Soho Vanishing
Sunil Kumar
At its heart, The Soho Vanishing was born from an obsession—the kind that lingers in old books, shadowy theatres, and whispered conversations with ghosts of the past. My love for British literature, history and cinema, alongside years in journalism, taught me to chase mysteries hiding in plain sight. From castles and forts to the stories of Tagore, Wilde and Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, even the graves of Jim Morrison in Paris and Karl Marx in London, I’ve collected shards of wonder. And always, London itself—its cultural mélange, warmth and chill, its midnight streets is the inspirational city where imagination turns uncanny.
L
ondon at night is a shifting beast—half-lit alleyways curling like cigarette smoke, shadows pooling where neon fails, history bleeding
through the cracks of gentrified brick. The most CCTV-ridden place in the world. One on every corner - Big Daddy’s watching. Orwell is dead, and Bob is not your uncle. You can’t even sneeze or cross the road without every action being captured from multiple angles.
I’m Adrian Sen… Part British, part Bengali.
Nothing had prepared me for the woman in gold. It was like something between a psychotic Hitchcock movie and a Game of Surreal Thrones. A sneaky Cersei Lannister in the flesh. High and prominent cheekbones with those mesmerising eyes. The sweet and killing poison of unrequited love. She was there, standing at the threshold of a jazz club that shouldn’t exist—smoke curling around her as if reality was struggling to hold her in place. She turned, stepped through the door, and disappeared.
​
I should have walked away. Instead, I did what any idiot with a journalist’s curiosity and a questionable survival instinct would do—I followed. Patterns always repeat themselves, so in this dysfunctional world, we’re back where we started.
​
The club’s entrance was just a door, wedged between a boarded-up bookstore and a massage parlour that didn’t specialise in massages. Or was it a strip club? I didn’t care enough to look, my heart throbbing erratically, pulse already ticking. No bouncers. No lines. Just the strange music leaking through the cracks, thin and electric like something dreaming in wires.
​
The sign above blinked like a cackling cadaver hooked to faulty wiring—twitching, clinging. Anxious, alive. For a second, I swore it spelt my name. Sultry Sirens for Odysseus. Nah, not the cunning Greek hero always caught between thought and thighs. Adrian Sen, stumbling into myth like a drunk into dangerous traffic. I pushed the door open.
​
Inside, the air changed. Thicker. Warmer. The scent of something rich and spiced — exotic incense, or maybe just the past—seeped from the walls.
​
The lighting was dim, but not in the usual dive bar way. This was intentional. Calculated. Like stepping into a place that existed just outside of time, maybe. The woman in gold was nowhere to be seen.
​
A bartender with a face like he’d seen too much and cared too little raised an eyebrow. Behind him, rows of dusty bottles lined mirrored shelves, their labels worn away by age or indifference. Unpolished and grungy, but oozing character. A handful of patrons sat in deep red booths, talking in low voices.
​
Normal. Too normal. Subdued, sans verve, chilly and banal. Which, in a place like this, was the strangest thing. I wished the whole dead vibe gone, and goddamn, the universe listened.
​
I looked at the bartender again. His face was unfamiliar now. His suit was sharp, but the tie was just slightly wrong—too wide, too vintage, a relic from a time that never quite happened.
​
“You lost?” he asked, voice smooth as smoke.
​
I glanced around. A woman in an airy red backless dress met my gaze and smirked. A man in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat whispered into a rotary phone. No one here looked as if they belonged in the same decade, let alone in the same room.
​
“Maybe,” I said. “Depends on what I’ve found.”
​
The bartender poured a drink I didn’t ask for. It smelled like a memory.
The Club That Wasn’t
Something had changed. I couldn’t tell you what at first — not exactly. The lights weren’t quite the same shade. The music had shifted; the rhythm distorting like a record warped by heat. Something that did not belong to the past or any time I was familiar with. As a one time intern with the world’s greatest musical magazine, Rolling Stone, I was pretty well informed.
​
The people… they looked normal, but only if you didn’t look too hard. Their suits, their dresses—just a little off. Cuts and fabrics that didn’t belong to any specific decade, as if plucked from a dream of the past. Somehow bog-standard. Drab, mundane, artificial. No soul whatsoever.
