Ritoban Chatterjee
Part 1: The Snowline Ends Here
The road to Solang wasn’t a road anymore. Past the tourist checkpoints and the snowmobilers shouting into the white wind, the tar peeled into gravel, then to silence. Ishaan Sen stood beside the BRO milestone that read SOLANG – 1 KM, the last marker of civilisation before it disappeared under the crust of old snow. His taxi driver had refused to go further. “Bad season,” he’d muttered, not making eye contact. “Locals don’t go that side after winter sets in. You shouldn’t either.” Ishaan had smiled. Writers didn’t scare easy. Or so he thought.
He dragged his suitcase through knee-deep slush, camera bag slung across his shoulder, notebook pressed tight to his chest under layers of wool. The cold here wasn’t biting—it was watching. A stillness hung over the valley, not peaceful but expectant, like the whole landscape held its breath just under the fog.
Solang, when it finally emerged, wasn’t what the travel guides said. There were no paragliders, no laughing honeymooners, no food stalls steaming with maggi. Just six wooden homes, shut tight with blue tarpaulin sheets nailed across their windows. No smoke, no dogs, no footprints. The village looked abandoned, except for the single oil lamp flickering outside the last house on the slope.
He knocked once. A pause. Then the door opened just enough to let out the scent of old wool, woodsmoke, and something faintly herbal. An old woman stared out at him — wiry hair wrapped in a grey shawl, eyes milky but sharp. “You came,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I’m looking for accommodation,” Ishaan began, slipping off his glove to show his fellowship letter. “I’m a writer. The Himalayan Heritage Trust has sent me to document disappearing villages. They said there’s an empty house up this slope I can stay in.”
The woman’s eyes did not waver. “You mean the Tara House.”
“Tara Kapoor? Yes,” he said. “The botanist.”
She didn’t answer. Just opened the door wider and nodded him in. The inside was dim, lit only by the lamp and the cracks in the wooden wall. Five other faces turned to look at him — men and women in layers of handmade sweaters, silent and weather-worn.
“I’m Amrita,” the old woman said. “This is all of Solang now. Six left. Everyone else gone. City, or mountain. No difference.” She gestured to a corner where tea brewed in an iron kettle. “Warm yourself before you go up. After tonight, don’t come back down.”
Ishaan blinked. “Why?”
“The path will be snowed over by morning. The mountain closes what it doesn’t want opened. You’ll understand.”
They said nothing more. He drank the tea in silence, its warmth unfamiliar and sharp, like it was made from something that shouldn’t be steeped in boiling water. Then, wordlessly, Amrita handed him a rusted iron key on a red thread and pointed up the slope.
By the time he reached the Tara House, dusk had congealed into a blue-black fog, thick enough to muffle the sound of his own steps. The house stood apart from the village, half-hidden behind cedar trees, its roof slanted under snow, windows black. It looked less abandoned than deliberately untouched, like someone had walked away mid-breath and never returned.
Inside, dust lay thick on the floorboards but the air didn’t smell stale. It smelled faintly… botanical. Like dried lavender. Or crushed wild thyme. The walls were lined with shelves—books, plant samples in jars, a broken microscope. He found a candle, lit it, and in the flicker saw a photograph pinned above the fireplace. A woman in her thirties, smiling, hair braided, hands holding a bouquet of alpine flowers.
Tara Kapoor, he thought. The missing botanist. Gone without a trace seven winters ago.
The house had no electricity. Only candles, matches, and a paraffin lamp. The bedroom upstairs was neat, sheets folded, a shawl draped over the wooden chair. He unpacked his notebook, spread out the Trust documents, and began scribbling first impressions.
Half an hour in, the lamp sputtered. The flame did not go out. It bent—to the left.
He looked around. No wind. The windows were closed. Yet the flame leaned and trembled, as if reacting to something unseen. Then, from upstairs, came a thud.
He froze.
The second thud was softer. Followed by a creak.
It wasn’t imagination. It was a footstep. In the locked room at the end of the hall.
Ishaan stood, grabbing the lamp. He climbed the stairs slowly, each board groaning like a protest. At the end of the corridor, the door was shut with a rusted latch. The air around it was colder. The kind of cold that wasn’t just temperature — it had intent.
He reached for the latch. It was warm.
He pulled his hand back. Warm. In a house abandoned for seven years. In a room never opened.
Downstairs, something crashed. The lamp hissed. The flame snapped vertical again.
He ran down, expecting wind. Or perhaps a fallen book. But nothing had moved.
Except the photograph.
It now lay facedown on the floor, glass unbroken. When he picked it up, his breath caught.
The photo had changed.
Tara’s bouquet was gone. Her smile too. She looked… straight at the camera now. Blank-eyed.
And something stood in the blur behind her. Half-seen. Tall. Shadowed.
Not a tree.
Not human either.
