Aaryan Kaul
Arrival in Mist
The taxi wheezed up the winding hills like an asthmatic animal. Rain lashed against the glass. Ayesha Dhar sat in the backseat, her suitcase pressing against her knees, and stared out at the town rising through the fog. Kalimpong looked like it had never heard of sunlight. The trees bled mist. The road disappeared behind every bend. And everything smelled faintly of moss, burnt rubber, and regret.
She hadn’t spoken much since leaving Siliguri. The driver didn’t press. He was like most people in the hills — weather-beaten, wary, and not particularly fond of questions. The silence between them wasn’t hostile. Just the kind that piled up like wet leaves.
The school came into view suddenly — St. Agnes Memorial Institution. Brick-red, colonial, with gargoyle rainspouts and a bell tower that hadn’t chimed in years. Ayesha reached into her coat pocket and felt the envelope again. Her appointment letter. She had a job. A room. A new beginning.
But beginnings had a way of disguising themselves as endings.
“Here,” the driver said, pulling to a stop under a broken lamp post. “They don’t let cabs inside.”
She paid him, nodded her thanks, and wheeled her suitcase through the gate. Gravel crunched. Her boots were soaked in seconds. The school loomed like a brooding presence, its windows catching stray lightning like eyes catching fire.
Mrs. Lobo, the headmistress, met her at the entrance. Thin as a stick, swaddled in a brown shawl, her eyes were sharp and tired. “Welcome, Miss Dhar,” she said briskly. “We don’t usually get mid-term appointments, but Mr. Menon’s sudden departure created… a vacancy.”
“What happened to him?” Ayesha asked.
Mrs. Lobo’s lips twitched. “He took leave. Permanent. Best not to talk of such things on a rainy day.”
They walked through dim corridors lined with oil portraits and wooden plaques. The air smelled of camphor and floor polish. Ayesha felt the familiar twitch in her left hand — the one she’d told her Delhi psychiatrist about. “Stress tic,” they’d said. “Hallucinations, even mild ones, are not uncommon after trauma. But you’re doing well now, Ayesha.”
Right.
Her quarters were small but dry. A desk, a bed, a bathroom. A bookshelf full of past curriculum. And a large, circular window that looked out onto the forested slope beyond the school walls.
“There’s hot water in the mornings. The staff eats together at 8. You’ll be teaching Literature for Classes 9 and 10,” said Mrs. Lobo. “We expect discretion. Especially around the girls. They spook easily.”
Ayesha blinked. “Spook?”
But Mrs. Lobo was already gone.
That night, the wind howled. The forest hissed. Ayesha unpacked slowly, the motion of folding and placing each item into its space giving her some illusion of control. She had brought few things — books, three woolen shawls, a photograph of her parents from ten years ago, and a journal with empty pages.
She didn’t write yet.
Instead, she stood by the window, watching the mist coil between the trees. It reminded her of fingers. Or ropes.
At midnight, a scream cut through the rain.
She froze.
Then silence. Just the wind again. Just the trees.
Ayesha waited. Nothing.
She told herself it was a dream. Delhi had left her with plenty. Soundless, faceless panic. Days she couldn’t remember. She had to learn to trust herself again.
But the next morning, during roll call in Class 10A, a boy was missing.
Rudra Roy. Age fourteen. Room C-7. Absent.
The class was quiet. Not worried. Just… used to things.
She asked, “Does this happen often?”
A girl in the front row — pale, big eyes, long braids — said, “Sometimes people go. Like Mr. Menon.”
The other students stared at her, but she shrugged. “It’s the mountain.”
The principal made an announcement before lunch. “Rudra Roy has not reported to class today. If anyone knows his whereabouts, please inform your housemaster. We expect full cooperation. No speculation.”
The teachers exchanged glances. No one said much.
Later that evening, Ayesha knocked on her landlady’s door. Mrs. D’Souza was a widow in her sixties who smelled of talcum powder and eucalyptus. Her cottage stood at the edge of the campus, a few feet from Ayesha’s own.
“Have a cup,” Mrs. D’Souza offered, pouring tea into porcelain. “It’ll take the cold off your bones.”
“I heard someone scream last night,” Ayesha said gently. “Then I found out a boy went missing.”
Mrs. D’Souza didn’t flinch. “You’re not the first to ask. And you won’t be the last.”
“Does this happen often?”
“More often than we care to admit,” she said. “Sometimes they’re found. Sometimes they aren’t. The hill keeps what it wants.”
Ayesha frowned. “What does that mean?”
But the old woman only shook her head. “You’ll learn. But do one thing, Miss Dhar — don’t walk near the chapel after sunset. Especially not alone.”
“Why?”
“Because the ones who don’t listen,” she said, sipping her tea, “are the ones the hill never gives back.”
That night, Ayesha stood again at her window.
The rain had stopped. The forest breathed. Somewhere near the base of the trees, a shadow moved.
She stared hard.
It was too large for a dog. Too slow for a man. And it was watching her.
She stepped back quickly, heart hammering.
When she opened her drawer to take out the journal — her hand brushed something she hadn’t placed there.
