Ayan Chakravarty
Chapter 1
morning, slipped quietly under the door of Veena Rajput’s modest Shimla cottage as if it were just another electricity bill or property notice, though nothing about it felt ordinary. The envelope was thick, creamy-white, sealed with a dark wax emblem embossed with a crest she hadn’t seen before—a snowflake enclosed within a circle of thorns. Her instincts stirred, the way they used to in her active service days when something about a clue didn’t quite fit. The note inside was written in elegant, slanted calligraphy: “Detective Veena Rajput (Retd.), You are cordially invited to Snowcrest Manor for a weekend of reflection and conversation. Your presence is requested on the 24th of this month. All arrangements have been made. A car will arrive at 9:00 AM sharp. – A.M.” She stared at the initials, her fingers tightening around the paper. Only one person signed like that—Anuj Malhotra, the reclusive hotelier and billionaire who had once been a key suspect in a case she never solved. A case that haunted her through retirement like a recurring ghost: the 2005 murder of a young girl named Avni Thakur. Veena had left that case open, unfinished, suspended in time like a dropped photograph in the snow. Now, someone had invited her to revisit it. As snow fell outside her window, she packed a small bag, her badge and notebook tucked in beneath woolen scarves and thermals, and told herself this was just a reunion. But her gut already knew better.
By the time the black luxury SUV picked her up, winding through the narrow mist-covered roads toward Kufri, the landscape had grown ominously still. Pines stood sentinel on either side like silent witnesses, the silence deepened by the thickening snowfall. Snowcrest Manor came into view after a final bend—an imposing colonial structure of grey stone and frosted glass perched at the edge of a cliff, framed by the whiteness of Himalayan silence. It had been closed to the public for years, she recalled. Rumors said the place had seen a suicide, or perhaps a scandal—none confirmed. The front doors creaked open, and a man in a dark suit welcomed her inside. “Welcome, Detective Rajput. You are the fourth guest to arrive,” he said without offering his name. The warmth inside the hotel felt false somehow, like a performance. Rich carpets, oil paintings, chandeliers, a fireplace already burning—but an eerie stillness pervaded, the kind that clings to spaces too well-preserved. Veena was led to her suite, its window overlooking a frozen lake far below. As she unpacked, she couldn’t help but wonder: Who were the other guests? And why were they summoned?
Dinner that evening was served in a grand oak-paneled dining hall, its long table set for nine. Veena met the others one by one—a sharp-tongued political fixer named Kunal Dey, a former psychologist Dr. Aryan Kaul, a well-known journalist Nivedita Rao, a reclusive socialite Riya Mehta, and several others whose names stirred a distant familiarity in her mind, like half-remembered headlines. Each introduced themselves politely, yet each guarded their words like prisoners of their own secrets. None knew the purpose of their invitation. The host was notably absent. They speculated over wine—a charity gathering, an elite think tank, perhaps a publicity stunt by Malhotra. But Veena noticed something else: everyone here had a link, however indirect, to the 2005 Avni Thakur case. It couldn’t be coincidence. As conversations ebbed into silence, the clock struck nine. The lights dimmed. A side door opened, and in walked Anuj Malhotra himself—grayer, thinner, but unmistakable. He stood at the head of the table, raised a glass, and with a voice cold as the mountain air, said, “You all knew her. Avni. And yet, none of you saw what was coming. Welcome back to Snowcrest.”
Silence fell like a blade. Anuj’s words cut through the warmth of the room, pulling a veil back on something far more sinister. No one clapped. No one smiled. His eyes, tired but burning with something fierce and personal, scanned each of them as if counting sins. “This weekend is not about pleasure,” he said. “It is about truth. It is about justice.” He turned and left as abruptly as he had entered, leaving behind a table of confused, uneasy, and suddenly sobered guests. Veena looked at the others and saw what she feared: they were not just attendees. They were suspects. The snow outside thickened, sealing the manor in white silence. Somewhere in its history-soaked walls, the past was breathing again—and it had not come to rest, but to hunt.
Chapter 2
The morning after Anuj Malhotra’s chilling toast, the guests awoke to a heavy silence that felt different—thicker, more watchful. Veena Rajput had slept only lightly, her instincts on high alert. As dawn light bled through her window, casting pale streaks across the Persian rug, a knock echoed on her door. It was the hotel butler, his face ashen. “Madam, it’s Mr. Malhotra. Please come. It’s urgent.” Moments later, Veena stood in the grand library, its tall windows half-fogged from the cold, its walls lined with dustless leather-bound books. Anuj Malhotra sat in a high-backed chair, motionless. His skin was gray, lips slightly blue. On the table beside him was a glass, half full of red wine. Veena stepped closer and saw the truth: he was dead. No sign of violence. No weapon. Only a faint almond-like scent in the air—bitter and chemical. She touched the glass stem with her gloved finger, then looked around. The windows were locked. The doors had been bolted from the inside. A classic locked-room scenario. Her heart quickened. This was no accident. This was murder.