Part 2: The Locked Room
He did not sleep that night. He didn’t even lie down. Ishaan sat in the armchair near the fireplace, lamp burning low, the warped photograph resting face-down on the desk beside him. At some point, the wind had risen outside, thick with ice crystals rattling against the shutters like fingernails on a coffin lid. But it wasn’t the cold that kept him alert. It was the silence of the locked door upstairs. Silence that had followed a sound. And silence, he’d learned as a travel writer, was rarely innocent.
At dawn, the wind retreated. The hills outside were white as paper, no sign of road or trail. The house was now an island, and he its lone castaway. Ishaan made tea over the fire and reread Tara’s last known research entry from a weather-warped notebook he’d found tucked behind the fireplace bricks:
Solang forest base, 2 Jan. Strange fungal pattern near old cedar root. Spore map doesn’t match anything in Alpine ecology logs. Unmapped mycelium cluster? Maybe. Also… voice at 3:17 a.m. Not dream. Must observe again. Stay until full moon.
She had stayed. She hadn’t returned.
He climbed the stairs again at noon. No wind, no footsteps. The house groaned like a sleeping beast. The corridor held its cold breath as he stood before the door at the end. The latch remained shut, but the wood was slightly bowed outward, as though the room were trying to exhale.
He unlatched it.
The hinges wailed as it opened. The smell hit him first — not rot, not mold. Earth. Wet soil, mushrooms, something green and fecund and breathing. The room was dim. No window. The walls were lined with maps. Not paper maps — fungal ones.
Circular mycelial growths on bark slices, pinned and labeled with Tara’s writing. Latin names crossed out. New ones invented. Cordyceps himaliana var. devika? Unmapped neurogenics. Responds to prayer tones. Why?
In the center of the room, a small shrine had been built entirely from dried mushroom stalks, red string, and yak bone. It looked like a spore temple — something grown more than made.
A chill crawled up his spine. This wasn’t just botanical research. It was ritual. Scientific or spiritual, he couldn’t yet tell. He took a photo of the wall, then turned to leave.
And saw the etching on the back of the door.
A hand-drawn symbol, scratched in with a nail: a cedar tree split by lightning, roots wrapping around an eye.
Underneath, written in Gurmukhi script and faint English:
“Don’t let it follow the snow.”
He slammed the door shut and backed away. The cold in the corridor had grown teeth. He descended the stairs fast, heart pounding with something he couldn’t yet name.
Back in the living room, he opened his laptop to jot down what he’d seen. No signal. No GPS. He checked the photo he’d just taken.
It wasn’t there.
The image had failed to save. The file was a black square.
He clicked the shutter again, aimed at the fireplace. This one saved. A test. Working.
But the photograph of Tara — now sitting again on the mantelpiece — was different once more.
The shadow behind her was closer now. Almost touching her shoulder.
That evening, he visited Amrita again.
She opened the door before he knocked. “You went in,” she said flatly.
“What was she doing here?” Ishaan asked. “What did she find?”
Amrita did not answer immediately. Behind her, the other villagers sat still, listening without seeming to. “She came here to study moss and leaves,” Amrita said. “But the mountain shows you what it wants to be studied. That house—Tara changed after one moon cycle. Stopped coming down. Laughed at night. We heard her talking to herself. And then… one morning, just… gone.”
“No footprints?”
“Only hers. Leading into the cedar grove. Not back.”
Ishaan swallowed. “And the others? The families that left?”
“They saw it,” Amrita whispered. “The Devta. Tall. Eyes like coal in snow. Sometimes it comes for one. Sometimes it comes for all. It sleeps until someone disturbs the root. You disturbed it.”
Ishaan frowned. “This Devta. You think it’s real?”
“Realer than you, city man,” she said. “It doesn’t kill. It keeps. Like a seed under ice.”
That night, he dreamt of roots growing from his spine, curling through the floor, wrapping around the beams of the house. He dreamt of snowflakes shaped like eyes.
He woke at 3:17 a.m.
The lamp was lit.
He hadn’t lit it.
From upstairs, the door creaked open on its own.
This time, he didn’t go up. He sat still, unmoving, as the temperature dropped like a coin through water. Then, faintly, a sound rose from the locked room.
A voice. Female.
Not whispering. Humming.
A low, circular tune — like the one in Tara’s journal. Like a lullaby, but hollow. Drifting. Ancient.
And under it, a scraping sound. Like something growing.
He shut his eyes. He held his breath.
And the candle blew out.
Part 3: The Thing in the Cedar Grove
By morning, the temperature had fallen below minus fifteen. The frost on the windows had thickened into white ferns, obscuring the view. Ishaan hadn’t slept, not in the way people do. He had sat rigid through the darkness, listening to the last strains of the humming fade into a silence that rang louder than any sound. When the sun finally appeared, grey and watery through the snow-thick sky, he moved. Slowly. Every muscle sore. Every breath reluctant.
The house was still. The door upstairs had shut again. Or had it ever opened? Doubt was now his most familiar companion.