A folded piece of paper. Old. Yellowing.
She opened it.
Scrawled in a child’s hand:
“It always begins with the silence.”
Ayesha looked up at the window again.
And saw that the glass had fogged up — from the outside.
The Note
By morning, the fog had turned the world into a ghost. Even the trees outside Ayesha’s window looked like brushstrokes on a ruined canvas. She hadn’t slept. The note lay on her desk, the handwriting etched into her mind — childish, frantic, oddly slanted.
It always begins with the silence.
She stared at the sentence over and over, willing it to mean something else. Anything else. But the more she looked, the more it reminded her of something she’d once heard — or dreamt — in the long, fluorescent nights of her recovery ward in Delhi. Only back then, the voice had whispered: “You’ll hear them before they remember you.”
She dressed quickly, walked to the school’s common hall, and found Mrs. Lobo hunched over a mug of black tea. She looked up, unsmiling, as Ayesha approached.
“You found the note, didn’t you?” the headmistress said.
Ayesha’s breath caught. “What do you mean?”
Mrs. Lobo didn’t blink. “You’re not the first. Rudra’s dorm-mate found one yesterday. Didn’t say anything until last night, after the patrol found nothing. We’ve had incidents before. It’s better not to speak of them in front of the students.”
“What kind of incidents?” Ayesha pressed.
But Mrs. Lobo only sipped her tea. “Keep your head down, Miss Dhar. You’re here to teach. Not to chase shadows.”
After class, Ayesha visited Dorm C-7. Rudra’s bed was untouched — a folded blanket, a geometry book under his pillow, and a wooden chest with his initials carved into the surface. His roommate, a boy named Sarin, sat on his own bed, chewing a pencil, trying not to meet her gaze.
“You were the last to see him,” Ayesha said gently. “Was he acting strange?”
Sarin shrugged. “He said he heard someone crying outside the window. Then he went to look.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“He thought it was a girl from the junior dorm. But when he opened the door, there was nothing. He didn’t come back.”
“Do you still have the note?”
The boy hesitated, then pulled a crumpled piece of paper from under his mattress. Same handwriting. Same strange message. But the words were different.
“She forgets she was one of us.”
Ayesha’s blood went cold.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
Sarin shook his head. “He said it was from the hill. Like the mountain was remembering something. He used to talk like that. Weird stuff.”
Ayesha turned to leave, then paused. “Did Rudra ever talk about… voices?”
Sarin looked up sharply. “He said the forest talked. But only when you were silent.”
That night, Ayesha skipped dinner and walked down to the chapel.
She told herself she was just being curious. She didn’t want to believe Mrs. D’Souza’s warnings. She didn’t want to believe in old women who spoke like hills were living things. She just wanted the fog to clear.
The chapel stood alone at the far end of the campus, near the slope that overlooked the valley. Abandoned years ago, it still bore the shape of devotion — narrow arched windows, a broken bell rope, and a rusted cross that pointed westward like an accusation.
Inside, it smelled of stone and wax. The pews were rotting. An old harmonium lay split in two by mildew. The altar had a faded portrait of Mother Mary — but her eyes had been scratched out.
Ayesha stood there, heart loud.
There was silence.
Then — a rustle behind her.
She spun around.
No one.
Only the wind moaning through broken glass.
She turned to leave, but something caught her eye — near the foot of the altar, tucked inside an old donation box, half-buried under coins blackened with time.
Another note.
This one in the same childlike scrawl:
“Don’t look for what you forgot. It remembers you.”
Back in her room, Ayesha laid out all three notes. She tried comparing the ink, the folds, the wear. One had water damage, one smudges, one was nearly clean. None were older than a week, though the handwriting was deliberately juvenile. She took a photo of them on her phone. Sent them to no one. There was no one left to ask.
Except maybe the nurse.
Martha Biju, the retired nurse who lived across the courtyard.
Ayesha knocked on her door just before lights-out. The woman opened the door in her shawl, her eyes wary and alert. “I thought you’d come,” she said.
“You remember me?” Ayesha asked.
Martha studied her face. “You don’t?”
“I’ve never been to Kalimpong before.”
“That’s not entirely true.”
Ayesha’s spine stiffened. “Please explain.”
The old nurse beckoned her inside. The room smelled of iodine, rose oil, and boiled rice. Walls were covered in photos — not of people, but of places: tunnels, stairwells, fire escapes. All old. All institutional.
“You were here. Not in this school. But on this hill.”
“When?”
“1962. The asylum.”
Ayesha shook her head. “That’s impossible. I wasn’t even born.”
“Maybe not you,” Martha said. “But someone who looked like you. Exactly like you. A girl named Anamika. She disappeared the week the war began. Some say the army cleared the place. Others say the asylum buried itself.”
Ayesha stared at her. “Are you saying I’m… a reincarnation?”
“I’m saying,” Martha said softly, “that the hill remembers faces even when the world forgets names.”
Later that night, Ayesha dreamed.
She was in a long corridor lined with beds. The walls were pale blue, peeling at the edges. The smell was antiseptic and wet iron.
Children whispered.
A voice — not hers, but inside her — said: “Don’t open the fifth door.”