It felt like a Star Trek episode with endless androids. Shepherded by the rogue Harry Mudd, who I expected to pop out at any second. And when they spoke, their words stretched in ways I couldn’t place, syllables bending like light through old glass. A slow, crawling dread curled in my gut.
​
I turned, scanning for the woman in gold. She was gone. So was the whispering man on the rotary phone. So was the bartender. But now—now there was a bouncer… he wasn’t there before. And he was looking straight at me.
​
“Oi, time to go, you deadbeat thug,” he said.
​
His voice—wrong. Not deep, not high, not even mechanical, but something in between. As if a reel-to-reel tape was playing back a voice that had never belonged to a living throat. I didn’t argue. I walked. I could feel his gaze on my back as I stepped out the door — into a city that wasn’t mine.
​
An unusual scent lingered. Unreadable symbols glowed from neon signs. Although I knew the roads' shapes, the names—Moor Street, Greek Street, Tisbury Court, Frith—were gone, replaced by unfamiliar words. No seedy lap-dance joints, Quentin Tarantino movies or ethereal pedal-powered rickshaws. And the people—they moved just as people should. But their faces… too smooth, too symmetrical, like images rendered by a machine that understood humanity in theory, not in practice. Their eyes lingered a fraction too long. Their smiles were a beat too late.
​
I turned to glance at the club, half-expecting it to be gone… I was wrong… it was still there.
​
But the sign above the door had changed… and this time, I could read it… It said my name.
The Forgotten Street
My name shouldn't have been on the sign. And yet, there it was. Not “Adrian Sen” in clear, block letters, but something warped, twisted, stretched just enough that my mind had to squint at it. A dreamlike, unreal apparition.
​
Chills ran down my spine… I turned back to the street. It wasn’t Soho. Not anymore.
​
The asphalt shimmered under flickering streetlights, their glow a colour I couldn’t name. The black cabs—were they black cabs—rolled past without headlights, surfaces dark, swallowing light instead of reflecting it.
​
The buildings had the right shapes and bones of a city, but something had changed in their skin—like they were new copies of old blueprints, built by hands that didn’t quite understand what the contours of London were supposed to be. And the people—I started walking.
One of them, a woman in a green coat, brushed past me. She was warm, solid, human. But when I turned back to glimpse her face, it wasn’t the same. Subtly, something redrew the alteration, rather than ripping away a mask.
​
This wasn’t a trick of the mind. This was something else. The bouncer’s voice still rang in my head—time to go. Go where? I reached into my pocket for my phone. No signal. No clock. Just a black screen stared back at me.
​​
The crowd thickened ahead, flowing like a torrent down an alleyway I knew shouldn’t exist. I felt a powerful urge to flee, but my feet seemed to have a mind of their own.
​
The alley melted into a space that shouldn’t have fit between the buildings—a wide, open square soaked in electric twilight and shadows that didn’t belong. At the centre stood a figure. Not waiting. Expecting. She lifted her gaze to mine.
​
The woman in gold.
​
Only now, her eyes were pitch black. Bottomless, wrong.
The Rift in Time and Reality
I woke up in my flat, but it wasn’t mine. Not exactly. The furniture was in its proper place. The bookshelves, the old armchair, even the half-empty whiskey glass on the side table—all in their places. But something was wrong in the same way a childhood home feels unfamiliar after years away. Like someone had recreated my life from memory, but the details were… off.
​
I ran a hand over my desk. My laptop was open. An unfinished article I didn't remember writing blinked at me.
​
The Woman in Gold: A Century of Disappearances.
​
The words, the phrasing, and the rhythm and cadence were all mine. But the byline—someone else’s name.
​
I shuddered. I opened my browser. The rave article I was writing was gone. Not cached. Not archived. As if it had never existed. Like I’d hallucinated the whole thing. Even my drafts folder was empty. Either the system or something more ancient had swallowed my final draft.
A knock at the door. Too sharp. Too precise. I hesitated. My body said no. My curiosity didn’t care. I opened it.
