I applied as a housesitter, I think I lived here The…
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I applied as a housesitter, I think I lived here
The gravel of the driveway crunched beneath my worn out flats, a sharp, metallic sound that felt entirely too loud in the dead quiet of the Western Ghats. Before me stood the house - a striking modern monolith of exposed concrete and glass, nestled aggressively against the misty, forested hillside of Lonavala. It was beautiful no doubt. just perfect. As I approached I couldn't help but notice how exact the perfection was. It lacked the soft, chaotic warmth of a real Indian home. There were no fallen leaves despite the extreme foliage, no stray shoes by the door, no smell of flowers. Too pristine and perfect...just what I needed for a break.
I was here because of a listing on a private Facebook group…I think... I don’t exactly remember. The owner, a woman named Maya, was looking for a long-term house sitter. I was desperate to escape the suffocating routine of my life in Mumbai - the relentless, soul-crushing corporate job, the aunts constantly asking when I’d finally "settle down" since I was nearing thirty, and a fiancé chosen more by my family's astrological charts than by me. I had applied instantly hoping it would be one of those strange richie- rich South Bombay people thing. The pay was really good, way more than what my job paid me. Who knows if Maya liked me enough, it may become a full time gig? I desperately prayed for that.
The heavy teak front door swung open before I could even reach for the calling bell.
Maya stood in the entryway. She was elegant, perhaps a few years older than me, wearing a crisp, raw silk tunic that looked expensive but effortless. She smiled, but her eyes remained intensely focused, tracking my movements with a strange curiosity.
"You're right on time, dear. Come in," Maya said. Her voice had a peculiar cadence, a rhythmic, hypnotic rise and fall that made my head feel instantly heavy.
As I stepped over the threshold, a wave of vertigo hit me. The interior layout was breathtaking, yet deeply unsettling. It felt like walking through a memory that wasn't mine. This house looked like my Pinterest board brought to life.
"Let me show you around," Maya whispered, walking ahead.
We moved through the kitchen. Polished black granite, state-of-the-art Italian appliances, completely devoid of clutter. "I built this place to be a sanctuary," Maya explained, running a manicured finger along the counter. "A place where no one demands anything of you. No husbands to serve, no in-laws to please, no bosses demanding PPTs at midnight. No one asking when you're going to give them a grandson." She laughed.
I swallowed hard. How did she know about my future mother-in-law’s subtle hints? I hadn't mentioned that to anyone.
"It's perfect," I muttered, a cold shiver running down my spine.
*Beeep*… a strange noise shook me. I looked around, must be some alarm system.
We walked up the floating wooden staircase. Maya opened the door to the master bedroom. It was dominated by a massive, floating bed facing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that looked out into the dark, rain-soaked woods.
"Go ahead," Maya urged softly, gesturing toward the room. "This is your room.”
You know how strange and awkward it feels when you fantasize about something for so long and it just manifests out of the blue? Like meeting your favourite actor or someone buying you that pure silk kurta you’ve always wanted. This room was everything in my moodboard in reality. That wasn't the problem though...it seemed exactly like a collage of the pieces I had liked over time.
I stepped inside, my feet sinking into the plush Kashmiri rug. I walked over to the carved wooden vanity. On the smooth surface sat a silver hairbrush, a bottle of jasmine perfume, and a small, silver-framed photograph. I leaned closer to look at it.
My breath hitched. It was a picture of me. Not Maya. Me. I looked at the other stuff, the silver hairbrush – mine gifted by my grandma, the perfume – my mom’s.
I took a closer look at the photograph. I was sitting on a cliff in Goa, laughing, hair wild in the wind, looking younger and vastly happier than I felt now. It was a trip I had secretly planned years ago but canceled because my father said it wasn't safe for unmarried girls to travel alone.
"What is this?" I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. I spun around to face Maya, but she wasn't standing by the door anymore.
She was standing right behind me. Too close. I couldn't hear her breathing. In fact, I couldn't hear the rain outside anymore either. The entire world had gone unnaturally, suffocatingly quiet.
*Beeeeep*… there it was again…that strange persistent beeping.
"Don't you recognize it?" Maya asked. Her voice didn't come from her mouth; it echoed directly inside my skull, vibrating against my teeth. "You designed this house. You chose this isolated hill. You wanted to be far away from everyone who expected you to be a good daughter, a submissive wife, a dutiful daughter-in-law."
