened uniform. Cracked skin. Burning smile.
But not just one version.
Her face rippled, morphed — now a child, now old, now crying, now laughing. She was unstable, shifting with every second.
Ananya knelt before the mirror and whispered, “Stop hiding.”
The face stilled.
The eyes fixed on her.
“You brought me back,” Lakshmi said, her voice echoing from every shard of glass in the room.
“Yes,” Ananya replied. “But you can’t have me.”
Lakshmi’s smile twisted. “I am already inside you.”
“No,” Ananya whispered. “You’re only what was forgotten. And I remember you now.”
At that moment, the seven mirrors around them began to shimmer. Reflections twisted, pulling toward the center. The fragments of Lakshmi — her whispers, her hands, her laughter — began crawling across the floor, converging toward the oval mirror.
The ground shook.
Rayan stepped back. “It’s working. She’s collapsing.”
But then Lakshmi screamed — not out of pain, but rage. The sound splintered glass across the room. One of the mirrors cracked, then another.
“I will not be whole!” she shrieked. “You don’t get to name me!”
“You named yourself,” Ananya shouted. “And now you can end!”
Lakshmi’s figure lunged forward — from the mirror — half-formed, reaching through the glass like it were water. Her arms burst into smoke, her torso shimmering with blood and light.
Ananya held her ground.
Then she reached into her satchel and pulled out the last piece she’d kept hidden — a photo. A reprinted yearbook page.
She had drawn in the eighth face.
She had given Lakshmi a face, a shape.
And now she held it up.
“This is you.”
Lakshmi froze.
Her figure began to stiffen, turning to ash and frost.
The mirrors howled.
And then — silence.
She was gone.
The oval mirror shattered.
The lights returned.
Outside, the fog lifted for the first time in days.
Rayan dropped to his knees. “You did it.”
Ananya didn’t respond. She looked down at her hands.
They were clean.
But in the cracked shard by her foot, her reflection smiled.
And didn’t blink.
Part 8: Beneath the Architect’s Skin
For two days, the school was quiet.
The fog that had cloaked the hills lifted like a veil. The swing in the courtyard hung still. Even the birds returned, chirping softly around the chapel roof. Ravi said nothing, but he lit incense sticks in the prayer hall and mumbled something in Tamil under his breath that sounded like thanks or forgiveness — maybe both.
Ananya stayed mostly in her room, eyes tracing the cracks on the ceiling like they were lines on a map. The mirror was gone, shattered, swept away. The journals were archived. The sealed door had vanished entirely — as if the eighth wing had never existed. Ravi swore it was always just a wall.
Rayan left for Ooty with the tapes and the documents. “I’ll make sure she’s recorded properly this time,” he said. “Lakshmi deserves her story told.” Ananya had nodded but didn’t say much. Something inside her had gone quiet, and that silence sat heavy.
She tried to focus on the restoration again — broken beams, termite trails, roofing angles — but her fingers fumbled when she drew. Her once-precise lines were now uneven. Her hands trembled when she touched paper. Even simple words on blueprints would flicker, letters rearranging themselves for split seconds. The word door once became dead. The word wall shifted into walk. She blinked, and it was normal again. But she knew something wasn’t right.
It started with her reflection.
Three nights after the ritual, she caught herself humming a tune in the bathroom mirror — one she didn’t know. A nursery rhyme, maybe. Old, breathy, with a rhythm that didn’t match any language she recognized.
She jerked back. Her lips had stopped moving.
But the reflection was still humming.
She didn’t sleep that night.
The next morning, she tried to call her mother. The phone dialed, rang, then buzzed with static — and through it, faintly, someone whispered, “Come back. You forgot something.”
She threw the phone across the bed.
Later, she found fingernail marks on her own palm. Five perfect crescents dug into her flesh.
She hadn’t been clenching her hand.
That evening, Ravi knocked and entered her room. He carried a small mirror — oval, polished wood, something from the old teacher’s dressing room.
“Ma’am,” he said carefully, “I found this on the altar. Thought you might want it.”
She looked at it. For a second, it shimmered — just a flash — and she saw Lakshmi’s face, smiling faintly behind her own.
She shook her head. “No. Throw it away.”
Ravi nodded, relief flickering across his face. “Some things reflect more than light.”
After he left, Ananya stared into the full-length mirror in her wardrobe. She hadn’t looked at herself fully in days.
