It had been a while since Raisa had such a vivid dream.

She was in a park somewhere; there were no lights so she could not tell where she was. Everything was silent, too silent. Not a car honked, not an insect buzzed. It was an unusual quiet that deafened her senses. Raisa was clutching the hoodie she was wearing close to her chest, rocking back and forth on the cold bench she was sitting on. Besides being silent, the scene of her dream was cold.

It was not the damp cold of Britain with which she was accustomed to since birth. This cold was much harsher, as if the wind were a sleek knife cutting through her flesh. It crawled into her bones like an invasive parasite, keeping her tethered to the dreamland. The tips of her fingers were turning blue. Raisa gasped and tried to run her fingers together to give them some warmth. But no, her hands refused to move.

“Ree-ree?”

Oh, no. Raisa groaned internally. She knew this shrill voice pretty well because it belonged to her ex-girlfriend, Sharon. Nobody other than her could have called Raisa by the ridiculous name and gotten away with it. Raisa hated nicknames with a passion. She had a first name for a reason, and nobody had the right to shorten it because it was a mouthful. In fact, her name was quite simple to pronounce, but some of them, especially white people, found it amusing. She would never understand why.

“What are you up to, Sharon?” Raisa asked. They could not see each other, and that was for the best. The last thing she needed was to see this bitch in her dreams. “Go away. I don't want you here.”

“Don't you miss me, babe? I know you are hopeless without me.” Sharon’s laughter was a jarring interruption in this soundless plane. “You are a mess, Raisa. Admit it.”

Damn it. Sharon knew just which buttons to push to get under her skin. When they started dating, Raisa didn't mind how Sharon was always correcting. Soon it turned to how she should and should not dress. Her diet, lifestyle, friend circle; Sharon controlled everything in a subtle way. A stray comment here and there, and she would start doubting herself. It did not help that her parents had a nasty divorce, after which her father went back to Indonesia, because Sharon loved rubbing it in her face.

“Do you think you might have commitment phobia?”

“Baby, I think you are overreacting. I mean, I get it. You have daddy issues, but this is not it.”

“This is why you never got into a proper relationship.”

Raisa should have known. Should have stopped her the very moment she trespassed all her boundaries. But she had let her do it, thinking that Sharon loves her, and is telling all these things because she cares for her. How wrong she was to not see she was being gaslighted. And by the time she tried to stop it, things had gotten ugly. They had a screaming row in the restaurant. The patrons gave them glances as Raisa slapped a sneering Sharon and walked off the establishment, shaking.

That was what she felt in the dream. A surge of white hot anger swirling in her veins, a hurricane formed from years of hurt and suppression of that same hurt. But Raisa could do nothing. Here, she could not lift a finger, let alone send Sharon away. That was what made it so much worse.

“Don't you miss me, Ree-ree?” She felt Sharon's palm on her shoulder. It was freezing. “Do you not want to come back?”

“You know I don't!” Raisa yelled into the darkness. “Just get the hell out of here. I don't want to do anything with you!”

“Come on. You know I love you, don't you?”

Sharon caressed her cheeks from behind with those ice-cold fingers. She turned Raisa’s head in her direction and no matter how hard she struggled, Raisa was powerless in her grip. It was vice-like and relentless, nothing that the willowy Sharon could have done in real life. A retort was on the tip of her tongue when Sharon licked her lips before plunging her tongue into Raisa’s mouth.

A full-bodied tremor went through her being.

Dream Sharon's breath was putrid, the kind that one would smell if a batch of vegetables are left to rot out in the sun. A gag went up her throat, only to be suppressed by that slimy tongue entering her mouth. Raisa widened her eyes. What was happening to her? The more she struggled, the deeper it went. This was not a kiss, but a mockery of it. Sharon was trying to choke Raisa but that too with her tongue. How was it so long that it tickled the insides of her ribs?

For a moment, her vision burst into bright white light. She was still blind to the world around her, save for the damn tongue inside her throat. Her insides were itching, but she could not move. Tiny roots crawled within, trying to pierce through her skin. Her body hummed with the activity of crawling things that twirled and tangled. The smell of rot burnt her nostrils, and then—

“Ugh!”

With a strangled cry, Raisa sat up on the couch. The empty cartoon of chocolate milk had fallen on the floor. Her chest heaved with panicked breaths as she tried to make her mind calm down and understand that it had only been a dream. An unpleasant one, but just a dream. At least it had broken the pattern of her usual nightmares where she would see Charles’ caved in skull leering at her. Was this better than that? Of course not. Nightmares hardly were.

Sighing, she took out her phone from her pant’s pocket. 11.25 PM, the illuminated screen read. Damn it, she thought, I have wasted the entire day. She had been sleeping for well over half the day, without changing her dirty, travel worn clothes. Her sciatica was so going to kill her for falling asleep on a couch. These days, she was not sure when a bout of pain would hit her from nowhere. Made her feel like a grandma, so she did not complain about it in public. That did not mean it did not hurt.

