The Parasite: Chapter Three

III: Dreams in the Witch House

It took him a while to fall asleep, and he tossed and turned in his narrow corner bed, too cold, too hot. On the bed beside the fireplace, his mother lay on her side, facing away from John, who fell into a deep sleep instantly. Wayward drips of blood from her shattered nose stained the sheets around her head and face. Cillian’s mind jumped from thought to thought but soon he slipped into the darkness. 

He leaped up from his sleep. 

Around him, the wind dragged itself across the moors like some wounded animal, moaning and sighing. He whirled around unsteadily on his feet. 

He was in a field.

He was freezing.

He was naked.

There was a yellow, homely glow in the distance. A dot in the blackness. 

(Wake up please wake up)

There was a splashing sound, a whirring. But the fields were bare and the sky was black. Heavy, oppressive darkness but the whirring sounds and the splashing were near, close, coming closer. 

Freezing his bollocks off, his hands were cupping to keep warm but the sound, the whooshing sound, was too loud and he clasped them against his ears but his head whirred along with the sound and it was in his head and for a moment he was the sound and it reverberated through him, his head swimming and spinning and the darkness engulfed him.

“Wake up Jesus Christ this is awful please God.”

“Shhh.”

He opened his eyes. A young girl had a finger pressed against her lips, looking at him sternly. She leaned back against the stone wall of a flame-cast cabin. She was familiar but he couldn’t concentrate, his mind grasped for purchase on her face to no avail. He was in the cabin along with her, and she pointed across the cramped room.

An old woman was perched over an iron pot in the middle of the room. She was facing away and he could see her naked, slouched forward, the weary lines of old age engrained in her back and legs like patterns of rough bark on a tree. Lifeless strands of hair, grey and white, clung to the sides of her head. She was reaching into the pot, her forearms submerged, whisking its contents. Fear brewed in his stomach and slithered up his throat and he could taste old copper shillings, he needed to wake up. He couldn’t move, he was rooted to the ground like a century-old oak and all he could do was watch. Wait.

The stirring stopped. Steam rose from the pot. 

The old woman reached for a shelf and took an empty jar from it. She turned to Cillian and crouched beside him. Her breasts sagged in a myriad of blue and purple veins. Her hands and forearms were stained black from mixing the pot. She held the jar to his mouth. “Análú”. 

He breathed out, his lips shakily and eyes wild as they scoured the face of the woman. She twisted a cork into the bottle and set it back on the shelf.

“Knotweed”, she tapped a jar of white flowers. Cillian’s eyes were fixated on hers still, so she tapped it again.

“Knotweed.”

 She moved across to the next jar on the shelf, tapping it with long, black fingernails. “Darknut.” The next bottle she tapped, “Cow’s tongue.” The young girl beside Cillian covered her face and sniggered. 

“Ciúin!”, the old woman snapped at the girl and mumbled something else below her voice.

The next bottle, the one she brought to Cillian’s face, she tapped three times. “Eagla. Fear.”

She turned from the shelves and faced the iron pot, hands on her waists and dripping that putrid moisture down her legs and feet, seemingly hypnotised by its contents. She hit the side of the pot with a bang, and crouched beside Cillian, looking at him through a wall of hanging hair. “Cruel Man of the Woods.” Behind the clumps of hair that curtained her face, he looked into her eyes. Emerald green, smokey blue. 

Cillian was drifting in and out of consciousness, suspended in a state of gripping terror. But he listened.

“Tomorrow”, she said. She pulled from behind her back a flower, fully bloomed, a beautiful thing. Holding it in front of his face, she twirled it. “Tomorrow”, she repeated. “Alive. I’ll do the rest.”