The rain had stopped hours ago, but the sound of dripping water still echoed inside the house like a heartbeat that refused to die. Aarav stood in the middle of the hallway, the air thick with the smell of rotting wood and something metallic — like rust, or blood. His torchlight flickered weakly against the damp walls, revealing shadows that seemed to move slower than they should.
He hadn't seen Aisha since she opened that door in the last room — the one that whispered her name. She had vanished into the dark before he could stop her. Only her voice remained, faint and disoriented, like it was being dragged through water.
"Aarav… don't look for me."
But he had to. Because every time he closed his eyes, he saw her reflection in the broken mirror — and behind her, a figure that didn't belong to either of them.
The deeper he went, the more the house changed. The staircase bent upward in impossible angles. The wallpaper peeled away, revealing words carved beneath it:
"We remember what the living forget."
Aarav ran his fingers over the letters. The grooves were wet. Fresh.
He turned, hearing whispers behind him. They were soft at first, almost gentle. Then they layered — hundreds of them, whispering at once, overlapping, choking each other.
"Who are you?" he shouted, his voice cracking.
But the answer came in the same tone as his own — his voice, spoken back to him:
"Who were you?"
He froze. His own reflection stared back from the darkened glass of a framed painting. Only, this reflection smiled.
Then the lights went out.
The house began to hum — a low, vibrating sound that made his teeth ache. Aarav dropped the flashlight and stumbled backward, tripping over a loose floorboard. Beneath it was a hollow space, and from that hollow came a voice he knew too well — his mother's, calm and trembling all at once.
"Don't listen to them, beta. They only want what you promised."
Aarav's chest tightened. "Promised? I— I don't remember—"
The voice cut him off with a laugh that broke mid-sound, glitching like static.
"Exactly."
The wall behind him split open — not cracked, but peeled, like skin. Behind it was darkness that pulsed, and within that darkness, faint outlines of people, hundreds of them, whispering his name. He saw faces — not strangers, but ones from his memories: his friends, his father, Aisha, and even the reflection that wasn't him.
Every whisper merged into a single, unified sentence.
"You were the one who built the Abyss."
Aarav stumbled back, screaming. His flashlight rolled across the floor, and the beam landed on something in the corner — a chair, with a typewriter on it. The typewriter was still typing, even though no one sat there. The ribbon was soaked in red.
He approached it slowly. On the page, one line kept repeating:
"The author never leaves his story."
Then the typewriter stopped. A key clicked one last time, and a drop of ink — or blood — smeared the word author.
Suddenly, Aisha's voice returned — distant, hollow, as if she was speaking from the other side of the page.
"Do you see now, Aarav? We're not in the house. We're in the book."
The hallway began to fold inward. The ceiling melted into the floor, and the walls curled like paper burning from the edges. Aarav ran, but the corridor stretched endlessly, twisting and breathing, each door opening to another version of himself — crying, writing, laughing, dying.
Then — silence.
He fell to his knees. The typewriter was gone. The paper floated down in front of him, blank — except for one single line appearing in real-time, written by invisible hands:
"Chapter 31 — The Voices Remember."
Aarav whispered shakily, "That's this chapter… isn't it?"
A faint chuckle came from nowhere and everywhere at once — the same voice that had written his fate since the beginning.
"Exactly. You're catching on."
And then, before the last flicker of light went out, he saw one last thing written beneath the title:
"Chapter 32 — The Living Don't Write Back."