Failure might taste like dust and cheap coffee, but my mother's interrogation tasted like overcooked lentils and simmering, unspoken terror.
"You're not eating enough. Look at you, skin and bones. Who is washing your clothes? You're using the machine, yes? Not just scrubbing them in the sink like a savage? And the hostel food—it must be pure poison. I've seen the reels. Flies on the samosas."
I shoveled rice and dal into my mouth, a human disposal unit nodding at the right intervals. "Yes, Maa. No, Maa. The machine, Maa. It's not that bad, Maa."
The truth was uglier. My rented apartment had a leaking ceiling, and my diet revolved around instant noodles and dread. But some truths are nuclear—you don't drop them at the dinner table.
My father ate in silence, his eyes far away. He was back on that dark road, hearing the jhum jhum jhum of anklets. I could see it in the way his knuckles whitened around his spoon.
The conversation was a life raft in a sea of the unsaid. We clung to it desperately, talking about everything except the faceless thing that chased us and the blood-drenched goddess who saved us. We were a family pretending the code wasn't on fire.
Finally, the meal ended. The relief was temporary.
Sleep was a lie. The room was pitch black, save for a thin, guilty sliver of streetlight cutting through the gap under the door. I lay there, counting the cracks in the ceiling I couldn't see, my mind replaying the night's horrors in 4K Ultra HD.
Then something shifted.
The sliver of light seemed to swell, bleaching the darkness. Slowly, meticulously, the room resolved into impossible clarity. The grain on the wooden door, the dust motes dancing in the air, a gecko on the far wall—its throat pulsing as it devoured a moth. I could see the individual wings of the insect twitching in its final moment.
This wasn't normal night vision. This was a predator's gaze. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic prisoner. What the hell is happening to me?
My eyes scanned the room. They snagged on a patch of darkness in the corner, deeper than the rest. A void that drank the light.
And the void had a shape.
Slim. Female. Seated on the floor with her knees drawn up, arms resting on them. A posture of infinite patience. She was clad in what seemed like solidified shadow, a pitch-black attire that clung to a form that was both emaciated and unnaturally curved. Long, wet hair hung like a curtain of black seaweed over her face, dripping something that wasn't water onto the floorboards with a soft, persistent drip… drip…
A cold knot tightened in my gut. But a bizarre, detached curiosity overrode the fear. I'd already seen the menu tonight; this was just the late-night special.
If she wanted to hurt you, you'd already be a souvenir, I reasoned, the survivor in me trying to run a threat assessment on a supernatural entity. She's a feature, not a bug. Maybe you can debug her.
Slowly, against every screaming instinct, I swung my legs out of bed. The floor was cold under my feet. I took a step. Then another. The air grew colder with each movement, the scent of wet earth and decay blooming in the room.
Her head tilted slightly, following my approach. From behind the veil of hair, I could make out the faintest gleam of a single eye, watchful and dark.
I was close now. Close enough to see that her skin wasn't skin at all but a pale, polished sheen, bone stretched too tight over angles that should have been a woman's softness but weren't. Her black attire clung to her like liquid shadow, outlining the impossible curve of her chest. Her breasts rose and pressed against the thin darkness, her nipples pushing through like dark thorns, obscene markers on a body too sharp, too wrong. It was beauty sharpened into a weapon—beauty that begged to be touched even as every nerve in me recoiled. The heat of her seemed to radiate across the small space between us, a warmth that made me ache in spite of myself. Her hair wasn't just wet; it writhed, each strand alive, slithering across her shoulders as if eager to bind me.
My hand, moving with a will I didn't recognize, rose towards her face. To push the hair away. To see.
Her own hand shot out. Fingers, long and cold as marble, wrapped around my wrist. The touch wasn't painful. It was possessive. Final.
And then she smiled. It wasn't a welcome smile. It was the rictus grin of a predator whose prey has just walked into its jaws. Her lips curled back over teeth that were too white, too sharp, stretching impossibly wide towards her ears.
"I didn't know terror came with kinks," I muttered, my voice breaking around the joke I desperately needed.
Her grip tightened instantly, becoming vicelike. A bone-deep cold shot up my arm. Her form seemed to shimmer, becoming more alluring and more terrifying at once—a lethal parody of desire. Her feet, now visible, were twisted inward, broken and unnatural. The urge to pull away, to run, was a primal scream in my head.
"What are you doing there?"
My mother's voice from the hallway was a bucket of ice water.
I flinched, turning my head. "Mom… she's—"
I looked back.
The corner was empty. Only a dark, damp stain on the floorboards remained.
My mother flicked the light on. I blinked in the sudden glare. She pressed a hand to my forehead, her eyes widening. "You're burning up! Your skin is on fire!"
I felt fine. More than fine. I felt electrified. "Mom, I'm okay. I saw her. I swear."
She ignored me, calling for my father. "Medicine! Get the medicine we bought yesterday!"
A pill was forced into my hand. I dry-swallowed it to end the argument, the placebo of their concern a poor shield against what I knew was real. I lay back down, pretending to sleep, listening to the frantic whispers outside my door.
"…I don't know, he's seeing things…"
"…the mark… it's getting darker…"
I turned my wrist under the light. Where her fingers had clamped me, a bruise coiled like a brand—not purple, not blue, but a deep, septic black, as if rot had been inked into my flesh.
Sleep mocked me. I lay sweating through the sheets, every half-dream unraveling into dripping hair and the hiss of anklets I couldn't outrun.
Morning dragged me back only because the alarm wouldn't stop screaming. Monday. Another lie to my job. Another excuse rehearsed in advance.
I told myself the day would be ordinary: temple with Maa, errands, repairing the scooter, hauling bricks for Father at the half-built house. Mundane rituals, anchors to the real.
But when I dressed, the bruise had spread, threading veins of black across my wrist. It wasn't a bruise anymore. It was a mark.
And it pulsed—slow, steady, like a second heartbeat not my own.