By noon, the snowstorm had paused. A grey quietness settled in the air, heavy and unmoving. Ishaan layered himself, packed water, notebook, flashlight, and his camera, and stepped out of the Tara House. He needed air. Needed distance. Most of all, he needed to see the cedar grove — the place where Tara’s footprints had once ended.
The path behind the house was narrow and half-buried. The snow swallowed his boots in moments. But the trees loomed tall, ancient, draped in white, their green almost black under the cold. He walked, eyes flicking left and right, tracing the shape of the landscape, the absences between trunks. Solang was silent behind him now. The grove waited ahead.
Twenty minutes in, he found the clearing.
No birds. No wind. Just a bowl of stillness cradled by rising slopes and gnarled trunks. And at the center, something wrong.
A tree, thicker than the others, twisted like rope. At its base: a hollow. Large enough for a person to crawl into. Not a natural opening. Cut. Then grown around. Like the tree had tried to swallow what had disturbed it.
Around the base, strange arrangements of stones and flower petals — frozen now, wilted into black spirals. Offerings? Rituals?
And then, footprints.
Not his.
Fresh.
Barefoot.
He knelt. They led into the hollow. Vanished there. No sign of exit.
He lifted his camera. Snapped a photo.
The camera clicked.
But the screen remained black.
He tried again.
The camera shut down. Battery dead. Fully charged just two hours ago.
A rustle behind him.
He spun.
Nothing.
No, not nothing — something. A shape. Between two trees. Tall. Too tall.
Not moving. Not watching.
Just there.
And then — gone.
The silence returned, but now it throbbed. It pressed against his ears like water pressure. He backed away. Slowly, deliberately. Not turning. Not running. The grove seemed to lean inward, trees tightening their circle. The branches overhead trembled, but there was no wind.
He made it back to the house without remembering the walk.
Inside, he bolted the door. Lit the lamp. Poured water with shaking hands. His breath steamed in the air like smoke from some sacrificial fire. He wiped his lens, turned on the laptop.
No photos.
The folder existed. The files were there.
All black.
Every single one.
He opened his notebook and wrote everything down before it could vanish from his mind. Tara’s notes, the shrine, the footprints, the twisted tree. The shape between the cedars. The humming.
A knock.
He jumped. The door.
Another knock.
Too soft to be wind. Too slow for accident.
He stepped close, held his breath. “Who’s there?” he called.
Silence.
He opened it a crack.
Amrita.
Her eyes were different today. Wide, glassy. Her hands clutched a copper bowl, steaming with something dark and herbal.
“You’ve been marked,” she said. “It touched your shadow. I told you not to go.”
“I had to see it.”
“And now it sees you.”
She pushed the bowl into his hands. “Drink. It will hold you until the full moon. After that, no leaf, no root, no charm can help.”
“What is this?”
“Smoked juniper, bearberry, two other things you won’t know. It keeps the Devta from entering when you sleep.”
Ishaan hesitated.
“Drink, boy,” she said. “Or dream of your own bones.”
He drank. It was bitter, gritty, and hot. It burned going down, as if it carried memory inside it.
“Three days,” Amrita said. “Then the moon. Then the choice.”
“What choice?”
She didn’t answer. Only turned and walked back into the white.
That night, the dreams came sharper.
He was standing in the grove, naked, rooted. The tree before him opened like a door, but inside there was no hollow. Only stairs, spiraling down, carved in bone.
At the bottom: a mouth. Wide as the valley. Filled with eyes.
It opened.
And spoke his name.
When he woke, his ears bled.
And the humming had returned.
Only this time, he was humming back.
Part 4: Three Nights to the Moon
On the first night, the humming stopped. But silence had grown teeth.
Ishaan awoke to frost on the inside of the windows. The fire had gone out in his sleep, even though the logs were only half-burned. He touched the floor. Warm. A line of dampness led from the fireplace to the stairs. Like something had crawled across while he dreamt. His hands trembled as he lit the paraffin lamp, each movement more ritual than reflex now. The house was no longer a structure. It breathed.
He opened his notebook and found a leaf pressed between the last two pages — small, golden, veined like fingers. It hadn’t been there the day before.
He shut it.
At noon, he went back to the village. The path was thicker with snow. He left no prints behind him. When he reached Amrita’s door, it was already open.
“You dreamt of the stairs,” she said before he spoke.
“How—”
“You’re not the first,” she said. “But you may be the last.”
Inside, the other villagers were burning pine resin in small iron bowls. Their eyes followed him — not in fear, but in mourning.
“You didn’t say there’d be stairs,” he whispered.
“No one sees them unless they’ve already been chosen,” Amrita said. “Once marked, the mountain waits to root you. That’s how it feeds.”
“What is it?” Ishaan asked, suddenly desperate. “A spirit? A fungus? A god?”
“Yes,” Amrita said.
“Yes?”
She met his eyes. “You ask city questions. It has no answer that fits your books. It’s older than shape, older than word. We only call it the Devta because that’s what fear needs — a name. But it’s hunger. Memory. Pattern. The thing beneath the tree bark that still dreams of the forest. And you—”
“I just came to write about a forgotten village.”