I stumbled backward, knocking the silver brush off the vanity. It didn't make a thud when it hit the floor.
Instead, a sharp, electronic sound pierced the silence.
Beep.
It was high-pitched, metallic, and completely out of place in this luxury villa. I blinked, and the floorboards beneath the vanity seemed to stretch away from me, the geometry of the bedroom distorting into an impossible, elongated corridor.
"No, I don't know you! This is your house!" I stammered, tears stinging my eyes.
*Beep*.
The sound was louder now, carrying a heavy, rhythmic weight that pulsed in the back of my eyes. I looked toward the large glass wall, seeking the comfort of the Lonavala woods, but the reflection didn't show the bedroom anymore. The glass had turned into a terrifying, transparent window looking down from a ceiling.
It showed a hospital setting. A stark, white ICU room. Beneath the glass, a mangled body lay hooked to a dozen tubes. I recognized the faded birthmark on the right wrist. It was me.
**Beep**.
The sound wasn't just in the room; it was syncing with the frantic thumping of my own heart. A heavy, mechanical hiss - the sound of a machine forcing air into failing lungs - bled through the concrete walls.
"Look at me, Sakshi," Maya said.
I turned, paralyzed. Maya’s elegant silk tunic began to fuse with her skin. Her features melted like warm wax, bubbling and shifting until I was looking at a perfect duplicate of myself. But her jaw opened just a fraction too wide, and behind her eyes, there was nothing but a crushing, absolute void.
***Beep****. Beep. Beep...*
"There is no Maya," the thing that wore my face whispered, its jaw clicking mechanically. "You are Sakshi - the witness, trapped in the reality of your breaking bones. I am Maya - the grand illusion, the perfect dream you built to escape it. There is only the life you wanted. The life you built in the dark."
The concrete walls of the house began to bleed. Thick, black, tar-like fluid seeped from the joints of the modern architecture, smelling faintly of burning rubber and ozone.
The floor beneath my feet softened, turning into a wet, yielding membrane that felt less like hardwood and more like the flesh of a living throat.
*Beep. Beep. Beep.Beep. Beep. Beep...*
The intervals between the sounds were stretching, growing wider, more agonizing. Each mechanical tone felt like a physical blow to my chest, a violent reminder of a reality I was running from.
I tried to scream, to run for the door, but the air had turned to syrup. Dark, formless silhouettes - shadows with no faces, wearing the traditional clothes of my aunts and elders—began to rise from the corners of the ceiling, their elongated fingers reaching down toward me. They whispered a chaotic symphony of demands: *When are you getting married? Why aren't you listening? Be a good girl. Be quiet. Die...*
"The crash on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway was two weeks ago, Sakshi," the entity wearing my face said, sitting down beside me on a bed that was rapidly transforming into a blood-stained ICU cot. "Your fiancé was driving. You were arguing about the gold jewelry for the wedding. You looked away for one second."
**Beeep**.
Images flashed in my mind, violently ripped from my consciousness - shattering glass, the blinding glare of a truck's high beams, the suffocating grip of the seatbelt, and then, a profound, terrifying freedom as the car spun out into the gorge.
"Your body is a broken shell under white sheets in the hospital," the alternate Sakshi whispered, her cold, dead fingers wrapping around my wrist. Her touch felt like ice, burning into my skin. "Your family is reciting prayers, begging you to wake up so you can marry the man you don't love and live the life they scripted for you. But this house... this house is an apex predator. It feeds on the desperate. It feeds on women like us who want to disappear."
The entity leaned in, its breath smelling of stagnant water and old earth. "If you wake up, you go back to the cage. If you stay here, the house keeps you. You become the house."
**Beeeeeep**.
The sound was agonizingly slow now. The space between the beeps felt like eternity. I could feel the cold plastic of an oxygen mask ghosting over my face in the real world. I could hear my mother’s voice crying, reciting the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, her grief pulling at my soul like a heavy iron chain.
I looked up at the parasitic spirit wearing my ideal self.
"Stay," it whispered, its hand extending. Its fingers elongated, ending in sharp, gray points. "Don't go back to them."
**Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—**
The sound of the ICU monitor flatlined into a single, continuous, deafening screech. It vibrated so violently that the glass wall shattered into a million floating shards. The shards didn't fall; they suspended in mid-air, reflecting a thousand different angles of my dying face, before dissolving into thick grey fog.