Then came a flash — red, white, screaming — and the sound of bells melting.
She woke with a gasp, her shirt soaked.
The forest outside was still.
Too still.
She opened her drawer to find her journal.
Another note was there.
This one written in red.
“He’s waiting for you in the ruins.”
And this time, she was certain — the handwriting was her own.
The Red Umbrella
The path to the ruins was barely a path at all—just a suggestion of earth where the grass refused to grow. Ayesha stepped over broken stones and bramble, her boots sinking into the wet soil. The sky above was a dull sheet of grey, and somewhere beyond the ridge, thunder grumbled like an old man muttering to himself.
The note still sat folded in her pocket, its red ink a pulse against her thigh. He’s waiting for you in the ruins.
She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving the school grounds. Mrs. Lobo would have forbidden it. Martha might have tried to follow. But Ayesha had decided there were two kinds of people in this place—those who feared the hill, and those the hill feared.
She had to know which she was.
The asylum wasn’t marked on any map. Officially, it had been condemned after a landslide in 1963, a year after the war. But Martha had described the way well enough. Past the chapel. Through the forest that locals called “the hush”. No birds. No underbrush. Just moss, mist, and memories.
Ayesha walked deeper.
The air thickened. Not with cold, but weight. It was the kind of quiet that made your ears ache. The kind of quiet that tasted metallic.
And then she saw it.
A yawning structure of broken columns and caved roofs, crumbling like a half-remembered dream. Ivy crawled across its belly like veins. One of the outer walls had a symbol painted in faded white—two interlocking circles, pierced by a vertical line. She didn’t know what it meant, but it made her stomach turn.
She stepped inside.
The floor was carpeted with dust and decay. Beds without mattresses. Wheelchairs with one wheel missing. A lamp hanging from a frayed wire, swaying slightly though there was no wind.
And there, near a pile of fallen plaster, it lay.
A red umbrella.
Tiny. Child-sized. With a wooden handle and a stitched label: R.R.
Rudra Roy.
Ayesha picked it up. The fabric was torn at the edges. A smear of something dark—not quite mud, not quite blood—streaked the underside. Her fingers trembled as she turned it over.
Underneath the handle was another note, impaled on the tiny spoke like an insect on a pin.
This one read:
“She opens the wrong doors. Again.”
She backed away. Her breath fogged in front of her. She wasn’t sure when it had gotten so cold.
Then—footsteps.
Light. Skittering.
She spun around. No one.
“Rudra?” she called, voice shaking. “Is that you?”
A shuffle behind a doorframe. A glimpse of motion.
She ran after it, deeper into the ruins.
The hallway was long and cracked. The ceiling had caved in at intervals, letting in long vines of ferns and rainfall. She turned a corner—and froze.
The walls here were covered in writing.
Not painted. Scratched.
Sentences, symbols, drawings.
Over and over:
Don’t remember her.
Don’t say her name.
The fifth door breathes.
The fifth door bleeds.
Ayesha’s heartbeat roared in her ears. She stepped back and bumped into something cold.
A doorknob.
One of many along this corridor. All uniform. All sealed shut.
She counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Her hand hovered over the fifth.
Her journal’s voice echoed in her mind: “Don’t open the fifth door.”
But she had come this far. Some truths required ruin.
She turned the knob.
It creaked open.
The room was small. Intact. The walls were padded. A bed bolted to the floor. A rusted mirror cracked across the center. And on the far wall, in faint red strokes, a single word repeated six times:
ANAMIKA.
Ayesha’s knees buckled. The name vibrated through her skull.
She had never told anyone that name.
It had come to her in a dream, once—years ago, during her first breakdown. The doctors thought it was a fragment, a symbol, a displaced memory. She had written it on her hospital bed sheets until the nurses took her pens away.
But here it was again.
Anamika.
A name that meant “nameless.”
She staggered back out of the room, gasping.
The forest seemed to breathe louder now.
Then—a scream.
Sharp. Young. Male.
It echoed through the ruins.
“Rudra!”
She ran, flashlight flickering, skidding over moss and broken tiles.
The sound had come from downstairs.
There was a rusted metal staircase half-eaten by time. She descended, boots slipping.
The basement was pitch-black.
Her flashlight flickered. Then died.
Total darkness.
She reached into her coat pocket for her phone. A weak beam.
She swept it around the room.
A row of cribs. All empty. All too small for anyone still living.
And on the far wall—a mural.
Children. Painted in a circle. Holding hands.
Each one had a blank face.
Except one.
A face she knew.
Hers.
Not as she was now, but as a child. Seven. Eight maybe. Hair tied in two braids. Eyes looking out of the wall like they still remembered everything she’d tried to forget.
Her phone slipped from her hand. The light shattered on the floor.
Then came the voice. Whispered.
Right behind her ear.
“You promised you wouldn’t come back.”
She turned—
But there was only darkness.
And silence.
And the feeling that she had just unlocked something that had been waiting a very, very long time.