​
Samar stood there, my old bruv from the paper, looking… different. Thinner than I remembered, it had been a few months since I’d met him after he’d landed a gig at the Birmingham Post. The same face, the same posture, but his eyes darted as if he weren’t sure of the world around him. Like I wasn’t supposed to be here.
​
“Adrian,” he drawled. “I wasn’t sure you were back… but I came anyway, just in case you…”
​
“Back from where?”
​
His brow furrowed. Like he didn’t know the answer. Or didn’t want to.
​
“I—” He cleared his throat. “There’s something I need to show you.”
​
He handed me a newspaper, creased and yellowed at the edges. The date read 1926.
​
And on the front page—a photograph. Grainy. Haunting. The woman in gold, her eyes searing through my insides.
The Invitation
Samar didn’t take me back to his place. He took me underground. Through an unmarked door in a back alley behind a pub that no longer existed on Google Maps. Down a spiral staircase that smelled of old books and candle wax. The kind of place where secrets had weight.
​
“Samar, what is this place? Where are you—”
​
But he was already drifting away… not fast. Not scared. As if a man left the stage without bowing.
​
The room was dim, the air thick with incense and something older—dust, maybe, or time itself. Around a long wooden table sat seven people, light from gas lamps casting shadows on their faces. Scholars, writers, men and women in tailored coats and gloves looked as though an old photograph had brought them to life. One of them resembled Arthur Conan Doyle.
​
The woman at the head of the table, wearing a sharp suit and radiating an intimidating air, lit a cigarette.
​
“Mr Sen,” she said. “Welcome to the Penumbra Society.”
​
I took a chair.
“Sounds theatrical.”
​
She exhaled smoke.
​
“A bit of pageantry keeps people away.”
​
I glanced at the others. Knowing eyes. Hands that had written stories never published. Lips that knew names history had erased. This woman—Amara, she called herself—slid a folder toward me. Inside were sketches, newspaper clippings, and redacted reports. Photographs, lots of them. The Woman in Gold. In every era. A silent witness in oil paintings, a shadow in antique photos- daguerreotypes, a blurred figure in CCTV stills. Always watching. Always waiting.
​
“She’s not human, is she?” I said.
​
A man in round glasses—coat lapel pin badge stating Ravi Korisetty, historian—shook his head.
​
“She’s an echo.”
​
“A what?”
​
Amara tapped ash into a tray.
​
“Mr Sen, they didn't build London on solid ground. It’s built on… layers.”
​
She pointed to the floor.
​
“Imagine time not as a straight line, but as a palimpsest. Layers upon layers. Ancient, modern, future—all stacked, all bleeding into each other. Sometimes, people slip through the fault lines of the universe. Sometimes, things come through that shouldn’t.”
​
I swallowed.
​
“And she?”
​
Ravi adjusted his glasses.
​
“She’s not a ghost. Not even a person. She’s an intelligence—a sentient pattern. Maybe a memory. Maybe something older. And she chooses.”
​
I leaned forward.
​
“Chooses?”
​
“You,” Amara said.
​
“Artists. Thinkers. The mad. The lost. She marks people. Invites them into her world. And no one ever comes back the same.”
​
The room went quiet. I glanced at the photograph in my hand. The Woman in Gold. Eyes locked on mine. Again. Inviting.
​
I always found Oscar Wilde’s wit and flamboyance admirable—decadence, sharp suits, piercing sorrow. The Picture of Dorian Gray taught me that beneath polished charm rots a hungry ghost. Grief-stricken, scratching. The shallowness of appearances and mortality.
​
That was what the Penumbra Society had promised, too, for a while. Elegance, intellect, and a place for people like me, obsessed with the unseen. The following day, I returned.
​
Then it vanished. Just… gone. Offices stripped. Records scrubbed. I thought maybe I’d imagined the whole thing—another fevered side effect of sleepless nights and unread footnotes. After all, a few Molly trips had cracked open the sky and shown me buzzing cityscapes and real people before. I doubted the society ever existed.
​
But then Samar showed up, this time haunting the Tesco Express visible from my window. I didn't question his source or why he chose me. The Chosen One. Me, as Neo, inhabiting a surreal ‘Matrix’. Maybe I should have, before it was too late. He led me to 'The Woman in Gold’. I never saw him again.