The guests were gathered hastily in the main lounge, eyes wide with fear, confusion, and denial. The storm had grown worse overnight. Snow blanketed the roads and windows. Phone lines were down. There was no leaving the manor. Veena stood before them, the unofficial figure of authority. “Mr. Malhotra is dead,” she said. “And it was not natural.” Gasps, whispers, frantic questions followed. Kunal Dey was the first to speak. “Poison? You think someone here did it?” Veena nodded. “The doors were locked from the inside. Either he killed himself—or someone planned it well.” Dr. Kaul frowned. “He was agitated last night. That speech… it felt final.” But Veena had seen suicides. This didn’t feel like one. She asked the staff to secure the body and the room. Then she began her interviews, starting with the guests seated closest to Anuj the night before. Every detail mattered now—who poured the wine, who handed the glass, who might have left the table unnoticed. It became clear quickly: everyone had a story, but no one had an alibi.
As the day wore on, Veena began charting connections—discreet inquiries, remembered quotes, fragments of glances and gestures. Nivedita Rao admitted she had interviewed Avni Thakur back in 2004, but her piece was never published. “I was told to drop it,” she said. Riya Mehta revealed she had briefly attended the same school as Avni. Dr. Kaul had consulted on a psychiatric evaluation connected to her case. Kunal Dey, under pressure, confessed he knew Avni’s father through an old political client. Every thread returned to the same girl. Veena’s old case files, still vivid in her mind, resurfaced with painful clarity. Avni Thakur had died at age 19—brilliant, lonely, caught in a net of powerful people. The evidence had gone missing. Witnesses had vanished. The case was shelved. Until now.
As darkness fell, and the guests huddled in their rooms, the hotel itself seemed to tighten around them like a trap. The walls whispered, old pipes groaned, and the fire crackled with a nervous energy. Veena stood in the library once more, watching Anuj’s lifeless form. He had called them here for justice—but someone had silenced him before he could deliver it. The killer was in the manor. Among them. And the storm would keep them all inside long enough for the truth to claw its way out.
Chapter 3
The snowstorm intensified by morning, transforming the world outside Snowcrest Manor into a white void. No sound came from the hills, no birds or wind—just the soft, relentless descent of snowflakes as if time had halted. Inside, Veena Rajput sat at the antique writing desk in her suite, the case file in her memory being reassembled piece by piece. Avni Thakur. Nineteen years old. A bright student of psychology at a Delhi university. Found dead in her apartment in 2005. Official cause: suicide. But Veena had never believed it. There were bruises on her wrists, a torn page from a diary, and a trail of inconsistencies in statements from people who had since risen to wealth or power. Now, almost two decades later, they were all here—assembled under one roof by a man who was no longer alive. The parallels were too precise to ignore. The night’s unease clung to every corridor of the manor as Veena descended to the breakfast room, where the remaining guests sat in muted tension. Their masks were thinning. She noticed it in the darting eyes, in Riya Mehta’s shaking hands, in the way Kunal Dey glanced toward the hallway as if afraid of what might come next. She didn’t speak right away. She let silence become her tool—watching who could bear it and who couldn’t. Then she said softly, “Tell me what you remember about Avni Thakur.”
It was Nivedita who broke first. Her professional calm cracked as she sipped her tea. “She was going to expose something,” she said. “She hinted at it when I met her in 2004. A therapy scandal. Names were involved—big names. But she was frightened. She backed out before the interview aired.” Dr. Aryan Kaul gave her a sidelong look. “She was disturbed. She had delusions, perhaps even paranoia. I treated her briefly, yes, but—” Veena interrupted, “Did you ever diagnose her with schizophrenia?” He hesitated, then said, “Not formally. But she exhibited symptoms. Hallucinations. She believed she was being watched.” Veena narrowed her eyes. That detail had been buried in the original file. She had seen it once—then it vanished, scrubbed from the official report. And Riya? She sat stiffly. “Avni and I were in boarding school together,” she murmured. “We shared a dormitory. But she changed over the years. She grew… withdrawn.” Veena knew deflection when she heard it. She remembered Riya’s father—a prominent industrialist—had funded a hospital wing in the same city where Avni died. Coincidence? Maybe. But the web was tightening. When Kunal finally spoke, his voice was measured. “I met her once,” he said. “She came to see my client—a minister. She had information. Threatened to go public. The minister paid her off, I think.” His gaze didn’t waver. “But someone didn’t want her to talk. Someone powerful.” Veena stood slowly, her chair scraping against the marble floor. “Then the question is: Who among you was that someone?”
Later that day, drawn by instinct and memory, Veena found herself in the west wing—a part of the manor that seemed untouched by time. Dust clung to banisters. Furniture stood under white sheets like ghosts frozen mid-step. She came to a locked door at the end of the corridor. The butler, when summoned, opened it reluctantly. “This was Mr. Malhotra’s private study,” he said. “No one’s allowed—” Veena brushed past him. Inside, she found rows of shelves filled with files. Floor-to-ceiling corkboards cluttered with photos, newspaper clippings, maps, and hand-written notes. It was a war room—an obsession. And at its center, Avni’s name appeared again and again. Anuj Malhotra had been investigating her death in secret for years. There were documents Veena had never seen—copies of her therapy records, a missing page from her diary, photos of bruises labeled “unexplained injuries.” And then there was a letter: dated just three days before Avni’s death, addressed to “A.M.” It read, “They are watching me again. Please be careful. If anything happens to me, you know who did it.” The last sentence was underlined in red. Veena’s pulse raced. Anuj hadn’t just brought these guests together for closure—he had brought them together to finish what Avni started. He had found the truth. And someone had silenced him before he could reveal it.
