Chapter 6
I wake to find myself quietly closing the back door, my hands drenched in something cold—sticky and wet. At first, I’m sure this is a dream. I blink, disoriented, the panic building slow like syrup as I stare in confusion at my bloodied hands, the door disappearing into the wall in front of me.
What—?
Red. Red. So much fucking red.
No.
I swallow. The sharp taste of blood and raw, animal meat snaps me fully out of my daze.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand, and I go still for a moment before spinning sharply around, my chest heaving, eyes wild.
There’s no one there. Rosemary’s scent is fading, like she had been standing right here but had literally disappeared. I stare through the empty archway into the living room, all my senses sharpening, listening for her.
There’s nothing. It’s like she’s not even in the house.
I don’t look at my hands. My lips and jaw feel cold, my clothes entirely drenched at the front. The grief is so intense I nearly collapse to my knees right there.
I practically run out of the kitchen and up the stairs.
“Why did you—why would you—?” I hate that I sound so fucking betrayed. I barely know this house. I’ve barely accepted that it’s even alive.
My clothes go unceremoniously into the trash. They disappear the moment they make contact with the plastic bag in the netted basket, and I spare only a brief thought for where the house has taken them before I’m back to trying to simply breathe.
Underneath the hot spray of the shower, I don’t taste the salt of my tears.
I cup both hands behind my neck, squeezing hard like Rosemary used to do the rare times I’d lost control.
It doesn’t help. I’ve brushed and rinsed with mouthwash, but I can still taste blood, can still feel the gore lodged between my teeth, pushed up against my gums.
I bend over, heaving. Gagging. My arms shake where I’ve pressed them weakly against the tiled shower wall. I stare at them like like they aren’t a part of me.
What had I done? Where had I gone?
And why had the house let me?
Fuck, I wish my mum were here. My grief morphs into fury.
Why hadn’t she told me? Why had she lied?
It’s a type of madness, she’d said; a disgusting understatement. A curse placed on our family, specifically the women. You must never let your emotions get the best of you, Genevieve. You must remain in control at all times, or the hunger will take control of you.
She’d spent years teaching me that control. Years training away my body’s natural reaction to stimuli, like she’d been afraid even a stray sneeze would have the “madness” taking hold.
Then, during the funeral, like a harbinger of truth, my grandmother had come. Despite the fact that I’d been ten years old the last time I’d seen her, I’d recognised her immediately.
She looked almost exactly like my mother.
Almost exactly like me.
The Lagos sun had been unforgiving. It had just been us, two solitary figures standing under a large, dark umbrella behind the house I’d grown up in, along with the gravediggers I’d hired, and the grief of losing the only other constant in my life.
I’d refused to think about Rosemary, how I’d left her back at the bus terminal in Benin literally less than a week ago.
How she’d so easily let me go.
The tears had burned like acid, and I’d lied to myself that I wasn’t grieving her, too.
“I’m sure your mother has told you all sorts of things about me,” my grandmother had said, her voice raspy with age.
She’d been dressed to the nines, her lips painted red and lined with brown, her eyelids lined simply in black.
Her head had been covered in a bright pink gele shaped like a rose, her blouse made of white silk and lace.
Her dark blue velvet wrappers were pristine and smelled faintly of camphor, probably fresh from a precious silver trunk filled with other expensive clothing, like my mother’d had.
Despite the unquestionable authority radiating off her form, something about her had seemed injured. Vulnerable.
When I hadn’t responded, she’d whispered, “How did she die?” her voice thick with anguish and something else I hadn’t recognised.
At the question, I tasted blood. Heard that damning scream, brutally cut off. Perhaps the beast had gotten confused, because it plunged me into one of my clearest earliest memories of my mother.
I think I’d been five or six. It had been late at night, and I’d heard the high-pitched whines of an animal in pain. The sound had drawn me out of the house like the Pied Piper’s flute, except it was the call of prey, small and vulnerable, to an apex predator on silent feet.