She took a breath. Faced it.
At first, everything was normal. Her face, her tired eyes, the dust on her sleeves.
But then, the reflection smiled.
She hadn’t.
And it whispered, lips barely parting:
“You tried to name me. But names don’t stop becoming.”
She stumbled back, mouth dry. “You’re gone. We sealed you.”
The mirror shimmered like ripples in a black lake.
“I never wanted escape. I only wanted to live. And now I do.”
“No,” Ananya whispered.
But her reflection moved closer to the glass, pressing palm to surface.
“You’re the architect. You make space. I… fill it.”
She ran. Down the corridor, past the chapel, into the cold night air.
She didn’t stop until she reached the cliff at the edge of the school, the valley stretching like an ocean of green below. The wind howled around her. The moon was full. Her breath came in ragged pulls.
She looked down at her hands.
They weren’t hers.
Slightly longer fingers. Paler. The veins too sharp. The nails too smooth.
Then she heard it — inside her head, like a thought she didn’t think:
“I wore them all before. Just for a while. Now I want to stay.”
She pressed her hands to her ears. Screamed into the wind.
Rayan returned the next day. Found her sitting on the chapel steps, staring at the earth like it held equations she couldn’t solve.
“You look tired,” he said gently.
“I am,” she said. “She’s not outside anymore.”
Rayan’s face paled. “Ananya—”
“She’s inside.”
He knelt. “We can undo it. We can find the root—”
“No,” she said, a strange calm in her voice. “She chose me because I build. And now she’s building with me.”
Rayan swallowed. “Who are you now?”
She looked up slowly.
And her eyes glinted, just for a moment, with something that didn’t belong to this world.
Part 9: The Room With No Return
Rayan didn’t return to Bangalore that week.
He stayed in the caretaker’s quarters, keeping watch over Ananya from a distance. She drifted through the old school like a shadow — measuring, sketching, marking spots on her blueprint with a compulsion that disturbed him. Her movements were slower, her voice softer, almost melodic. But it wasn’t her voice. Not exactly. There was something measured about the cadence. Something too calm. Like a rehearsed lullaby.
One morning, he found her in the East Wing — not where the eighth door had once been, but across from it. The opposite wall, now blank, was covered in chalk sketches. Circles, lines, geometric forms with strange ratios and angles. In the center: a perfect arch. A door. No frame. No hinges. Just the outline of one, drawn over and over until it almost seemed to shimmer.
“I thought we sealed it,” Rayan said gently.
Ananya turned. Her face was pale, and her eyes rimmed with darkness, but she smiled like she knew something he didn’t.
“We did,” she said. “But doors are ideas. And ideas don’t die. They just change shape.”
Rayan swallowed. “You need help. This place—”
“This place is me now,” she said quietly. “She’s not inside me like a parasite, Rayan. She’s building through me. That’s what I do. That’s why she waited.”
She handed him her sketchbook. He flipped through it — pages filled with architectural designs of spaces that didn’t exist, windows facing inwards, staircases that led nowhere, and room plans shaped like symbols from old tantrik texts. On the final page was a drawing of the school — but it had changed.
Eight wings.
Each one radiating outward like a star.
“This is what she wants?” he asked.
Ananya shrugged. “No. This is what she is. She just needed someone to finish the blueprint.”
That night, Ravi packed his bags. “I’m not staying here anymore,” he told Rayan. “She’s in the bricks now. The place has started whispering again.”
“Whispering what?”
“That she’s opening the room again. But this time, from the inside.”
Rayan couldn’t sleep. He dreamt of corridors that bent in on themselves, of mirrors stacked like eyes, of Ananya walking barefoot through the school with soot trailing behind her. He woke up drenched in sweat, heart racing.
At dawn, he stormed into the East Wing. “Ananya,” he shouted. “This ends now!”
But the hallway was empty.
Only the chalk outline of the door remained — glowing faintly.
He followed her sketches, the ones he’d memorized from the notebook, to the old infirmary. A room no one had entered in decades. The door creaked open with effort.
Inside, the walls were lined with mirrors. Seven of them. Framed in black wood. Each one cracked.
And in the center — a new door.
Real. Not drawn. Not imagined.
Made of the same wood as the one they had once unsealed.
It pulsed slightly. Not vibrating — breathing.
He heard humming.
He turned.
Ananya stood behind him.
But she wasn’t fully Ananya anymore.
