She Walks in Shadows(42)

I was afraid at first, but my fear dissipated quickly and I began to look forward to our visits with excitement. She told me all sorts of stories about gods and dark things and creatures that sounded more terrifying than any monsters I’d read about. I’d never heard of those creatures, or the places they came from, but I believed in them with all my heart.

Ancient, important-looking books covered every available surface of the room we met in and a ghostly, violet light whose source I was never able to determine cast an unearthly glow throughout the space. Everything looked wrong and weird in that light — I wondered, sometimes, if the books scattered around were innocuously pedestrian, and it was only the ethereal glow that made them seem as though they contained instructions for dark rituals. I could easily have looked over at one of the many that lay open and read from it, but doing so seemed as though it would be a horrible breach of etiquette for some reason I couldn’t quite explain. I was terrified of upsetting Keziah -- initially, because she was such a frightening figure, but later, because I worried that angering her might cause her to stop visiting me.

At first, I was distracted by the strange geometry of the space. I lived with my parents in a rectangular room inside a rectangular apartment inside a rectangular building full of rectangles. I had never seen the kinds of angles and curves and half-walls that outlined the space in which Keziah lived. I made up my mind that I would have a room like hers one day.

It must have made for a bizarre picture: a gnarled old woman in a shapeless brown robe with wispy grey hair; a rat-bodied creature with a distorted face, grizzled beard, and murderously sharp teeth perched on her shoulder; and a dark-haired and bright eyed girl in cheerful, pink pyjamas.

Often, I wondered if she was lonely. Was she spending time with me because she didn’t have family, because she didn’t have her own daughter to teach these things to? I think I always knew that she was dead, though at that age, I didn’t really understand what death meant. I understand it even less now that I’m older.

I drew pictures of her and Brown Jenkin in school, as well as some of the creatures from her stories: the Black Man, Shub-Niggurath, Azathoth. What began as concerned looks grew to worried questions and culminated in a visit to a child psychiatrist. I was, he decided, a lonely child who wanted to feel special, so I had created a world for myself where I was the Chosen One. My parents needed to spend more time with me, he concluded. If they could make me feel important, I wouldn’t need to make up stories.

I mulled over what my parents told me of his assessment in the car ride home. At first, I was angry. If I were going to dream up a fairy godmother, I’d have made her plump and soft, and smelling of cookie dough and brown sugar and full of love and laughter. She’d tell me stories about knights and princesses and happy things. If there were an animal following her around, it would be an energetic puppy.

I hadn’t thought of myself as a “chosen one” before he’d said so, but I realized afterwards that it was true. Every child reads stories about how one day, a normal boy or girl finds out that they are different than every other child in the world in the best way possible and every child waits for the day when they, too, find their golden ticket. Most of them are disappointed. Not me. Keziah’s presence in my life proved how very important I was. I had a big, amazing story ahead of me.

I stopped drawing pictures of Keziah’s stories at school. I realized that it was bothering people because they didn’t understand, because I was special and they weren’t. I listened to her tales with rapt attention, writing down in a notebook I kept by my bed whatever I could remember upon waking, and reading and re-reading them as I fell asleep at night.

The frequency of her visits decreased dramatically as I grew older. In the ever-growing spaces between our visits, I would spend lonely days seething in silent fury, imagining all of the angry things I would say to her, everything how-could-you and how-dare-you, until my emotions boiled over and I collapsed on my bed, a sobbing, sniffling mess.

I need you, Keziah, I would whisper before sleep claimed me on those nights, as though I could summon her through my desperation.I need you now more than ever. I want to be your chosen one. I want to be special.

Every night that Keziah failed to visit me led to another day where I was just another girl. I was an awkward teenager no different from all of the other awkward teenagers. How could she expect me to live like this? Our secret times were everything that made me important. Without them, I was doomed to be another weak and crawling thing like every other human being on this planet: impotent and voiceless, mindlessly shuffling towards my own death, unaware of my own tremendous insignificance. It was worse for me, though, as my eyes had been opened to the possibility of what could be, whereas the other unchosen were comfortable in their beds at night, believing that their pitiful existence was how things were supposed to be.

The instant I saw Keziah, however, my rage was forgotten. I had so much to learn and such little time with her that spending any of it on being angry seemed a terrible waste. Anyway, she wasn’t part of this world in the way I was — maybe time was different for her. Maybe what were weeks for me were hours for her.

On the night after my 17th birthday, Keziah came to me for the last time. I knew it was the last time even before she said anything. Brown Jenkin was agitated, running circles around me, climbing up my back and crawling down into my lap, staring at me with his beady black eyes. I reached out to him tentatively and he nuzzled my hand, stirring a strange kind of love in my heart.