Piyali Banik
Part 1
Misty winds curled around the crumbling eaves of the ancient monastery perched on the edge of Darjeeling’s high cliffs. It had stood there for over three centuries, cloaked in silence and stories—some whispered, some buried. To the tourists who visited, the monastery offered serenity, a glimpse of the spiritual. But to the monks within, and the locals who dared to speak of it, the place carried shadows. Shadows of the past. Shadows of something that refused to rest.
Dr. Ayaan Mukherjee, a young anthropologist from Kolkata University, arrived at the monastery to study Buddhist rituals and oral traditions. He was earnest, skeptical, curious. Having grown disillusioned by academia’s sterile detachment, he sought the raw heartbeat of belief, the pulse of the unknown. His grant was short, just four weeks, but he planned to document every chant, every ritual, and every myth that the monastery held.
Upon arrival, he was greeted by Lama Tenzin, an elderly monk with parchment skin and a gaze as deep as a winter pond. Tenzin didn’t smile often, but he welcomed Ayaan with quiet courtesy and offered him a small cell overlooking the valley. The days began peacefully. The chants, the incense, the soft shuffling of robes—all soothed Ayaan’s frayed nerves. But on the seventh night, the monastery stirred.
It was past midnight when Ayaan first heard the sound. A bell—not the grand gong used in rituals, but a smaller, delicate chime—rang faintly in the distance. He sat up, alert. The corridors were supposed to be empty. Curiosity overrode caution, and he slipped on his shawl and stepped out. The air was cold and tinged with juniper smoke. Shadows danced along the narrow stone halls. The bell rang again, leading him toward the old meditation wing, long sealed after an earthquake damaged its structure decades ago.
To his astonishment, the wooden door was ajar. The air inside smelled musty, layered with dust and forgotten incense. Ayaan entered, flashlight trembling in his grip. The bell rang once more, then stopped. On the far wall, a tapestry fluttered faintly though there was no wind. As he approached it, he noticed a small symbol embroidered in crimson thread—an eye encased within a lotus. It wasn’t in any of his texts. He documented it quickly and returned to his room, heart hammering. He told no one.
Over the next few days, Ayaan noticed peculiarities. Monks whispering in corners. Lama Tenzin watching him more intently. A novice named Dorje left him a folded note tucked under his bowl one morning. It read: “Don’t ask about the Eye. It sees back.”
The tapestry haunted Ayaan. He returned several times, taking photos and sketches. He noticed the pattern of threads around the Eye seemed… newer than the rest. As if it had been altered recently. Then one day, Dorje disappeared.
No one would speak of it. When Ayaan asked Lama Tenzin, the monk simply said, “Some journeys are not meant to be returned from.” The words chilled him more than the wind ever could.
Ayaan’s research shifted. He began digging through the monastery’s hidden library, requesting access to the inner sanctum archives. The old scrolls revealed fragments—mentions of a forbidden sect, the Drakpa Lingpa, who believed enlightenment could be achieved by invoking an ancient consciousness trapped between lives. The Eye of the Lotus, they called it.
Rumors told of rituals that blurred death and time. Of monks who meditated themselves into madness trying to speak with the ‘Eye’. One scroll even suggested that the sealed meditation wing was once their ritual chamber.
On his twenty-fourth day, Ayaan awoke to chanting—low, guttural, otherworldly. It wasn’t coming from the main hall. He followed it to the sealed wing again. The door was now wide open. Inside, candles flickered in a circle. Tenzin stood at the center, eyes closed, arms raised. Around him stood other monks, faces blank.
Ayaan froze.
Tenzin opened his eyes. “You were meant to find it, Ayaan. The Eye called to you.”
A sudden gust extinguished the candles. Darkness fell.
When Ayaan came to, he was back in his cell. His phone was gone. His notes, his camera—all missing. Lama Tenzin came to him with tea and said nothing of the night before. “You are unwell,” he said. “You need rest.”
But Ayaan remembered. The Eye had opened. And something within it had stared into him.
The following day, a tourist’s child went missing near the cliffs. Search parties were sent out, but the boy was never found. That night, Ayaan heard the bell again.
He knew then: the Eye didn’t just see. It took.
On his last day, Ayaan packed only what he could carry and left the monastery before dawn. He never submitted his research. He returned to Kolkata changed—withdrawn, plagued by dreams of chanting, of eyes opening within walls.
Six months later, a letter arrived. No return address. Inside was a photograph of the tapestry—now gone from the monastery. In its place, a blank wall with a single message etched into the stone:
“Those who seek must never look back.”
And Ayaan understood. The Eye hadn’t finished with him. It was patient. And it waited in silence. Always watching. Always waiting.
Part 2
Darjeeling’s air had grown colder in the past week, but Ayaan Mukherjee knew the chill creeping into his bones wasn’t just from the Himalayan winds. Dorje’s disappearance had cast a long shadow over the monastery. No formal announcement was made. No prayers offered. It was as if the boy had never existed.
But Ayaan remembered him well—how Dorje’s sharp eyes often wandered during prayer sessions, how he once confessed an odd dream involving a lotus with bleeding petals. And that final note: “Don’t ask about the Eye. It sees back.”
Now, every time Ayaan passed by the silent courtyard or heard a whisper cut short as he entered a room, he sensed that his presence had triggered something ancient and dangerous.