Voices in the Wall
She stumbled back into the daylight like a diver surfacing too fast. The air outside the asylum was thin and brittle, and for a moment, Ayesha wasn’t sure whether the forest was trembling or if it was just her legs. She ran. Didn’t look back. Her hands were still stained with the red ink—or was it blood?—that had seeped from the note. Anamika. That name echoed behind her eyes like a bell tolling inside her skull.
By the time she reached the school’s outer gate, she was drenched in sweat, mud streaking her jeans, her hair plastered to her face. The bell for afternoon class had rung, but the courtyard was eerily still. Too still. No birds. No footsteps. Only the low, steady thump of her own heart.
She walked directly to her quarters, locked the door, and sank to the floor. The journal lay on her desk, unopened. It felt heavier now. A thing with memory. A thing watching her.
She didn’t write.
She couldn’t.
Instead, she sat cross-legged in the middle of the room and tried to breathe. Tried to separate the hallucination from the evidence. The face on the wall. The scratched writing. The fifth door. All of it sat like splinters under her skin. And the worst part was the familiarity. Like she wasn’t discovering something—only remembering.
A knock.
She jumped.
Another knock, sharper.
She approached the door cautiously and opened it just a crack.
Martha stood there, her expression unreadable. “You went to the ruins.”
“I had to,” Ayesha said.
“You shouldn’t have.”
“Why not? Because of the door? Because of the name?”
Martha pushed inside, her voice low. “Because it wakes things. The asylum was sealed for a reason.”
“Then why does it remember me?”
The nurse’s eyes narrowed. “Because you never left.”
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Martha walked to the window and pulled the curtain shut. “Tell me something. Since arriving here, have you noticed anything strange in your walls?”
Ayesha blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Voices. Knocks. Whispers. At night.”
She hesitated. “I thought it was pipes. Or the wind.”
“It’s neither,” Martha said. “There are things under this campus. Tunnels that were once part of the asylum’s basement. When it was ‘cleared,’ they didn’t demolish it—they just built over it. That’s what St. Agnes is. A patch on a wound.”
Ayesha’s mouth went dry. “You’re saying the children sleep above—”
“Memories. The kind that don’t like being disturbed.”
A low thud interrupted them. Ayesha turned. It came from inside her wall. Then again.
Thud. Thud.
A soft dragging, like fingers.
She and Martha froze.
The sound moved left, along the back wall, towards her wardrobe.
Ayesha grabbed the torch from her table and opened the cupboard. Inside, her clothes hung limp, her suitcase was shut.
And the back panel of the wardrobe was ajar.
A hidden crawl space.
She stepped back.
“No,” Martha said. “Not now. Not alone.”
But something had already begun whispering.
A tiny, childlike voice.
“Come back, Anamika. Just one game.”
Ayesha’s knees gave out. Martha caught her, dragged her to the bed.
“You’re not safe anymore,” the nurse whispered.
They stayed up all night.
Martha recited names from old records she’d kept hidden. Children who had been patients, all under the age of fifteen. Disappeared before the fire. Some believed they were moved during the war. Others said they were subjects of an experimental program—details erased from public record. Ayesha’s name—or rather, Anamika D.—was among them.
“You think I’m… her?”
“I think trauma leaves an imprint,” Martha said. “On places. On people. Maybe you’re her. Maybe you’re what’s left of her. Either way, the hill doesn’t forget.”
“But how could I remember something I never lived?”
“You ever heard of residual self-memory?”
Ayesha shook her head.
“Not in medical textbooks. But in places like Kalimpong, we believe the land absorbs pain. If the pain is sharp enough, loud enough, it echoes. And if someone comes who fits the shape of that echo—”
“It finds them.”
Martha nodded. “It’s not about belief. It’s about resonance.”
Ayesha glanced at the wardrobe. The crawl space was silent again.
Too silent.
The next day, Ayesha decided to stay in class.
She tried to pretend things were normal. She wore a calm face. She taught a T.S. Eliot poem to Class 10A.
Midway through the lesson, a boy raised his hand.
“Yes, Kabir?”
He pointed at the blackboard. “Ma’am, why is that name written there?”
She turned.
In the bottom corner of the board, scrawled in smudged white chalk, was the word:
ANAMIKA
Ayesha’s throat closed. She hadn’t written it.
She wiped it away.
The chalk snapped in her hand.
That night, a student went missing again.
This time, it was a girl. Class 8. Her name was Leena Sanyal.
Gone from her bed. No signs of forced entry. Only her diary remained, open to a final, unhinged entry:
“The girl in the wall said her name was Anamika. She wants to be remembered. She said the school was never real.”
Panic spread through the staff.
The headmistress called for tighter curfews. Night patrols.
Ayesha stayed silent.
Because she had seen the girl in the wall too.
The night before, as she tried to sleep, she had felt the plaster behind her pillow grow warm. Then pulse. Then, for a second, she swore she saw an outline — a child’s face pressing through the wall like it was skin. A smile too wide. A name mouthed silently.
Mine.
In her dream, Ayesha stood again in the padded room behind the fifth door.
But this time, she wasn’t alone.
Children circled her. Faces blank. Voices chanting:
“The ones she forgets, we remember.”
“The ones she remembers, we become.”
She turned.