“You came because the mountain called,” she said softly. “You came because your blood remembers. And the House beyond Solang? It waits for those who hear it.”
He shook his head. “You’re trying to say this was inevitable?”
Amrita did not answer. She handed him a pouch — cotton, hand-stitched, still warm. “Keep this near your heart. Don’t speak your name aloud until the third night has passed.”
“What’s in it?”
“Words older than your tongue.”
He left without speaking further.
That evening, he went back to the shrine room. The air had changed. The smell was thicker — like rot beneath wet leaves. The walls were damp. One of the fungal maps had begun to glow faintly in the dark. A phosphorescent pulse, like a breath. He touched it.
His vision shattered for half a second. Like falling into a different sense. He saw the cedar grove from above — not with eyes, but with roots. Beneath the ground, things moved.
Not worms. Not insects.
Faces. Human. Thousands. Their mouths open. All dreaming.
He pulled his hand back and fell.
The map faded.
That night, as the wind moaned across the ridges, he stayed by the fire. He clutched the pouch Amrita had given him, heart beating too loudly. Just before midnight, he heard a new sound.
Not humming. Not knocking.
A voice.
Calling his name. “Ishaan…”
He stood. The voice was female. Soft.
“Ishaan…”
Familiar.
He opened the door.
Tara Kapoor stood there.
Hair matted. Eyes vacant. Lips blue.
Her feet were bare in the snow. Her coat torn. Her breath—absent.
He couldn’t move.
“Tara?” he whispered.
She looked up.
And smiled.
“I found the root,” she said.
Behind her, the cedar grove had moved closer. Somehow. As if the house itself had shifted down the slope.
“You have three nights,” she said, “but only one answer.”
Then she vanished.
No wind. No sound. Just gone.
Ishaan shut the door. Bolted it. Sank to the floor.
He understood now.
The House didn’t haunt. It prepared.
Three nights.
Three visions.
Three parts of something ancient unfolding beneath snow and wood.
The first was calling.
The second would offer.
The third… would root.
Part 5: The Second Vision
On the second night, the fire refused to light. The wood hissed but never caught. The paraffin lamp dimmed with every breath Ishaan took, flickering as if inhaling fear. He wrapped himself in wool and sat facing the window, though there was nothing to see now — only snow against glass, thick and luminous like a second skin. Somewhere beyond it, the forest waited. So did she.
Tara’s voice hadn’t returned. Nor had her shape. But her scent lingered — damp pine, wilted chamomile, wet stone. It wasn’t memory. It was presence.
He drank the last of the herbal liquid Amrita had given him. It was colder now, more bitter, almost metallic on his tongue. He sat in silence until the lamp dimmed once more. Then, with no warning, the world turned sideways.
It was not a dream. It was not waking.
It was something else.
He stood at the edge of the cedar grove. But it wasn’t winter. The sky was golden, burning with late afternoon sun, the trees alive with whispering green. Birds chirped above. Children’s laughter echoed faintly through the slopes. He turned.
The village was full. Women washing clothes. Men mending roofs. Smoke rising from chimneys.
Solang — before.
Before the silence. Before the House had claimed its space.
He looked at his own hands. They were the same. No younger. No older.
Time had not sent him here.
Something else had.
Then — movement.
Tara, walking down from the House. Hair tied, boots muddy. Laughing. A notebook clutched in one hand, a basket of dried leaves in the other.
She didn’t see him.
But she walked straight past him — into the trees — and he followed.
She knelt by a root, muttering to herself. Drawing something.
And then her voice changed. Slowed.
“Ishaan?”
He froze.
She turned.
But her eyes were wrong now. Black. Veined. Her smile too wide.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said.
Behind her, the trees wilted. Their bark blistered and peeled. The golden sky darkened into blue, then red. Then the earth cracked.
Roots, like snakes, coiled up and wrapped around Tara’s ankles.
She did not scream.
“I wanted to see,” she whispered. “That was my only sin. Wanting to see what no one else did.”
The forest behind her bled. Sap poured like tar from the trees.
She looked up at Ishaan. “You came to write a book. But it already wrote you.”
He tried to step back.
But his feet were rooted.
Literally. Into the soil.
He looked down.
The ground had swallowed him up to the calves.
And the sky opened.
Not with stars.
But with eyes.
He woke gasping, mouth dry, neck drenched with sweat. The fire had still not caught. The lamp had gone out.
And yet, the room glowed faintly.
He turned.
The fungal shrine pulsed in green, throbbing like a heart. The bark symbols shimmered. Tara’s photograph — the one that had changed — was gone from the mantelpiece.
In its place, a mirror.
He approached it, unsure when it had been put there.
The reflection showed the room. The fireplace. The table.
But not him.
He wasn’t in it.
He touched the glass.
It rippled.
Then the mirror cracked — not shattering, but veining out from the center like ice on water.
Behind it, a shape moved. Black. Angular. Fluid.
