Haunted hallways, p.3
Haunted Hallways, page 3
There was a full-length mirror resting against the wall to her right, patina upon its brass frame, black freckles adorning the glass. In the mirror, she saw a famous face, one marked by sweet adoration and gentle praise, the finer, prettier, more beloved twin emerging in its platinum face. Is this what Nazar saw before she died? Faridah thought.
Only perfect mirrors can make perfect reflections of one another. If one mirror is broken, the other might appear so, but the truth is that the corruption of one corrupted the appearance of the other.
As one soul begins to shatter, their twin soul wears similar cracks.
She walked on, hyper-aware of the footsteps that were a miniscule quarter of a beat behind her own. The color quickly drained from her face.
“Do you remember when Ammi would read the Qur’an to us? There was one story,” She didn’t dare turn around as she spoke. “Habil was righteous and innocent, and his brother, Qabil, was full of arrogance, pride, and jealousy. He slew Habil, but in doing so, he ruined himself. The God-fearing would never murder for the sake of envy—”
The air was suddenly rent by the sound of breaking glass. She brought a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream as she returned to the mirror, where fragments sharp enough to cut on contact littered the porcelain floor tiles.
Yet, somehow, the mirror was still perfectly intact.
She raised a hand, and her reflection did the same—a tenth of a second later. Before her brain could register the sound of breaking glass, a million new knives fell over her exposed skin, painting her crimson. An explosion of pain burst through her as she staggered backward, glass crunching beneath her black loafers.
Her reflection climbed out of the mirror, a thick shard of glass so tight in her grip that bright red took on a brownish hue as it gushed from her palm.
“You’re—you’re supposed to be dead,” she gasped, walking backward until she hit the slender, stone colonnette behind her and froze in place.
Nazar looked exactly like her, with brown hair, dark, downturned eyes, and a hooked nose. Faridah steadied her breath and tried to calm her panic.
“I escaped the mortuary, barely alive, found the help I needed. I know what you did, Nazar,” said Nazar. Not Nazar.
She could keep her façade, play the part well enough to continue, or she could give up and revel in her identity: the lesser twin, a picture of pure grief as she sought after the revenge her sister never could.
“I didn’t kill you,” she said—Nazar, once more.
“No, but you left me for dead,” Faridah was shivering, glass still clenched in her palm. “Why, Nazar? Why didn’t you help me? Why did you steal my life?”
Self-delusion was a human’s greatest power. Sometimes, Nazar thought that it was the only thing that kept most people sane. A desire to reject what is true, construct what is false.
Love, hope, happiness. All were abstract fantasies that gave life meaning. Without delusion, what are we? Insipid, hollow individuals who wandered the earth without a path, and never stopped at a destination, or wondered why.
But when she was Faridah, she mattered and, just for a moment, people listened.
Her parents had called her Nazar. The evil eye, the envy of the envious. The belief that some can bring pain, illness, or even death to those around them. The superstition said that objects that are gazed at with jealous eyes will break or shatter. Not every face that smiles at you is your friend, their mother had told them.
It was always Faridah she worried about. Her famous child.
Whilst Nazar was quick to condemn the injustices that meant almost every disappearance thus far had been a student of color, exploring every death as if it were her own, Faridah had always preferred to assimilate. Her sister’s comfortable, unassuming place in rich, white society was a door Nazar had walked through in a bid to get what she wanted: retribution.
She mattered. But the moment passed quickly, and oblivion swallowed her whole once more.
“I just…I just wanted them to listen,” she said.
Nazar was the eye of her own storm; she would never have Faridah’s life, nor could she escape her own. Only fools were too afraid to live as they’d been put on Earth, but she was a fool, and she was a coward.
Her sister’s smile was pained. “You wanted vengeance, but before you seek it, behn, dig three graves. Two for them, and one for yourself.”