In the mirror stood her reflection—only it wasn’t her.
It was a girl in hospital whites, hair braided, eyes dark with silence.
The girl reached out.
And Ayesha woke screaming.
The 1962 File
The attic was sealed with a rusted latch and an unspoken warning. No one had gone up there in years. Ayesha found the key from the janitor’s drawer, hidden beneath a pile of old examination ledgers. She told herself it was just research. Context. Something to quiet the noise inside her head. But in truth, she was looking for herself. Or for whatever remained of the girl named Anamika D.
The staircase groaned with every step. Cobwebs clung to her sleeves. Light filtered through a cracked skylight, illuminating dust in heavy shafts. The attic smelled like forgotten paper and old rain.
Stacks of files, trophies, ledgers, and photographs were scattered in no particular order. Some boxes were labelled “Property of St. Agnes.” Others bore the faded stamp of an institution long erased from official memory: Darjeeling State Asylum – Records Division.
Her breath caught.
She pried open one of the boxes. Inside—medical files. Names. Patient numbers. Diagnoses scrawled in looping cursive.
Delirium. Night terrors. Identity fragmentation. Recurring mutism. All under the age of fifteen.
She flipped through them slowly, eyes scanning for anything familiar.
And then—
D-47: Anamika Das. Age 9.
Admitted: March 1962.
Diagnosis: Visual hallucinations. Dissociative identity disorder.
History: Orphaned in the Siliguri floods, 1959. Transferred from Mission Home to Darjeeling Asylum under state recommendation.
Notable incidents: Recurring mentions of “the mirror girl.” Expresses fear of walls. Repeatedly draws figures with no faces.
Status: Disappeared, October 1962, during wartime evacuation. Case unresolved. Presumed deceased.
A black-and-white photograph was clipped to the top right corner.
The face stopped Ayesha cold.
It was her.
Or someone who could be her twin. Same eyes. Same curve of jaw. Same faint scar over the left eyebrow.
She sat down, hard, the file clutched in her lap.
It wasn’t possible.
She had no memory of adoption. Her parents had told her she was born in Delhi. Her childhood photos lined the walls of their old home.
And yet this file felt more like a birth certificate than anything she’d ever held.
Beneath the photo, in faded pencil, someone had written:
“She will return. They always do.”
Ayesha flipped the page. Attached was a drawing—done in crayon. Six stick figures standing in a circle. One in the center, face scribbled out in red.
At the bottom, in a shaky hand:
“This is where they live when they don’t sleep.”
She shoved the file into her satchel.
Another box caught her eye—larger, heavier, unlabelled.
Inside were photographs. Group portraits of children and staff, dated between 1958 and 1962.
She found one taken on the asylum lawn. Twenty children, four nurses, and a man in a white coat at the center. His face was scratched out.
But Ayesha saw the same red umbrella Rudra had carried—held by a girl two rows from the front.
Rudra’s umbrella. In 1962.
Time was unraveling.
She flipped the photo over. On the back: Class C – The Silent Ones.
And beneath that, a name handwritten in ink:
“Anamika. Do not let her find the fifth again.”
Back in her room, Ayesha laid the file out on her bed.
She stared at the photo again. It didn’t just resemble her—it felt like her. Like a memory she’d misplaced deep inside her body, now returned without warning.
She closed her eyes.
The wall behind her creaked.
Then scratched.
Faint, almost playful.
She turned.
On the plaster, barely visible, someone had etched a tally mark.
One.
A whisper followed.
“Five and she forgets.”
She backed away, heart thudding. Her phone vibrated. A message from an unknown number.
Stop opening what you were told to seal.
She dropped the phone.
The crawlspace in her cupboard groaned.
That evening, Martha came with tea, found Ayesha pacing.
“I found the file,” Ayesha said. “It’s her. It’s me.”
Martha nodded, unsurprised. “She was the youngest patient to survive the fire.”
“She didn’t survive.”
“She did,” Martha said softly. “But she forgot. Or was made to forget.”
“I don’t remember any of it. Not the floods. Not the asylum.”
“Memories can be buried,” Martha said. “But the hill keeps the bones.”
She placed a folded cloth on the table. Inside: a rusted key and a badge.
Property of Darjeeling Asylum – Staff Access.
“I took it before the place closed. I never thought I’d give it to anyone.”
“What does it open?”
“The records chamber. Beneath the old tunnel that runs from the chapel to the ruins.”
“There’s a tunnel?”
“There’s more than one,” Martha said. “Kalimpong is stitched together by forgotten paths. You’ve only just begun to see the map.”
That night, the school lost power.
The generator sputtered once. Then darkness swallowed the halls.
Students were herded into the assembly room with flashlights and blankets. Teachers passed out biscuits and reassurances.
Ayesha slipped away.
The chapel door creaked open with a protest.
Torchlight barely cut through the dark, but she found the trapdoor where the altar once stood—half-covered in mold and rat droppings.
The key turned with a snap.
A stairway yawned beneath.
The air inside was wet and hot, like breath.
She descended.
The tunnel was brick-lined, carved with strange sigils—circles within squares, eyes without lids, hands without fingers. The symbols pulsed faintly, as if absorbing her presence.
