Sameera didn’t like their new house.
It was in a bad neighbourhood. It was very cramped in there. The walls had streaks of termite colonies and half of them weren’t even painted, just exposed bricks. The floor was bare cement and ugly. There was no direct water or gas supply and there was frequent load shedding. This meant that she spent most of her time yelling about how hot it was or helping her mother and father with small things. And there was nothing wrong with helping them, but it reduced the time she spent studying. She was 12 but she knew that her father had lost his job and they were going to have to adjust to harsher conditions. So she complained to her father about everything in the house, the only thing about which she liked was the pink paint which was lathered on the exterior. But never so much to bother him too much. She also knew that she had to study. Being her parents only child, she knew that she was their only hope to a kinder and softer old age. This was one of the reasons why she didn’t like the new shoddy house. It prevented her from maximising her study time, or let her enjoy her playtime.
Another reason, Sameera didn’t push much about the miserable condition of her room and her house was her mother. Their sudden financial and social plunge had devastated her mother more than her father, who was somehow coping. She was always on the end of her wits. She would lie on the mattress in the room that was hers (although calling it a room was an embarrassment to all rooms since it was more of a small partition of her parents bedroom.) and listen to her parents and quarrelling. Her father would try to placate her mother but her tone and aggressiveness would rise through the hours of night like notes in an orchestra and reach a crescendo near dawn, when she would start sobbing, and would cry herself to sleep.
One of the biggest arguments, her mother made was about the house and its previous occupant.
The local people weren’t very friendly but they were forthcoming enough to tell them that the house was previously owned by a healer of sorts. She used all kinds of herbs and ointments, oils and spices to treat divergent ailments including but not limited to cancer, infertility, depression, body aches and flu and everything between these. Needless to say many people considered her a quake, however she was the closest thing to a doctor that the people in that area knew.
As a result of her profession, the healer kept all sorts of bottles containing all sorts of things in her house. And before dying (nobody knew if she even had, she had just vanished one night) she had forgotten to take down her vials. These were the primary harbinger of annoyance for her mother. They consistently found colourful bottles, which upon opening would effuse pungent odours in the small interior. Sameera’s mother had thrown out heaps and heaps of those bottles and suspicious looking paper bags containing plants and other gooey materials. She didn’t want to know what they were. Or what they did. Their unnaturally bright colors and pervasive smell were enough to have them discarded. One particular bottle, which had faint red smudges inside, indicating that it had previously been filled with something crimson-red, was the worst. Sameera found it first. She didn’t even have to open it. She was searching for something deep inside the cupboard when her hand touched it. She recoiled and pulled it back, repulsed by the slimy cold exterior. When she brought her fingers close to her mouth to get a whiff, her body reacted by making her puke. That was when her mother had decided to unhesitatingly dispose off all previous furniture too, even at their own discomfort.
But it still wasn’t enough. Sameera found this out one night. She was sleeping on the mattress, just a few centimetres off the floor, when she felt something brush her feet. That didn’t wake her up though. When the light stroking got insistent she thought it was just another annoying fly. Suddenly, she realised no fly would be this stubbornly affixed with her feet. She woke up; jerked her feet away and stood up to turn on the lights. There was nothing there. She might’ve yelped or screamed without realising because her parents had rushed to her room too. She was hyperventilating; unsure whether of fear or disgust or apprehension. She told her mother what she had felt, not failing to mention that she had felt something hard scratching against the sole of her feet. Her mother had deduced the culprit instantly. Rats. They had gnawed on Sameera with their grotesque teeth.
It was a pity they couldn’t afford an exterminator or even efficient poisons. Her mother had bought a few rat traps in vain. Sameera knew too well that she would just have to get used to of getting nibbled at in the night. So time passed as it always does, the rats no longer limited themselves to any one part of her body while Sameera continued excelling in school at everything she did, while bearing all domestic difficulties. In fact if anything Sameera had gotten used to of the adverse living conditions. She found herself completely revitalised in the mornings just by sleeping after a tiring day, that had left her body full of aches.
All normalcy in her life however changed one day. Sameera like all girls of her age, had her first period.