“At least I’ll be blessed with a proper burial,” Nazar felt tears welling up in her eyes. “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? To return to the soil. Instead, they dissolved your skin and bones to ashes—”
“Nazar, the best revenge is to live well—”
“How can I live well?” Nazar cried, and Faridah stood, affronted. “How can I live well after death breathed down your throat? How can I live at all when they punish us for just that? How can I ever find peace?”
“You’ve always been so…so enamored by death, Nazar, so attached to the idea that we’re all expendable. How is this any different?”
“Because death is just. It’s uncolored, objective. Anyone could contract cancer, or get an infection, or find themselves in a motor vehicle incident. In the end, all are equal.”
They were identical, technically, but Faridah looked worlds apart from her, her hijab jet-black and pressed tightly to her scalp, wearing a skirt that reached her ankles as opposed to trousers. “You’d call Thomas’s death just?”
Thomas Girton was bleeding out onto the old, lacquered oak. But the blood was ice-cold, and it was black, congealing, and thick as molasses. It was a living force, reaching for Nazar’s ankle as it dragged along the floor.
And it was fast, faster, until she was running down cold, stone corridors, each footfall chaotically spaced from the last. Frigid air bit into her lungs as she gained momentum with each push of her legs, her body cold with dread.
It engulfed her foot, and she cried as she fell to her hands and knees. Terror washed over her, raising the fine hairs on the back of her neck, her pulse beating loudly in her ears. When she turned, the monster had vanished, and an empty pool of scarlet blood was spreading before her eyes, with bloody footprints leading back to the stairs she had left her sister to perish at.
“Faridah?” She looked around. The school hallways were dark, marble floors and wooden walls of ribbed vaults and pointed arches, large stained-glass windows and ornate decoration, with glossy doors and brass, baroque handles. “Faridah!”
“Behind you.”
She turned. Faridah smiled; Nazar smiled back. She looked like a heart that beat in time with its double.
“You scared me,” Nazar said, shivering as cold sweat soaked her skin. It was never cold in India. Here, you could never be entirely warm, not inside. It was as if everyone’s souls had been frozen to ice, leaving them with an inability to feel.
“I know.” Her smile fell. “Nazar, you need to ask yourself… does murder suddenly become just when it’s a repercussion, as opposed to the initial act?”
Their father had continued his travels but abandoned his daughter at the Mallory Thorne School following his wife’s death; he couldn’t justify the costs of bringing them along. Even with all his British blood money, all the Indians that starved so that he could eat, or died so that he could live, it still wasn’t enough.
Greed was a lesson their father had learnt well: lick a white man’s shoe, and you’ll soon be wearing a similarly expensive pair.
Faridah was gaunt, almost ghostly, her skin pressed thin to the bone. “I never escaped the mortuary, Nazar. I never survived my wounds,” she said. Nazar’s small, crimson lips parted into an “O.” “You know, as a child I feared ghosts. Now, I realize that the ones who live are far scarier.”
Ghosts. A shard of ice struck Nazar’s heart as candlelight flickered overhead, bathing her in dull, orange light.
This isn’t real, none of this is real. The only escape she could find was to close her eyes, the darkness of shut eyes providing her a temporary comfort. For a moment, she could pretend that she was in India, and the air was warm and smelt of exhaust fumes, incense, and heady spices.
And the traditional riad their mother had been raised in smelt of camphor and coconut oil. Outside was a clash of color and a cacophony of sound. At home, no one mocked your accent, or called your food foul-smelling, or asked if you were bald beneath your hijab. You were not an other. You belonged.
She opened her eyes. It was dark, the air foreboding and still. Without the bustle of chatter and steady stream of order, the hallways felt bizarre.
A great tremor overtook Faridah, but her gaze was always steady; she never let it fall. For a sinister moment, she looked completely, utterly real. She looked living. Nazar knew it was an illusion, her mind playing tricks, telling her that someone soulless had life, that someone hollow had blood.