Thinking of more worldly pain seemed to have calmed her racing heart. Raisa gathered both bags in one hand and the keys in the other. Time to bathe before falling asleep in a proper bed, in proper clothes. She was not too hungry, so skipping dinner would not hurt. She stifled a yawn as she made her way to the second floor of the house, her limbs leaden with tiredness. A part of her just wanted to crawl into a bed and sleep. Yet another part would be so mad at herself the next morning if she did that. She could not believe she had slept for so long; it had been late afternoon when she had arrived and now it was night. Her head felt heavy, as if somebody had put a few kilograms of stones on the top of her head.

Really, what a homecoming it has been.

***

Her great grandma was obsessed with flowers.

From the few black and white pictures her mother loved to show her again and again, Raisa had noticed how much the woman loved her flowers. She distinctly remembered Alice Reed’s wedding picture — she was a tall, willowy young girl of eighteen with curled locks not unlike Raisa's own. Her wedding gown was made of tulle and she wore a wreath of flowers around her forehead. In the picture she was grinning, which revealed a gleaming set of perfect teeth. Raisa was sometimes jealous of that girl. She was never taunted for perpetually pouting when it was her overbite that was doing it.

This addiction was not limited to flowery jewellery; the entire house at Gwaywe was floral themed. From the wisteria in the living room downstairs, the faded baby's breath in the dining room and the tulips in the kitchen, to her allotted bedroom on the second floor, every single wall in the house sported a specific flower. Raisa's bedroom, in particular, had a mauve wallpaper with vivid orchids. She did not know to whom it had originally belonged, this bedroom. Maybe one of the many daughters of her great grandma.

They looked so real that she could almost touch them and feel their softness beneath her fingertips. Standing there in her slate coloured pajamas, she felt like an imposter because rooms like these were meant for fairytale princesses. There was a small dresser in that room too shaped like a bower of fat roses and meandering vines. The wardrobe was equally intricate, made of real wood. Top of its head was curved like a dissected cornucopia. There was an owl in the middle, staring at her with soulless eyes. Blodeuwedd, she remembered. Her great grandma was obsessed with her myth. With the soft light of the single bulb in the room, they looked real.

Alive.

Just like your dream, huh? A voice in her head sneered. She hated it. It knew how to interrupt her peace. Because all she wanted to do was lay in the bed that Miss Rose, the housekeeper, had so kindly made for her and listen to an audiobook. This year she got herself a premium subscription to Audible and was determined to extract the most out of it. Self-care goals, after all. Her great grandma had her flowers, Raisa had her audiobooks.

She plopped into the bed. The sheets were clean and smelled faintly of whatever detergent Miss Rose had used to wash them. It was a bit too chemical smelling for her liking, but she did not have the heart to complain. Tucking a pillow behind her and another beneath her arm, she started her audiobook. It was a non-fiction one called Presence, read by the author Ben Alderson-Day himself. A few minutes past midnight, it was. Raisa was sure she'd be dozing off by another hour and a half.

The voice was lulling, soothing her frayed nerves from her earlier nightmare. She was only half-listening, as the narrator droned on about true accounts of people feeling an unseen presence being with them, sometimes benign and sometimes malicious. Her eyes were half lidded with exhaustion. She was about to fall asleep at any moment. The owl gazed at her like a silent sentinel. There was a certain comfort knowing that she was being watched. She smiled, half-asleep.

Flower faced, the flower maid
She sleeps beneath the trees
Frolicking with nymphs and faeries
Eyes like stars twinkling bright,
If you heed my words, all will be right.

Raisa did not remember why she thought of it or where she had heard it from. Maybe her mother? She was always humming something or the other when Raisa was young. Especially after her father was gone, her mother could hardly bear the silence. She kept the radio on. The audiobook was a buzz in her head. Raisa's thoughts were with this little melody that her brain had decided to spontaneously recover.

Flower faced, the flower maid

Eyes like twinkling stars

If you heed my words…

The words were a warm embrace on a winter evening. Raisa curled into a fetal position, unmindful of how her earbuds painfully dug inside her ears. She was dazed, lost in the gaze of the pleasant drone of Ben Alderson-Day’s voice and the little rhyme playing in her head. Because if she were truly awake, she would have screamed. But she was already lost to these sudden sensations.

First, the light flickered out and died. The room swathed in darkness, not unlike what she had experienced in her dreamscape. A rustle sounded in the room, though the window behind the headboard and the one beside the bed were both closed. The orchids fluttered. Literally. As if a thousand unseen fingers prodded at them from beneath the wallpaper. The floorboards creaked just in time as the door, which Raisa had left closed, fell open.

The darkness beyond it was the gaping maw of a beast; a beast she had once known well.

***

It stirred beneath the bog. Roused from years of sleep. Somebody was here. Somebody new. It writhed in pleasure, the tantalising smell of new blood filling its every pore. The bog churned around it; branches broke off and fell on top of it.

All it needed was a bait to lure its latest prey. Something that had once belonged to its victim.

~•~