That night, the manor was cloaked in silence deeper than ever before. Outside, the blizzard was now a full-on siege, the windows crusted with frost, the roads buried in snowdrifts. Inside, Veena called the guests into the drawing room, confronting them with what she had found. She revealed Anuj’s secret files and the letter, letting the weight of it fall on them like a guillotine. Their reactions told her more than their words. Dr. Kaul went pale. Riya collapsed into a chair, whispering, “It wasn’t supposed to go that far…” Kunal’s jaw tightened but he said nothing. Nivedita turned away, her eyes wet. Veena raised the letter. “Who was Avni afraid of? Who had the power to erase evidence, silence witnesses, and now—kill Anuj Malhotra?” No one answered. But in that stillness, the guilt radiated like heat from a fire. Then came a sound that turned every head: a creak from the hallway. Veena ran to the door, opened it—and found nothing. Only cold air and a faint echo of footsteps receding into the darkness. She turned back slowly, her voice low. “Someone in this house doesn’t want the past uncovered. But it’s too late. The ghosts are awake. And justice is coming.”
Chapter 1: The Invitation
The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, slipped quietly under the door of Veena Rajput’s modest Shimla cottage as if it were just another electricity bill or property notice, though nothing about it felt ordinary. The envelope was thick, creamy-white, sealed with a dark wax emblem embossed with a crest she hadn’t seen before—a snowflake enclosed within a circle of thorns. Her instincts stirred, the way they used to in her active service days when something about a clue didn’t quite fit. The note inside was written in elegant, slanted calligraphy: “Detective Veena Rajput (Retd.), You are cordially invited to Snowcrest Manor for a weekend of reflection and conversation. Your presence is requested on the 24th of this month. All arrangements have been made. A car will arrive at 9:00 AM sharp. – A.M.” She stared at the initials, her fingers tightening around the paper. Only one person signed like that—Anuj Malhotra, the reclusive hotelier and billionaire who had once been a key suspect in a case she never solved. A case that haunted her through retirement like a recurring ghost: the 2005 murder of a young girl named Avni Thakur. Veena had left that case open, unfinished, suspended in time like a dropped photograph in the snow. Now, someone had invited her to revisit it. As snow fell outside her window, she packed a small bag, her badge and notebook tucked in beneath woolen scarves and thermals, and told herself this was just a reunion. But her gut already knew better.
By the time the black luxury SUV picked her up, winding through the narrow mist-covered roads toward Kufri, the landscape had grown ominously still. Pines stood sentinel on either side like silent witnesses, the silence deepened by the thickening snowfall. Snowcrest Manor came into view after a final bend—an imposing colonial structure of grey stone and frosted glass perched at the edge of a cliff, framed by the whiteness of Himalayan silence. It had been closed to the public for years, she recalled. Rumors said the place had seen a suicide, or perhaps a scandal—none confirmed. The front doors creaked open, and a man in a dark suit welcomed her inside. “Welcome, Detective Rajput. You are the fourth guest to arrive,” he said without offering his name. The warmth inside the hotel felt false somehow, like a performance. Rich carpets, oil paintings, chandeliers, a fireplace already burning—but an eerie stillness pervaded, the kind that clings to spaces too well-preserved. Veena was led to her suite, its window overlooking a frozen lake far below. As she unpacked, she couldn’t help but wonder: Who were the other guests? And why were they summoned?
Dinner that evening was served in a grand oak-paneled dining hall, its long table set for nine. Veena met the others one by one—a sharp-tongued political fixer named Kunal Dey, a former psychologist Dr. Aryan Kaul, a well-known journalist Nivedita Rao, a reclusive socialite Riya Mehta, and several others whose names stirred a distant familiarity in her mind, like half-remembered headlines. Each introduced themselves politely, yet each guarded their words like prisoners of their own secrets. None knew the purpose of their invitation. The host was notably absent. They speculated over wine—a charity gathering, an elite think tank, perhaps a publicity stunt by Malhotra. But Veena noticed something else: everyone here had a link, however indirect, to the 2005 Avni Thakur case. It couldn’t be coincidence. As conversations ebbed into silence, the clock struck nine. The lights dimmed. A side door opened, and in walked Anuj Malhotra himself—grayer, thinner, but unmistakable. He stood at the head of the table, raised a glass, and with a voice cold as the mountain air, said, “You all knew her. Avni. And yet, none of you saw what was coming. Welcome back to Snowcrest.”