My mother had appeared just as silently and abruptly, staring coldly down at me after I’d wrung the poor rat’s neck, putting it out of its misery, and brought its limp, warm, disgusting flesh to my mouth. I’d never forget the look in her eyes, that unique mix of fear and revulsion.
Of course, she’d been the one to put the rat there. Deliberately triggering instincts apparently borne from the “curse”. She’d placed many more “traps” like that over the next few months, and every time I let the “madness” take hold, I was punished.
A normal person would try and help the animal, not kill and attempt to eat it, she’d said, hard and unflinching. A normal person would see a hurt, vulnerable creature in need of assistance, not fresh prey in need of devouring.
A normal person wouldn’t have this hunger at all.
“Heart attack,” I told my grandmother stonily. It still seems so ridiculous. So wasteful. After everything—after all her training, and she’d been taken by a fucking heart attack, a thing she literally couldn’t control. Ha.
My grandmother made a disbelieving snort. I’d been too tired to glare at her.
“I guess that’s what the doctors told you.” She shook her head. “It isn’t true, edémi.” My daughter. “Your mother died because she refused to give the dagbato a sacrifice.”
I’d turned to stare at her. The what a what? What was she talking about?
“She really didn’t tell you anything.” She hadn’t looked surprised in the least. “Isn’t that just like her? To pretend she knows everything only to come crying to mummy when she’s made a mess.”
I bristled.
She waved a dismissive hand, as if to say calm down. It was such a perfect mimic of my mother’s own gesture that I’d felt my throat thicken.
“The dagbato is a crossroads demon, one our family has had a deal with for generations. Your mother broke that deal, and the dagbato killed her for it. Heart attack, ke?” She’d scoffed.
“I’m here because I need you to uphold your end of the bargain before your …
symptoms … start to manifest, and the dagbato decides to kill you, too. ”
Madness, my mother’s voice whispered. And, like her good little lamb, I’d listened.
“Don’t think because I’m letting you witness this that we suddenly have a relationship,” I said coldly.
“Oh, you’re letting me, is it?”
I hadn’t reacted to the dangerous tone. My mother had been just as dramatic, like she’d ironically forgotten my training; I don’t react to kicks and punches and literal fire, why would I react to a tone of voice?
The silence had stretched until the body was in the ground, covered in a mound of dirt. The gravediggers had left us afterward, their money safe in their pockets.
Her loss hit me all over again, slamming into my back like a truck. What was I going to do without her? How I was going to manage? At least she’d owned the house.
The painfully empty house, filled now with only memories and reminders.
God, I wanted Rosemary.
I needed her.
My claws threatened to pop. I grit my jaw so hard I was practically shoving my teeth back into my gums, my entire skull aching with it.
All the reasons why I couldn’t have her. Why leaving her behind had been the right thing to do.
“I see you’re not ready to receive my message,” my grandmother said eventually. I felt her searing gaze on the side of my face. Even though I hadn’t been looking directly at her, I had felt her amusement. “I’m going to give it, shall we say, ten years?”
Ten years had been exactly how long it had taken.
When my already heightened senses elevated even more.
When my body began to … change. When I felt every single emotion a thousandfold.
When the hunger, which had suspiciously—though only barely—quieted after I’d left Rosemary, began to claw at my belly once more.
When something that had once been easily ignored, threatened to become all that I am.
My deterioration had been slow, so slow I’d ignored it. It had been a stray leaf brushing lightly against my ankle, yet when next I’d looked, I was completely enveloped in vines, wound so tightly I could barely breathe.
I don’t remember the dog. Maybe I refuse to remember.
I’d come to myself in a heady daze, the hunger, for once, marginally satisfied.
I was squatting in the backyard of the house I’d once shared with my mother—a few feet from where I’d buried her.
My mouth and my front had been soaked in red, like just now, my right hand still curled mercilessly around the dog’s limp throat, great chunks of its flesh missing. Bitten and torn off.
Its rib cage lay ripped brutally open, its heart gone.
