The next morning, I woke up screaming. The memory of feeding on filth was too real, too close. I scrambled out of bed and was sick in the bathroom, my body heaving with sobs. I stared at my reflection in the mirror. My face was pale, my eyes wild and haunted. The face of a woman who had spent the night in hell.

I can’t do this.

The thought was a rebellion. A mutiny of the soul. I can’t. I won’t.

I spent the day in a haze of defiance. I didn’t write. I didn’t even look at this journal. I cleaned the house with a frantic energy, trying to scrub away the phantom stench of the Vaitarna river. I put on loud music, trying to drown out the memory of my own mother’s cries.

As night fell, I didn’t get ready for bed. I sat on the sofa in the living room, the lights on, a blanket wrapped tightly around me. A foolish, childish rebellion. As if a lightbulb could hold back the darkness Katha commanded.

When the clock struck midnight, the lights in the room flickered and died. The music cut out. The air grew cold, a deep, penetrating chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.

She was standing in the middle of the room. Not the serene girl from the woods. This was the other Katha. The one whose eyes were pits of black ice.

“You are not in your bed, Dimple,” she said, her voice the sound of grinding stone.

“I’m not doing it,” I said, my own voice trembling but stubborn. “I can’t. It’s too much. You can’t make me.”

A low, cruel laugh escaped her lips. “Make you? Oh, Dimple. You still don’t understand.” She drifted closer, and the cold intensified. “This isn’t a negotiation. It’s a penance. Your penance.”

“I told you,” she hissed, “your sins are far greater than your daughter’s. Shall we review them again? The affair with Sameer was not just a ‘mistake’.

It was a calculated betrayal. You sent him photos of your naked body while your husband slept beside you. You planned your ‘business trips’ around his. You lusted after him, you craved him, and you did it all while smiling in your husband’s face and posting pictures of your ‘perfect family’.”

Every word was a nail hammering me to the sofa.

“And Maya,” she continued, her voice merciless. “Her suicide was not a singular event. It was the final harvest of a seed you planted. Her boyfriend, the one who broke her heart just before she died? You hated him. You thought he wasn’t good enough for her. You deliberately undermined their relationship. You dropped poison in her ear about him. You wanted them to break up, and you got your wish. Her despair was your victory. You just didn’t expect the consequences.”

Tears streamed down my face. It was true. All of it.

“I can’t,” I sobbed. “Please.”

“If you refuse to write,” she said, her voice dropping to a terrifying whisper, “if you break this pact, then the deal is off.

Maya will be lost forever. And your husband and son, whose journey to this realm is about to begin, will follow her straight into the fire. Their only hope of a peaceful passage rests on the completion of this book. On you.”

Her dark eyes bored into me. “Think of them, Dimple. Think of Rohan. Think of little Avi. Do you want them to walk that road of spikes? Do you want them to bathe in that river?”

She had me. She had my heart, my soul, my entire family in her cold, cruel hands. My rebellion was a pathetic joke.

“The journey continues tonight, Dimple,” she said, her form already beginning to fade. “And tomorrow, you will write. You have no other choice.”

Index of: Journey Of Hell: The Unforgotten Promise

• A Warning to the Reader
• A Mother’s Testimony
• Chapter 1 The God of Small Betrayals
• Chapter 2 The Sins of a Mother
• Chapter 3 The Soul and The Body
• Chapter 4 the Road of a Thousand Regrets
• Chapter 5 A Desert of Burning Rage
• Chapter 6 The Prison Before Birth
• Chapter 7 A River of Self
• Chapter 8 The Twelve-Day Ghost