Home, Dark Home
by Jahnavi Misra
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
I turn to look at the terrace stairs, maybe there is a way out from there, but the darkness has started to ascend them, in fact, it is almost halfway through already. That escape route is closed to me now; even if I had been brave enough to approach the stairs, there is no way that I can get past the black sludge. The open, uplifting terrace is gone forever now.
The darkness has cast a shadow that drenches everything in a sad and silent dusk with no prospect of light ever breaking through. I run to the next room, thinking maybe there is someone there. I can detect the shape of my mother, lying on the bed with her back to me. It is so quiet and so dark. “Mother!” I scream. She does not turn. “Mother!” “Mother!” I scream again and again, but there is no response. “Please help,” I say in a despairing voice, my mouth metallic, drying up more and more every second.
“Mother,” I say once again. This time she does turn. I wish she had not. Her eyes sparkle in the dark and, when she opens her mouth to smile at me, her teeth are neon-white. My mind feels like it might die. I know I should have never returned. I always knew the house was not done with me; I should have been done with it. But here I am now, and look what my mother has become. It chills me to the bone as her smile gets wider, looking directly at me but not quite, like she cannot really see me. I turn away in utter terror and look again at the terrace. Maybe there is some way out.
The blackness seems to have covered the terrace completely now. But there is another thing that I can vaguely see taking shape amid the dark sky and the black terrace. I can sense that it is evil; it is all evil. “Why is it looking at me?” I ask myself loudly, unable to avert my own eyes from the formless figure observing me calmly with its red slits for eyes. It is staring at me even as it is taking shape right in front of me.
The eyes have formed before anything else; the body is just a bald blob. It is like a giant bubble with two glowing red gashes at the top, as if there are light bulbs illuminating them from behind. The bubble starts to move inward into its own centre and, instead of bursting, it slowly starts to mould itself. The more definite the shape gets, the more terrified I become.
Two arms spring out from the sides of the collapsed, deflated bubble. Then the lower part of the bubble separates to form discernible legs. The neck is formed swiftly and expertly, as if an invisible potter is hard at work. I can even see fingers, but there is no face; nothing except the glowing incisions where eyes should be.
I wonder what it is. A person? Something else entirely? My chest cannot contain my panic; maybe I am having a heart attack. I am in deep pain, but too frightened even to collapse or look away. I am transfixed; doomed to witness every second of the creation, cursed to bear every second of the pain in my heart.
It is finally finished, taking the form of a bald, coal creature; the only thing that stands out properly are the red eyes. It looks straight at me and does something with its face; whether it is snarl or a smile, I cannot tell. But I know it is something, even though there is no mouth, because its face distends in an odd way, the cheeks pushing into the red slits, compressing them even more.
“Did you come from that space-ship?” I mutter, barely audible even to myself. I never actually believed that I had seen a space-ship or, shall I say, space-ships: there had been two glittering lights that night, one small and one large, moving across the sky, as adolescent me struggled to fall asleep on the terrace. The whole family was up there, trying to escape the heat during a blackout. But I was the only one who saw them.
I must have already fallen asleep and must have been dreaming; that is what I always tell myself every time I think about the event as an adult. But this? How can I explain all this? I am pretty certain that I am not asleep now, when that godless creature is snarling at me. It must have fallen from those ships, waiting all these years to take form. What else could it be? And why won’t it just let me run away?
“Take the house if you like,” I mutter weakly. “Just let me go, please.”
And then I see another one. Another tarry bubble forming like an ugly burp under the stairs, right across from me this time, at my eye level. This one will not even need to descend a flight of steps to get to me; it can slither straight towards me if it so pleases. This bubble is smaller, and the creature formed is child-size, but it feels equally evil with its equally red eye-slits.
It is closer so I can see it more clearly, not only does it have slits for eyes, but something similar in place of a nose as well. The eyes are two red lines going up and under it. There are two smaller, colourless lines slanting down that seem to be the nostrils. I can see the smaller slits throbbing, taking in air. But other than that, there is nothing, just utter darkness.
I am scared that the child will charge at me any second. It will be faster than the larger one, I am sure of it. Children have so much more energy. ‘Stop it!’ I scold myself silently. I don’t even know what these are. Maybe the smaller one is older than the taller one. Who knows how it works with these things? My mind is racing uselessly, as my body is once again fixed in place even more uselessly.
The small one takes a step forward, and my legs find the courage to take a step back. Then it stops moving and does with its face what the taller one has been doing throughout: smile or snarl, who knows? The black tar has spread much, much farther. It is almost at my feet now. I ponder the ways in which the tar could destroy me; maybe I am going to melt into the blackness as soon as it touches me and be transformed into one of them. I turn to see whether my mother is watching the craziness unfold, but she is not in that room anymore. The bed is empty; everything is empty.
There is no one anywhere except me and them. I have heard it said that no one can hear you scream in space. The same goes for a large, empty house full of earless, snarling creatures. Who will come to save me if I scream? Who will hear me? The guard, perhaps; it’s possible.
“Help!” I scream, scaring myself with my own loudness. But the figures do not move; they are like strange, automated statues. “Help!” I scream again into the growing, moving darkness. No response, just silence. I don’t know if it is just in my head, but I feel like I can see both their faces distend more and more at my increasing desperation.