Her skin was her own, but her expression was not. It was too still. Too smooth. Her eyes were like polished glass, and when she smiled, it was Lakshmi’s smile — serene, knowing, endless.
“You shouldn’t have followed,” she said gently.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m completing the design.”
“What’s behind the door, Ananya?”
“Nothing,” she said. “And everything. The Room With No Return. She was never meant to be remembered. But memory is like architecture. It rebuilds itself. Every time someone forgets, the door closes. Every time someone recalls, it opens. I remembered her too well.”
She stepped toward the door. The mirrors shivered.
“You don’t have to do this,” Rayan pleaded. “You can fight her.”
She tilted her head. “I’m not fighting her. I am her.”
And then she opened the door.
For a moment, Rayan saw nothing. Just darkness. A silence that wasn’t quiet, but absent. As though sound had never existed.
Then — a flicker.
A corridor of mirrors.
Each one reflecting Rayan.
Each one showing him older. Sadder. Forgotten.
And in the last mirror: no reflection at all.
Ananya stepped inside.
The door closed behind her.
Rayan ran to it, pounded on it, screamed her name.
But the wood was cold.
Still.
Sealed.
He never saw her again.
Part 10: The Eighth Wing
Years passed.
The restoration of St. Elora’s was quietly canceled. The board claimed logistical setbacks, lack of funding, structural instability. No mention was made of doors, mirrors, or missing architects. Rayan returned to Bangalore, but not to teaching. He withdrew from academic circles, gave no lectures, published no papers. He kept a single sketch on his wall — Ananya’s last drawing: eight wings spiraling outward like a snowflake made of corridors.
Some nights, he’d wake up convinced he heard her voice in the walls. Not calling for help. Just… humming.
He still visited the hills every year.
Not out of hope.
Out of responsibility.
In 2024, a young intern named Diya Mathur from the Heritage Trust reached out to him. She had found his name in a footnote attached to a decades-old article on abandoned colonial-era schools. She was preparing a thesis on haunted architecture.
“I’ve been reading about St. Elora’s,” she said. “There’s a discrepancy in the design records.”
“Burn the records,” Rayan told her. “And forget the name.”
But she didn’t listen.
No one ever did.
That spring, she visited Black Hollow Bend. The villagers still kept away. Ravi was long gone. The old jeep route had overgrown, but she managed. She took photographs. Made sketches. She noted something strange.
The building was… different.
The original blueprint showed three wings. But now there were four. A collapsed West Wing had been mirrored on the opposite side. Unmarked. Unrecorded.
Diya returned to Delhi and compared her data.
And something clicked.
Each photograph she took of the front entrance showed an extra shadow. A tall figure. Unmoving. And in one window — Dorm D — a face that hadn’t been there before.
It was Ananya’s.
But altered.
Worn.
Translucent.
Still smiling.
Rayan heard of Diya’s death a month later. Hiking accident, they said. Fell from a cliff near the school. Her body was recovered, but her camera was never found. Nor her notes.
After that, he stopped returning to the hills.
But the dreams didn’t stop.
In them, he walked down unfamiliar corridors, each lined with mirrors that hummed. At the end of every dream, a door appeared — the eighth — and it opened to show a room where all versions of him waited. Some old. Some lost. One weeping. All staring.
One night, the dream changed.
He stepped through.
And awoke in bed, heart hammering, breath short, as if he’d run for miles.
The mirror in his bedroom was fogged over. He hadn’t taken a hot shower. The glass had words written in condensation:
“We’re building the ninth.”
He smashed the mirror that night. But the message began to appear elsewhere — his phone screen, car windows, puddles. Wherever a reflection could live.
He tried to forget.
But forgetting, he knew too well, is how it begins.
In 2027, the building was officially deemed unfit for entry. Government records list it as sealed and structurally unstable. But locals claim they still see lights at night. Flickers through the fog. They say the school breathes sometimes. That the wind around the East Wing always hums a tune.
And in the hush between gusts, if you stand close enough, you might hear her voice — soft, serene, satisfied.
Ananya.
Or Lakshmi.
Or someone in between.
And if you listen too long, something inside you will itch. Not your skin. Not your mind. But the part of you that forgets and remembers.
Because The Eighth Door was never about a place.
It was an idea.
And now it’s a design.
Waiting for its next architect.
THE END
— but the door is always ajar.