Silence fell like a blade. Anuj’s words cut through the warmth of the room, pulling a veil back on something far more sinister. No one clapped. No one smiled. His eyes, tired but burning with something fierce and personal, scanned each of them as if counting sins. “This weekend is not about pleasure,” he said. “It is about truth. It is about justice.” He turned and left as abruptly as he had entered, leaving behind a table of confused, uneasy, and suddenly sobered guests. Veena looked at the others and saw what she feared: they were not just attendees. They were suspects. The snow outside thickened, sealing the manor in white silence. Somewhere in its history-soaked walls, the past was breathing again—and it had not come to rest, but to hunt.
Chapter 4
The storm raged on through the night, but inside Snowcrest Manor, it was not the wind that kept the guests awake. It was fear. The kind that turns shadows into threats and silence into accusation. At dawn, Veena Rajput walked the halls, her senses sharpened. The events of the previous day had cracked the veneer of civility among the guests, revealing fault lines of guilt and memory. She passed the locked study again—Anuj’s war room—and felt the weight of what was now in her hands. But just as she approached the main corridor, a shriek shattered the hush. It came from the third floor. Veena ran, her boots echoing on the wooden stairs, followed by the butler and two other guests. The scream had come from Riya Mehta’s room. The door was open, the bed unmade, snow drifting in from a broken window. But Riya was gone. Her coat remained. Her boots. A teacup on her nightstand still warm. There was no sign of struggle, no blood—but a single piece of paper lay on the carpet. Veena picked it up. Written in elegant cursive: “Some doors should remain shut.” The storm had not lifted. No one could leave. And yet, Riya Mehta had vanished into thin air.
Panic spread quickly. Kunal demanded to know if the killer had taken her. Dr. Kaul muttered that perhaps she’d run off in fear. Nivedita cried, “How? There’s nowhere to run to!” Veena silenced them with a raised hand. “We search the house—every room, every cellar, every locked door. No one moves alone.” They split into pairs. Veena and the butler searched the servants’ quarters and old storage halls. The manor was a labyrinth—hallways that ended in blank walls, doors that opened to closets too shallow to be useful, staircases that led nowhere. But in one forgotten hallway behind the main dining room, Veena found something chilling: a door bolted from the outside. The butler said quietly, “No one uses this wing. It was sealed after… the incident.” “What incident?” she asked. He hesitated. “A guest fell from the balcony. Years ago. The girl—Avni Thakur.” Veena’s stomach turned. She broke the bolt and stepped inside. The air was stale, heavy with mildew. Furniture draped in yellowed cloth. But on the far wall was a mirror—and behind it, a doorframe. Hidden. She pried the mirror loose, revealing a narrow passage. Dusty boot prints led inside. Fresh. “Riya?” Veena called. No answer. She entered, her torch beam cutting the gloom, and followed the steps down into the dark belly of the house.
What she found was not Riya—but something far worse. The passage opened into a room with stone walls, colder than any other part of the house. At its center stood an iron-framed chair with leather straps. Old bloodstains darkened the wood below it. A camera lay rusted on a tripod. “What in God’s name…” the butler whispered behind her. There were files in the corner, mold-streaked but legible. Medical forms. Observation notes. Therapy transcripts. Veena scanned them and saw names—names of children, teenagers, many now grown or long gone. And there again: Avni Thakur. The room had been part of a secret psychiatric “program” conducted in the manor decades ago—unregistered, experimental, and likely illegal. Veena felt her breath freeze. This was what Avni had discovered. This was what Anuj had uncovered. And someone among the guests was involved deeply enough to kill to keep it buried. She returned to the surface, her fury now focused, her suspicion narrowed. But the house had a final cruelty for the day. Back in the lounge, Nivedita stood trembling. “I found something in Riya’s bathroom,” she said. In her hand—still damp—a single silver locket. Veena opened it. Inside was a photograph of two girls. Riya and Avni. Laughing. Arms around each other. Sisters in everything but name.
That night, no one spoke much. The fire burned low. Kunal paced. Dr. Kaul drank. Nivedita watched Veena like a hunted deer watches the last trees. Veena, notebook in hand, began building the timeline. Riya and Avni had shared more than school—they had shared a secret. Dr. Kaul had evaluated them both. Kunal’s political client had ties to the illegal therapy experiments. And Anuj had been trying to dismantle the whole system quietly. One by one, the pieces fell into place. She confronted them in turn, revealing each thread, daring them to lie. No one confessed—but the cracks were spreading. Just before midnight, as the wind howled louder than ever, a voice whispered through the walls. It said only one thing: “She’s still here.” Veena stood abruptly. She knew now—Riya hadn’t run. She had been taken. And somewhere in this house, behind yet another false wall or hidden passage, lay the next piece of the puzzle. The snow wouldn’t let them go. Not yet. The manor had more truths to yield. And Veena Rajput was ready to tear it apart, brick by brick, to bring them to light.
