Chapter 10
CALLAN
I wanted her fire. I wanted to burn under her gaze.
I was seven when I realised there was someone else living inside my body.
It was another boy who looked exactly like me. But his eyes were older…colder.
Once, I had a stuffed animal my mother got for me from a thrift shop on a Christmas eve. It was a dirty, old brown bear with one glass eye and one ear missing.
I liked it a lot and often slept with it tucked beneath my chin, hugged tightly in my arms. I never let go of it at night, never slept without it.
But one morning, I woke up and he was laying by the foot of the bed, head ripped off clean, stuffing everywhere—pink and white—like something inside him had tried to escape.
I remembered standing there, staring at the remains, waiting for the fear to arrive, the monster in the wardrobe that must have done this. But neither the fear nor the monster ever came out. I was left with only confusion. A hollow space where a memory should have been.
And as time went on, that hollow space became all too familiar.
Some mornings, I’d wake up with dirt under my nails, packed so deep it hurt to scrape them out.
Other mornings, my palms were sticky, darkened with something that smelt like metal.
There were times I would notice dry blood on my nails and on the cuffs of my pyjamas.
Yet I would search my body and find no wounds.
There were always gaps in my memory. Whole hours, days missing. Like someone had taken scissors to my life and cut pieces out while I slept.
One morning I woke up and found my mother lying on the bed, still as a picture. My little sister, Ophelia—two months old—was wrapped with a thin linen, left on the bare mat, wailing, breath heaving loudly.
And my mother…my mother’s skin was breaking.
Not rotting all at once, but splitting in places, soft and wet, as though her body had forgotten how to stay closed.
Thousands of maggots writhed through the seams of her flesh, pale and frantic, spilling out of her the way words spilled out of a mouth that had forgotten how to stop speaking.
Her lips were dry, white. Her eyes…empty.
At first I didn’t understand. My mind couldn’t. Because the last thing I remembered was eating the porridge she made for dinner. I had stood by the counter while she stirred it, watched the steam rise and vanish. Ophelia was long asleep on the bed, thumb buried in her mouth.
I remembered going to bed full…warm that night.
I had slept.
I had only slept.
But whatever had been wearing my body wasn’t asleep while I slept.
At An Sgàil House–an academy for the children considered wrong by society–where my sister and I had been shoved into after our home was set on fire, I finally met him. The thing—boy or ghost living inside me.
I was standing on the bathroom stool one morning, facing the mirror as I brushed my teeth.
But something was off; the boy in the mirror didn’t move the way I did.
His mouth curved when mine didn’t. He had a sharp grin while my lips were pressed in a thin line.
And his eyes looked older, watching, not reflecting.
He tilted his head, studying me like something fragile.
Then finally, “Hello, brother,” he dragged the words on his tongue, testing it, sending a chill down my spine. My toothbrush slipped from my grip and clattered into the rotten basin.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t run.
Because somehow, I already knew his voice, knew his existence.
According to my late mother’s dusty diary that I was able to grab before we got kicked out of our home so they could set it on fire—with my mother’s decaying body in it, the doctor had told her it was a ‘vanishing syndrome’.
One moment, the scan held two heartbeats, the next, it was only mine.
The doctor said I had eaten my brother. But he laughed it off like it was something dismissive.
Babies do that sometimes. It was simply… biology, he said.
But did biology have a history of whispering to you in the dark?
My twin brother didn’t vanish. He lived as a ghost inside me. I hated it, but it was a price I had to pay. A little sacrifice because I had taken his life before he got to live. It was a predicament I was willing to endure. As far as he stayed out of my business and I stayed out of his.
But this blood always clinging to me every time I woke up was annoying. I hated it.
A soft groan left my lips as my eyes cracked open for the first time in a while. My cheek was pressed against the black porcelain tile of my room. My fingers twitched, as if life once left my body and now was slipping back in through my bones.
Half of my body was on the bed, while the other half had slid to the floor, twisted, like I attempted escaping myself the night before but couldn’t.
Then, a familiar scent hit me; coppery and fresh, clinging to my skin like another pulse.