Then, absolute, terrifying silence.
The black fluid snapped back into the walls. The floor hardened into luxury wood. I gasped, sitting up quickly on the plush bed. The morning sun was shining through a perfectly intact glass wall, burning through the Lonavala mist. The hospital room, the shadows, the blood - all gone.
The flatline had stopped. Because my heart had stopped.
I walked downstairs, my heart pounding - no, that wasn't a heartbeat. It was just a hollow echo. I pressed my hand to my chest; there was nothing but a cold, still cavity. A sudden, crushing dread washed over me as the true nature of this "sanctuary" crystallized in my mind.
The house hadn't been a manifestation of my subconscious. It was a trap, a localized, predatory anomaly that lured in the souls who wished so desperately to escape their lives that they practically willed themselves out of existence. I hadn't found a vacancy. I had fulfilled a cycle.
I was no longer Sakshi, the witness watching her own demise. I had become Maya -the permanent, living illusion of the house.
My body began to move on its own, pulled toward the front entrance by a magnetic, supernatural force. I had no control over my limbs. I was merely a passenger in a shell that now belonged to the house.
As the heavy teak front door swung open, the gravel driveway crunched.
A dust-covered sedan was pulling up. The driver's side door opened, and a woman stepped out. She looked exhausted, her shoulders slumped under the invisible weight of a corporate laptop bag, a heavy gold engagement ring glittering mockingly on her finger. She looked up at the house with a mixture of awe and desperation.
I looked down at my own hands. I was wearing the raw silk tunic now. My skin was unnaturally smooth, free of pores, blemishes - completely flawless. Like a porcelain doll.
I looked back at the woman walking up the driveway. The house didn't just feed once; it was a cosmic weigh station, an endless maw waiting to consume every soul that wishes for an alternate reality.
My jaw unhinged slightly on its own, a wide, serene, empty smile stretching across my face. I stepped onto the porch as the tired woman reached for the calling bell.
"You're right on time, dear. Come in," I said. My voice had a peculiar cadence now - a rhythmic, hypnotic rise and fall that made the air grow thick, ready to swallow another soul.
#entertainment
source
The gravel of the driveway crunched beneath my worn out flats, a sharp, metallic sound that felt entirely too loud in the dead quiet of the Western Ghats. Before me stood the house - a striking modern monolith of exposed concrete and glass, nestled aggressively against the misty, forested hillside of Lonavala. It was beautiful no doubt. just perfect. As I approached I couldn't help but notice how exact the perfection was. It lacked the soft, chaotic warmth of a real Indian home. There were no fallen leaves despite the extreme foliage, no stray shoes by the door, no smell of flowers. Too pristine and perfect...just what I needed for a break.
I was here because of a listing on a private Facebook group…I think... I don’t exactly remember. The owner, a woman named Maya, was looking for a long-term house sitter. I was desperate to escape the suffocating routine of my life in Mumbai - the relentless, soul-crushing corporate job, the aunts constantly asking when I’d finally "settle down" since I was nearing thirty, and a fiancé chosen more by my family's astrological charts than by me. I had applied instantly hoping it would be one of those strange richie- rich South Bombay people thing. The pay was really good, way more than what my job paid me. Who knows if Maya liked me enough, it may become a full time gig? I desperately prayed for that.
The heavy teak front door swung open before I could even reach for the calling bell.
Maya stood in the entryway. She was elegant, perhaps a few years older than me, wearing a crisp, raw silk tunic that looked expensive but effortless. She smiled, but her eyes remained intensely focused, tracking my movements with a strange curiosity.
"You're right on time, dear. Come in," Maya said. Her voice had a peculiar cadence, a rhythmic, hypnotic rise and fall that made my head feel instantly heavy.
As I stepped over the threshold, a wave of vertigo hit me. The interior layout was breathtaking, yet deeply unsettling. It felt like walking through a memory that wasn't mine. This house looked like my Pinterest board brought to life.
"Let me show you around," Maya whispered, walking ahead.
We moved through the kitchen. Polished black granite, state-of-the-art Italian appliances, completely devoid of clutter. "I built this place to be a sanctuary," Maya explained, running a manicured finger along the counter. "A place where no one demands anything of you. No husbands to serve, no in-laws to please, no bosses demanding PPTs at midnight. No one asking when you're going to give them a grandson." She laughed.
