You Can’t Escape

In the heart of Mumbai, Rekha was a promising upcoming architect, renowned for her innovative designs and impeccable attention to detail. Her life seemed perfect to the outside world — a successful career, a beautiful apartment, and a close-knit group of friends. But beneath the surface of her professional success lay a mind in turmoil. Rekha had a secret, one that even she struggled to comprehend.

It began innocuously enough. Rekha would catch fleeting glimpses of shadows moving at the edge of her vision or hear faint whispers that seemed to come from nowhere. She dismissed these as symptoms of stress, the byproducts of her high-pressure job. But as the days turned into weeks, the strange occurrences grew more frequent and more unsettling.

One evening, as she was working late on a critical project, Rekha heard a faint knocking on her window. Living on the fifteenth floor, she knew this was impossible. Her heart pounded as she approached the window, only to see the reflection of a gaunt, shadowy figure standing behind her. She spun around, but the room was empty. She shook it off as a trick of the light, a figment of her tired mind.

The next day, she confided in her best friend, Priya. “Priya, I think I’m losing my mind. I keep seeing things, hearing things that can’t be real.”

Priya frowned, concern etched on her face. “You need to get some help, Rekha. This isn’t normal. Promise me you’ll see someone.”

“I don’t know, Priya. I’m scared”, Rekha admitted, her voice trembling.

The hallucinations escalated. In meetings, she saw her colleagues’ faces contort into grotesque masks, their eyes empty and hollow. At home, her apartment seemed to warp and shift, shadows lengthening into sinister shapes that crept closer and closer. Her once peaceful sanctuary had turned into a haunted house, each corner hiding a new terror.

One particularly harrowing night, Rekha awoke to find her apartment filled with smoke. She coughed and gagged, stumbling through the thick haze, desperately trying to find the source. Flames licked at the walls, the crackling of burning wood filling her ears. Panic set in as she fumbled for her phone to call for help. But when the fire department arrived, they found no fire, no smoke, only Rekha, trembling and hysterical.

It was the breaking point. Rekha knew she had to get help, or she would lose herself entirely. The next day, she made an appointment with a renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Arya, who specialised in treating rare psychological disorders. Dr. Arya listened patiently as Rekha recounted her experiences, her fears, and her desperation.

“Rekha”, Dr. Arya began, his tone serious yet compassionate, “you have a condition known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It’s a rare disorder where your mind creates vivid, often terrifying hallucinations. Without treatment, these hallucinations will only get worse, leading to a complete breakdown of your ability to differentiate reality from illusion. It’s imperative that we start treatment immediately.”

“Charles Bonnet Syndrome?” Rekha repeated, her voice trembling. “How do we treat it?”

“We’ll use a combination of medication and therapy”, Dr. Arya explained. “But you need to be committed to this process. If untreated, your hallucinations could become even more frequent and intense, eventually consuming your every waking moment. You could lose touch with reality entirely.”

Rekha started on a regimen of medication and therapy. Slowly, she began to feel some semblance of stability returning. The hallucinations became less frequent, less vivid. She felt hope for the first time in months. But just as she thought she was getting better, a glimmer of hope flickered, then vanished as a dizzying sequence of incidents plunged her back into confusion.

One evening, as she sat in her living room, she received a call from Priya. The voice on the other end was frantic, urging Rekha to come to her apartment immediately.

“Rekha, you have to come now! It’s an emergency!” Priya’s voice was filled with panic.

Rekha rushed over, only to find Priya calm and composed, insisting she had never called. “I didn’t call you, Rekha. Are you sure you’re okay?”.

Confused and shaken, Rekha returned home, only to find her apartment exactly as she had left it, but with a chilling message scrawled on her mirror in red: “You can’t escape.”

Terrified, Rekha called Dr. Arya, who assured her it was just another hallucination. But as the days went on, the line between hallucination and reality became more blurred. She started seeing Dr. Arya in places he couldn’t possibly be, heard him speaking to her when she was alone.

“Rekha, you need to stay strong. We’re making progress”, he would say, his voice steady and reassuring, echoing in her empty apartment.