She reached a heavy iron door. On it, a plaque:
ARCHIVE 13 – CLOSED OCT 1962
The key fit.
Inside, the room was lined with shelves. Medical reports. Tape reels. Personnel files.
She scanned rows until she found a locked drawer marked “A.D.”
Inside, one single reel and a transcript.
She opened the folder.
Subject: Anamika Das
Interview Date: Oct 3, 1962
Dr. Basu: Do you know where you are?
Child’s Voice: Inside.
Dr. Basu: Inside what?
Child’s Voice: Her.
Dr. Basu: Who is her?
Child’s Voice: The girl in the wall. She watches. She waits.
Dr. Basu: Why does she wait?
Child’s Voice: Because she wasn’t buried. Not all the way.
Dr. Basu: And what will happen if she wakes up?
Child’s Voice: Then we forget the name again. And she gets to choose who remembers.
The tape ended.
Ayesha closed the folder.
Behind her, the tunnel walls breathed.
Dead Leaves, Dead Men
They found Ms. Rajni Varma, the history teacher, at dawn.
She was lying at the base of the watchtower, limbs bent at impossible angles, eyes wide open to the mist above her. Her lips were blue. Her throat bruised in rings, as if someone had tried to silence her too late. In her hand, clutched so tightly that her nails had broken, was a dried leaf.
On the back of the leaf was Ayesha’s handwriting.
Not a copy.
Not an imitation.
Her handwriting. From her journal. A paragraph she remembered writing two nights ago, after the tape in the archive:
“She was never dead. Just misplaced. Like a word we’re too afraid to pronounce.”
The leaf was bloodstained.
Police were called. Statements taken. Mrs. Lobo paced the courtyard like a cornered crow. No one could explain why Rajni had ventured out alone at night. No one had seen her leave. The dorms were locked. The watchtower rarely used.
Martha found Ayesha later, crouched in the storeroom behind the staff kitchen, shaking.
“She had my words,” Ayesha whispered. “In her hand.”
“You’re a part of this now,” Martha said gently. “Whatever’s happening, it’s not done with you.”
“I don’t understand what she wants.”
“Not she,” Martha corrected. “They.”
That evening, the students were sent home. Temporary closure, the board said. Psychological well-being, the principal claimed. But everyone knew—whispers had escaped the chapel walls, slithered through town. Ayesha watched as taxis, buses, and guardians pulled students away from the school like blood being drained.
She stayed.
Of course she stayed.
What else could she do? Run? Where? Into a world where her own handwriting murdered people?
Into a past that didn’t believe in her?
That night, she returned to the chapel.
The trapdoor remained open, gaping.
This time, she went further. Past Archive 13. Past rusted doors and dust-covered beds. Past walls where children had scratched their truths in secret. The tunnel dipped and rose like something alive.
Then, ahead: a stone stair spiraling down into a circular chamber.
She entered.
The room was round, low-ceilinged, its walls covered entirely in mirrors. Each one cracked, as if someone had screamed into them and the glass had shuddered in response.
In the center, a chair.
Bolted to the floor.
Straps still hanging from its arms.
And in front of the chair—a pile of dried leaves. Each with writing. Each in her hand.
She bent, picked one up.
“They keep her asleep by forgetting. If one remembers, she walks again.”
Another:
“Walls are doors for those who remember where they used to be.”
And one more:
“Rudra knocked too many times. That’s why he’s gone.”
Ayesha turned slowly.
One mirror—directly behind her—was whole.
Her reflection stood.
But blinked before she did.
She stared.
The girl in the mirror wore her face.
But younger. Pale. Eyes wide with silence.
Anamika.
Ayesha whispered, “What do you want?”
The girl in the mirror pressed a hand to the glass.
Then opened her mouth.
But the sound came from behind Ayesha.
A chorus.
Children’s voices.
Soft. Chanting.
“We see you. We hear you. We are you.”
Ayesha spun.
No one.
But the air had thickened. The temperature dropped.
She backed away, breath shaking.
Then—
A whisper behind her ear:
“She needs one more to stay.”
Back in her quarters, she found her journal on the bed.
Open to a page she hadn’t written.
In red ink:
“It’s time to come home.”
The wardrobe was slightly ajar.
Scratches lined the inside.
Tally marks.
Four.
The wall behind her began to breathe again.
Martha came running, banging on the door.
“Come with me,” she said.
They fled to Martha’s cottage, where she kept a box of old keys and papers.
“I never told anyone,” Martha said. “But there’s one more chamber. Deeper than the archives. Below even the tunnels. The place where they started everything.”
“Who?”
“The doctors. The ‘experimenters.’ They believed some children had a condition—memories of past selves. They thought they could erase them. Rewrite the soul.”
“They were wrong,” Ayesha said. “They didn’t erase anything. They scattered it.”
Martha nodded. “And now you’re piecing it together.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were never meant to survive. But you did. And now they need you to finish what they couldn’t.”
Ayesha’s fingers trembled. “Or to bury it for good.”
At midnight, Ayesha returned to the tunnel. Alone.