I swallowed hard. How did she know about my future mother-in-law’s subtle hints? I hadn't mentioned that to anyone.
"It's perfect," I muttered, a cold shiver running down my spine.
*Beeep*… a strange noise shook me. I looked around, must be some alarm system.
We walked up the floating wooden staircase. Maya opened the door to the master bedroom. It was dominated by a massive, floating bed facing a floor-to-ceiling glass wall that looked out into the dark, rain-soaked woods.
"Go ahead," Maya urged softly, gesturing toward the room. "This is your room.”
You know how strange and awkward it feels when you fantasize about something for so long and it just manifests out of the blue? Like meeting your favourite actor or someone buying you that pure silk kurta you’ve always wanted. This room was everything in my moodboard in reality. That wasn't the problem though...it seemed exactly like a collage of the pieces I had liked over time.
I stepped inside, my feet sinking into the plush Kashmiri rug. I walked over to the carved wooden vanity. On the smooth surface sat a silver hairbrush, a bottle of jasmine perfume, and a small, silver-framed photograph. I leaned closer to look at it.
My breath hitched. It was a picture of me. Not Maya. Me. I looked at the other stuff, the silver hairbrush – mine gifted by my grandma, the perfume – my mom’s.
I took a closer look at the photograph. I was sitting on a cliff in Goa, laughing, hair wild in the wind, looking younger and vastly happier than I felt now. It was a trip I had secretly planned years ago but canceled because my father said it wasn't safe for unmarried girls to travel alone.
"What is this?" I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. I spun around to face Maya, but she wasn't standing by the door anymore.
She was standing right behind me. Too close. I couldn't hear her breathing. In fact, I couldn't hear the rain outside anymore either. The entire world had gone unnaturally, suffocatingly quiet.
*Beeeeep*… there it was again…that strange persistent beeping.
"Don't you recognize it?" Maya asked. Her voice didn't come from her mouth; it echoed directly inside my skull, vibrating against my teeth. "You designed this house. You chose this isolated hill. You wanted to be far away from everyone who expected you to be a good daughter, a submissive wife, a dutiful daughter-in-law."
I stumbled backward, knocking the silver brush off the vanity. It didn't make a thud when it hit the floor.
Instead, a sharp, electronic sound pierced the silence.
Beep.
It was high-pitched, metallic, and completely out of place in this luxury villa. I blinked, and the floorboards beneath the vanity seemed to stretch away from me, the geometry of the bedroom distorting into an impossible, elongated corridor.
"No, I don't know you! This is your house!" I stammered, tears stinging my eyes.
*Beep*.
The sound was louder now, carrying a heavy, rhythmic weight that pulsed in the back of my eyes. I looked toward the large glass wall, seeking the comfort of the Lonavala woods, but the reflection didn't show the bedroom anymore. The glass had turned into a terrifying, transparent window looking down from a ceiling.
It showed a hospital setting. A stark, white ICU room. Beneath the glass, a mangled body lay hooked to a dozen tubes. I recognized the faded birthmark on the right wrist. It was me.
**Beep**.
The sound wasn't just in the room; it was syncing with the frantic thumping of my own heart. A heavy, mechanical hiss - the sound of a machine forcing air into failing lungs - bled through the concrete walls.
"Look at me, Sakshi," Maya said.
I turned, paralyzed. Maya’s elegant silk tunic began to fuse with her skin. Her features melted like warm wax, bubbling and shifting until I was looking at a perfect duplicate of myself. But her jaw opened just a fraction too wide, and behind her eyes, there was nothing but a crushing, absolute void.
***Beep****. Beep. Beep...*
"There is no Maya," the thing that wore my face whispered, its jaw clicking mechanically. "You are Sakshi - the witness, trapped in the reality of your breaking bones. I am Maya - the grand illusion, the perfect dream you built to escape it. There is only the life you wanted. The life you built in the dark."
The concrete walls of the house began to bleed. Thick, black, tar-like fluid seeped from the joints of the modern architecture, smelling faintly of burning rubber and ozone.
The floor beneath my feet softened, turning into a wet, yielding membrane that felt less like hardwood and more like the flesh of a living throat.
*Beep. Beep. Beep.Beep. Beep. Beep...*
The intervals between the sounds were stretching, growing wider, more agonizing. Each mechanical tone felt like a physical blow to my chest, a violent reminder of a reality I was running from.