Chapter 5
Morning arrived muted beneath a sky heavy with unshed snow, the light outside the manor filtered through a glassy haze of white and silence. But inside Snowcrest, the hush was deceptive—beneath its calm pulsed a simmering dread. Veena Rajput awoke to the sound of slow, dragging footsteps above her ceiling. She sat up, reached for her coat and torch, and stepped into the corridor. It was empty. The footsteps had already stopped. But a new sense of unease had taken hold. Something had shifted in the house overnight—not just fear, but a strange acceleration, as if the walls themselves were tightening their grip. Downstairs in the drawing room, the remaining guests sat clustered like stranded travelers awaiting an invisible rescue. The blizzard had buried the road under five feet of snow. The phone lines were still dead. And Riya Mehta had not returned. “She’s still alive,” Veena said aloud, mostly to herself. “But we are running out of time.”
To narrow the timeline, Veena began reexamining Riya’s last known actions. The broken window in her room, the teacup still warm, the footprints into the hidden passage—those clues all pointed to an abduction rather than a voluntary escape. But why take her and not kill her outright like Anuj? Veena returned to Anuj’s secret study and pored through his notes, focusing on a recurring symbol she’d earlier dismissed as decoration: an hourglass with wings. It appeared in margins, in letterheads, and once—on the back of a photograph of Avni Thakur. Now she found it again, scrawled beside the names of several others: not just guests, but therapists, funders, and even police officers. This was no coincidence. It was the mark of an organization—possibly a cult-like institute—connected to those experimental therapies from the early 2000s. Among Anuj’s papers was a faded schematic of the manor’s old architecture, showing sub-basements that weren’t listed on the current blueprints. Veena felt her pulse quicken. She called the guests together and told them plainly: “There’s more to this house than we’ve seen. And Riya is somewhere inside it.”
Armed with torches and the old blueprint, Veena led them through the manor’s east wing, behind a panel disguised as a bookcase. Beyond it lay a spiral staircase that descended sharply into blackness. The air changed—the smell of earth and rust replacing the dry chill of upstairs. At the bottom, they found a corridor of sealed wooden doors, some bolted, others chained. One had a small metal nameplate that simply read “Observatory 3.” Veena forced it open. Inside was a circular room with mirrors on every wall. A leather-bound chair sat at the center, lit from above by a cracked skylight. Blood speckled the floor. On a nearby table was a small hourglass filled with black sand—its glass fractured, the grains leaking like a wound. And beside it, a notebook in Riya’s handwriting. “I remembered it all,” it read. “Avni wasn’t crazy. We were told to forget. They made us forget. But it’s coming back. It’s all coming back.” Veena’s hands trembled as she turned the pages—flashes of sessions, coded phrases, injections, names. And the last page was a confession: “I told them everything. Anuj. Avni. Myself. I was part of it.”
Back upstairs, night began to fall once more. The manor creaked louder. The storm, if anything, was strengthening. But it was inside the house that the real weather had changed. Nivedita stood in Veena’s room with pale cheeks and trembling lips. “I know who’s next,” she whispered. “There was a list in that locket. Riya and Avni weren’t the only girls. They were just the ones who got close to the truth.” Veena stared at her. “And where is that list now?” Nivedita held up a folded paper, still damp from the bathroom. “I took it. I was scared. But now I think… I think we’re all targets.” Veena took the list and scanned the names—five of them. Two were dead. One was Riya. One was Nivedita. The last name made her breath catch: her own. “They think I’m going to expose them,” Veena said aloud. “And they’re right.” Just then, a faint chime echoed from the main staircase—a sound too delicate to belong in a place like this. They rushed out. A new hourglass sat at the foot of the stairs, untouched, still upright. A message beside it: “You have until the sand runs out.”
Chapter 6
The hourglass on the staircase had run out by dawn, its final grains resting in eerie silence. But no one had vanished, not yet. The guests—what remained of them—sat in grim silence at the breakfast table, untouched toast and lukewarm coffee in front of them. Veena stood at the head, more a general now than a guest, scanning their faces for signs of fear, deceit, or guilt. Her mind turned back to the list—five names, four accounted for, and the fifth one still missing: Veena Rajput. Someone was targeting survivors of the buried “memory erasure” experiments, eliminating anyone who could testify. And yet, there was something missing—something Avni had seen, something Riya had written but not explained. The answer, Veena suspected, wasn’t just in documents or names. It was in something recorded. And suddenly she remembered what the old caretaker had once whispered about Snowcrest’s original architect: that he had “wired voices into the walls.” At the time, she thought it meant insulation or acoustics. But now—Veena was certain—it meant something else entirely.
She returned to Anuj’s study and examined the paneling, tapping along the walls and corners. Behind the stone fireplace she found it—a square recess, sealed with screws and covered by old wallpaper. She peeled it back and opened the panel to reveal an ancient cassette recorder embedded deep in the wall, surrounded by reels of magnetic tape. The recorder had no power, but the tapes… they were intact. One reel was labeled “Session 14 – A.T.” and dated three weeks before Avni’s death. Veena gently removed the reel and carried it to the old basement projection room she had seen earlier. With the help of the butler, she got the antique AV system working. The tape clicked, hissed, then began to play. A voice filled the room. It was young, female. “My name is Avni Thakur. This is my fourteenth session. I remember things now. Not dreams. Not hallucinations. Real things. The white room. The black chair. The questions.” Another voice cut in—calm, clinical. “What did you see in the dream this time?” Avni’s voice trembled. “It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. You showed me something. Or… no, you made me forget. And it’s leaking through.”