​
I was again hunting this accursed spectre.
She was impossible to miss, draped in a shimmering, floor-length black gown that looked more melted onto her than worn. Her hair, cascading red-gold curls, echoed portraits of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. Daughter of Anne Boleyn, mother of the East India Company. But it wasn’t just looks that caught my attention. It was the way she moved. She glided. Floating in the air… not in the way models do, but as if she weren’t entirely bound to gravity.
​
And then there were the men following her. In dark suits, the three men were so still, so lacking in expression, they seemed carved from wax. They moved in sync, their polished shoes stalking the pavement without a whisper.
​
The woman in gold turned a corner. The men followed. So did I. The alley was tight, dark, damp, and smelled of spilt beer, piss and old cigarettes. I picked up my pace, half-expecting to find the woman in gold cornered, but as I rounded the bend, she was gone. The men in suits stood in front of an old wooden door, arguing in low, urgent voices. My journalistic instincts kicked in. I yanked out my battered pay-as-you-go iPhone and hit record. The door they were standing in front of wasn’t just any door. It was old. A thick slab of oak, iron hinges rusted with age, its frame carved with intricate symbols. Symbols I had seen before. At the Tower of London. The Beefeaters, the all-seeing black ravens, and the pageantry – a quick montage of images in my mind’s eye. These were Tudor markings. Protective sigils from the 16th century, carved into the doors of noble houses to ward off evil.
​
One man pressed his palm against the wood. The markings glowed. And then—without a sound—the door opened. The men stepped through. I was nervous. I’d never been cautious, but reckless wasn’t the same thing as brave. A byline or an obituary? I imagined front-page global exclusives. Maybe working for the Times or the Guardian after this. Ditching my deadbeat rag- the Daily Chronicle. I went in.
The Room That Shouldn’t Exist
I expected another alley. Instead, I lurched into a banquet hall. Candles flickered in golden sconces. A long wooden table stretched before me, piled high with roast meats, fresh bread, and goblets of wine. Raucous ghostly apparitions cackled. And at the head of the table sat a man.
No, not a man. A king. Luxurious velvet enveloped him, with chunky rings adorning his fingers and a thick chain encircling his neck. I had seen that face before. On the pages of history books. Paintings at Hampton Court. Malicious and funny rhymes in school or kindergarten. Divorced, beheaded, and died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. The fate of his multiple wives. Henry VIII.
​
The king raised his goblet.
​
“Welcome, Adrian,” he said, his voice deep, echoing through the hall. “You’re late.”
​
My heart slammed against my ribs. This wasn’t a reenactment. This wasn’t a dream.
​
Somehow, impossibly, I had stepped through a door in modern-day Soho—and straight into the Tudor era.
​
My throat was dry, my pulse hammering. I was standing in a Tudor banquet hall, staring at Henry VIII himself. The room was alive, breathing. The golden candlelight bounced against the stone walls, the scent of roast boar and spiced wine thick in the air. Minstrels plucked out a melody on lutes, their faces unnervingly vacant. Servants glided between the guests, their movements too smooth, too inhuman. And seated beside the king, watching me with cat-like amusement, was her. Anne Boleyn.
​
Her allure was undeniable, a petite figure with a vibrant energy that no portrait could ever truly represent. Her dark eyes were alight with something sharp, mocking, knowing. A smirk ghosted her lips as she delicately plucked a grape from a silver bowl and slipped it playfully between her teeth.
​
My journalistic instincts screamed at me to take out my phone again, snap a photo, and get proof. I had stumbled before the maverick king and kept the mobile in my jeans. Now, the pièce de résistance. Boleyn in the flesh. My hands were ice.
​
“You’re late,” Henry VIII repeated, swirling and sipping his wine.
​
His voice was deep, weighted with the authority of a man who had made and unmade kingdoms on a whim. Also, rummaged through wives to breed male heirs. Off with their heads! I swallowed hard.
​
“This—this isn’t possible,” I muttered.
​
Anne leaned forward in her French hood and black damask gown, her neckline low, revealing smooth, pale skin. The cleavage and dress oozed trouble. Her seductive smile reeked of privilege and malice. I hate to admit this, but this ghostly apparition turned me on.
