The Parquet Pattern

I never believed in the old stories until I spent a summer in my great-aunt’s house in the hill station of Mahabaleshwar. The house was a crumbling Victorian relic, perched on a fog-drenched slope, its verandas wrapped in moss and its windows like vacant eyes. My great-aunt, whom everyone called Dadi, was a wiry woman of ninety with skin like old paper and eyes that had seen too much. She had a peculiar rule: never go into the room at the end of the long corridor on the second floor. The corridor itself was lined with peeling floral wallpaper and photographs of ancestors whose faces seemed to melt into shadows. The room’s door was painted a faded crimson, and a brass handle gleamed dully, as if constantly polished by unseen hands.

One evening, a distant cousin from Pune, a brash young man named Rohan, arrived for a visit. He was an engineer, a skeptic who mocked Dadi’s tales with a condescending chuckle. Over dinner, Dadi repeated her warning, her voice trembling slightly. Rohan laughed and said, ‘Dadi, you’re living in the past. There’s no such thing as ghosts. I’ll sleep in that room tonight to prove it. If I see anything, I’ll apologize for my skepticism.’ Dadi’s face turned ashen. She tried to dissuade him, but he was adamant. My stomach churned with a dread I couldn’t explain as he grabbed his bag and stomped up the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the silent house.

I stayed up, unable to sleep. I sat in the living room, reading an old book I had found, but my attention kept drifting to the ceiling above. At around 3 a.m., I heard a faint scraping sound, like a chair being dragged across a wooden floor. Then, a low, rhythmic tapping, like a fingernail on glass. My heart pounded. I crept to the bottom of the stairs and called out Rohan’s name. No answer. The tapping stopped, and a heavy silence descended. I went up, step by step, the stairs groaning under my weight. The corridor stretched long and dark, the crimson door at the end now slightly ajar. I pushed it open.

The room was lit by a sliver of moonlight from a tall window. Rohan lay on the bed, motionless, his eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling. I approached him, and as I got closer, I saw that his lips were moving, but no sound came out. I leaned in and heard him whispering over and over, ‘The pattern… the pattern… the parquet pattern…’ Then I noticed the floor—the expensive parquet flooring was arranged in an intricate geometric pattern, but the wooden pieces were slightly askew, as if they had been disturbed. I followed his gaze, and my blood ran cold.

The pattern on the ceiling was the exact same as the floor, but the ceiling had a dark, wet stain in the center, shaped like a sprawling human body. It seemed to pulse, as if breathing. I backed away, and as I did, the stain began to spread, darkening, reaching down the walls like fingers. I turned to Rohan, but he was now sitting up, his head tilted at an unnatural angle, his voice a distorted whisper: ‘It sees you through the pattern.’ I screamed and ran, stumbling down the stairs, out of the house, into the foggy night. I never looked back.

The next morning, I returned with the village constable. We found the house empty. No trace of Rohan, no blood, no sign of struggle. But in that room, the parquet floor pattern had changed. The wooden pieces had shifted to form a new shape—a shape that looked like a man, and inside that shape, a letter: my initial. I took a piece of that wood with me, a small dark sliver, and I carry it with me always. It is a reminder that some patterns are not meant to be broken, and some doors should never be opened, because once they are, they are never fully closed again. The wood feels warm in my pocket, and at night, I swear I can hear a faint tapping, as if something is trying to complete the pattern.