The final chamber lay behind a false wall in the mirror room. She found the mechanism—a loose tile, twisted anticlockwise. The wall opened with a hiss, revealing a stone spiral, descending.
She entered the dark.
At the bottom, a door.
Carved into the stone:
REMEMBER NOTHING. SPEAK NOTHING. LEAVE NOTHING.
Inside: a circular room, lined with iron drawers. Cold. Too cold.
Autopsy tables.
Recordings. Film reels.
On the walls: Photos of children.
Every missing child. Including Rudra. Leena. Her.
One photo on the central wall.
Anamika. Nine years old.
But someone had drawn over it in red.
She wasn’t alone in the photo.
Behind her—half-shaded, almost hidden—stood a figure in black.
Face erased. Hands on her shoulders.
The caption read:
“Dr. Ishaan Basu and Subject D-47.”
Ayesha stared. “He was real.”
She turned—and saw a tall, rusted locker against the far wall.
Its door hung open.
Inside, hanging by a rusted hook—
A hospital gown. Small. White.
Her fingers touched the fabric. Familiar. Almost warm.
A child’s voice echoed from the ceiling:
“If you wear it, she remembers.”
She stepped back.
But behind her, the drawer doors began opening. One. Two. Three.
Inside—no bodies.
Only mirrors.
Each one reflected not her—but versions of her. Eyes bleeding. Mouth sewn. Hair burned.
She ran.
The door slammed shut behind her.
The walls whispered:
“Dead leaves. Dead men. Dead girls. Wake again.”
The Fifth Door
She woke up in her own bed, the smell of formaldehyde still clinging to her skin. For a long time, Ayesha couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Her fingernails were dirty, cracked. Her palms were stained with dust. She couldn’t remember how she had left the chamber—only that she had screamed until her throat bled, banged on the iron door, and then… the mirrors.
So many mirrors.
Ayesha pulled the blankets around herself like armor and stared at the wardrobe. Its door stood open now—wide, inviting, hungry. The crawlspace beyond it breathed. She knew she would have to go in.
But not yet.
A piece of paper fluttered to the floor as she sat up. Folded once, neat, almost polite.
“The fifth door was never a door. It was you.”
There were four tally marks scratched into the back wall now.
One more.
And it would begin again.
She found Martha burning papers in the garden behind her cottage. Old asylum reports, attendance registers, a staff roster that included her own name. The flames licked at history like it was nothing more than kindling.
“Does destroying it help?” Ayesha asked, stepping out of the fog.
Martha didn’t look up. “Not really. But it feels like a kind of exorcism.”
“I saw him,” Ayesha said. “Dr. Basu. In the photo.”
Martha’s hands stilled.
“He didn’t vanish, did he?”
“No,” Martha whispered. “He died in the fire. Or so they said. But the fire wasn’t natural. Some say it started in Room Five.”
Ayesha nodded slowly. “The padded room.”
“It was locked that night. He was conducting a ‘retention trial’ with three children. None of them survived.”
“But he did?”
Martha shook her head. “No one knows. The fire consumed most of the records. Some believe he became part of the place. That his methods bled into the soil.”
Ayesha’s voice was quiet. “If I go into the fifth door again… if I finish the tally…”
“You might not come back.”
A pause.
“I might not want to.”
The wardrobe was waiting for her when she returned.
She crawled through slowly, flashlight in hand. The crawlspace narrowed, twisted downward. Brick turned to stone. Stone to earth. Until, without warning, the path opened into a chamber she had never seen—low ceiling, circular, lit faintly by an oil lantern resting on a child’s desk.
The walls were papered with drawings.
All the same child’s hand.
All faces.
All versions of her.
Smiling.
Screaming.
Melting.
She approached the desk. On it, a final note.
“To seal what you opened, you must go where you began.”
A map was drawn underneath—crude but unmistakable.
The school. The chapel. The tunnel.
And beyond it—The Fifth Door.
She descended through the chapel for the last time. Her hands no longer trembled. The corridor welcomed her now. Recognized her.
In the mirror chamber, the glass no longer cracked.
She stood before the fifth door again, but this time she wasn’t afraid.
She opened it.
The padded room was unchanged. Bed. Mirror. Silence.
Except now, there was a child in the corner.
Braided hair. Bare feet. Clutching a red umbrella.
Her eyes lifted slowly. Familiar. Ancient.
“You came,” the girl said.
“I had to,” Ayesha replied.
“You always do.”
The girl stood and stepped into the light.
It was like looking into a childhood photograph—only this one had never existed in any family album. This was a version of her that had never grown up.
“I forgot you,” Ayesha said.
“You tried.”
The walls began to murmur.
Whispers layered over whispers.
She broke it. She bled it. She built it again.
“You have to end it,” the girl said. “This time, for real.”
“How?”
“By remembering. Everything.”
And then—the room cracked.
Like an egg.
Like memory splitting open.
Ayesha dropped to her knees as the voices flooded in.
Flashes.
A corridor lined with metal doors. Children screaming. Dr. Basu’s voice: “Let her speak.”
Hands gripping her wrists. Needles. Ice water. The smell of burned skin.