I’d felt my mother’s presence standing over me, glaring down like I was a disgusting slug. She had screamed in my head, that perhaps she had gone too easy on me if I’d forgotten my training this fucking easily.
I hadn’t even bothered with cleaning the blood off before I’d tried to contact my grandmother with blurry eyes, a tightening throat, and shaking hands.
She’d said something about a deal. About “symptoms”.
She had to know something—a way to help me stop it.
To help me re-wrap the sluggishly unspooling thread of my control.
Only, at the exact moment I’d made that decision, her message had come, landing in my phone like my panic had summoned it.
Edémi,
If you’re reading this, I am already dead.
She’d left me everything; all her assets, a sentient ancestral home, and the secrets of our family.
Fuck. It’s only been a few days since I’d gotten that message, but it feels like a lifetime has passed, my life now segmented into four parts: Before and After Rosemary, and Before and After the Truth.
Imagine if I hadn’t left Rosemary back then, when I’d still believed my affliction was just “madness”.
When I’d believed all that training had helped me suppress this—this hunger, when in reality, no amount of training would have helped.
My ancestors had literally had to make a deal with a crossroads demon for that very purpose, with hundreds of years of my foremothers fulfilling this deal.
Until my mother had broken her end of the bargain, and my grandmother had tried futilely to get me to keep to mine.
I’m not simply losing control, or whatever illusion of it I’d thought I’d had.
I’m losing myself. And I have never been more afraid.
I need to find the details of the ritual my ancestors had used to uphold the deal with the dagbato.
I refuse to become this—thing. This monster.
I don’t think about the semantics, about why my mother had decided breaking the deal was her best course of action.
About why she’d lied, and kept me away from my grandmother. Kept me away from the truth.
But I can’t do anything while Rosemary is here. The possibility of her disposition changing if she learns … what I am, of her hating me, or worse, being afraid of me—
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
For whatever reason, the house had let me outside. A subconscious part of me knows why—the beast’s ever-present hunger has been marginally satisfied once more—but I pretend not to notice or understand.
If the house had opened up once, there’s a high chance it might do so again. Once Rosemary’s gone, I’m summoning the dagbato and upholding whatever deal my ancestors had made. Whatever it takes.
I step out of the shower, slightly lightheaded from the searing heat of it, even though there’s no evidence on my skin; another effect of my … affliction—supernaturally fast healing.
I notice something strange as I walk past the fogged mirror. My heart leaps into my throat and I freeze. I unstick my feet and walk resolutely back to the sink, lifting a hand to wipe away the steam.
My grandmother is standing behind me.
I don’t outwardly react, though my pulse speeds up, something awful clawing into my throat.
I hadn’t known her. I barely even remember her from the few times my mother and I had visited when I was a child, and had only met her that one time during the funeral.
But still, fuck, she looks so much like my mother I can’t look away, even though every instinct is screaming at me to.
She looks furious, mouthing something rapidly. I try to read her lips and fail, gripping the edges of the sink with despair.
The longer she speaks, the more uncanny her appearance becomes.
Her teeth go first; sharpening, lengthening. Her brown skin grows paler, saggier. Her fingers extend, extra joints popping into existence as her nails do the same, the tips sharpening to wicked points.
I feel humid breath on the back of my neck, even though this can’t possibly be real. It’s just the madness. It’s the madness—
Look away. Look away. Look away.
A sharp crack echoes through the air, the sound startling me despite the iron grip on my control.
My grandmother’s spine is arching unnaturally.
Another crack. Her head jerks and twitches like it isn’t connected to the rest of her body.
Her hair falls out in clumps, and her eyes are flooded entirely with black.
I notice something shifting in the reflection. When I look at myself, my eyes in the mirror are entirely black, too.
I rip my gaze away and leave the bathroom. I refuse to run, even as those sickening cracks echo around me as my grandmother’s spine breaks and breaks.
I don’t look back as I close the door on her slowly morphing into the monster I might soon become.