I lifted my hands and saw it, blood lining my palms, damp and thick. It threaded under my nails, streaking up my forearms like something had been dragged down.
My throat tightened. My nose flared slightly, and my jaw flexed.
Seriously, what exactly would it take from him to just clean up, leave my body the way he met it?
I stood up fully and a ringing started in my ears, faint at first, and then sharp enough to blur my vision. My memories from the last moment I was in control of this body flickered, broken, a fragment I was desperate to piece together.
Elizabeth.
I saw her smile, her voice asking me if we could go get the coffee now. I heard her laboured breaths, saw the horror in her bejeweled eyes that had put a spell on me, until the world tilted, then she drifted away from me, and darkness took over me.
I hadn’t been ready to walk away from her then.
I wanted to spend the rest of the night soaking in her presence.
I didn’t know what it was about her that kept drawing me like a moth to a flame, but I wanted to be wherever she was.
Her voice curled around me too easily, too sweetly, a siren’s call I couldn’t resist.
I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted it. I needed it. All of it. Even if it ended up ruining me. Even if all of this didn’t make sense because I just met her. I barely knew this girl for crying out loud.
But what was I to do when with her, everything had felt right, like her presence was where I was meant to be all along?
I stumbled to the sink and turned the faucet on full blast. Water hammered the steel basin, splashing my shirt, causing the dried blood clinging to it to bloom.
I wondered who the blood belonged to. Mine? His? Someone else? A tremor ran through me at the thought. I’d had to wipe bloodstains away half of my life, but never really knew who they belonged to.
How cruel indeed.
My reflection wavered in the mirror, split by streaks of water, fractured by the harsh bathroom light. Two faces in one. Two shadows behind one set of eyes.
“What did you do with my body this time?” I whispered, but of course, no answer came, just his satisfaction that pulsed in my chest like a slow, poisoned heartbeat.
I took off my shirt, ready to scrub the coppery scent off my body, erase this memory, pretend it never happened. Elizabeth’s face flashed before me than my reflection did.
Did she ever try to call me after that day? It would make sense if she did.
I had told her I would call her. But it had been more than a week.
She must have spent the days wondering why I left her stranded that night.
Why I never bothered to call. Why she called and the number didn’t go through.
I had switched off the phone that had her number.
Hid it away from my brother’s reach. He didn’t need to know she existed.
Elizabeth was my little secret.
I bet she thought I was a bad person for leaving without contact. She had no idea what I desperately tried to protect her from, what was going to come out to meet her instead of me that day.
She had no idea that I woke up today, ten days later, stained in blood, because of the monster inside me who loved breaking things.
I pulled a face towel from the silver rack, wiping my hands with it, leaving a rusty train of blood. Then I walked over to my medicine cabinet, and couldn’t help a sigh at the sight before me.
The pill bottles sat the same way I left them last time.
And when I picked one and twisted the cap, not a single pill was missing.
Zaghan had been in control for ten days.
Ten pills were supposed to be missing from this bottle.
He was meant to take them everyday like I always did, like he should whenever he took over my body.
Yet, he always skipped them. Said he hated the pills. But I needed the pills.
“Seriously?” I whispered to nothing. “You couldn’t even take one? Just…once?”
???
The small bell above the cafe door chimed as she walked in, a tiny, trembling sound that somehow felt louder than it should.
The cafe was nearly empty, so she spotted me instantly. But instead of her quiet smile, her gaze slid past me, unfocused, as if she left her mind somewhere else.
She came closer, pulled out the chair and sat across from me, her dewy rose scent enveloping me.
“Hi,” she whispered quietly, her fingers going to the hem of her woolen arm warmer, twisting the fabric, undoing and redoing the threads.
The silence between us stretched, long enough for the steam on the latte I had ordered for her to fade.
Something was wrong. And it made me anxious. I had been trying to not make mistakes with her, to not say or do anything that would make her not want to look at me, talk to me or be in my presence.
Did I fail?
After what felt like a decade of watching her stare into the middle distance, I finally asked, so quiet, so scared, “Are you okay, Elizabeth?”