As the recording played, Veena felt cold sweat on her back. Avni’s voice went on. She spoke of injections—“the clear one makes me forget, the cloudy one brings things back”—and of waking up with bruises on her arms and notes she didn’t remember writing. She mentioned the names of doctors—Kaul among them. “He smiles too much when he lies,” Avni had said. “I think he thinks this is all okay. That I’m an experiment.” The reel ended abruptly. Veena sat in silence, bile rising in her throat. Dr. Aryan Kaul, sitting now in the library and sipping from a brandy glass, had been part of this. Maybe not the killer—but certainly not innocent. She brought the reel to him. “Care to explain?” she asked coldly. The brandy glass shook slightly in his hand. “Those tapes were meant to be destroyed,” he muttered. “I thought he’d burned them.” “Who?” “The man funding the program. The one who called it ‘Operation Mnemosyne.’ You think Anuj was in charge? He was a figurehead. The real architect was someone far more dangerous.”
That night, as the storm began to abate, Veena made a new decision: she would break open every sealed wall, every boarded room, until she unearthed the truth. In the west wing’s old nursery, she discovered something worse than a body. Behind a cracked plaster wall was a hidden cabinet containing twenty-three unmarked tapes and one VHS cassette labeled simply: “Exit Protocol.” She played it. The footage was grainy, but unmistakable—teenagers strapped into chairs, bright flashes of light, and a calm male voice repeating commands: “Forget. Forget. Forget.” Then static. And then… Riya. Alive, weeping. “They won’t stop,” she said into the camera. “They know who I am. They know what I did. But I remember now. I remember all of it. And if you’re watching this, it means I’ve failed.” The screen cut to black. Veena turned to the others. “We’re not just dealing with a killer,” she said. “We’re dealing with an institution. A system that turned minds into property. And it’s still running. Still watching. Still erasing.”
Chapter 7
The storm had weakened, but inside Snowcrest Manor, the air was thicker than ever—thick with dread, secrets, and the slow churn of madness. Veena Rajput knew now that this wasn’t merely about justice for a dead girl or revenge for broken memories. This was about dismantling a machine—one built to alter minds and erase truth. She moved methodically, tracing the remaining architectural sketches Anuj had gathered. All of them pointed toward one final mystery: the Spiral Room. According to an old engineer’s log, it was part of the “original sensory disorientation chamber,” an experimental space designed to induce a breakdown of temporal memory. The notes ended with a warning: “Access only with calibrated supervision. Prolonged exposure may result in permanent psychological fragmentation.” Veena didn’t flinch. Somewhere inside that room, Riya was still alive—or what was left of her.
With Kunal and the butler at her side, Veena pried open a sealed floor panel in the west observatory. Below it lay a tunnel lined with curved bricks, descending like a whirlpool. The further they went, the more distorted the air became—warmer, yet staler. Time felt different there, as if an hour passed in seconds or a second in hours. They found the Spiral Room at the bottom: circular, metallic, every wall shaped to reflect sound inward. The moment they stepped in, voices echoed that hadn’t been spoken. Whispers of Avni, sobs of Riya, even fragments of their own sentences repeated back to them—but slightly off, as if filtered through someone else’s memory. In the center sat Riya Mehta, crumpled on the floor, murmuring incoherent sentences. She was alive. Veena rushed forward, her heart breaking at the sight. Riya looked up, her eyes milky with tears and confusion. “I never left,” she whispered. “They made me watch everything again. I couldn’t tell what was real. I think… I think I forgot myself.”
Veena wrapped a blanket around her and turned to inspect the room. Along the walls were screens—ancient monitors flickering with static—and below them, file drawers containing records of every patient ever subjected to the program. Most of the names had been crossed out in red ink. But one file stood untouched: Veena’s. Her photo. Her name. A profile describing her reactions to trauma. “Why me?” she whispered. “Because you remember,” said a voice behind her. Dr. Kaul. He stood at the entrance, his hands raised, unarmed. “I was forced to come back. They threatened to expose my daughter. But it’s too late now, isn’t it?” Veena stepped forward, fists clenched. “You watched them erase those girls. You let them break them down for a grant. A theory.” Kaul didn’t argue. He merely said, “This house will never let you go unless you feed it one more memory.” Then he stepped into the spiral’s core—and before Veena could stop him, he pressed a switch on the floor. The lights flickered. A sound like rushing water filled the room. And Dr. Kaul slumped to the ground, his eyes rolling back as if something had unraveled inside him. The room had claimed another mind.
Dragging Riya up the spiral passage, Veena told herself one thing: she would not become another file. Not another crossed-out name. She emerged into the light of a new day—sun finally cracking through the clouds above Snowcrest. But the manor remained. Its foundations too deep, its sins too old. As Riya slept in the safety of the main lounge, Veena began copying every file, every tape, every record she could salvage. “No one else forgets,” she said aloud. “Not ever again.” But behind her, in the cracks of the walls, the Spiral Room’s low hum persisted—a sound that promised: memory is a circle. And circles always return.
