Storm child

I held it between my hands and I snapped it clean in two. Gramma did not react. I stood up and kissed her on the forehead. I left her sitting on the swing, and I strode through the old house, the house of my childhood. I stopped in front of the locked door to the room in the south-west corner, the room I'd been born in. The room I'd never entered since. It was not locked anymore. The door opened smoothly.

I gazed inside. 

It was a black room. Blacker than black, darker than any darkness that should have been possible in this world. Like a hole in the fabric of reality. Like someone had Photoshopped away a piece of the universe. There was no opposite wall, no floor, no ceiling. It was emptiness, like stepping into the void itself. And in the middle of that vast, blank, nothingness floated a child. A newborn, glistening in the fluids of birth from the light behind me. She was partially draped in soiled towels, and her eyes were open. 

And I knew those eyes. I knew the shape and colour. I knew the slight up-turn on the corners, and the tangled lashes that framed them. I'd seen them hundreds, thousands, of times. I'd seen them that very morning, gazing at me from the mirror, from my face. 

I stepped into the void. 

There was no floor, yet I walked. There was no air, yet I breathed. I moved over to the child, the child who was me. Her eyes, my eyes, focused on my face. She smiled, and it was a smile of ultimate horror. It was a smile of pure, ancient pleasure, the likes of which had no place on the face of a human child. But this was not a child, was it? 

She twisted and arched her back, and I reached out with a numb hand to touch her. The moment I made contact with her skin, she crumbled. Like ash. Like she'd been made of wood and had been burning for decades, and had finally disintegrated. The debris swirled around me. I twisted, hanging suspended in that huge, forsaken nothingness, and watched, unfeeling, as the dust settled on my skin. 

Pain. Fire scorching through my veins instead of blood. Whips of thorn, lashing at me, flaying me, laying me terribly, horribly bare, exposed, naked to the nameless malice that slept in that room, that wretched room, that secret, locked, deadly room, room, room! Voices and screams inside my skull, colours and shapes swirling in front of my blind eyes, and a soft, secret laughter coming from far, far away—but that voice was familiar. I knew that voice. I'd heard it before, hundreds, thousands of times. I'd heard it just a few hours ago, coming from my own throat. I gasped—

And I was standing on the floor of my childhood home, retching dryly, one hand braced on a blank wall which, for the entirety of my life, had been a locked door that no one had been allowed to enter. I glanced down at myself, but there was not a mark, even not a hint of—

"Sarah." 

I turned, swallowing hard, to see Gramma standing a few feet away from me. There were tears on her cheeks, the same as mine.

"Sweetheart, what have you done?" she whispered. 

"Mom can feel things too, can't she?" I asked her, forcing air back into my lungs.

"Sarah—"

"Please, Gramma."

"Yes. She can. Since you were born."

I swallowed again. I wished I could stop shaking. "She won't have to, anymore."

"Sarah, sweetheart—"

"Gramma," I said slowly. "You must never look for me. Do you understand? And you must make sure the rest of the family doesn't, either. Please. For my sake."

She did not fight me, did not try to change my mind. She'd always understood me, better than anyone else in the world, Gramma had understood me. 

"But where will you go?" she whispered, and her voice cracked.

I hated that. I hated that someone as tough as my Gramma was crying. "Far. I don't know. I'll figure something out. I promise you, I'll be okay. I have your blood, I'm strong too. But the others cannot look for me. You saw the picture. You saw what'll happen. I love you, Gramma. I really do." 

And I walked out of the house quickly, before the sight of her on her knees, crying, could kill me in truth. 

That was a year ago. I've moved out of the country since then. To a different climate, and a different continent. I've kept mostly to myself. It's good. Lonely, but good. True to their word, the family has not contacted me. I try to use my real name as little as possible, to make it harder for them, and there are often weeks when the pain of not seeing them is an agony I have to fight past. But then, at times, at the strangest moments, I find myself feeling things. Strange things. Bad things. At times, I'm able to stop whatever it is. Sometimes, I cannot. I haven't yet been able to figure out the pattern, or if a pattern even exists, what triggers it, what the threshold of this might be. 

Yet, at other times, I'll see myself in the mirror, and I'll see a strange smile on my face. A smile of ancient pleasure, a smile that should never have been mine at all.

Tomorrow is Christmas in my home country, and that ghastly smile has not left my face all day today.

This is the third and final part of "Storm Child", serialised here on Star Literature.

Sarazeen Saif Ahana is an adjunct member of the faculty at Independent University, Bangladesh where she teaches English and has a small cult of friends similarly obsessed with genre fiction.