He dropped the mirror.
It didn’t fall. It sank — slowly — into the floor, vanishing like it had never been.
He stood alone in the silent house, panting, knowing now what the second vision meant.
This was not about seeing the truth. It was about being seen.
The forest, the House, the Devta — whatever name it wore — it didn’t just watch. It catalogued. Studied. Absorbed.
And now it had seen enough.
Two nights.
One more to the moon.
He barely slept.
And when the third day rose, dull and cloudless, footprints circled the house.
His own.
But in reverse.
Leading toward the door.
From inside.
Part 6: The Third Night
The third night came without dusk. One moment, the sky was grey-blue; the next, a sheet of darkness dropped like a curtain across the valley. The forest vanished. The wind died. The snow stopped falling.
The world went still.
Ishaan sat in the center of the Tara House, every lamp lit, every candle flickering like nervous breath. He’d circled the walls with chalk and cedar ash, a crude barrier he’d copied from Tara’s journals. The pouch Amrita had given him still hung around his neck, now stained with his sweat. The tea was gone. The shrine in the locked room had stopped pulsing.
Nothing moved.
Except the mirror, which was back.
It had reappeared on the mantle, unbroken.
This time, his reflection stood in it. But not… him.
The man in the mirror wore his clothes, bore his face, even held his posture. But the eyes were wrong — black, unblinking. And behind that reflection, the room stretched deeper than it should. Endless.
Ishaan looked away.
The humming began again. Soft. Familiar.
But layered now — voices over voices, male and female, childlike and ancient.
Then: a knock.
Not on the front door.
From upstairs.
Three slow taps. Then silence.
He stood.
Walked toward the staircase.
Each step creaked like it remembered the last feet that had touched it.
At the top, the corridor stretched longer than before. The walls bowed slightly inward. Doors he didn’t remember now lined the hall — four on the left, three on the right, none marked. All shut. All waiting.
At the end, the original door. The shrine room.
Open.
No light inside.
He stepped through.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
Then — breath. Not his own.
Something stood in the corner.
Tall.
Still.
He lit a match.
For a moment, the room flared orange.
Tara.
Not standing.
Growing.
Her body fused with the wall, skin textured like bark, hair woven into moss, arms stretched outward like branches. Her chest moved with shallow breaths. Her mouth opened.
“Root,” she said.
He stumbled back.
“You have one choice left,” she rasped. “Stay, and become.”
“Or?”
Her eyes opened — glowing pale green.
“Run. And forget.”
“Forget what?”
“That you were ever here.”
The match burned his fingers. He dropped it.
Darkness again.
Then a sound — wet, dragging. Roots shifting under floorboards.
He ran.
Down the stairs. Through the hall. Out the door.
Into the snow.
But the forest had changed.
The cedar grove was closer now. Trees lined the slope like sentinels. The trail was gone. The snow was deeper.
He stumbled into the night, feet sinking, lungs burning. The House behind him exhaled — the sound of wood splintering and something ancient rising.
He ran faster.
Toward Solang.
Lights ahead.
He reached the village out of breath, collapsing at Amrita’s doorstep.
She opened the door like she’d been waiting.
“You came back,” she said.
“Please,” he gasped. “I saw her. She’s—she’s part of the house. Or the forest. Or something—”
Amrita helped him up. Her eyes were dark, unreadable. “Did she offer it to you?”
“The choice?”
She nodded. “All chosen are given the option.”
“Why would anyone stay?”
“Because forgetting is worse.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will.”
She led him inside.
The villagers stood in silence.
This time, they did not look mournful.
They looked relieved.
“Tonight,” Amrita said, “you must drink one final cup. Either it roots you, or it releases you. But know this — only one who has touched the third night may return to the world without it.”
She placed a steaming bowl in front of him.
Dark liquid. Floating petals.
“I don’t know what I want,” he said.
Amrita smiled sadly. “Then the mountain will decide.”
He drank.
The room tilted.
The fire snapped.
And his memory unraveled.
He was five, lost in a forest in Darjeeling. A voice had led him out.
He was twelve, drawing strange symbols in the back of his school notebook — shapes he’d never seen before.
He was twenty-eight, staring at a cedar tree on a solo trek in Sikkim, weeping for no reason, his hands in the soil.
He was thirty-four, standing in Tara’s house, roots around his feet, humming without knowing why.
He woke at dawn.
The sky pale. The air still.
Amrita sat beside him.
“It’s done,” she said.
“What is?”
“You chose.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’re not meant to.”
The Tara House, when he returned to it, was empty.
The shrine room bare. No fungus. No symbols.
The photograph back to its original form — Tara, smiling, holding her bouquet.
The forest had retreated.
But something in him had not.
The House had seen him.
And now it waited.
Part 7: The Return Path
The road out of Solang reappeared two days after the full moon. A military snowplow, red paint flaking, had cleared a narrow stretch leading down toward the valley. No one in the village said goodbye. They watched Ishaan from doorways, their eyes dry, unreadable. Amrita stood last, by the firewood stack, hands folded into her shawl.