​
“Oh, but it is,” she murmured, her voice teasing. “And you, sir, do not seem entirely displeased to be here.”
​
Her delicate and tapering fingers trailed along the table, absentmindedly tracing the wood.
​
“Who are you?” I asked. Was this the real Anne Boleyn or an illusion?
“A question best answered over wine,” Henry said, gesturing grandly.
​
“Sit, scribe.”
​
The way he said it made my blood run cold. Scribe. Not a journalist. Scribe. How did they know who I was?
The Ink That Binds
I hesitated, then slowly lowered myself onto the wooden bench. Deep-red wine filled the goblet in front of me. It smelled rich, spiced—dangerous. Anne Boleyn rested her chin on her hand, watching me.
​
“You write for a newspaper, don’t you?”
​
I flinched.
“How do you—”
​
“We know many things,” she purred. Her eyes were mesmerising. Black, bottomless and beautiful. “What the world chooses to remember. What it chooses to forget.”
​
Her lips curved, and something about the way she said, forget made me shiver. Henry VIII set down his goblet with a thud.
​
“Do you know why you are here?”
​
I shook my head. The king exhaled heavily.
​
“The ink that binds.”
​
Silence hung between us.
​
“The what?”
“The ink,” Anne murmured, reaching for a quill that rested by the king’s plate. She twirled it between her fingers. “The ink that has written history. Your kind have always been its slaves.”
​
“Excuse me?”
​
My voice was tight. Henry’s face darkened.
​
“Victors do not write history. Scribes write it. I understand, Adrian, that you have a fondness for history. And those who control the ink control the world.”
​
Anne leaned in, her warm breath tickling my ear.
​
“You are one of them, Adrian. You have always been one of them. Every dream you forget or sleepwalk through leaves a door open. What walks through doesn’t walk back. The ink that binds isn’t a metaphor, scribe. It’s memory, it’s magic, life itself—and it’s running out. "
My skin prickled. This was insanity. I wrote for a bloody newspaper. But before I could speak, Anne’s fingers grazed my wrist. The room tilted. The candlelight stretched, distorted—voices blurred into echoes. And just like that, I was no longer at a Tudor banquet. I was back in modern-day London. Sitting at my desk at the Daily Chronicle. A fresh document was open on my laptop. And scrawled across the screen, were words I did not remember typing.
​
The ink that binds.
Non Sequiturs
I’ve always prided myself on logic. The fictional Vulcan Spock was my firewall against madness. The North Star of Hope. Rational, restrained, everything I wanted to be in a world addicted to noise. I was a journalist- obsessive, disciplined, a devotee of symmetry. Every sentence like a mirror. Every fact checked and aligned.
​
A scribe, if you wanted to get poetic and archaic about it. I dealt in facts, headlines, the currency of the written word. But lately, things were slipping. My dreams were getting more vivid and bizarre. Sans rhythm, no connection to anything that had gone on before. A non sequitur.
​
One night, I found myself lounging at the Playboy Mansion, sipping a Black Manhattan. Surrounded by curvaceous bunnies with feather boas and elegant gloves, giggling at some absurd joke I made. Hugh Hefner clinked his glass against mine like an old friend.
​
“You were never just a scribe,” he said.
​
I laughed. The bunnies laughed. But their eyes were cold. And the drink tasted like something rusting inside me. It all felt real, as if I were on solid ground. But this was a dream.
​
Then—snap—Lords. Cricket Mecca. Virat Kohli’s heavily tattooed hands mid-cover drive, cutting through time itself. The crowd froze. The ball was heading straight for me as the sky glitched. I couldn’t feel my body.
​
Then, Karaikal. Tamil Nadu, India. Ammaiyar’s statue. Skeletal crone-saint. Adi Parashakti—the sacred feminine. Womb of Tantra. A cosmic force, ancient and terrible. Eyes hollow, blood dripping. Timeless.
​
A voice pressed against my skull.
“I gave up beauty for devotion and truth. What will you give up, Adrian?”
​
My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The air smelled of ash and rotting animals. Then, the closing curtain. Inkfall. A banquet, a beheaded Boleyn, raising a glass to me. Smirking, laughing, twisting a knife, slow and deep, until fiery blood gushed from my heart. Sadistic pleasure. I felt the crushing weight of a crown welded to my head.