Late that night, unable to sleep, Ayaan crept back to the sealed meditation wing. The door, once ajar, had been nailed shut again. Heavy wooden planks crossed it crudely, as if in panic. He noticed something new: a smear of red—dried blood?—beneath the threshold. He knelt to examine it, but a soft footfall behind him froze him in place.
Turning quickly, he expected to find Lama Tenzin or one of the elder monks. Instead, a robed figure stood at the far end of the corridor. Hooded. Motionless. Watching.
Ayaan called out, “Who are you?”
The figure slowly raised an arm and pointed—not at Ayaan, but at the door. Then vanished into the darkness without a sound.
He ran after it but found only empty corridors.
The next morning, he cornered Lama Tenzin in the prayer hall. “I want to know what happened to Dorje.”
The old monk regarded him with tired eyes. “He left the monastery.”
“Left? Without his sandals? Without telling anyone? He warned me about something—something about the Eye.”
Tenzin’s lips tightened. “Curiosity, Dr. Mukherjee, is like fire. It can warm a house or burn it down.”
Ayaan was about to argue further when another monk, younger, stepped forward. Brother Lobsang. His face was pale.
“Enough,” Tenzin said. “Lobsang, come.”
But the young monk hesitated, then whispered to Ayaan, “Meet me in the bell tower. After dusk.”
Ayaan waited all day in restless anticipation. The bell tower stood behind the monastery’s northern wall, rarely visited except during festival times. At twilight, he climbed the narrow spiral stairs to the top. There, beneath the giant bronze bell, stood Lobsang, clutching a worn book wrapped in cloth.
“I can’t stay long,” Lobsang said. “But you need to see this.”
He unwrapped the book. The leather binding was cracked, the title written in an archaic Tibetan script. Ayaan’s limited knowledge could barely translate: Rinchen Nyima’s Codex. Within the pages were diagrams—circles within circles, mantras twisted into spirals, drawings of a large eye set within a lotus, identical to the tapestry Ayaan had seen.
“This is forbidden,” Lobsang whispered. “Only the Abbot and Lama Tenzin are allowed to read it. But I found it in the inner library years ago and kept it hidden. I think Dorje found it too.”
“What is the Eye?” Ayaan asked.
Lobsang hesitated. “It’s… not a metaphor. It’s a presence. A consciousness. According to the Codex, centuries ago a monk attempted to transcend the cycle of rebirth not through detachment, but through containment. He invited an entity into himself—something that exists between states of being. He called it the Eye of the Lotus.”
“And the rituals?”
“There’s a belief that if enough focus is placed—through prayer, sacrifice, silence—the Eye can be awakened. Not just in visions. In the flesh.”
Ayaan stared at him. “You think the monks are trying to awaken it?”
Lobsang swallowed. “No. I think they already have.”
A loud gong rang suddenly from the monastery below. The evening prayer bell. Lobsang stiffened.
“I have to go. If they find me with this—”
He shoved the Codex into Ayaan’s hands. “Hide it. Don’t trust anyone. Not even me.”
Then he disappeared down the stairs.
That night, Ayaan read the Codex by candlelight. It spoke of Sambhogakaya, the luminous form, and the dangers of misusing meditation as summoning. One line stood out, scrawled in faded red ink in the margins:
“To look upon the Eye is to invite the watcher within.”
The next day, Lobsang was gone.
The monks said nothing.
Two disappearances in a week. Two warnings ignored. Ayaan felt the monastery shift around him, its stillness like a serpent coiled under robes of tranquility. Every prayer, every chant now seemed laced with a secret intent.
He returned to the sealed wing once more. This time, there was no blood. No figure. But as he turned to leave, he heard a sound from within—a whisper. Barely audible.
His name.
Ayaan.
Part 3
The whisper echoed faintly in the corridor as Ayaan stood paralyzed outside the sealed meditation wing. His rational mind wrestled with the surreal. There was no one inside. There couldn’t be. The wing had been condemned for years, abandoned after the earthquake shattered its foundations. And yet—
“Ayaan…”
This time, the whisper came again, more insistent, as if carried on a breath just behind the wooden planks.
His pulse roared in his ears. He pressed a hand to the ancient door, its surface rough and ice-cold. It vibrated, barely perceptible—like a heartbeat, or chanting from a depth beyond stone.
He stumbled back. The Codex clutched beneath his robe suddenly felt heavier. Every line he’d read in the past night’s feverish study blurred together into a single, chilling idea: the Eye wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t lore.
It was awake.
Back in his room, Ayaan sealed the windows and lit a single candle. He turned again to the Codex. He had bookmarked several passages, but one he’d skipped now screamed for his attention.
“The Eye awakens not with sound but with attention. He who sees the Eye grants it permission to enter.”
He recalled the tapestry. The symbol. The sensation of being watched.
The monks weren’t just guarding secrets. They were feeding something.
A knock at his door startled him.
It was Lama Tenzin.
“I trust you’re resting, Dr. Mukherjee?” the old monk asked, voice unreadable.
Ayaan smiled weakly. “Trying to.”
Tenzin entered uninvited. His eyes scanned the small room. “Some guests find it hard to sleep in sacred places. Old energies disturb the modern mind.”
“Or awaken it,” Ayaan said.
Tenzin turned to him. “You’ve been wandering. Speaking to monks you should not. Asking questions long buried.”
“I’m here to study traditions,” Ayaan said coolly. “Rituals. Beliefs. That’s what your monastery agreed to.”
“There are beliefs not meant to be studied,” Tenzin said, stepping closer. “And knowledge not meant to be shared.”
Ayaan’s hand inched toward the Codex beneath his bed.
