This is a story my mom had told me a year ago about a series of repetitive dreams she had when she was just a small girl. The events in this story are very real however I will say that I may have dramatised my descriptions on the scenery and atmosphere, but not the events or the looks of the entity.
My mom was about seven or ten when this happened. My mom grew up in the countryside. Therefore, the surroundings were always calm and quiet. Small patches of forest surrounded the area, vast fields of crop laid bare under the hot sun. In the morning, the air was always tranquil, the scenery so serene and undisturbed. The birds chirped and the sky was like a canvas for the sun to release its brilliant rays of dazzling sunlight, reflected on the silvery ripples of water, intensified by the vivid blotches of wild flowers. The beautiful landscape could have bewitched anyone who passed by. My mom had always loved the simplicity of countryside in the morning, however, at night…
The lonely moon would be the only source of light to melt away the inky blackness of the night. And trust me when I say it is dark, because it is nothing but black. The dullness and gloom of the forest overpowered the isolated land. The surroundings were in absolute darkness, tiny beams of dim moonlight could be spotted further down. It seemed as though eyes are glaring at you in between those leaves, branches and dangling creepers of the forests. Night was when the bliss of daylight wither and fade, like thin wisps of smoke blown away.
One day my mom was walking home, ready to cook a meal on her own as she had just came back from farming with her auntie. It was the afternoon, the atmosphere was transitioning into the eerie aura of the night. Her little house was still quite far away and the sky was gradually dimming. Beside her where a small dense forest, emitting a menacing vibe. There was a rustle. My mom stood dead in her tracks as she turned her head and saw a blurry, dark figure of a woman, standing still. She retained her impassive complexion, with a hint of a faltering hostility. Her bangs hovering over her left eye, emitting a line of darkness over the other. A shadow, cutting through her face like a blade. Her thin pallid lips seemed to be mumbling something. My mom was frozen, unable to move due to sheer terror, escalated by the baleful night and the nightmarish motionless demeanour of the figure. It was as if this figure had transmitted this strong, feral and dark feeling into my mother’s heart. The air felt hot, though the sun was nowhere in sight. She sprinted home, her breath, raspy and rough. Tiny tears of shame and aggravated horror formed in the corners of her eyes. Finally, home was right in front of her.
After dinner and other usual chores, she climbed onto her bed and went to sleep. Back when my mom was just a little girl, Vietnam was still a very poor country, it was still healing from the war. Because of this, houses, especially in the countryside were small, cramped, dirty and the crooked, deteriorating wood floors were EXTREMELY creaky.
That night, my mom had an eerie dream, and painfully slow one. In the dream, she would hear loud thumping sounds outside of her tiny room. The sounds would be of that woman from the forest, crawling up the stairs in suspense, like a spider. My mom would be trapped in her bed, horror-stricken. At every thump, she would squirm and twitch, trying to break free. The woman would crawl into the room, dragging in an entire veil of darkness, of sinful aura, demonic energies and hatred, oh so much hatred. The sight of her repulsive features only intensifies it even more. The woman’s disgusting and decayed skin trailed along the wooden floor, the blood-soaked wood. Disintegrated flesh hung from her visible bones, they danced and twirled, blind to the all the gore, to the puddles of blood gushed from her distorted mouth, which inflames the revulsion of the scene. Her legs, bend yet attached as if they were bound. Her contorted arms would make these hair-raising cracks. Leading up to the distressing, disturbingly malformed face that melted into a painful frown. Her head, cracked open like an egg. Worms and flies were feeding off the ripped up flesh, slashed into multitudes of raw fragments. The vile and loathsome odour of rotten meat and vomit swirled up my mother’s nose. The woman would leaped onto my mother… and she would wake up, in sweat and tears.
From then on, she’d have that awful dream every single night, for weeks. The worst part was, my mother wouldn’t be able to move, when it crawled, when its arms and neck cracked, when it glared at her with hatred and torment. Until she told her auntie, and she believed that my mother may have been toyed by a wicked abomination. You see, I come from a Southeast Asian country where the knowledge and cultural rituals relating to the spiritual world are imprinted deep within our roots. Her auntie sliced a knife through air, and she continued to do so around the room. She left the knife with a parchment, containing sacred writings of Buddhist monks under my mother’s bed. My mother told me her aunt even sliced the air with this tree branch of a certain kind, and that she lighted up a few strands of straw until it burned and waved it around the house… in order to chase the spirit away. The knife and the sacred parchment was the ensure that no evil spirit will be able to evade her bed and personal space.
From then on, the dreams stop. Sometimes I wonder if the woman is still out there to this day, waiting for another child, to fall into its blackhole of aguish and fear.
Author: Bloomett