​
And then—I woke. Cold sweat. Bloodlike taste. Something buzzed. I looked at my phone. I hadn’t used it for hours. One notification.
​
From Samar. The bastard was like the Grim Reaper and a half-remembered nightmare rolled into one. No words. Just an image. A screenshot of the newspaper I’d been reading earlier—same layout, same date. But the headline had changed.
​
Three Found Dead in Soho. Their Eyes Missing.
​
Below it, a police sketch. One victim looked like Hugh Hefner… another like Ammaiyar’s visage. I don’t know what the third face was. But it looked too much like me. Back in reality. Londres. C’est la vie.
​
But was I?
Liquid Dreams- I Never Saw Electric Sheep
"You look rough, mate," Callum, my editor, said, tossing a file onto my desk at the Daily Chronicle. "Maybe lay off the absinthe?”
I massaged my temples and asked, “What’s this?”
​
Callum replied, “A feature piece on the new Kensington Tory shagging Princess Naomi. Scribes, scandal, sleaze, payoffs, the usual. Or do something on art forgery. Dig deep.”
​
I frowned.
​
“You’ve got interns for this.”
​
Callum explained, “Our last intern went missing, so congrats, you’re now our fixer, ghostbuster, man of steel. The dog’s friggin’ bollocks. Ray Donovan—think of it as an upgrade. I’ll pay you an extra quid. We’re short on staff, pal.”
​
I looked up sharply.
​
“Missing?”
​
Callum shrugged and said, “One day here, next day poof. Last thing he was researching? Some mediaeval scribes’ conspiracy—but listen if you want, write about old newspapermen and the invention of the printing press, alright? No faffing and spooky nonsense. Also, haven’t you heard? Your bud Samar died in a freak accident yesterday in Brum. Andrea, the editor, is a friend. Called me up.”
​
That night, I dreamt again. Eerie floodlights illuminated the Wembley pitch. The teams? England vs. Transylvania. Yes, Transylvania. The one with Count Dracula- Nosferatu, Vlad the Impaler. The number 10, a tall, gaunt figure in a Victorian cape, was bearing down on England’s goal, fangs glinting as he prepared to shoot. I, in an England jersey, found the ball at my feet. Samar was the goalie. Somewhere in the stands, Hugh Hefner was holding up a sign that read, THE INK THAT BINDS.
​
“Wake up, scribe,” a voice whispered, Anne Boleyn’s voice.
​
Soaked in honey, driving a stake through my heart. And then, like ink spilt across a page, the dream dissolved.
​
When I opened my eyes, I wasn’t in my flat but in Soho, but outside a dimly lit café that smelled of cigarette smoke and old paperbacks. The sort of place I once loved. Across the street—she was there. The woman in gold. Not Tudor. Not Playboy Bunny. Not a saint. Not a vampire. She was herself now. Terrifyingly so.
​
She stepped forward. For the first time. Like Annie Lennox with graveyard sockets. Her eyes weren’t just watching. They were reading me.
“You’re almost out of pages. Highway to the danger zone,” she said.
​
My ears rang. The shadows stretched. My stomach dropped. And then, she smiled. The traffic lights behind her glitched, stuttering in red. A newspaper rustled at my feet. The headline chilled me to the bone:
​
Missing Journalist Found Dead. Strange Markings on Body.
​
The byline?
​
Adrian Sen.
A History of Ink and Blood
Back at the office, I dug through the archives. The missing intern. The strange headline. The phrase The Ink That Binds.
I found a reference in a dusty old tome:
​
Those who rewrite history are doomed to become its prisoners. The ink that binds is not a mere metaphor—it is the blood of those who seek the truth.
​
The footnote cited an early 16th-century scribe. May 19, 1536. The author? Anne Boleyn.
​
My blood ran cold.
​
How? She wasn’t a writer. She was—
​
A whisper in my ear.
​
“Oh, but I was.”
​
I turned. Anne was standing there. Her eyes weeping rivulets of crimson, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle—like a rag doll–a marionette with its strings savagely cut, yet somehow still standing. She tilted her head.