“You’ll forget it,” she said. “Bit by bit.”
“I wrote everything down,” Ishaan replied, patting his notebook.
She smiled. “The mountain will take that too.”
He didn’t answer. Just nodded and turned down the slope, duffel bag heavier than before, heart lighter than it should have been. Something inside him felt like a room left open — airless and unfinished.
By afternoon he’d made it to Manali. Tourists filled the Mall Road again — snow boots, pink earmuffs, honeymooners sipping overpriced coffee under glowing fairy lights. Children posed with yaks. The forest here was tamed, domesticated. It felt absurd.
He checked into a cheap hotel by the Beas, left his bag untouched, and stared at himself in the mirror above the bathroom sink.
No shadow behind him.
But his eyes looked… different. Clearer. Or older.
That night he typed his report for the Himalayan Heritage Trust. Three pages. Clinical. No mention of Tara, the shrine, the mirror, or the thing beneath the cedar grove. He attached a dozen photographs — snowy trails, empty village homes, a profile of Amrita Aunty seated by the fire.
He double-checked the photos. All were clear.
Except one.
A wide shot of the Tara House.
In its upstairs window, a figure.
Not Tara.
Him.
Staring out.
His clothes. His eyes.
But taken from outside. While he had been walking down the trail.
He deleted it.
Sent the report.
Then booked his bus to Chandigarh. From there, a flight to Kolkata.
The next morning, he left Manali.
But the forest didn’t leave him.
In Kolkata, the house felt smaller. Dustier. The walls closer. He unpacked slowly. Let the duffel bag sit untouched for days. The notebook remained sealed in its zipper pocket.
One week in, he received a reply from the Trust — glowing praise, a request for a follow-up article, and an advance deposit.
He should’ve felt proud.
Instead, he felt hollow.
He tried to write again — fiction this time, something unrelated. A travel column, maybe. But his sentences fell flat. His thoughts unraveled.
And each night, he dreamed of roots.
Not metaphors.
Real ones.
Coiling under his skin.
On the tenth night back, he finally opened the notebook.
The pages were blank.
Every single one.
Not torn. Not smudged.
Blank.
Except the last page.
There, in Tara’s handwriting:
“You chose to forget. So I remember for you.”
Below it, a sketch of the cedar grove — simplified, spiraled — like a sigil.
He slammed it shut.
The next day, he returned to the local university library. Found Tara’s old thesis in the ecology section. Highlighted passages, bookmarks, botanical terms.
But the last page of her research was missing.
A note in its place:
Archived by request. Classification: Memory-Bound. Restricted.
He asked the librarian.
She looked puzzled. “We don’t have any system like that. Looks like an internal prank.”
He didn’t push further.
Instead, that evening, he walked to Prinsep Ghat. The air smelled of burning sugarcane and oil. He stared at the river, let the sound of traffic fill his head.
But behind it, the humming had returned.
Faint.
Low.
Circular.
He held his breath.
Waited.
It faded.
When he returned home, the mirror in the hallway had cracked.
Not shattered.
Just a single, spreading fracture — veined like a tree root.
The dreams that night were colder.
The house in Solang. The fireplace.
And Tara — seated before it, humming, smiling.
Behind her, the forest walked.
And when he woke up — heart racing, skin cold — the scent of cedar and fungus lingered in the sheets.
He checked his feet.
Mud.
Not much.
Just a thin ring around the heel.
But mud.
As though he’d walked somewhere wet, without knowing it.
Or remembering.
He sat up, blinking against the morning light.
Then froze.
On his desk — beside the untouched duffel bag — lay a flower.
Pale yellow.
Dried.
One he had never seen before.
Except in the sketch from Tara’s journal.
Part 8: Tara’s Letter
He didn’t touch the flower. It lay on his desk like a question left unanswered too long — its pale yellow petals splayed outward, edges brittle, veins paper-thin. When he leaned close, he smelled snow. Wet moss. And something faintly metallic, like rusted copper.
He opened his duffel bag.
The notebook was still inside. Still blank. Still warm, though the room was cool.
He took it out, laid it beside the flower, and turned to a fresh page.
Only now there were words.
Not typed. Not printed.
Handwritten.
His name.
“Ishaan.”
Just that. Centered.
He flipped the page.
More writing appeared, like ink blooming in real time.
“If you’re reading this, you remember.”
His throat dried. He didn’t move.
“You chose forgetting. But forgetting isn’t the same as leaving. You stayed longer than most. You saw deeper than most. The House knows this. So does He.”
“The Devta doesn’t hunt. He receives. He waits for invitation. You invited Him when you stepped into the root-ring behind the shrine. You hummed. You dreamed. You looked into the mirror. That’s how it begins.”
“But it can be reversed.”
He leaned in.
“There’s one way back. One last way.”
“My letter.”
Then the ink stopped.
Ishaan sat back.
Letter?
