The drops of blood fall slowly off each of its fingers, one by one echoing through the dark room when they hit the old wooden floor. He doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe, doesn’t flinch… doesn’t come for me. He simply stands there, facing me, the blood flowing continuously, each drop vibrating through the soundwaves as it hits the floor.

My eyes drag up his bloody arm, yet when I see his neck, I pause, I have to… my gaze fixed on the thick open wound that sits there—a slash splitting the skin from behind the ear to where it meets the shoulder. Yet that is not where the blood is coming from… somehow, I know it isn’t his.

I want to look… look further, beyond his defined jaw, I want to see the face of the bloody man that watches me, haunts me, yet does nothing more than that. I need to see who he is… but the air feels heavy, the pressure on my eyelids growing, and my head might as well be bound with rope and tied to the floor because I can’t do it—I cannot lift it.

Let me see! Goddamn it, let me move!

Who am I yelling at?

Who am I begging?

Who is he… why is he here… and more importantly, whose blood is that?

I shoot up in bed, my eyes hurting from the strain of opening them too fast, my heaving breaths filling the silence of the bedroom, the faint moonlight the only light in the room. I quickly turn my gaze to the window, the only thing I can see properly in this darkness, because I need to remind myself, confirm that I am home… or at least in this house. I’m not sure if I can call it home anymore.

I want to look right, to the darkest corner of the room, next to the antique wardrobe we inherited with this house, but there is a voice in the back of my mind that tells me that by the time my vision adjusts to the darkness, whatever is there will come for me.

There’s nothing there, Zahara… The voice of reason whispers in my mind.

I feel like the moon that watches me beyond the window mocks me as I force my neck to turn the other way, painfully clutching the sheets in my hands. I don’t dare move fast, instead I allow my vision to adjust as the wardrobe is finally in my sight… full, yet dim view. A little more and finally I can see, just barely, the darkest corner of the room, along with the ornate dark wood door. There’s nothing there. My back slumps as my hands release the poor sheets from my grip, and I take a deep breath in, hold it—one, two, three—and out.

I see you…

The room grows cold in an instant, and my body stiffens, a shiver rushing from my spine, wrapping itself around my body and my head, like toothpicks stabbing every inch of my skin as tears fill my eyes. The whisper still echoes through the room, like a spell controlling the endless tremor… it holds me in its clutches, my body frozen, unable to move a muscle on my own. I heard of this, sleep paralysis… only I’m not sleeping.

Whispers escape my throat, tears cloud my vision, but I’m grateful for them, because whatever that was… I don’t want to see it! I want to close my eyes, yet I can’t… even my eyelids are frozen, seemingly tied to the air since there’s nothing else holding them.

And then a sensation comes… like a smooth, icy brush being dragged slowly from the left side of my lower back… to the right side of my waist… up to my left shoulder, and I know… I know in my gut that if I would have the ability to turn around right now, I wouldn’t see a thing. Nothing at all. Yet that feeling doesn’t stop there. Slower than before, it drags from my shoulder to the base of my throat… then climbs right under my ear, to the spot where the man from my dream had his open wound… and then it stops. Fear explodes inside of me, a freezing storm simmering under the surface.

My head twitches, and suddenly, like the air was breathed back into the room and the blood had refilled my veins, I can move. My fingers can too, and I drag them slowly over the soft cotton of the sheets, calculating my next step.

But not even a second passes before the room fills with a roaring scream that makes the windows rattle and the wooden floor creak, deep and gravelly, every individual fiber of my skin shaking. Suddenly, that storm breaks to the surface, gripping my flesh as a dark hand whips around from behind, covering my mouth, its heat searing my skin as it pulls me down. My body hits the bed so fast and hard that the duvet and pillows envelop me, my hands and legs flailing as I struggle for control. I scream into the hand, and images flash in my mind with a speed that doesn’t allow me to distinguish any of them, but there is one common denominator—blood.

“Aaaahhhhh!!!” I’m free. I shoot up, once again sitting on the bed, yet the room is filled with an uncomfortably bright light from the sun streaming through the bare windows.