“You seek what you do not understand, Dr. Mukherjee. The Eye doesn’t grant answers. It consumes them.”
Tenzin turned to leave, but paused at the door. “If you continue down this path, the monastery cannot guarantee your safety.”
The door shut with finality.
That night, sleep evaded Ayaan entirely. He sat cross-legged by the window, watching the moonlight carve silver lines across the courtyard. Movement flickered in the shadows—robed figures, silent and swift, carrying candles toward the cliffside shrine beyond the outer wall.
He followed at a distance.
The path was steep, and the air grew colder with each step. At the shrine, nestled beneath an overhanging cliff, the monks formed a circle around a hollow stone platform. They began chanting in a tongue Ayaan didn’t recognize—more guttural than Sanskrit, more rhythmic than Tibetan. The vibrations made his skin crawl.
And then he saw it.
At the center of the stone, etched into the surface, was the same Eye within a Lotus.
As they chanted, it glowed faintly.
One monk stepped forward—head bowed, holding something wrapped in red cloth. He placed it gently on the Eye and stepped back. The chant rose.
A gust of wind howled through the pass. The candle flames danced. The wrapped object uncoiled, revealing—
A sandal.
Small. Familiar.
Dorje’s.
Ayaan gasped, and several monks turned their heads sharply toward the trees. He ducked and fled.
Back in his room, he could hardly breathe. They were performing rituals. Offerings. Perhaps even sacrifices. And Dorje—he hadn’t run away. He’d been given to something.
He turned once more to the Codex and noticed, in the final chapter, a passage written in a different hand. Shaky. Desperate.
“The Eye is not confined to the monastery. Once it sees you, you carry it. It dreams through your dreams. Speaks through your silence. To escape it, you must return what you’ve taken.”
Return?
Ayaan’s gaze darted to the tapestry photo in his notebook. The symbol he’d copied. The sketches. The Codex.
The Eye had seen him. And now, it was him.
The following day, he prepared to leave. He packed his bag, hid the Codex within layers of clothes, and marched to Lama Tenzin’s chamber.
“I need to go. I’m not well,” he said plainly.
Tenzin merely nodded. “Some knowledge leaves a mark.”
As he turned to go, Tenzin added softly, “But remember, Dr. Mukherjee… the Eye travels with you.”
Hours later, Ayaan boarded a shared jeep down the mountain. He didn’t look back.
But he felt it.
Somewhere inside him, something stirred. A presence. Quiet. Waiting.
That night, in a cheap guesthouse in Siliguri, Ayaan dreamed for the first time in weeks.
A corridor of stone. Candles flickering. The sound of a bell.
And a voice, soft and ancient:
“You opened the door. Now keep it open.”
He awoke drenched in sweat. The wall beside him bore a faint stain, as if something had pressed against it from the other side.
An eye. Half-formed. Watching.
Part 4
The next morning, Ayaan left the guesthouse early, hoping a change of environment would silence the dream that clung to his memory like wet cloth. But even in the bustle of Siliguri’s streets—the honking jeeps, roadside tea stalls, and jostling crowds—he felt like a ghost among the living. Every reflection in a shop window, every flicker in his peripheral vision, made him jump. Something was following him. Not with footsteps. But with presence.
He booked a train back to Kolkata, desperate to bury himself in the familiarity of the city, in his apartment filled with books and dust and distraction. But as the train pulled out of New Jalpaiguri station, he noticed something strange.
A monk.
Seated three coaches down. Wearing the ochre robes of the monastery. Head bowed. Unmoving.
He told himself it was coincidence. Perhaps another monk traveling. Maybe a tourist impersonating one.
But as the train crossed into Bihar, and then West Bengal, the monk never changed posture. Never ate. Never even looked up.
At Howrah Station, when the train came to a screeching halt, the monk stood and exited on the opposite side. Gone.
Back in his apartment, Ayaan collapsed into his old chair, clutching the Codex as if it might protect him. He placed it in a locked drawer and pushed it from his thoughts. He wanted to believe it was all an illusion, a mountain-induced hysteria. The air up there was thinner, wasn’t it?
He returned to work. Lectures. Research. Pretending.
But the dreams came every night.
A candlelit corridor. A whispering voice. The Eye.
His students noticed his distraction. Colleagues whispered. One day, he found himself staring at a student’s notebook, unable to look away from a doodle she had drawn in the margin—a lotus.
He snapped.
That night, he returned to the Codex.
He reread every passage, every marginal note. One name appeared repeatedly in the older sections: Padma Dorje, a 17th-century monk exiled for practicing forbidden rituals. Some sources claimed he vanished near Darjeeling. Others said he achieved “unbodied awakening”—becoming neither spirit nor man.
One obscure footnote caught Ayaan’s eye: Padma Dorje’s chamber was never destroyed. It was sealed.
Could the sealed wing have been his?
Ayaan needed answers.
He reached out to a friend from his archaeology days—Rik Sen, now working on Himalayan monastery preservation projects. Over coffee, he told Rik a watered-down version of events: unusual symbols, whispered stories, perhaps a forgotten tomb.
Rik was intrigued. “There are several sites around Darjeeling that were sealed after the 1934 earthquake. You’d need permission to access the records. But I know someone at the heritage board.”
The next day, Rik handed him a photocopy of a hand-drawn map, dated 1907. It showed the monastery’s old layout—including an annex not visible in modern diagrams.
Padma Dorje’s chamber.