​
“You see, dear scribe, history is not just written. It is made. And those who dig too deep—” she trailed a finger down my hairy chest, stopping at my rapidly thumping heart, “—find themselves part of the story.”
​
My breath hitched.
​
“Why me?”
​
“You chose this… because your soul remembers what your name doesn’t. The burden isn’t new, scribe, just returned, rehashed ad infinitum,” she murmured. Her lips parted into a cracked porcelain smile.
​
“Every time you wrote about power. About history. About the things men desire, crave. Longing, lust, sorrow and fear…” she trailed off, her lips curving.
​
My mind reeled. The dreams. Symbols. The missing journalist.
​
“Is this a warning?” I asked.
​
Anne just smiled. And then—I was awake. In the office. Nobody around. There was a notification on my phone.
​
Final Edit Uploaded. Modified: 03:15 AM.
​
I stared at it. My fingers twitched. I had written nothing. My laptop was still open from last night, a half-finished draft about an art forgery scandal. The Courtauld, the Tate Modern and the National Art Galleries. I scrolled up—words had been added. Not by me. It was a Starfleet Captain’s Log.
​
“Stardate 78646.4. Sector 001 Federation HQ-The Alpha Quadrant. Subject: The Scribe Paradox. A journalist from 21st-century Earth, Adrian Sen, became trapped in a self-referential loop. His words dictated his reality. The city teeters on the edge of forever. The moment he started investigating ‘The Ink That Binds,’ his agency was removed. His story was no longer his own.”
​
I felt a chill at the back of my neck. This was a joke. It had to be. I checked the document history. No one else had edited it. But the timestamps didn’t make sense—the file had been modified before I even started writing. That’s when I saw my reflection. It was lagging. Just a second slower. Not quite in sync. Like the infinite recursion of Shiva. The Hindu God of creation, destruction and renewal.
​
Then, it smirked. Not my smirk. Not a nervous, sleep-deprived grin. It was… coquettish. Anne Boleyn’s.
​
“Did you think you were the writer?”
​
The voice wasn’t mine. It wasn’t in the room. It was in my skull. Playful, knowing, smirking, laughing. Whispering in the tone of a woman who danced and slept with kings, betrayed friends, prayed and smiled before executions. The devil’s whore.
​
“Oh, dear Adrian… did you think you were the writer?”
​
The words on the screen rewrote themselves.
​
He reached for his phone, but the message had already changed. The ink was already dry.
​
I grabbed my phone. The notification was gone. No record of it ever existing. Something was watching me. Writing me. I needed air. I stumbled out of the Wembley office, rode the Bakerloo Line to Oxford Circus and walked into the neon glow of Soho, a cigarette warm between my lips. Dangling like a question that had no answer. The woman in gold was still there.
​
I first saw her across the street, where a jazz club spewed saxophone smoke. I thought she was a trick of the lights—a socialite from another era, swaying like she was waiting for someone.
​
Now, she wasn’t moving. I walked faster. Hugh Hefner once said, ‘Life is too short to be living someone else’s dream.’
​
Was I?
​
I had always been obsessed with dreams. Not just mine, but the concept itself. That they were fluid interpretations of conscious preoccupations. Messages from parts of the mind that never slept. The primordial id, as Sigmund Freud put it, or Svapna Avastha, the dream cauldron, according to the Indian Upanishads. My dreams weren’t normal. A structure defined them. Star Trek. Every night, I beamed into a different episode.
​
Spock: “Your reality is unstable.”
​
Picard: “Who is writing this? Is that mon ami Data?”
​
Khan: “Ah, Adrian, the weakness of the frail ordinary man. I am the genetically enhanced Superman, Khan Noonien Singh.”
​
They weren’t random dreams. They were corrections to the script. Because my life was being rewritten.
​
By whom? By what?
​
I turned a corner. And walked straight into Anne Boleyn. She was exactly as before—petite, dark-eyed, lips contorted into a knowing smile. Eyes that plunged curved daggers or threw pointed darts. I wasn’t Shakespeare or a brown-noser to wax eloquent. The coquettish smirk of a woman who played a king. Seduced, bedded and beheaded.