What the fuck just happened…

My chest is heaving, like I inhaled frigid air, the feeling of it lingering. I touch my face, and somehow… it’s warm, my lips swollen and my body still shaking.

Just a dream, Zahara… just a dream.

Yet my body is having trouble believing that.

“Are you alright?!” Kristina bursts through the door, stumbling as she rushes to my aid, trying to figure out what’s happening.

“I’m fine. Sorry, it was just a nightmare.” I gesture her to stop in an attempt to calm her, then rub my temple, willing away a headache that’s bound to come, strands of it already here.

“Jesus, my heart stopped.” She stands in the middle of the room, clutching her baggy band t-shirt above her heart as she steadies her breathing. Cocking her head, she looks at the window, or beyond it… I can’t quite tell. “You know… this is a damn beautiful view to wake up too. Unlike London, the countryside is almost like a different world.”

I follow her gaze, but from where I’m lying down, all I can see are the orange shades of the tops of the trees and the clear blue sky. I’m not sure what she’s seeing, but I guess even this isn’t bad at all. Slowly pushing the duvet away, I swing my legs out of bed, and the first thing I notice is a cluster of faint bruises, toward the inside of my thigh in a strange pattern that somehow looks familiar. Kristina turns to me, and I push my long t-shirt over them—I don’t know where I got them from, and I don’t want to worry her.

I jump out and join her, looking out the window at the beautiful view painted in shades of ochre… autumn here always was beautiful. I’ve never woken up in this room before, but the view was pretty similar in my childhood bedroom. The grounds of the manor stretch for a few acres, large trees dotted around the naturally planted garden—my mother was never a fan of the perfectly manicured lawn and French style gardens. She wanted this space to feel like a park or woodlands, with cobblestoned winding paths taking you to the various spots within the property—the Victorian greenhouse, the beautifully ornate bandstand, the tennis court, the pool house and its indoor pool, the pond. The path swirls amongst the trees, wildflowers dominating the grounds for most of the year, with only small patches of intentional flowers dotted around the open space.

I enjoyed it as a child, enjoyed playing hide and seek between the trees, enjoyed climbing some of them when they weren’t as tall, enjoyed the privacy when I wanted to escape the screaming fests between my peculiar parents, and dive deep into my books. Their relationship was a paradox; most times it felt like they hated one another, but they loved each other more, they craved each other—an unhealthy addiction that somehow pushed them on through the years. It was strange… unnatural, yet somehow, it was their own love, one that only they understood, one that I stayed thoroughly away from.

It was ultimately what killed them. They died driving back to this house, after they were seen arguing at a cocktail party at their best friend’s house a few miles from here. My father drove the car off the bridge that crosses the river flowing around the border of their… my property, and that is how it all ended. It’s disturbingly poetic, because deep down I know one could not have lived without the other. It would have been impossible, and I’m sure whoever would have survived would have taken their own life later…

Is it harsh to think this way considering I am their daughter? One might think so, but I do not. I loved them, and they loved me in their own way, but I never thought that they were made to be parents. Some people simply aren’t. I had a nanny that helped raise me, and she was good to me. They were good to me too, but their parenting instincts lacked at best. They didn’t hire a nanny because they couldn’t be bothered with me, they did it because they recognized their own shortfalls… especially when I got hurt during one of their passionate fights. My mother threw a vase at my father just as I was coming through the door. I was maybe four years old, and when he moved out of the way to avoid it, it hit me instead.

Apparently, I woke up in the hospital, yet I don’t remember anything beyond the screams… and I’m not even sure whose screams they were. They said I stayed in the hospital for a while… asleep… they said I lost my memory and that they had to work hard for me to come back to them, to know who they were, where I was, who I was. Yet… I don’t remember any of it. I heard that story a few times in my life, although never from my mother. Her guilt over the incident made it impossible to talk to her about it, or for anyone to mention it in her presence. And my father… he never blamed her for it, never her, always himself. For a long time, sometimes even now, I debated the validity of that story, of that chapter of my life, simply because I have no memory of it. It’s like someone telling you that you went to war, yet the only thing that makes you trust them are your battle scars. And I do have a battle scar, a thick one running from the top of my forehead above my left eye, down my temple, ending around where my ear starts.

