The Locked Gate

I’ve never been the sort to believe in ghosts. I’m a practical man, an engineer who trusts in circuits and load-bearing walls. But what happened in my grandmother’s house in the hill town of Solan, Himachal Pradesh, still makes the hairs on my neck stand up when I think about it. I’d gone to visit her with my parents, my uncle, aunt, and my cousin, Arjun. We were a big family, but after dinner, everyone drifted to their rooms, and I ended up in the living room, sprawled on a leather sofa, watching the embers in the fireplace die down. My grandmother sat in her creaking rocking chair, knitting a sweater that would never be finished, while my uncle and aunt whispered about property disputes and old neighbors. Arjun had gone up to bed on the second floor, a room that overlooked the garden.

At around eleven, a strange thing happened. The light in the hallway that led to the kitchen and the front door—what we called the gallery—went out. Not flickering, not a blown bulb, but a clean, deliberate click of a switch. My uncle muttered about faulty wiring, but we both knew the switch was at the far end of the gallery, and no one had walked past us. I felt a prickle on my neck. The room we sat in was the only way to reach that gallery from the ground floor. The front door was locked, and the window in the gallery was barred. I called out, ‘Arjun, did you turn off the light?’

From the darkness of the gallery came a voice, unmistakably Arjun’s: ‘Haan, I’ll come down in a minute.’ I exchanged glances with my uncle. ‘He’s supposed to be sleeping,’ my aunt said, her voice shaky. I rose, my legs feeling heavy, and walked to the archway that led into the gallery. It was pitch black. I called again, louder, ‘Arjun? What are you doing down here?’ No reply. I stepped into the gallery, my hand searching for the switch on the wall. I found it—it was in the ‘off’ position. I flipped it on. The light flickered on, revealing an empty hallway. The front door was still bolted from the inside. The window latch was secure. There was no one.

A cold dread settled in my stomach. I walked back to the living room, where my grandmother had stopped knitting. She looked at me with a knowing, ancient stare. ‘The gate,’ she said in a low voice. ‘You’ve unlocked the gate.’ I had no idea what she meant. She explained that the old house was built on a path that used to lead to a crematorium in the hills. The dead would pass by, and if you called out to them, they might answer. ‘It’s not Arjun,’ she said. ‘It’s one of them. They’re mocking you, pretending to be your kin.’ My uncle scoffed, but my aunt crossed herself.

I refused to believe it. I marched up the stairs to Arjun’s room, taking them two at a time. I threw open the door. Arjun was sound asleep in his bed, the covers pulled up to his chin. I shook him awake. ‘Arjun, did you just call out to me?’ He blinked, groggy. ‘No, bhai, I’ve been asleep for an hour.’ My blood ran cold. I went back down, determined to prove my grandmother wrong. I went to the gallery again, and this time I did something rash. I called out, ‘Whoever you are, show yourself!’

A voice, again Arjun’s, replied, ‘I’m here, bhai, in the kitchen, the lock on the back door is stuck.’ I ran to the kitchen, but the back door was locked tight from inside. The voice came again, now from the storeroom: ‘Bhai, I’m in the attic, can you open the trapdoor?’ The trapdoor to the attic was in the ceiling of the storeroom, and it was bolted shut from the outside. I stood there, trembling, my mind racing. My grandmother appeared behind me, her face pale. ‘Stop talking to it,’ she hissed. ‘Every time you answer, it gets stronger. It learns your voice.’ She told me to say nothing, to go to my room and lock the door until dawn. She made my uncle and aunt do the same, but she insisted on staying downstairs, sitting by the fire, knitting.

>From my room on the upper floor, I could hear the knocks. At first, they were gentle taps on the bedroom doors. Then they grew louder, heavier, like a fist pounding against wood. And then the voices changed. Instead of Arjun’s, they were the voices of my dead grandfather, my late aunt, even my own mother, who was in the next room but sound asleep. ‘Let me in, beta,’ my grandfather’s voice pleaded. ‘It’s cold outside. The gate is open.’ I pressed my hands over my ears, but the voice seemed to come from inside my head. Just as I felt my sanity slipping, I heard my grandmother’s voice, sharp and commanding, from downstairs: ‘Enough! The living are not yours to claim tonight.’

Then silence. A profound, deafening silence. I stayed in my room until the first light of dawn crept through the curtains. I went downstairs, finding my grandmother asleep in her chair, her knitting needles still in her hands. The gallery light was on. The front door was locked. The trapdoor was still bolted. It was as if nothing had happened. But I knew something had changed. For weeks afterward, I would hear that mocking voice in my dreams, always saying my name in my cousin’s tone. And my grandmother never went near the front gate again, always using the back door, muttering, ‘They don’t need an invitation, but they’ll remember one.’ That lock, that simple hardware on the front gate, was replaced with three new ones. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I still hear a faint ‘Haan’ from the gallery, and I know it’s not my brother.