Ayaan’s skin prickled. It lay directly beneath the sealed meditation wing.
Not beside it.
Beneath.
Buried.
The dreams worsened.
He no longer heard just his name in the dark. He heard chanting. Sometimes, he would wake and find his own lips moving in rhythm to words he didn’t understand. His apartment felt colder. Windows rattled when there was no wind.
Then, on a quiet Thursday afternoon, his front door creaked open on its own.
Ayaan rushed to it, heart pounding, only to find no one outside. But on the floor, just beyond the threshold, lay a folded piece of cloth.
Red.
He picked it up with shaking hands.
Inside was a single object.
A sandal.
Dorje’s.
He dropped it and backed away.
The Eye had followed him. Through stone. Through sleep. Through silence.
He considered calling the police, a priest, anyone. But he knew no one would understand. The Eye wasn’t haunting him. It was inhabiting him.
He knew what it wanted.
To be seen. To be found again.
To be brought back.
The next morning, Ayaan purchased a one-way ticket to Darjeeling.
This time, he didn’t bring notebooks.
He didn’t bring his camera.
Just the Codex. The sandal. And a lantern.
He arrived at the monastery under fog and silence. No one greeted him. No one asked why he had returned.
Lama Tenzin stood by the main gate as if he had been waiting. “It is not too late,” he said.
“It’s already inside,” Ayaan replied.
Tenzin studied him for a moment, then stepped aside.
Ayaan made his way directly to the sealed wing. The planks were gone.
Inside, the chamber was dark, but different. The dust seemed disturbed. The tapestry was no longer on the wall. Only a deep circular groove remained on the stone floor, like a ritual boundary worn down by centuries of footsteps.
He felt drawn forward.
He set the sandal at the circle’s edge.
Then, from beneath the chamber, he heard it:
The bell.
Slow. Echoing.
And rising from the floor, a faint outline of a door. A hidden passage.
His heart raced.
The Eye was opening the final gate.
Part 5
The hidden door was circular—etched faintly into the stone like a scar beneath the tapestry’s absence. At its center was the Eye symbol, worn smooth with time. As Ayaan approached, his lantern flickered violently, casting his shadow against the walls in grotesque shapes.
He reached out, hesitating only for a moment before pressing his palm against the Eye. A deep rumble resonated through the chamber, and slowly, the stone receded inward, revealing a narrow spiral staircase chiseled directly into the rock. Cold air, thick with the scent of old incense and something more pungent—earth, decay—rose up to meet him.
With only the Codex and his lantern, Ayaan descended.
Each step seemed to pull him deeper into silence. The chanting from his dreams now echoed in the stone. He didn’t understand the words, but his body responded—goosebumps, shivering, a strange tightness in his chest. The spiral path finally gave way to a vast underground chamber.
At its center stood a circular platform, surrounded by tall brass prayer wheels—unmoving. Strange diagrams were painted on the floor: mandalas twisted into spirals, petals forming eyes, eyes forming petals. The architecture was older than the monastery above—cruder, darker. This had been built not for prayer, but containment.
The Eye was here.
He didn’t see it at first, but he felt it—a low hum behind his ribcage, an ancient presence observing him without light or sound. His lantern cast strange halos on the walls, where crude paintings depicted men with lotus flowers blooming from their faces. One mural showed a monk kneeling before an enormous eye suspended in darkness, threads connecting it to the monk’s heart.
Ayaan stepped into the center. He unwrapped the Codex, opened it to the final passage, and read aloud the invocation etched in crimson ink.
The floor vibrated.
The brass prayer wheels began to spin—slowly at first, then faster, though no wind stirred. The chanting returned, louder now, echoing around the walls though no one else was present. The light from the lantern dimmed as a new source of illumination emerged.
From the center of the platform, a dim glow rose like mist. It formed an orb, flickering like flame, and within it—a slit.
Vertical.
Unblinking.
The Eye.
Ayaan couldn’t move. His mind screamed for flight, but his legs had already sunk into a trance. The Eye pulsed with awareness. It saw everything—his thoughts, his memories, his fear. A thousand images flashed through him: Dorje in ritual robes, Lobsang crying in the bell tower, Tenzin chanting alone before the tapestry.
Then he felt it enter.
A sudden jolt in his spine, a heat flooding through his skull. He screamed, but no sound came out. The Eye wasn’t just watching—it was merging.
He collapsed to his knees.
From the darkness, a voice echoed—not external, but within.
“You have returned the vessel.”
A vision flooded his mind: Padma Dorje, centuries ago, performing the first summoning. He had not sought enlightenment. He had sought presence. A bridge between realms. But when the Eye entered him, it brought madness. Death. And he had been sealed below by the terrified monks.
Until now.
“You opened the seal,” the voice whispered. “You are the next vessel.”
Ayaan staggered back. “No… I’m not…”
But it was already inside.
He looked at his hands—they were shaking uncontrollably. His reflection in the brass wheels shimmered and warped. For a moment, he saw his own face flicker—and then something else behind his eyes. Watching.
The floor beneath him cracked faintly. From the edge of the platform, tendrils of black mist curled up like vines seeking warmth. The Eye was anchoring itself. Claiming the chamber. Claiming him.
He had to stop it.
He remembered the Codex’s final line: “To escape it, you must return what you’ve taken.”
But what had he taken?
He fumbled through the book again, searching for anything he missed. Then he saw it—a footnote in the margins, nearly illegible.
“The Eye seeks a vessel only when unanchored. Destroy the tether, and it returns to dream.”