He had searched the house. He had read every page in the journals. Nothing had been marked ‘letter’.
Unless—
He opened the zippered side pouch of the duffel — a space he hadn’t checked since returning.
Inside: a sealed envelope. No stamp. Yellowing edges. On the front, just a name:
To the One Who Stayed.
Hands trembling, he opened it.
Tara’s handwriting.
Slanted, precise, fragile.
Ishaan (or whoever finds this),
If you are reading this, it means the House let you leave. Or at least made you believe you left. Either way, your shadow is already rooted. Mine was too, once.
We were both watchers. We both stared too long into places we weren’t supposed to. Solang is not a place on the map. It’s a threshold. The villagers aren’t its victims. They’re its caretakers. The ones who guard the path. The House is older than them. Older than words. But it remembers everyone who passes through.
The Devta is not evil. He is memory. Growth. Reclamation. What humans discard — silence, rot, time — He stores. Preserves.
I disturbed Him when I mapped the underground mycelium network near the cedar grove. I followed a pattern in the root systems that didn’t belong to any species. What I found wasn’t fungal. It was neural. Conscious. Recursive. Sacred.
It was alive.
And I made the mistake of calling it beautiful.
Now, He waits inside me. Grows through me. I am the archive now.
You don’t have long. If you feel the humming in your teeth, it’s already begun. If you dream in spirals, He’s already sung to you.
There’s a way to slow the rooting.
Burn this letter.
Scatter the ash in a living forest. Not a park. Not a plantation. Wild trees. Native ones. And don’t speak a word while you do it.
That’s all. There’s no guarantee.
But it’s more than I had.
Forgive me.
—T
Ishaan read it twice. The third time, the ink began to fade.
By the time he stood up, the letter had turned blank.
He struck a match.
Watched it burn in the steel bowl he used for incense.
The flame was silent. The ash fine. Pale.
He packed it in a glass vial.
Two days later, he boarded a train to Dooars — dense forests still untouched by tourist brochures. He didn’t book a guide. Didn’t carry his camera.
He walked five kilometers into the forest alone, as dawn rose in strands of mist.
When he found a cluster of wild sal trees, he knelt.
Opened the vial.
And scattered the ash wordlessly, letting it fall between roots.
The wind did not stir.
But the earth shifted.
So subtly he felt it in his spine.
And then — breath.
His own, yes.
But also something else.
A presence moving away. Not gone. But no longer looking.
He sat in the mud a while. Just breathing. Listening.
And then he wept.
Not from fear.
From release.
That night, back in his hotel in Siliguri, he dreamed of Tara one last time.
She stood beneath the cedar tree, hand pressed to its bark. Her body was whole. No moss, no bark, no roots.
Just her.
She smiled.
And mouthed one word.
“Free.”
When he woke, the humming was gone.
So was the flower.
So was the mirror.
The notebook, when he opened it, had filled itself again.
With words he didn’t write.
With stories not his own.
Roots in sentence form.
And in the final page — a signature he’d never seen before.
Malin.
The Devta had a name now.
But no face.
Part 9: The Archive Beneath
There were no voices now. No dreams. No scent of cedar in the pillows, no cracking mirror glass. The silence, for once, felt honest. But Ishaan knew better than to call anything finished.
The notebook still wrote itself.
Each morning, new paragraphs appeared. Descriptions of root formations beneath pine canopies in Uttarakhand. Names of extinct fungi. A woman’s account of her last day alive inside a cave in Meghalaya — the humidity blooming with spores. None of it in his handwriting. None of it things he knew.
The Devta — Malin — was still speaking. Just in a different language now.
Not haunting. Not hunting.
Depositing.
He was no longer being watched.
He was being used.
Used to remember.
The deeper truth came two weeks later, in a brown envelope marked Confidential – No Archive Record sent to his apartment in Kolkata. No return address. Inside: one page, thin and watermarked.
Typed in clean serif font:
“THE ARCHIVE BENEATH”
Internal Reference: M-R/Memory-Root Systems/Unmapped Sites
Following an anonymous submission (source unknown), the following coordinates have been flagged for non-human neural patterning beneath terrestrial structures. Site linked to pre-oral memory deposits encoded via botanical mycelium. Suspected overlaps with folklore systems in Himachal Pradesh (ref: Solang), Uttarakhand (ref: Raini), and one declassified zone in the Eastern Himalayas (ref: code-name Saranyu Pit).
Field access restricted.
This is not a research site.
It is a receptacle.
Do not excavate. Do not document.
Let it remember in peace.
M–Division
Department of Subterranean Memory Systems
Classified: Level Red
The coordinates pointed to a region in Sikkim he’d never heard of. No roads led there. Satellite maps blurred it. Local maps pretended it didn’t exist.
But the moment he read the word Saranyu, he felt something shift behind his ribcage. Not fear.
Recognition.
As if a door had clicked open in a part of him he hadn’t known was locked.
He packed light. One bag. One journal. No camera this time. No GPS.
