The Sleepwalker

“You’re always scribbling in that notebook! You won’t study, and you won’t let anyone else have peace either!”
My mother’s voice cut through the early morning stillness. It was the same lecture every single day. She jabbed a finger toward my desk, where my open notebook lay buried under a towering stack of Class 12 textbooks, its pages crammed with dark plots and crime notes. I didn’t argue. I just kept my head down, zipped my school bag, and walked out the door.
School was quiet. While the rest of the class gossiped about exams, I sat at my isolated corner desk during recess, dragging my pen across paper, letting the fiction swallow me whole.
“Why do you keep locking these away?” Priya, my only real friend, asked, leaning over my shoulder. “You have a smartphone, Ananya. Just create an anonymous account and post them online. Let people actually read what you write!”
Her words lingered. That afternoon, sitting on my bed with the fan whirring lazily overhead, I finally gave in. I set up an Instagram account and uploaded my latest dark mystery, titled The Sleepwalker.
I didn't expect anything to happen. But when my alarm blared at 6:00 AM the next morning, my phone was humming off the nightstand with an endless wall of notifications—thousands of likes, comments, and shares. Overnight, The Sleepwalker had gone viral.
A week later, around 1:30 AM, a direct message popped up from an account with a blank avatar named Karthika.
“I’ve read everything you’ve posted,” the DM read. “You understand how dark people can get.”
“Thank you! That means a lot,” I typed back.
“I have a story,” she replied. “I wrote it myself, but I feel too awkward to publish it on my own page. Can I send it to you? If you like it, you can polish it and post it as your next piece.”
“Sure, go ahead,” I messaged.
The typing bubble flashed three dots for a long time before the text dropped in.
“It happened twenty years ago, in 2006. A seventeen-year-old schoolgirl named Minu vanished on her way back from tuitions. At first, the police didn't even file a missing person’s report. Security cameras caught her stepping into a dark sedan at the end of the alley without a struggle. Everyone in town assumed she had just eloped.”
“A week later,” Karthika continued, “her heavy canvas school bag was found tossed in a ditch off National Highway 66. It was soaked in rainwater, but her textbooks and pencil pouch were still inside. That’s when her family knew she hadn't run away.”
I sat up in bed, my thumbs feeling oddly heavy. “What did the police do?”
“The local station dragged its feet until the case was handed over to the CBI,” she replied. “They searched for four long years—no body, no clothes, no suspects. By 2010, her file was stamped as a cold case.”
“That’s awful,” I messaged, looking around my dark room. “How does your story end?”
“It ends with the truth that nobody found,” Karthika typed. “Minu didn't get into a stranger's car. She was taken by Alex—a boy from her tuition batch. Three days before she disappeared, Alex slid a love letter into her notebook. Minu threw it in the trash right in front of him. Out of pure rage and obsession, he stalked her, forced her into his car, locked her away, and beat her to death.”
The description was so raw and specific that it sent a shiver through me.
“Karthika... how did you come up with all of this?” I asked, my heart hammering against my ribs.
“I just made it up,” her reply came through. “There’s nothing unusual about it. I think you should write it out and post it.”
Driven by a mix of fear and strange inspiration, I sat up till 5:00 AM weaving her narrative into prose, publishing it online before dawn.
At 8:30 AM, my bedroom door creaked open. My mother didn't yell this time; her voice was tight, low, and laced with unease.
“Ananya. Come downstairs. Now. There are... officers here to see you.”
My stomach dropped. I walked down the hallway into our living room. Two plainclothes officers sat on our sofa, their posture rigid, while a local inspector stood near the window. On the coffee table lay my open notebook, right beside my phone, which was lying face down.
“Ananya,” the inspector said, his tone deceptively calm. “Your mother tells us you spend a lot of time writing stories late into the night. Crime fiction, mostly?”
I swallowed hard, standing by the doorway. “Yes. Just fiction. Is... is something wrong?”
“Is it fiction?” the second officer asked, leaning forward. He pointed to my phone on the table. “You wrote about an abducted girl, a canvas bag dropped off National Highway 66, and a four-year CBI investigation into a boy named Alex. Tell me, Ananya, where did you get those specific details?”
“I didn't steal them!” I stammered, my hands trembling. “A girl named Karthika messaged me the plot last night! She said she wrote it herself!”
The officers exchanged a long, heavy look. The inspector gestured toward the phone lying face down on the table.
“Unlock it for us,” he said firmly.
The second officer picked it up and turned the screen toward me. “Password?”
“2578,” I whispered, my throat dry.
He tapped in the four digits, unlocked the device, and opened Instagram. His thumbs scrolled quickly through my account, opening the direct message thread with Karthika. He read through the late-night messages, line by line, before sliding the account details open to check the phone number linked to the profile.
He typed the ten-digit number into his official tablet to run a telecom registry check.
For nearly a minute, no one in the room spoke. The officer’s thumbs suddenly stopped moving across his screen. He stared at the readout, blinked, and looked over at the inspector.
“Sir...” the officer whispered, turning his tablet toward his supervisor. “Look at the SIM registration details.”
The inspector scanned the screen, his expression stiffening into absolute disbelief. He slowly turned his eyes toward me, cold and unsettled.
“In your story, you called the missing girl Minu,” the inspector said, his voice barely a murmur. “Minu was just a press pseudonym used back in 2006 to protect her identity.”
He pointed a finger at the screen, showing the official registry record.
“Her real name was Karthika. She was the girl who vanished twenty years ago... and that phone number belongs to her personal SIM card. It has been deactivated for two decades.”