I do not know whose hands these letters will reach. Perhaps they will find a home in my trash bin, or be buried deep beneath the damp soil of this wretched estate. Or perhaps, they will share the fate of my cigarettes—burning my chest without mercy, turning my very breath into ash. My hands ache to write, hoping to unburden a heart heavy with secrets it cannot even remember.
Winter, 1920.
The silence in this mansion is not empty; it is heavy, a physical weight that presses against my temples. I sit alone before my shattered mirror. The glass is jagged, fractured into a dozen sharp, angry pieces, each reflecting a disjointed sliver of a face I barely recognize as my own. My eyes, dark and haunted, seem to belong to a stranger. I whisper to my tattered notebooks, their pages yellowed and brittle, like old bones. They tell me I used to be a writer, a lover of words, a creator of worlds. Or so I am told. Now, I am merely a ghost in my own life.
I have been in this house for five months—or rather, five months since I "awoke." Five months of breathing this heavy, suffocating air. My past is a void, a silent room with no doors and no windows. Khorshid, the man who claims to be my husband, tells me I survived a horrific accident. He speaks of a long coma that almost stole me from him forever, his voice dripping with a forced patience that makes my skin crawl. He talks of our "great love," of how I adored him, of our shared laughter. But when I look at him, I feel nothing. No spark, no warmth, not even a shadow of a memory. Only a hollow, echoing silence.
He brings me writing supplies, a silent promise, he says. "To find your voice again, my love."
"Does your heart feel me again, Asia?" he asks, pressing his cold hand against mine. His fingers are pale, almost bloodless, and they feel like parasites clinging to my skin.
I never answer. Silence is the only language I have left since I opened my eyes in that black room, to find him standing over me like a shadow. I want to scream, to push him away, to demand to know who I really am. But my body is a traitor, a prisoner of his "care." I look at him, and I see a stranger, a keeper of secrets, a man who knows more about me than I know about myself.
The house... the house is the strangest of all. It is a labyrinth of shadows and secrets, a place where the walls have ears and the floors remember.
I remember the day I awoke. The walls were black, a deep, consuming black that absorbed all light. A sickening, rotten stench filled the air, the scent of decay and death. It made me retch until my stomach was empty, until I was just a gasping, hollow shell. Tubes were snaked into my veins like glass parasites, pulling me back from the brink of a dark oblivion. I pulled them out, trembling, desperate to escape that room. My limbs were weak, but my resolve was strong. I had to leave. I had to know the truth.
On the wall, there was a statue—a creature with horns, a dark, grotesque figure. Its eyes... I swear its eyes followed me. I screamed until darkness took me again, until my voice was hoarse and my throat was raw. When I woke, they were all there, standing in a semi-circle around my bed, draped in funeral black. It was a macabre scene, a coven of shadows, waiting for me to speak.
Khorshid tells me I am safe. He tells me the forest surrounding the mansion is too dangerous to cross, a wilderness of wolves and wild beasts. He tells me we have never left this place, that this is our sanctuary, our home. But I cannot believe him.
And then there is the rest of them. The inhabitants of this tomb.
Mrs. Nazli, Khorshid's mother. Her eyes are fixed, piercing, like two pieces of flint. Her voice sounds as if it's rising from a deep, cold well, bringing with it a chilling dampness. She moves with a mechanical precision that makes my skin crawl. She treats me with a calculated harshness, resentment simmering beneath her skin whenever Khorshid shows me affection. She hates that he loves me, but she hates that I am still alive more.
Fikria, the widowed aunt. She is a nightmare dressed in black. Her lips are always painted a dark, bruised brown, a color that reminds me of dried blood. Her eyes are buried under thick coal-black kohl, and her face is a frozen mask of indifference. She appears and disappears like a ghost, her footsteps silent, her presence a chilling draft.
And Shams, his sister. Forty years of bitterness have etched deep lines into her forehead. Her breath is foul, a constant reminder of decay. Her hands are rough and repulsive, and her method of eating is a grotesque spectacle that makes me want to scream. They are all cold. They are all waiting.
One night, as I sat on my balcony, a sudden flash of memory hit me. It was disjointed, a jumble of sound and sensation. The screech of tires, a blinding light, the terrifying scream of a woman. Then, darkness. A deep, consuming darkness. I gasping, clutching my chest, trying to hold onto the memory, to find the truth hidden within the chaos. But it was gone, vanished like smoke in the wind.
But I saw it. From my balcony, I saw the gardener. A giant of a man who never speaks, whose silence is a weapon. And that night... I saw him raise a blade. I saw the spray of red, a violent burst of life. I saw a head roll away from a body. I saw the cold, calculated look on his face as he planted his shovel into the damp soil.
I screamed. I ran down the stairs, my heart pounding in my chest, a frantic drumbeat of terror. I searched for help, for a single soul to hear my cry. But the halls were empty, as if the house had swallowed everyone whole.
"Khorshid! The gardener is a murderer!" I wailed, collapsing into his arms.
When I finally reached the garden with Nazli and the maid, there was nothing. No blood. No body. No evidence of the violence I had witnessed. Only the gardener, calmly tilling the soil as if he were planting flowers instead of burying sins. He didn't even look up at me.
"Even if we believed you," the maid whispered, her voice like grinding stone, "how could he clean it all so fast?" Her words were a chilling mockery of my sanity.
They think I am mad. Khorshid needles my skin with sedatives to keep me quiet, to trap me in a world of cotton-wool silence. But I know what I saw. Or do I? Perhaps the blind heart cannot see, even with the strongest eyes. Perhaps my heart is not just blind... perhaps it is being hunted.