He boarded a local train. Then a bus. Then hitchhiked.
And finally, walked.
The last stretch was steep, overgrown, veined with old roots and abandoned prayer flags. The forest here didn’t hum. It listened.
Three days in, he reached it.
A sinkhole. Twenty feet wide. Lined with moss, bramble, and cracked stone.
Not natural.
Too round. Too precise.
He stood at the edge and looked down.
Nothing stared back.
But he felt it — a pull, not gravitational, not magnetic, but cognitive. Like part of him was being downloaded.
He sat.
Opened his notebook.
And it began to fill.
Sketches of fungus patterns.
Murmured phrases in languages he’d never studied — Sanskrit, Lepcha, something older.
He let it happen.
For three hours, the pages turned themselves.
And then stopped.
He flipped to the last one.
A drawing. Childlike. A house on a slope. Smoke from its chimney.
The Tara House.
Below it, in spindly writing:
“The House is a leaf. This is the root.”
Ishaan closed the notebook.
He knew now.
Solang wasn’t the source.
Just one sprout from a much larger network. One mouthpiece.
The Archive Beneath was vast. Quiet. Alive.
And it did not want to be worshipped.
Only remembered.
That night, under a sky filled with mist and moths, Ishaan lay beside the pit and slept without dreaming. For the first time, sleep did not mean visions or whispers. It meant storage.
When he woke, the notebook was gone.
In its place, a single mycelium thread lay curled into a spiral.
And beside it, a new page:
“You are now the archive.”
He picked it up.
Folded it.
And walked back toward the world.
Part 10: The Forest Will Remember
Ishaan did not return to Solang. He didn’t need to. Once you’ve stepped beyond the snowline of the known, once a forest has taken your breath and handed back memory in its place, you no longer walk toward places. They walk toward you.
Back in Kolkata, he moved slower. Woke before dawn. Ate only what grew from soil, as though his body now resisted anything rootless. The mirror in his bedroom remained cracked, but it no longer reflected shadows that didn’t belong. It showed him, yes—but as if through layers of bark.
The mycelium thread he’d found near the pit in Sikkim stayed curled in his pocket. It didn’t dry. It didn’t change. But when he held it, he sometimes remembered things he’d never lived—rituals under red moons, chants in lost dialects, hands burying tokens in snow. He was a vessel now. Not haunted. Held.
One day, the Trust called again. An editor had read his piece on Solang and offered him a book deal. Travel writing, perhaps. A memoir. Ishaan declined. “I’m no longer a writer,” he said gently. “I’m something else.”
“What would that be?” they asked.
He smiled. “A story.”
Spring came early that year. The city sweated in March. Leaves browned and fell before their time. At night, thunder cracked open skies that didn’t rain. Ishaan took long walks along the river. He carried no phone, no ID. Just the thread, and a quiet sense of being watched—not with menace, but familiarity.
In the second week of April, he woke one morning with soil beneath his fingernails.
He hadn’t left his bed.
And on his pillow: another flower.
This one blue.
A color he’d never seen in nature.
He knew then: it was time.
He travelled west. Alone. Quietly. No bookings. No trail. He let the earth pull him the way water pulls boats—slow, certain, without explanation.
By late April, he reached the edge of Himachal again.
And beyond it, a clearing.
It wasn’t Solang. Not anymore.
The houses were gone.
Only Tara’s remained.
No roof.
No doors.
Just walls wrapped in ivy, open to sky.
He stepped inside.
And the air shifted.
Not cold.
Not warm.
But exact.
The way breath feels inside a mouth that isn’t yours.
On the floor, where the hearth had been, sat the notebook.
The one he’d lost near the Archive.
Its pages open to the first line he ever wrote about this place.
“The snow here listens.”
He knelt beside it.
Beneath that sentence, a new one appeared—ink blooming from the paper like spores:
“And now it speaks.”
Ishaan exhaled.
He wrote nothing else.
He left the notebook open.
Stood.
And walked into the cedar grove.
No one knows exactly when he disappeared.
The villagers, what few remained in the region, said a man came through with soft eyes and empty hands. That he asked no questions. Slept under trees. Ate only berries. That he never said his name.
One of them saw him kneel in front of a broken cedar and press his forehead to the bark.
Then vanish.
No police report was filed. No obituary published.
But a year later, in a forest near Kaza, a botanist found a sprouting fungus never before catalogued. Pale, spiraled, shaped like the curve of a letter. When she sliced it open, a faint scent of ash and snow rose from its core.
She didn’t know what to name it.
So she called it Cordyceps ishaanensis.
It grew only in places untouched by machines.
Only where someone once listened.
They say stories fade.
That nothing truly remains.
But they are wrong.
Some stories don’t end.
They take root.
They grow silently beneath the world.
Waiting for someone—
a writer,
a wanderer,
a girl who asks the wrong question in the right forest—
to remember.
And when they do, the forest will bloom again.
And the House beyond Solang will open its door.
Because it never closed.
It only waited.
For you.