A chant: “Anamika, tell us who you were.”
A mirror. Her face. Not hers.
A wall that moved.
A silence that screamed.
When she opened her eyes, the room was burning.
The mirror shattered. The bed overturned. The child gone.
Only the umbrella remained—its red fabric catching fire.
The tally marks on the wall—five now—glowed like open wounds.
And the whispers said:
“It’s begun.”
She barely escaped the tunnel.
Smoke followed her, coughing out of the chapel trapdoor like a final exhale.
By the time she reached the surface, the wind had picked up. The fog swirled in tight circles. Leaves rose into the sky, forming shapes—eyes, mouths, hands. A sound vibrated through the ground, like laughter in reverse.
Martha met her at the gate.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?” she asked.
Ayesha nodded. “She’s awake now. Or I am.”
“What now?”
“We finish it.”
Martha’s eyes narrowed. “How?”
Ayesha’s voice was steady. “We burn the hill.”
Episode 8: The Last Breath of Kalimpong
The matches felt heavy in her hand. Too ordinary for what they meant to do. Ayesha stood at the forest’s edge with Martha beside her, a bottle of kerosene slung over her shoulder. The sky above Kalimpong had darkened to a bruised, uncanny hue, and the mist coiled low, like something waiting. Listening. The chapel behind them loomed, silent, its trapdoor sealed now—not with locks, but with finality.
“We only get one chance,” Martha said, voice brittle.
Ayesha nodded. “We’re not burning memories. We’re unburying them. There’s a difference.”
She stepped forward, past the tree line.
Each step felt deeper than the last.
The forest had changed.
The hush wasn’t just quiet now—it was reverent. As if the trees themselves bowed to her return. As if the roots knew the soles of her shoes. She moved through the underbrush with practiced memory, not direction, until she reached the clearing behind the ruins.
A place she hadn’t remembered until she did.
The fire circle.
Old stones arranged by child hands. Charred wood in the middle, bones beneath. She’d been here before.
A long, long time ago.
Anamika had.
This was where they had tried to burn it once. Whatever it was. The voices. The truth. The self. But they’d failed.
Because they hadn’t remembered enough.
Because one of them had screamed too loud.
And the hill had swallowed her.
Ayesha and Martha poured the kerosene in silence.
First the fire circle. Then the edges of the ruins. Then along the base of the chapel wall, where the trapdoor had coughed up secrets like phlegm. A perimeter of forgetting.
A ring of absolution.
Martha handed her the matchbox.
“You sure?” the nurse asked.
Ayesha nodded. “I’m not the guest anymore. I never was.”
She struck a match.
It caught instantly—hungry, eager. Orange flared into gold. Gold into smoke. The line of flame twisted around them, rising like serpents, roaring in old tongues.
The hill responded.
The ground trembled. Leaves blew upward against gravity. From the ruins came a long, low groan, like stone remembering its own birth.
And then—
Screams.
Not human.
Not animal.
Child-like.
Echoes of echoes.
The air split. The sky cracked.
And something rose from the trapdoor.
She couldn’t see it—not fully. Only fragments. A hospital gown. A braid. Eyes that had no end.
And then a thousand mirrors shattered at once—inside her head.
She dropped to her knees.
“I remember now,” she whispered.
Not just the asylum. Not just the fire.
But the other children.
The ones who whispered to the wall. The ones who scratched poems behind bricks. The ones who knew silence could bleed.
Anamika had not been a girl. Not only.
She had been a vessel.
A memory made flesh.
A mirror designed to reflect what everyone wanted to forget.
The fire caught fast.
The chapel fell first. Then the walls of the ruins collapsed inward like a ribcage caving.
Martha dragged her away as flames shot thirty feet into the air, black smoke clawing at the clouds.
“You did it,” she gasped. “You brought it down.”
Ayesha shook her head.
“I set her free.”
Martha stared at her. “What does that mean?”
But Ayesha was already walking away.
Back toward the school. Toward the forest edge.
Toward the place where the town would wake tomorrow and find nothing but ash and old wind.
Weeks passed.
The investigation was inconclusive.
Electrical fire said the reports. Mismanagement. Old fuel tanks underground. A mystery, but no one pushed. The school shut down for good. St. Agnes was struck from the state’s education registry. The hill was marked “unstable terrain.”
And Kalimpong exhaled.
No one mentioned the missing children.
No one remembered the name Anamika.
Except one.
Ayesha Dhar now lived in a modest flat in Shillong.
She taught creative writing at a small college.
She kept to herself.
Her students called her kind, if quiet. Some said she had a strange way of listening—like she already knew what you were going to say, but wanted you to say it anyway.
Every morning, she wrote in her journal.
Every night, she locked it in a drawer.
One rainy evening, she received a package. No return address.
Inside: an old red umbrella.
Child-sized.
No note.
No explanation.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then placed it beside her desk.
That night, she dreamed of fog and fire, and a little girl standing on a hill, arms wide, smiling not with her mouth but with her eyes.
The girl said:
“Thank you for remembering.”
And behind her, the walls of Kalimpong whispered one last time—
“She is home.”
End
