When Dr. Aarav Sen moved into the derelict Magnolia Residency, people thought he’d lost his mind.
It was a crumbling six-story building tucked behind the city's busiest hospital. The ceilings leaked, the pipes hissed like serpents, and the tenants were... off. But Aarav wasn’t concerned. He wasn’t like other doctors. He was a surgeon with hands worshipped by scalpel and sutures, and a God complex large enough to rent space in his chest.
By day, he performed delicate surgeries. By night, he walked the echoing halls of Magnolia, a stethoscope still hanging like a trophy around his neck.
His patients—those he chose carefully—shared something in common: they were alone, broken, and poor. Perfect. He fixed them in ways they couldn’t imagine.
After all, what was a kidney if not a canvas? A liver, a living manuscript?
No one knew that under anesthesia, he used a heated surgical stylus to etch his signature—“Dr. A. Sen”—onto their organs. Tiny, cryptic, impossible to detect by the untrained eye. It wasn’t just narcissism. It was a binding.
The first was Rishi, a homeless addict who came in with severe liver trauma. He left with Aarav’s branded signature pulsing inside him and an uncontrollable urge to carve things. He started with wood. Then rats. Then the superintendent’s cat. When confronted, Rishi said, eyes glassy and vacant, “He told me to open it up. I had to see how it worked.”
Rishi vanished a week later. No one cared.
But the true experiment began when Aarav operated on Maya, a vibrant literature student who suffered a freak accident and needed intestinal reconstruction. He signed her colon. Her recovery was swift—unnaturally so—but her personality eroded like eroded paint. She stopped going to class, stopped writing poetry. She muttered phrases like, “I’m just a vessel. He writes the story.”
Her roommate found her one night scribbling anatomical diagrams in her own blood, whispering, “The organs remember. The body obeys.”
By the third patient, Aarav was hooked. He didn’t just heal people—he rewrote them. And like any artist, he needed more material.
So he brought them to Magnolia.
One by one, his patients were offered cheap rooms there. At first, they were grateful—rent in the city was a nightmare. But Magnolia was more than a building. It was his gallery. His cathedral of control. And they, his obedient creations, began to exhibit... tendencies.
Aarav didn’t tell them they were under his spell. He didn’t need to. The organs whispered. The signatures pulsed. They began to sense each other. They gravitated together like wolves drawn to the same bloody scent.
One night, Maya and Rishi were seen dragging the body of a noisy tenant into the building's boiler room. They returned with bloodied clothes and dead eyes.
“You’re improving,” Aarav whispered to them later, voice like a caress. “I’m so proud of you Maya.”
Soon, the residents weren’t just patients. They were disciples. Worshippers of pain, ritual, and the god who lived on the sixth floor—Dr. Aarav Sen.
He would descend nightly in his white coat, hands always gloved, eyes gleaming like surgical steel. They gathered before him like children at bedtime.
“You are my masterpiece,” he’d say. “Each of you is etched with purpose. Each of you obeys the oath I signed within you. And together, we will cleanse this city.”
And so the gruesome acts began—methodical, surgical, and ritualistic.
A street thug was found nailed to a telephone pole in a crucified position, his torso split and labeled anatomically like a dissection chart.
A corrupt official disappeared. Only his lungs were found, inflated with concrete.
Each crime scene bore a cryptic symbol no one could decipher—until one detective noticed the markings resembled a cursive A. Sen when mirrored.
The media panicked. A serial killer with surgical precision. A cult leader in hiding. The public coined him “The Organ Whisperer.”
But Aarav was never afraid. He watched the news with amusement while sipping wine beside his sedated next patient.
He wasn’t hiding. He was reigning.
However, one night, something changed.
A new tenant moved in—Kabir Mehra, a psychology postgraduate. Quiet, unassuming, curious. Too curious. Aarav didn’t remember operating on him. That was a problem.
Kabir noticed the others. How they flinched when Aarav entered. How they stared too long into the dark. How their scars pulsed like nervous ticks.
And Kabir started digging.
He bribed a nurse. Found Aarav’s patient list. Recognized names of fellow residents.
And then he broke into Aarav’s personal records. There, behind locked drawers, were post-op photos. Not of the body, but the organs—each with that damn signature.
Kabir recoiled. It wasn’t medicine. It was branding. Possession.
One night, Kabir confronted Maya.
“He signed you,” he said.
She blinked slowly, then smiled like a broken doll. “Didn’t you know? The body is just a book. We’re lucky he chose to write in us.”
Terrified, Kabir tried to flee. But the building had changed.
The staircases twisted.
The elevator returned to the sixth floor no matter the button pressed.
The lights dimmed on their own. Whispers leaked from vents. And the walls throbbed like veins.
Aarav was waiting.
“You weren’t invited,” he said calmly, blocking the exit. “But now that you’re here... perhaps it's time I fixed that.”
He raised a syringe. “Don’t worry, Kabir. You’ll feel nothing. You’ll wake up reborn. And next time... you’ll understand the script.”
Darkness swallowed the hallway.
One Year Later
Magnolia is empty now. The news said it burned down in an electrical accident. No bodies were found.
But if you wander too close to its ashes, some say you’ll hear them—faint whispers in the wind:
“He signed me. I obey.”
And if you listen too long, you might start to feel something… twitching... under your ribs.