Her body ached in ways she found hard to describe. Her mother soothed her as much as she could and explained to Sameera that the bleeding, the pain, all of it was natural. She shouldn’t worry. She squirmed and curled up into a fetus on her mattress. All day, her legs and thighs hurt like they had never before. It was the kind of visceral pain she didn’t even knew was possible. Perhaps somewhere amidst all the pain she was also worried about the fact that she was no longer a child. People were now going to expect her to be even mature. All these agonies plagued her that day and when night finally came, she found herself sinking into sleep out of sheer exhaustion.
Sometime in the night, she abruptly woke up. Moon light was cascading on her face through the window. She realised she felt no pain. It was as if the last day hadn’t occurred. And all of the pangs were all nothing more than a nightmare. It was then that she realised something was wrong. Very wrong.
Someone was touching her. Massaging her. And it wasn’t her mother. No. The presence of her mother would never make her heart beat this fast, it wouldn’t have made the hair on her arms stand up. She wouldn’t smell as terrible as this. Sameera was afraid. She couldn’t dare to turn her head and gaze into eyes of whoever or whatever was around her. She was aware that the effect of this ‘therapy’ was profound as she felt completely fine. However, all of this was completely undermined by the fact that this was an unknown stranger doing this to her. Sameera would’ve lied like that, feigning sleep and indifference, maybe even thinking it was all a conjecture of her mind, when her mind picked up on a faint stimulus. She hadn’t known it then, when it had first happened, but she knew it now. The scratching on her feet by a hard surface. It wasn’t a rat. Or it’s teeth. It was a nail. It was someone’s nail rubbing against her skin.
Her heart skipped a beat and without a second thought she swivelled on her side to look at her ominous benefactor.
And Sameera screamed.
The woman who had been caressing her, and massaging her had long white hair all around her sickly long face. There was a mole on her left cheek: an obscenely large one, and her teeth were discoloured and broken. Her lips were thin and dry, and when Sameera had looked at her, she had been grinning. The grin had made her loose skin tighten at odd places and sag at others while showing off her broken teeth. It was her eyes that were the worst. They were unnaturally small and almost completely full of whites except the white was more yellow than white. The red streaks in her eyes were too contrasting and her black pupil was a little bead. She was wearing a black clothe and had a belt of sorts slung across her waist.
When Sameera had screamed and scurried backward on all fours, the woman had raised her pale white hands. She had long fingers and even longer nails. They were razor sharp; completely misshapen and full of filth. She had given Sameera a crazy look and then hissed. That had showed her forked crimson tongue. A tongue the color of congealed blood. A tongue more red than pink. That had done it for Sameera.
She screamed and screamed, ducking and hiding herself away in a corner. Her parents had come running to her room and turned on the lights. They saw nothing. Neither did the neighbours who had all woken up and arrived one by one. All of them saw nothing, except a little girl sobbing in a corner with her face all covered up.
She laid down the rest of the night on her parents bed. Laid, because she couldn’t sleep. For many days and nights, she felt sleep hard to come by and she would sleep on the floor in her parents room, hoping that would keep her safe.
Nobody had really believed her. It was partially her own fault. She hadn’t been able to properly describe what she had seen. The red stains on her sheets had only discredited her narrative, especially when her mother had chimed in with the bit about her feeling ill in the day too. All of them attributed it to weariness or burden of studies. Nobody took it serious.
And maybe neither did Sameera. Because like many of us, Sameera forgot her childhood gradually as she blossomed into a woman. All memories turned hazy and it was hard to say whether any supernatural or extraordinary events had been just dreams or reality.
When she was 35, a successful woman and the CEO of her own company, she felt like she had almost everything that she had ever wanted. Her husband and she had tried many times over the years for kids, but had failed. Her gynaecologist had recommended several treatments for both of them and none had worked.
Sometimes late at night, Sameera would find herself wondering if somewhere along the way, something was stolen from her.
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In a world and dimension not quite ours, and not quite far away from ours. A certain demonic witch sucked her pale fingers dry and chuckled. Her forked tongue slithered in her mouth, taking in all of the red juice that was dripping from her hand. Greedily, she pushed her hand again deeper into the bottle, which was filled to brim with something slimy and red. It also contained little dark jellies inside, that weren’t quite shapeless. In fact they looked like they had a head, and a tail, and eyes. And hearts. Little baby hearts, that were at times beating.