The tether.
The chamber.
The platform.
It wasn’t just a shrine—it was a gateway. A summoning circle. He had to break it.
Without thinking, he stood and kicked over one of the spinning prayer wheels. It clattered across the stone, halting the chanting for a split second. The Eye’s glow flared, angry now. Pain lanced through his skull.
He kicked another. And another.
Each one disrupted the circle’s rhythm, and the chamber trembled.
“You cannot escape,” the voice thundered. “You brought us forth. We are you now.”
“No,” Ayaan gasped. “You were never me.”
He grabbed the lantern and hurled it at the central altar. Flames erupted, consuming the brittle wood and old cloth offerings. The heat licked the symbols. The platform cracked deeper.
The Eye screamed—not in sound, but in his mind. A psychic howl of fury and loss.
The glow flickered, throbbed… then dimmed.
The mist recoiled.
The Eye began to collapse in on itself, curling into a single point of light—then vanishing like breath in winter.
Silence.
Darkness.
Ayaan collapsed.
When he awoke, it was morning. Sunlight filtered in through a jagged opening in the ceiling. The platform was broken. The chamber was still. No Eye. No chant.
Just stone. Dust. And the faint smell of burnt incense.
He climbed back up, each step heavier than the last.
Outside, the monastery was quiet. Empty. The monks were gone.
At the gate, Lama Tenzin waited—alone.
“You severed it,” he said.
Ayaan nodded, too exhausted to speak.
“The Eye sleeps. For now.”
And then, for the first time, Tenzin smiled. Not with peace, but with relief.
“You were never meant to find it,” he said. “But perhaps… you were meant to end it.”
Ayaan said nothing.
He turned away from the monastery, the mountains, the eye-shaped scars in his memory, and began the long journey down.
But deep within, he felt a faint hum.
As if something was waiting.
Not in the world.
But in him.
Part 6
Ayaan Mukherjee returned to Kolkata a changed man. He no longer flinched at shadows or jumped at dreams. But he also no longer slept without waking drenched in sweat, heart pounding, breath ragged. The Eye was gone—but the silence it left behind echoed louder.
He resumed his lectures, surrounded by students eager to learn about Himalayan anthropology, ancient Buddhist rituals, and forgotten texts. Yet every word he spoke now felt like a whisper against the roar of what he had seen. What he had been.
One afternoon, while reorganizing his study, he found the Codex. Charred around the edges, pages fragile and blackened from the fire he’d set in the chamber. He had thought it destroyed, but here it was—intact. Waiting.
He locked it away again.
Weeks passed. The city thrummed with its usual rhythm—trams clanking through north Kolkata, the smell of fried telebhaja in the alleys, and the evening chants from Kalighat temple in the distance.
Then one day, a letter arrived.
Unmarked envelope. No return address. Inside—two items.
A photograph and a note.
The photograph showed a monastery. Not the one in Darjeeling, but similar in design. Older. Weathered. Its stone walls partially collapsed. In the center courtyard: a familiar symbol faintly etched into the ground.
The Eye within the Lotus.
The note was hand-written in tight, urgent script:
“It’s not over. They’re waking others.”
No name. No location. But the photo had a faint watermark in the bottom corner: Bagdogra Archives, District Records Office.
Ayaan stared at it for hours.
Could there be more? Other monasteries—other gateways?
He remembered the words Tenzin had whispered at the gate: “The Eye sleeps. For now.”
But what if it was waking elsewhere?
He traveled to Bagdogra the next day. The records office was tucked behind the local administrative building—a dusty archive filled with fading documents and disinterested clerks. After some coaxing and a modest bribe, one attendant pointed him toward a stack of historical land survey files.
Hours later, buried between reports from the 1920s, he found it: a monastery located near the Nepal-Sikkim border. Abandoned after a landslide in 1893. Rumored to have been cursed. Locals spoke of strange sounds and “fire beneath the ground.”
Ayaan packed his bag that evening. Lantern. Notebooks. Camera.
And, reluctantly, the Codex.
The journey was rough. The path led through dense forests and precarious cliffs. Villagers along the way refused to speak of the ruins. One old man simply muttered, “They walk again,” and turned away.
By the third day, Ayaan stood before the monastery from the photo.
Vines coiled around its broken pillars. The stone was cracked, worn by time and neglect. But in the center of the courtyard, barely visible beneath the moss and dust, was the symbol.
Not an engraving. A burn mark.
The Eye had been here too.
He set up camp inside what remained of the main hall. The air was thick, metallic. That night, he slept fitfully—and dreamt.
The bell tower from the Darjeeling monastery stood before him again, shrouded in fog. Lobsang was there, holding the Codex.
“You stopped it,” Lobsang said. “But not them.”
“Who?”
“The seekers. The ones who want to bring it back. You sealed the gate. But now, they are building new doors.”
Then the monk’s eyes bled, and the dream fractured into black.
Ayaan awoke at dawn, gasping. The Codex lay beside him, opened to a new page he hadn’t seen before.
A diagram.
Not a summoning, but a banishment. Marked with the phrase: Only through memory can the Eye be unmade.
Memory.
Was that why it still stirred within him?
He stepped into the courtyard, knelt at the burn mark, and began to trace the symbol from the Codex with chalk. He muttered the counter-chant, syllables foreign and raw in his throat.
The wind picked up.
Dust swirled.
For a moment, he felt the same hum—the Eye’s signature vibration.
And then, silence.
Real silence.
The Eye did not appear.