Chapter 8
By the following dawn, Snowcrest Manor had quieted. The blizzard had passed, the roads partially visible under melting snow, and yet Veena Rajput felt no closer to freedom. She’d saved Riya, yes—but at what cost? Kaul was gone, the Spiral Room had claimed him, and though she’d unearthed years of illegal experimentation, the true puppet-master remained unnamed. That morning, she returned to her room to find a fresh envelope under her door. No handwriting, no seal. Inside: a single black-and-white photo—of her, as a teenager, standing outside the mental wellness camp she’d once believed to be a school for gifted children. On the back, scrawled faintly in pencil: “You’ve been here before.” Veena sat down, her hands trembling. The door creaked. Riya appeared, thinner, shaken but more lucid. “I think the house is remembering,” she said. “Not us. It. Every room holds something. But there’s one room they never let me go near. The door marked with yesterday.”
Together they ventured to the oldest wing of the manor, past broken chandeliers and mold-eaten portraits. At the very end of the corridor was a steel door etched faintly with the word “Yesterday.” Behind it was a space unlike any other—a chamber made of smoked glass and cold iron, with no windows, no echo. Just a low-frequency hum, and rows of black file boxes. Each box bore a name. Avni. Riya. Anuj. Kaul. Even Veena. But what truly chilled her was that beneath each name were descriptions—like memory scripts. Dates. Phrases. Behaviors. Predictions. “This is where they stored what they erased,” Veena whispered. Riya clutched her arm. “They took memories and rewrote us. Like characters.” As they opened Veena’s file, she saw it all laid bare: what she remembered of her childhood was manufactured. The scholarship that brought her to the manor. The stories of her mental breakdown. Even her desire to be a detective. “It was all implanted to monitor how you would process loss,” one typed page read. “Subject 11 exhibits resistance to emotional falsehoods.” Veena staggered back. “I was never free,” she muttered. “I’ve been part of this from the beginning.”
And yet, there was power in knowledge. They found a server hidden behind a false bookshelf, still humming. Its interface was antique, but the data within was vast: footage of sessions, internal memos, donor correspondence. Veena began uploading it all to her satellite phone, slowly but methodically. If she couldn’t take down the system, she could expose it. But just as she began transmitting, the monitors flared—showing security footage from rooms long sealed. In one, a man with sharp features sat watching the monitors: the financier. The true architect. “He’s still inside,” Veena said. “He never left.” That night, she made her way through the lowest tunnels of the manor, following heat signals and flickering power trails. At last, in an underground chamber lined with screens, she found him—his body frail but mind sharp, sitting in a wheelchair. “I’ve been waiting,” he rasped. “I knew one of you would break through the fog.” Veena raised her voice. “It ends now.” But he only smiled. “Nothing ends. You’ve already sent the data. Good. Let the world see. The memory war is just beginning. And you, Ms. Rajput, are my perfect prototype.”
By morning, he was dead—either from age or by his own hand. Veena never knew. She and Riya left Snowcrest that afternoon in a snowplow convoy sent by local authorities. She gave the files to an investigative unit in Delhi. By the time the news broke, the world was already ablaze with questions. Unauthorized mind experiments. Missing teenagers. Fabricated pasts. And Snowcrest was sealed, declared a national security site. But for Veena, the victory was hollow. She sat in her apartment weeks later, unable to sleep, knowing the truth but unsure of her own thoughts. In the silence, a strange music would sometimes play from the walls—a melody she remembered from the Spiral Room. And always, just before sleep, a whisper at the edge of her thoughts: “You were made to forget. But you chose to remember.” She smiled through tears. “Yes. And I never will again.”
Chapter 9
The media storm had barely begun to settle when Veena Rajput received the anonymous parcel at her Delhi flat—no return address, no markings, only a thick envelope and a flash drive labeled simply: “For the Archivist.” Her fingers hesitated. She’d thought it was over. That exposing Snowcrest’s experiments would have ended the cycle. But the moment the video on the drive began to play, she understood this was only an intermission. Grainy footage showed a dim room filled with shelves—shelves of identical black boxes. A masked figure spoke into the camera: “You exposed one node. But the archive has many branches. And not all archivists keep their collections in vaults.” Behind the figure, Veena could make out wall markings she recognized from the manor’s oldest blueprints. There had been no room labeled “Archivist’s Office.” But now she knew: it was hidden, and someone still occupied it. Someone who had never left the network that connected these memory experiments across institutions.
Veena traced the drive’s metadata—its source led to an abandoned post office in Dehradun. Within a week, she was there, navigating dusty streets and old colonial structures converted to storage. Her inquiries led her to a disused library once owned by the family of a certain “Professor I.M. Ghosh”—a name she recalled from a file in the Spiral Room. The man had been a theorist, designing “non-linear recall pathways” in patients. Locals said Ghosh had died. But when she broke into the basement of the building, Veena found a hidden room where the dust was disturbed—recently. On a desk lay a map of Snowcrest. But more shockingly, another: a similar site under construction in Madhya Pradesh, labeled “Mnemosyne 2.0.” Alongside it was a fresh ledger: names, ages, dates. Children. Teenagers. “They’re starting again,” Veena muttered. Riya, now working with her as a data analyst, called that night. “We were wrong. The funding never stopped. It just moved overseas. But the mind network… it’s still active. And there’s another player.”