Then I notice a third bubble. This one is behind the basement door, only partially visible. I see half the body form, an arm, a leg, half a face. This is a tall one, too. It sees me and moves farther back, trying to hide in the darkness of the basement, away from whatever little light is still filtering through into the courtyard.
It tilts its head and peeks at me from behind the door, watching me with its glowing eyes. “Am I in the wrong house?” I wonder foolishly. “Who are you? Please tell me who you are,” I ask loudly. “Help!” I scream again into the empty sky. This time I hear someone enter the front door. “Help... help!” I scream, frantic and hopeful. I am sure it is the guard. I wonder how he managed to hear me.
“Here, Shivnath. I am here. Look at what is going on in this house. What are these things?” I ask the footsteps, too afraid to turn around and check whether it really is the man. I have to turn eventually when I hear no response. It is indeed trusty Shivnath. But he is staring in front of him, looking past me, as if he is lost in a dream.
“What are you doing, you fool?” I ask, too frightened for politeness. “Are you sleep-walking or something?” I get nothing from him. He just stares, as if he too can perceive a glass wall in front of him, stopping him from entering. “Come here, now!” I command. “Or you can say goodbye to your job tomorrow. If my mother were still here, you would not dare ignore me like this.”
Even as I say it, I think of my mother lying in that room earlier. I remember for the first time that day that my mother died, a few years ago, in fact. My knees feel weak, as the guard turns on his heel and starts to head back. “Help... help... don’t go!” I scream after him, but he does not turn around. Then I hear the front door click, and I know that he is gone: my last hope.
I remember so well the sheer terror I used to feel as a child every time I accompanied an adult into the basement. The darkness in there was so complete; the single bulb hanging from the ceiling only emphasized it with the shadows it cast. The adult I accompanied would go about their business of rummaging through the many trunks there, retrieving documents or a precious old saree, while I observed the darkness, scared yet compelled.
I could hear things in the darkness; it sounded like beings scuttling away from the light of the bulb, I used to wonder whether they were as terrified and captivated as I was. Could I have been so right about it all at such a young age? I am in awe at the accuracy of my naïve, childhood feelings as I stand, quiet and motionless, staring back at those staring at me. Has the darkness really been waiting, all this time, to leak out?
“Are you them?” I ask loudly. “Is it your dark energy that I always thought was trapped in the basement?” I wonder to myself but do not say out loud. “Have you taken over the entire terrace? Is there no light anymore?” I ask. They do not respond, but their faces are distended.
“Why can’t the basement hold you in anymore? Is it because the house is dying?” Is it possible, I ask myself, is it possible for a house to die before it is even demolished? Have these creatures of the dark come out to feast on a dying house? How extraordinary it is to know for certain that I was right as a child; that the darkness is indeed full of scary creatures that keep themselves hidden, only to emerge like this, to spring at you suddenly and strip you of your entire reality. ‘Boo!’ Everything you thought you knew and were going to learn, everything turns to ash. Only darkness remains.
We all know deep in our souls the dangers of the dark and, as children, we often freely express our fears, but then we grow older and think people will laugh at us if we tell them how afraid we are; and so, the pretence begins. “Of course, I am not afraid to go into that dark room,” we learn to say, “I am not a child.” My mind is reeling with anger and resentment at all those who laughed at me; my father being the loudest of them all.
“You need to learn to be independent,” he would say to me whenever I told him about the creatures of the dark.
“Please let me sleep here tonight, or they will get me. My room is too dark. Sister’s not letting me hold her hand, and I feel alone,” I would plead.
“You cannot have somebody next to you twenty-four hours of every day. You need to grow up. You are a big girl now,” he always responded. I can hear him now, his foolish words echoing in my ears.
I can see that the creature on the terrace has curiously large hands. My father had curiously large hands. “Are you, my father?” I ask it suddenly. The face distends a little more.
Maybe it has always been my ancestors who were haunting the dark. Maybe they want to take me with them. And maybe I should just go, I reason with myself; after all, our elders know best.
I am surrounded by black ink now. I did not even notice when that happened; my mind was so fixated on trying to make sense of things that I had forgotten about trying to escape. It does not matter any way, I tell myself. There is no escape. It will all be over soon, hopefully. But I have not felt the blackness on myself yet. It has not touched me yet. Everything is covered in tar except for a tiny round circle around my feet. It is like a spotlight.
They are enjoying the show. Maybe they can read my mind and my meandering thoughts are their entertainment for now. Until they get bored, that’s when they will cover me. I wonder what it will feel like: acid, is my guess, since I expect I will be melting into the tar. I don’t even want to think about how painful it will be. Or it could feel like warm, soothing water; maybe I will experience something like an amnionic drowning or, perhaps, I will finally know what it feels like to die in a nice, warm bubble bath.
The distended, featureless faces looking at me; playing with their food. I had watched the house cat play with mice and squirrels, even cockroaches, before killing them mercilessly. I wonder where that cat went; it was still alive when I left the house so many years ago. I look to the terrace, maybe that is where the cat is, swallowed by the dark.
I do not see a cat, but I think I see two lights hovering in the sky, one big and one small. They are as bright now as they had been then, when I had seen them for the first time. I should never have come back. I knew in my gut that it was a trap when I started dreaming about the house and feeling this nagging need to return. I knew it was a trap when my father called and said that it had been too long, that he wanted the entire family to come together for Diwali. I knew it was a trap. I should never have returned.
Copyright © 2025 by Jahnavi Misra