Ayaan sat for hours, unmoving. And when he finally stood, something felt different.
Lighter.
That night, no dreams came.
The next morning, he left the ruins behind.
But he knew now—this was only one. There might be others. Other seekers. Other watchers.
He returned to Kolkata not to forget—but to prepare.
The Eye had shown him the truth: there were thresholds between this world and something far older. And knowledge, once unlocked, had a price.
So he began writing—not for fame, not for publication.
But for the next person who might see the Eye and not turn away.
The manuscript was titled:
The Whispering Monastery: A Chronicle of Seeing
In the final chapter, he wrote:
“To see is to open. To remember is to resist. And if you are reading this—perhaps you are already marked.”
Part 7
Six months had passed since Ayaan published The Whispering Monastery: A Chronicle of Seeing. He’d printed only twenty copies, privately distributed among trusted academics and monastery archivists across the world. No mainstream journal would touch it—too speculative, too metaphysical—but that suited him. He wasn’t trying to convince the world.
He was trying to warn it.
Then one rainy afternoon, a letter arrived—postmarked Vienna.
Inside was a formal invitation from Dr. Elsa Schneider, Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of Vienna and an expert in esoteric Buddhist practices. She had read Ayaan’s manuscript. More intriguingly, she claimed to have found references to “the Eye within the Lotus” in 15th-century Thangka paintings housed in a private Austrian collection.
The letter ended with a handwritten note:
“If the Eye is older than the Himalayas, it did not begin in Darjeeling. We must trace it further back. Before it wakes again.”
Ayaan was on a flight three days later.
He arrived in Vienna in early spring. The air was crisp, the sky a pale gray canvas. Dr. Schneider met him at the university’s antiquities archive—an elegant, high-ceilinged room lined with glass cases and ancient scrolls. She was tall, silver-haired, with sharp eyes that looked like they’d seen more than books.
“I didn’t think anyone else would take the Eye seriously,” she said, shaking his hand. “Your chronicle filled in gaps I’ve been mapping for years.”
She led him to a locked case in the back. Inside: three scrolls and a worn leather-bound diary.
“These belonged to Johann Meinhardt,” she explained, “an Austrian explorer who traveled through Ladakh and Tibet in 1887. His journal describes a cult of monks who worshipped ‘a sleeping watcher with a gaze that bled fire.’”
She opened the diary and pointed to a sketch.
It was unmistakable—the Eye within the Lotus.
“He called it Das Sehen, ‘The Seeing.’ He wrote that the monks claimed the Eye had once been awakened in the West, long before it reached Asia.”
Ayaan frowned. “You’re saying it migrated?”
“I’m saying it was carried,” she said. “By men who thought they were gaining power. Who didn’t realize they were vessels.”
They spent hours poring over the journal, decoding symbols, comparing rituals. A pattern emerged: the Eye’s presence tracked with historical collapses—plagues, wars, mass delusions. Always dormant for centuries. Always returning in cycles.
Then Elsa pulled out one final document.
An undated parchment—possibly medieval—written in Latin. At the center was an unfamiliar symbol: a double Eye, crossed by a line of fire. Underneath, three words:
“Custodes Ultimae Portae.”
“The Keepers of the Final Gate,” Elsa translated.
A secret order? A sect that had once fought the Eye?
If so, they had vanished.
Or… been erased.
Later that night, as Ayaan returned to his guest flat, he felt that familiar weight in his chest. The air shimmered slightly. His reflection in the window paused before he did.
Back in the apartment, he pulled out the Codex again.
And froze.
There was a new passage at the bottom of the final page.
Words that had not been there before.
“You left the door open.”
His breath caught.
He turned slowly to the dark window.
For a split second, in the reflection—he wasn’t alone.
Something stood behind him.
And it had no face.
Part 8
Ayaan didn’t turn around.
He couldn’t.
His reflection was still. The figure behind him—a shadow with a vague outline of a head, shoulders, arms—was closer now. The absence of a face made it worse. It wasn’t hiding. It simply didn’t need one.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
“Go away,” he whispered.
A cold gust of wind rattled the window panes, though nothing outside stirred. When he dared to open his eyes again, the figure was gone.
But the Codex remained open.
The ink of the new line still glistened, as if freshly written:
“You left the door open.”
He grabbed a pen, scribbled beneath it: What door? Where?
Seconds passed.
Then, slowly, new letters bloomed beneath his own:
The last. The first. The one you carry.
He stared, heart hammering.
It wasn’t a metaphor.
The Eye wasn’t bound to a place—it was bound to people. To those who saw it. Those who remembered it.
Like him.
The Eye had marked him not just as a vessel.
But as a gate.
Elsa arrived the next morning, concerned. “You look like you didn’t sleep.”
“I didn’t,” he replied. “Elsa… what if the Eye never truly leaves? What if it… lingers inside those who’ve been near it?”
She blinked, then slowly nodded. “I’ve seen this before. Survivors of certain rituals… they change. Some go blind. Others disappear entirely. A few become prophets of things they don’t understand.”
Ayaan said nothing.
He simply unwrapped the Codex and showed her the new text.
Elsa leaned in, jaw tightening. “That’s impossible.”
“I didn’t write it.”
They both stared at the page.
Finally, she whispered, “We need to find the Custodes Ultimae Portae. If they were the last to fight the Eye, maybe they knew how to contain it.”
Together, they followed the only lead the Latin scroll gave them: an address.
Not in Austria.
But in Rome.