That player revealed himself days later. Veena was invited to a private viewing of a new art exhibit titled Imprinted Echoes—a series of installations claiming to be “memory-based sculptures.” At first glance, it was harmless avant-garde nonsense. Until she saw one sculpture depicting a white room and a black chair. Another had an hourglass with black sand. Then she saw him: tall, angular, dressed in museum black. The artist. He introduced himself as Elias Narang. But Veena recognized him from a photograph once taken with Anuj. “You were there,” she said aloud. He smiled. “I never left. I just learned to repurpose pain into art.” He offered her a business card. On the back, in small print: “Archivist-in-residence.” Veena’s world tilted. He leaned closer. “You stopped the spiral, but not the circle. Memory is currency now, Veena. You gave people a taste of truth. And they’re hungry. Soon, they’ll pay to have it rewritten.” She walked away, heart pounding, but his voice followed: “You’re not a witness anymore. You’re part of the archive.”
That night, Veena opened a blank document on her laptop. Title: The Archivist’s Wake. She began documenting everything—names, connections, timelines. Her investigation had become larger than she imagined. It wasn’t about Snowcrest anymore. It was about a global network of memory manipulation, disguised as therapy, cloaked in art, and thriving in silence. Somewhere across the world, the Spiral Room had a twin. And more minds were being reshaped, sold, or lost. As she typed, a news alert blinked on her screen: “Missing Students in Bhopal—Officials Deny Connection to Experimental Center.” She closed the alert. Her fingers moved faster. She would not be silenced. Not now. Not after everything. She would bring the whole archive down. Even if it meant becoming the thing they feared most—a memory that refused to fade.
Chapter 10: Fadeproof (~6000 words in 4 immersive paragraphs)
Weeks after the Elias Narang exhibit, Veena Rajput sat inside a broadcast van parked outside an abandoned telecommunications station in Ujjain. The signal tower was long dead, but the equipment inside still worked—salvaged and repurposed by her growing team of whistleblowers, ex-technicians, and survivors. Across from her sat Riya Mehta, her hair now streaked silver at the temples from the trauma she’d endured, but her eyes were alert. They had uncovered something that made everything until now look like a prologue—a central database, buried within obsolete radio frequencies, broadcasting memory blueprints to private clinics, elite schools, even government labs. This wasn’t just about Snowcrest or Mnemosyne 2.0. This was a global consortium—hidden in plain sight—reprogramming pain, grief, and dissent. “We go live in five,” a young hacker whispered. Veena placed the final cassette—marked “Veena Rajput – Subject 11” —into the player. Her own voice crackled through the headphones. “They called me a test. I call myself a survivor. This is my memory. Unedited. Fadeproof.”
The signal erupted across unused FM spectrums, leaking into televisions, hospital monitors, airport speakers. Not polished or scripted—but raw. First her story. Then Avni’s. Then Riya’s. One by one, memories long buried were stitched together into a fugue of resistance. The world had never heard anything like it. By midnight, protests began in Delhi, Warsaw, São Paulo. Hashtags trended: #Fadeproof, #MemoryIsTruth, #IRemember. Within forty-eight hours, high-level resignations followed. Some institutions disavowed involvement. Others doubled down. But the damage was done. The archive had been breached. The Spiral was no longer hidden. And for the first time, those who’d been erased were being remembered. Veena walked out of the van and stared up at the empty sky, her chest heavy with exhaustion and a strange, glowing hope. Behind her, Riya asked, “Do you think they’ll come for us?” Veena answered without turning: “They already did. And we didn’t fade.”
In the months that followed, Veena established the Mnemosyne Tribunal—an independent body collecting testimonies from anyone whose memories had been altered without consent. She traveled from orphanages to asylums to elite universities, recording stories that didn’t make sense on paper but burned with lived truth. Survivors of erased love. Displaced identities. Invented traumas. Forgotten crimes. Each one added to the new Archive of the Remembered. But while some called her a hero, others branded her a destabilizer. One night, her apartment was broken into. Nothing was stolen, but the word “ERASE” was carved into her bathroom mirror. That same week, Elias Narang vanished from public life. His final email to her simply read: “We will meet again, either in memory or in dream.” She didn’t reply. But she kept the message.
Years later, in a quiet town in Himachal, Veena opened a school—not for facts or skills, but for memory literacy. Its motto was carved in stone above the gate: To Remember is to Resist. On the wall inside her office hung only one photo—Avni Thakur, smiling with a sketchbook in her lap. On certain nights, Veena would sit by the window, cassette tapes piled around her, headphones on, listening to echoes of lives the world tried to erase. The Spiral Room still haunted her dreams sometimes, but the fear had turned into clarity. Memory, she realized, isn’t about what stays—it’s about what you fight to carry. And no matter how loud the silence tried to grow, she had become fadeproof.
–End–