​
“You’re not real.”
​
I shuddered. Her fingers—cold, too cold—traced the edge of my jaw.
​
“But I’m written, aren’t I?” she murmured.
​
I stumbled back.
​
“You exist in history,” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re a figure. A story. Henry and Cromwell executed you in 1536. The French dude Jean Rombaud chopped off your head.”
​
Her smile widened.
​
“And yet, here I am.”
​
I wanted to run, but my feet wouldn’t move.
​
“You,” I croaked. “What do you want?”
​
She stepped closer.
​
“You think your thoughts are yours, Adrian? Cocky whippersnapper. That your words are your own?” Her breath was cool against my ear, like icicles. “Every thought you have, every obsession—Hefner, football, cricket, Karaikal Ammaiyar, the Nayanmar crone-saint, the vampires of Transylvania, all part of your damned script. You servile knave, those who meddle and try to rewrite history trap themselves forever.”
​
She leaned in for the kill. The Queen’s Gambit. Two moves before zugzwang, checkmate and silence.
​
“And the writer? Oh, my dearie… the writer wants you to remember.”
The Final Edit
I rushed back to my apartment on an empty Routemaster double-decker bus. Nobody was at the driving wheel. The silence hung like a final requiem. A danse macabre rattling my bones. My Oyster Card dissolved and evaporated into thin air in front of my eyes.
​
Laptop open. Cursor blinking. I typed furiously.
​
“This is not my story. Someone else is writing this. If I can just—”
​
The screen glitched. A new line appeared.
​
Delete Files: Yes/No?
​
My phone vibrated. A new notification.
​
Final Edit Uploaded. Published: 03:15 AM.
​
I looked at the mirror. My reflection wasn’t there anymore. The woman in gold stood in its place. Smiling. And behind her?
​
Spock. Kirk. Data. Picard. Khan. Karaikal Ammaiyar. Henry VIII. The Penumbra Society. History’s cast. Not ghosts in the machine, but ghosts of the infinite recursion… watching and waiting for their next cue. Their voices overlapped in my head.
​
“Adrian Sen… the ink is already dry.”
​
I reached for my keyboard. My hands trembled. The words on my screen stared back at me:
The ink that binds.
​
Anne’s voice echoed in my head.
​
“Those who write history are doomed to become its prisoners.”
​
The article about art forgery was finished—every word. But I did not remember typing it. And at the bottom—a byline I did not write.
​
By Adrian Sen. Last updated: March 7, 2025.
​
My heart pounded. My fingers hovered over the delete key. But something inside whispered.
​
“The ink is already dry.”
​
And outside my window, on the darkened London street—The woman in gold was waiting. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me. As if someone—or something—stood just behind my shoulder. A low hum filled the room. Not sound. Vibration. My phone screen blinked to life.
​
New Message: Unknown Number.
​
I swallowed hard and tapped it open.
​
Final Edit Approved. Await Further Instructions.
​
The cursor on my laptop started moving on its own. One last sentence appeared on the screen, typed out in slow, deliberate strokes.
​
Look again.
​
I gasped for air. I turned back to the window. The woman in gold was gone. But her reflection remained.
​
Smiling.
​
Waiting.
​
And this time, I knew—she wasn’t outside at all.
​
She was already inside.
Sunil Kumar
Sunil is the kind of person who gets equally lost in ancient epics and late-night overthinking. By day, he wrestles with numbers and strategy as an entrepreneur. By night, he chases questions that no one has time for as a researcher, and somewhere in between, he scribbles poems to make sense of it all. He doesn’t claim to know everything, but he does like to explore everything. His natural habitat is somewhere between a jazz club he has never visited and a library He never wants to leave. Humour keeps him sane and grounded, imagination keeps him busy, and words… they drag him deeper every time. Like rhythm to a dancer, like music to a rebel, they don’t just keep him alive—they keep him moving. His quest is for deeper enigmas, not the answers.
Raconteur, Researcher, Entrepreneur
Ink & Quill
Collective
Like what you see ?
To join just our book club
Book Club Membership
Want to start your writing journey with us?
IQC Membership
© The Ink & Quill Collective 2025. All rights reserved.