Lurking shadows- 4

Read part 3 - here

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The mirror was chipped on the top right corner. A pity too because it was the only mirror in her house.

Mita tried combing her hair but the effort exceeded her will and somewhere between detangling the knots and astonishment at the amount of hair that shed through her hairbrush Mita gave up.

She had since opened the windows and lit up some incense to drive out the squalid stench that once again made itself known. She continued to stare at the visage that mocked her. 

Of course, Anek wouldn’t love her, not when she looked like this. Her stained nightshirt, the musty smell, the unkempt house and tatters for curtains that lay on the couch with a dirty handprint in the background was one of the many reasons why perhaps her boyfriend was avoiding her.

A menagerie of all things wretched and Mita a locus point of misery.

Anek hadn’t spoken to her, except for wishing her that morning.

Her dreams materialized into a long visual and she remembered getting suffocated under his large hands. But that wasn’t true. Anek loved her.

Mita opened the cupboard to find herself something nice to wear. Nicer that is, because almost everything she owned looked like it had never known better days more so because she’d thrown everything in a thick lump of a shoddy pile and now struggled to pull out one sleeve of a tired shirt which she flung back to look for something prettier and eventually settled on a lacklustre blue dress. 

She yanked out the dress from under the disturbing pile of clothes which would have to live another day before getting folded and stacked when she remembered something the policeman had told her.

‘Please let us know if you find something’ they’d said and Mita had indeed found something.

Tossing aside her latest blue find she dived back in the cupboard to find the handbag that stayed hanging behind the fabric hill.

She’d not explored its contents yet.

What might she find? There were several zips and pockets around the bag and she fiddled to find the clasp to open it.

A blood-curdling scream erupted from outside Mita’s bedroom.

She ran out to see Pink growling with a bizarre look in his eyes. His body was contorted into a hair raising stance and his long tail was thicker than she’d ever seen before and he menacingly growled at Mita.

It was happening again. ‘Don’t do this, Pink’  Mita bleated inaudibly, her face blanching.

The hair on her arms stood on ends and fear crawled back into her spine lodging itself in Mita’s skull, it spread to her chest making it hard for her to breathe. Her heartbeat with an annoying acknowledgement of something positively uncanny around her.

With troublesome clarity, Mita saw the damp stain on the corner of the wall breeding thick spores of mould, its dank odour crawling on her body and the handprint behind the couch looked to have gotten darker.

‘Pink!’ Mita tried to order the cat and stretched out her hand she’d often seen Anek do like a friendly gesture.

The long strap of the handbag was braided on her arm and Pink let out a chilling distressing moan upon seeing it. He threateningly walked towards her and Mita stepped back cautiously before sprinting into her bedroom and banging the door to keep the cat out.

She felt debilitated with fear breaking into a fit of cough. Her throat was parched and she felt too weak to stand, letting herself slowly slide to the floor.

Feeling the coolness of the tiles against her cheeks Mita thought of the day she came to this house and the last time she spoke to her mother.

Where was her mother? She’d stopped talking to Mita before she moved into this house. 

‘I should probably call her’ Mita spoke to the thick dust crusting her floor. She blew on it and momentarily it fluttered away.

The cat was quiet now and Mita dared not go outside to inspect.

She lay still on the floor, looking at a blue wad of clothing flung carelessly on the side.

I was about to get dressed she thought and realized that a handbag still clung to her arm.

The policeman had told her that the earlier tenant was called ‘Liyah’ and how strange it was tit hat he thought she’d know her.

Mita opened the bag and it was filled with papers, mostly receipts, restaurant bills, grocery bills, tickets to the zoo, real estate flyers, photostat copies of her rental documents.

Almost every pocket which she unzipped held similar trash. Faded, yellowing papers and even some post it notes with random numbers and an old ball pen refill that had somehow leaked inside the bag and stained the pockets.

It was a lot of useless papers but still amusing for Mita who sat absorbed in opening and carefully reading the receipts and checking the groceries that were bought.

Several packets of instant noodles and chips, something similar to Mita’s own eating habits. Dry cleaning bills for shawls and a heavy jacket, several tickets to the aquarium and zoo on different dates through the year, expired subway and bus cards and a receipt for buying five two-litre bottles of coke.

These would make such an engrossing scrap file, Mita mused, for someone who was interested in such things because clearly Liyah didn’t much care or why else would she just stuff them in her bag and forget about it.

Finally, Mita unzipped every pocket and inverted the bag to let everything fall. A few heavy-handed shakes later the frayed handbag was drained of its contents and everything spilt on the floor.

Mita carefully spread each out each piece of paper including a very crumpled photograph that was stuck under the torn lining of the handbag.

With great caution she smoothed out the photograph which looked to have been faded and stained with the blue ink from the cartridge on the corners.

It looked like an old photograph of a group of people which on some inspection revealed to be kids, probably teens and she held the picture close to her face, squinting through the yellow of age and blue of stain to get a better understanding of perhaps who and what Liyah looked like but it was the boy standing close to her holding her hand whom she immediately recognised.

It was a very young and scrawny looking Anek.

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cont..