I tried to scream, to run for the door, but the air had turned to syrup. Dark, formless silhouettes - shadows with no faces, wearing the traditional clothes of my aunts and elders—began to rise from the corners of the ceiling, their elongated fingers reaching down toward me. They whispered a chaotic symphony of demands: *When are you getting married? Why aren't you listening? Be a good girl. Be quiet. Die...*
"The crash on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway was two weeks ago, Sakshi," the entity wearing my face said, sitting down beside me on a bed that was rapidly transforming into a blood-stained ICU cot. "Your fiancé was driving. You were arguing about the gold jewelry for the wedding. You looked away for one second."
**Beeep**.
Images flashed in my mind, violently ripped from my consciousness - shattering glass, the blinding glare of a truck's high beams, the suffocating grip of the seatbelt, and then, a profound, terrifying freedom as the car spun out into the gorge.
"Your body is a broken shell under white sheets in the hospital," the alternate Sakshi whispered, her cold, dead fingers wrapping around my wrist. Her touch felt like ice, burning into my skin. "Your family is reciting prayers, begging you to wake up so you can marry the man you don't love and live the life they scripted for you. But this house... this house is an apex predator. It feeds on the desperate. It feeds on women like us who want to disappear."
The entity leaned in, its breath smelling of stagnant water and old earth. "If you wake up, you go back to the cage. If you stay here, the house keeps you. You become the house."
**Beeeeeep**.
The sound was agonizingly slow now. The space between the beeps felt like eternity. I could feel the cold plastic of an oxygen mask ghosting over my face in the real world. I could hear my mother’s voice crying, reciting the Mahamrityunjaya Mantra, her grief pulling at my soul like a heavy iron chain.
I looked up at the parasitic spirit wearing my ideal self.
"Stay," it whispered, its hand extending. Its fingers elongated, ending in sharp, gray points. "Don't go back to them."
**Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—**
The sound of the ICU monitor flatlined into a single, continuous, deafening screech. It vibrated so violently that the glass wall shattered into a million floating shards. The shards didn't fall; they suspended in mid-air, reflecting a thousand different angles of my dying face, before dissolving into thick grey fog.
Then, absolute, terrifying silence.
The black fluid snapped back into the walls. The floor hardened into luxury wood. I gasped, sitting up quickly on the plush bed. The morning sun was shining through a perfectly intact glass wall, burning through the Lonavala mist. The hospital room, the shadows, the blood - all gone.
The flatline had stopped. Because my heart had stopped.
I walked downstairs, my heart pounding - no, that wasn't a heartbeat. It was just a hollow echo. I pressed my hand to my chest; there was nothing but a cold, still cavity. A sudden, crushing dread washed over me as the true nature of this "sanctuary" crystallized in my mind.
The house hadn't been a manifestation of my subconscious. It was a trap, a localized, predatory anomaly that lured in the souls who wished so desperately to escape their lives that they practically willed themselves out of existence. I hadn't found a vacancy. I had fulfilled a cycle.
I was no longer Sakshi, the witness watching her own demise. I had become Maya -the permanent, living illusion of the house.
My body began to move on its own, pulled toward the front entrance by a magnetic, supernatural force. I had no control over my limbs. I was merely a passenger in a shell that now belonged to the house.
As the heavy teak front door swung open, the gravel driveway crunched.
A dust-covered sedan was pulling up. The driver's side door opened, and a woman stepped out. She looked exhausted, her shoulders slumped under the invisible weight of a corporate laptop bag, a heavy gold engagement ring glittering mockingly on her finger. She looked up at the house with a mixture of awe and desperation.
I looked down at my own hands. I was wearing the raw silk tunic now. My skin was unnaturally smooth, free of pores, blemishes - completely flawless. Like a porcelain doll.
I looked back at the woman walking up the driveway. The house didn't just feed once; it was a cosmic weigh station, an endless maw waiting to consume every soul that wishes for an alternate reality.
My jaw unhinged slightly on its own, a wide, serene, empty smile stretching across my face. I stepped onto the porch as the tired woman reached for the calling bell.
"You're right on time, dear. Come in," I said. My voice had a peculiar cadence now - a rhythmic, hypnotic rise and fall that made the air grow thick, ready to swallow another soul.
#entertainment
source
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