The vase obviously split my skin open; however, they said it fractured my skull as well, and I had a hematoma pressing on my brain for a dangerous amount of time. All I know is that one day I woke up and I was going to my first year of school. The people I was seeing there were unfamiliar, all of them fresh faces… nothing unusual or out of the ordinary. And I knew everything of myself, of my life, my parents… it’s why I used to be wary of the story.

It was when I grew up, properly grew up, and had access to my own medical records, that I saw the reports and notes from the doctors. Thirteen days I stayed in a medically induced coma because they needed to assess the damage to my brain. And when they took me out of it, I still did not wake up, not until eighteen days later—I was in a coma for thirty-one days. No matter… if it wasn’t for the scar, even those notes wouldn’t mean anything to me.

“Maybe it’s because of the new room?” Kristina pulls me out of the intrusive train of thought that has not crossed my mind for years.

“Maybe…” My gaze settles on my favorite tree in the far distance as I answer—the weeping willow with its long branches brushing the surface of the pond in the morning breeze.

“Why didn’t you just sleep in your old room?” She turns to me, but my gaze is fixed on the mesmerizing dance of those branches.

“It didn’t feel right…” It didn’t. I walked inside of it yesterday evening after we arrived here, the long drive finally behind us, and the room felt foreign. I recognized everything it held, the pictures on the walls, the furniture, the wardrobe and the desk… I recognized it all. Yet the moment I stepped in, it felt like it didn’t belong to me anymore. A strange feeling that lingers even now, the memory of it imprinted on me. Only in there, though… it doesn’t feel like that anywhere else in the house.

“Hmmm… I guess it’s strange sometimes, staying in your childhood bedroom. I know it is for me. Every time I visit my folks it feels like I’m a teenager again, back in that same world, the same atmosphere, with the same insecurities and the same bullies… It gives me that annoying feeling that I got at my ten-year college reunion… what, like… five years ago?”

I nod and finally turn to her. I see that; I understand that feeling. I had my ten-year reunion four years ago, and there weren’t many of us unmarried or at least divorced. No one to fall back on, no one to remind me I’m an independent woman now, with a career I built for myself and a life I chose. No… I was that insecure fifteen-year-old all over again.

“Let’s have some breakfast.” I finally turn away from the window, looking for the slippers I know I threw around here somewhere.

“Oh, here they are.” Kristina points at the floor on the other side of the king size bed, and I slip them on my feet immediately. “Thank God we found that store open on the motorway and got those croissants, but we have to go get some stuff for lunch and dinner.”

“Yeah, I agree. Are you sure you can’t stay any longer?” We walk out of the bedroom into the grand hallway that overlooks the large open space—the ground floor open on two levels. A double staircase wraps around, its organic, almost semi-circled shape flowing down to the foyer, one curving to the right of me and one to the left. The oversized double front door stands on the wall opposite me, with an antique, stained glass, arched window above it.

“No… I’m sorry, Z. I’ll drive back on Sunday afternoon, though. It gives me more time here, but at least I’ll get home in time for work. I can’t guarantee I’ll be good for anything on Monday, but it doesn’t matter.” She looks around and sighs. “I can’t believe I can’t spend more time here… but I’ll talk to Mark, and we’ll come back together next weekend. If I can convince my boss, maybe we’ll come Friday morning. This place is just…” she pauses, looking at the highly decorated ceiling, with all its ornate plasterwork and corniches, and the row of thickly carved wooden columns that run alongside the balustrade of the landing, “it’s incredible.” She shakes her head. “I can’t believe you grew up here.”

I smile, just a small one as I look around the space. The corridors to the left and right are symmetrical, doors on either side of them leading to the library’s balcony, bedrooms and bathrooms, a large stained glass window at the end of them. It was both intriguing and scary living in this old house, a manor, yes, but the bones of this house creaked loudly, and a child can hear far more in those eerie creaks than an adult does…