One night, in a moment of clarity, Rekha decided to investigate her condition further. She delved into medical journals, case studies, anything that could offer an explanation. What she discovered left her reeling. She found references to an experimental treatment that Dr. Arya had been involved in, one that used suggestive techniques to induce hallucinations in patients for study purposes.

Rekha tried to get in touch with Priya, but there was no response. When she went over to Priya’s apartment, there was no answer either. Priya’s abrupt disappearance and radio silence further deepened her confusion.

Her mind raced. Could it be that Dr. Arya was manipulating her, exacerbating her condition for his own research? The thought was horrifying, yet it made a twisted kind of sense. She confronted him, demanding the truth.

“Dr. Arya, what are you doing to me? Are you experimenting on me?” Her voice was a mixture of anger and fear.

Dr. Arya denied everything, but the seed of doubt had been planted. Rekha began to notice subtle changes in her therapy sessions, inconsistencies in Dr. Arya’s behaviour. She realised she had to escape his influence, but she was trapped in a web of her own making.

The final nail in the coffin was when Rekha received an anonymous letter detailing Dr. Arya’s unethical experiments and urging her to go to the authorities. Desperate, she followed the instructions, only to find herself at an abandoned building, where she was met by a woman who claimed to be a former patient of Dr. Arya’s, also driven to the brink of madness by his experiments.

“You’re not alone, Rekha. Dr. Arya did this to me too”, the woman whispered, her eyes wide with fear.

In a fleeting moment of clarity, Rekha resolved to expose Dr. Arya and liberate herself from his manipulative grasp. She painstakingly gathered what she believed to be irrefutable evidence, but as she did, her world began to crumble further. Reality twisted into a nightmare. The anonymous letter, the former patient’s harrowing testimony, and even the damning evidence she had meticulously collected — none of it was real. Each revelation was a creation of her fractured mind.

As she stumbled through the chaos of her thoughts, she found herself frantically navigating a bustling street. She dodged speeding cars and weaving motorbikes, her eyes darting in search of the doctor’s office. But it wasn’t there. The familiar knock-off furniture store was in place, as was the Titan Eye showroom, yet Dr. Arya’s office was conspicuously absent. A chilling realisation washed over her: Dr. Arya had never existed. He was merely a figment of her disordered perception.

Rekha returned to her apartment in utter disbelief and despair. In utter desperation, she began frantically calling Priya, the only person who could help her calm down. Suddenly, a loud noise echoed through the room, leaving her in a state of complete shock and paralysis.

When she came to, her eyes widening in sudden understanding. She looked up at the ceiling, but the revelation was too much. She quickly slipped back into a trance, retreating into the safety of the repetitive story her mind had crafted.

“Charles Bonnet Syndrome?”, she muttered.

“We’ll use a combination of medication and therapy..”

…

“Rekha, you have to come now! It’s an emergency!”

“I didn’t call you, Rekha. Are you sure you’re okay?”

Rocking herself back and forth in her prison cell, she played the complete tale over and over in her head, a desperate attempt to find solace in her madness.

As the new guard, Rashida, was being briefed on the prisoners, she pointed to Rekha’s cell. “What’s her story?” she asked.

“Been here eleven years now”, the senior guard replied. “She was found guilty of murdering her best friend. Claims that some doctor did it, but it was her prints and DNA all over the place. Anyway, with her condition, she can’t tell what’s real anymore.”

“I didn’t do it!” Rekha’s scream pierced the silence, her voice filled with raw desperation. She punched the glass slider in the door with sudden, frantic strength, shattering it. Her hands stretched through the small opening, grasping at the air, a futile attempt to break free.

The guards reacted instantly, shooting her with a dart gun. As the tranquilliser seeped into her veins, Rekha felt herself slipping into an induced sleep. The guards unlocked the gate and rushed inside, tying her down while others cleaned up the shattered glass.

In the eerie silence that followed, Rekha’s gaze fell upon the broken shards scattered around her. Her own reflection stared back at her, a sinister smile playing on her lips. “You can’t escape”, it whispered, her own voice echoing back, a haunting reminder of the inescapable prison of her mind.