A dilapidated villa on the edge of Vatican territory. Once owned by a Cardinal Alonzo Bellini—excommunicated in 1701 for heresy and “communing with false angels.”
Two days later, Ayaan and Elsa stood before the villa’s rusted gate. Ivy crawled up its sides. No one had lived there for decades.
Inside, the air was thick with mildew and secrets.
The walls were lined with frescoes—angels with their eyes scratched out, saints bleeding from empty sockets, and at the center of it all: a symbol.
Not just the Eye within the Lotus.
But the double Eye—the one Meinhardt had drawn in his journal. The mark of the Final Gate.
They moved deeper into the house, following faded Latin inscriptions along the walls. One read:
“He who opens must also seal.”
Another:
“Memory is the altar. Forgetting is the flame.”
They descended into the cellar, where a thick wooden door lay partially open. Inside, they found a chamber not unlike the one beneath the Darjeeling monastery. Simple. Circular. Stone.
And at its center: a pedestal.
Upon it lay a mask.
Simple. Black. Smooth.
Elsa approached first. “I’ve seen drawings of these. The Keepers wore them during containment rituals. They believed that by hiding their own identity, they prevented the Eye from knowing them.”
Ayaan stepped forward.
As he did, the Codex trembled in his bag.
He opened it.
A new line had appeared:
Wear it. Remember nothing. Or remember all and become it.
He picked up the mask.
It was warm to the touch.
Almost… alive.
His hands shook. “What if this is a trap?”
Elsa looked at him, eyes unwavering. “Then walk away.”
But he couldn’t. He knew he couldn’t.
He put on the mask.
For a moment, nothing.
Then—
The cellar vanished.
He was in the chamber beneath Darjeeling again, but not as he had known it. This time, it was whole. Alive. Filled with monks in crimson robes, chanting in unison. At the center, Padma Dorje knelt before the Eye. Not the glowing orb—but something darker. A crack in reality, pulsing like a wound in space.
A figure stood beside him.
Masked. Silent.
A Keeper.
The vision shifted. Another monastery. Another gate. Another sacrifice.
Then another.
A dozen.
A hundred.
And always—one masked figure watching.
Remembering.
Containing.
You are the last, a voice whispered.
And then Ayaan fell.
Back into himself.
The mask dropped from his hands.
Elsa caught him.
“You were gone for ten seconds,” she said. “But your eyes—they turned black.”
Ayaan sat up, gasping.
“I saw everything,” he whispered. “The Eye spreads through memory. Through those who see. The Keepers… they were the memory’s prison.”
Elsa looked pale. “Then we need new prisons.”
“No,” Ayaan said. “We need a cure.”
Elsa raised an eyebrow. “A cure for memory?”
He stood.
“No. A cure for seeing.”
Part 9
Ayaan couldn’t shake the vision.
The chambers. The masks. The monks. A line of watchers across centuries, all faceless, nameless—sacrificed not by death, but by the obliteration of identity. The Keepers had not merely fought the Eye.
They had refused to remember it.
They had made their minds into vaults—and sealed them shut.
Back in the dusty villa in Rome, Elsa was running her fingers over the worn mask on the pedestal. “You said the Keepers were prisons of memory,” she murmured. “But even prisons have cracks.”
Ayaan nodded. “The Eye doesn’t need blood. It needs awareness. It feeds on remembrance.”
Elsa turned to him. “So your book… your manuscript…”
“May have been the Eye’s megaphone,” he whispered.
They stood in silence.
Ayaan walked to the far wall, where another fresco had begun to crumble. Beneath the flaking paint, he found a Latin inscription etched into the plaster:
“Solum per oblivionem clauditur.”
Only through forgetting can it be closed.
He turned to Elsa. “We need to shut the door. And to do that… I have to forget.”
Elsa’s eyes widened. “You want to erase your own memory?”
“Yes. Not just mine. All memory of the Eye. Of the Codex. Of the gates. The more it is remembered, the more it spreads.”
“But you’ve written it down—shared it with others. It’s already out there.”
“That’s why I have to go back. To where it began. The Codex was the first door.”
Elsa stared at him. “And if you destroy it?”
“Then maybe… the chain ends with me.”
Back in Kolkata, Ayaan moved quickly.
He contacted every recipient of the manuscript. Claimed it was a hoax. Asked them to return or destroy it. Some believed him. Others didn’t. He didn’t care. He just had to break the chain.
Then, on a monsoon-swept evening, he boarded a train north again—for the last time.
To Darjeeling.
To the monastery.
This time, it wasn’t Lama Tenzin who greeted him.
It was Lobsang.
Alive.
Or something like him.
His eyes were different. Darker. His smile carried no warmth.
“You came back,” he said, voice softer than mist.
Ayaan didn’t speak. He walked past him and entered the silent courtyard. The planks over the sealed chamber had been replaced. He pried them away with bare hands.
The stairway below was dry. Cold.
Waiting.
The chamber was empty now. The altar gone. No Eye.
Only the circle.
The place where it had been.
He took out the Codex. Its pages whispered as he opened them.
They were blank.
Every one.
No Eye. No chant. No diagram.
Just an empty book.
Still, it hummed in his hands. As if it remembered everything he was trying to forget.
Elsa had given him the tool. A simple one. A tincture developed by monks in the Himalayas—a memory-erasure ritual combined with rare herbs, used in cases of spiritual possession. It was unstable. Dangerous.
But it might work.
He lit a fire in the center of the chamber. Dropped the Codex in. Watched it curl and blacken. The flame turned blue. Then white.
He drank the tincture.
It burned.
He lay down inside the circle. The chalk lines still faintly visible beneath his body.
And he whispered, one last time: “Forget me. Forget it all.”
The flames rose.
His eyes shut.
He awoke in a clinic in Siliguri. A nurse was speaking in Nepali. He didn’t understand.
She tried again, this time in English. “Sir, you had an episode. The police found you near a monastery ruin. No ID. You’ve been unconscious for two days.”
He blinked. “What monastery?”
She smiled. “You don’t remember?”
He didn’t.
Not the name. Not the place. Not even why he had come.
They found no belongings on him. No bag. No journal. Only a burnt leather cover—blank. Meaningless.
He was released after a few days, disoriented but stable. A kind social worker helped him get a train ticket back to Kolkata.
No one met him there.
No one knew him.
He started fresh. A new name. A quiet life.
And no dreams.
No whispering.
No Eye.
But in a dusty antique store near Vienna, Elsa Schneider was organizing her files. A small black mask lay in the corner of her desk, half-forgotten.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then at her shelf—where a copy of The Whispering Monastery still sat.
She picked it up.
The cover had begun to fade. The ink on the title page was flaking.
She flipped through it slowly.
All blank.
Her hands trembled.
Then, on the final page—
One line, in her own handwriting:
“If you are reading this, you have seen.”
She stared at it for a long time.
Then, quietly, she walked to the fireplace.
And fed the book to the flames.
Part 10
The book was gone. The Codex, the manuscript, even the monastery — lost to ash and time. And yet, in a forgotten corner of Vienna, as the last page of The Whispering Monastery turned to flame, a whisper passed through the silence.
Elsa Schneider stared into the fireplace, her heart still, her breath slow. The mask lay untouched on her desk. No movement. No hum. Just the creak of old wood and the soft hiss of paper burning.
She should have felt peace.
But she didn’t.
Something inside her pulsed—faint, rhythmic, like an echo of a heartbeat that wasn’t hers. A pattern she couldn’t place. Not fear, exactly.
Recognition.
Later that night, Elsa sat in her study, sipping herbal tea and reviewing student essays. She was halfway through a dissertation on Tibetan cosmology when her laptop glitched. The screen flickered once.
Then again.
Her document closed itself.
The desktop flashed.
A single file appeared:
THE EYE
Her hands went cold. She hadn’t downloaded anything. She reached for the keyboard to delete it—but the cursor moved on its own. Clicked the file.
A white screen.
Then black.
Then words, typed in real time:
“You burned the book. But the story was told. A story told is a story seeded.”
She slammed the laptop shut.
Breath shallow. Chest tight.
She turned to the mask on her desk.
And froze.
It was no longer smooth.
Tiny cracks now ran across its surface—like a spiderweb. From within, something gleamed.
She picked it up with trembling hands.
Held it to her face.
And for a moment—only a moment—she heard it.
A voice.
Familiar.
Ayaan’s.
“If you see it… close your eyes.”
She dropped the mask. It clattered to the floor and split in two. From its hollow center, a thin trickle of ash poured out—followed by a whisper.
Not from outside.
But from within her.
She didn’t sleep that night.
And in the morning, she couldn’t remember why.
Meanwhile, in Kolkata, a man named Arjun Mehta wandered the alleys of North Park Street with no memory of his past. He had flashes—smoke, cold stone, distant chanting—but nothing solid. He had been found outside a monastery in Siliguri six weeks ago. The nuns said he had stared at the mountain for two full days, unmoving.
He found work in a bookstore. Read obsessively. Sometimes, strange phrases came to him while shelving ancient texts. Words in languages he didn’t know he knew.
One afternoon, while organizing the antiquities shelf, he discovered a small parcel addressed to someone named “A. Mukherjee.” No return address.
Curious, he opened it.
Inside was a page—aged, brittle.
Blank.
Until he blinked.
Then faint lines emerged.
Faint at first… then darker.
A symbol.
The Eye within the Lotus.
Arjun stepped back, dizzy.
His head filled with a low hum.
In the distance, a bell rang—though there were no temples nearby.
He looked around.
And for a heartbeat, in the reflection of the glass door, he saw someone else standing where he stood.
Not a stranger.
Himself.
But older.
Tired.
Marked.
The moment passed.
He closed the parcel, sealed it again, and tucked it into a drawer.
He told no one.
But that night, when he slept, he dreamed of a monastery carved into the side of a mountain.
And a circle drawn in ash.
Across the world, stories began to emerge.
A girl in Bhutan woke up speaking ancient Tibetan chants.
A monk in Ladakh painted an Eye on the floor of his temple, then vanished.
A radio transmission in Nepal repeated the phrase “Remembering is the wound” every full moon at 3:33 AM.
In each case—no origin. No explanation.
Just silence.
Then a whisper.
Then forgetting.
Back in Darjeeling, the ruins of the monastery remain sealed.
Children from nearby villages say they sometimes hear music from under the earth—low, rhythmic, like monks chanting in a dream.
No one dares enter.
Except once a year, on the last night of winter, when the sky is clear and the wind stands still, an old man in a red scarf climbs the hill alone.
He never speaks.
He never stays.
He only stands at the edge of the ruin, closes his eyes, and listens.
And as he turns to leave, he always says the same thing:
“Not today.”
Then walks away.
Into the fog.
Into silence.
And behind him, if one listens closely—
The faint sound of an Eye closing.
THE END