“Ask yourself, Nazar,” she whispered, “why, of all the people that wronged you, or left you, why am I the one you see?” She unconcealed a stiletto knife, and it glinted as it caught the orange light overhead. Nazar could’ve sworn she’d given Thomas Girton the knife. “Why am I the one who punishes you?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do,” A mad glint lingered in Faridah’s eyes, the color of rich, rain-soaked earth. “You wear guilt like shackles on your wrists. It is your greatest companion; you do not even see how it robs you of your humanity.”
Nazar’s brain stuttered for a moment, and every part of her froze as her thoughts caught up. Her life was still in fragments, like a body caught in a crossfire, but for a moment, she could piece each limb, each organ, nail, and strand of hair together.
After a wash of cold, she caught Faridah’s eye. Then, her face lit up. “I remember,” she whispered.
“Of course you remember. Ghosts don’t forget. Without a heart beating blood and lungs pumping air, the only thing keeping us here, half-alive, is memories of what we were.”
Faridah had been dead long before she had been pushed down the stairs: and Nazar really had taken her place. So why was Nazar here, dead, all her grief and regret and failings materializing at once, fighting to be kept alive?
She thought she was alive like any other, a vessel of flesh with bloodied organs and intricate veins. She thought she was human. But she was here, half-alive, a vessel made of guilt, regret, resentment. She was an imperfect thing, made entirely of her own sins, but she was not alive. Not really.
Spots of red were bleeding through Faridah’s shirt, where their father had stabbed her.
“The soulless come for the soulful,” Faridah whispered. That’s what her Ammi often told them; she never warned them that their father would be the soulless one. “Honor killing, he called it.”
“Where is the honor in murder?”
“I said no, I begged them. Abbu said that I had brought dishonour upon the family regardless,” said Faridah. The shadow that veiled Nazar’s skin was cold and grey, a sorrow that chilled what was once warm inside. “He said that my death would be the only way to restore his reputation. May dust and soil protect you now, Abbu told me. In your grave, you will be safe,”
The day he found out that Faridah had been brutally raped by two skinheads from the school, he had told Nazar: She is beyond saving, child.
“Shame, Abbu said. Think of the shame. It’s fear of judgment that drives men to murder. When I was killed, I thought I would slip into the past without a trace, but you took my place, kept me alive even if it meant killing yourself. Thomas and Alfred may not have murdered me, but they destroyed me in every other way.”
When their father had killed Faridah, Nazar had been there, hiding, watching. She knew something was wrong when he said he wanted to visit, but wrong has many definitions. When he left, he said “see you,” with no “soon.” The end of that sentence should’ve been “see you in Hell.” Only then would they have their bittersweet reunion.
His sleek, black automobile had drifted down the long road that separated the school from society, the wind howling, steady downpour sounding like running feet as it pummelled Nazar’s skin.
A newspaper had tumbled around the asphalt, and she had stooped to pick it up, just catching the headline before the ink dissolved into the paper. INVESTIGATION CLOSES FOR INDIAN BOY, 19, FOUND DEAD AT LOCAL SCHOOL.
She came to a very brisk conclusion, then. The authorities would never wonder how Faridah had been murdered, or why. They would never investigate the sickening happenings that occurred behind closed doors, or the fatal lust of the school’s most trusted students.
So, if a widely adored student like Faridah could sink into oblivion, a nobody like Nazar could do so with ease.
She dragged Faridah’s body to the bottom of that imperial staircase, along with her named books and resources. The next day, news spread that Nazar Malik had jumped from the stairs in an act of self-murder. Tragic, the papers had called it, but it was not on the front page, and the police hadn’t even opened the case before it was closed. She was part of a “suicide epidemic of colored students,” the papers had said.
Taking Faridah’s place had been Nazar’s way of enacting revenge with ease, of engaging with the school community through the eyes of someone who it accepted. She realized very soon that they would welcome you with open arms, sit with you at lunch, but they would never see you as anything beyond the other.
She would never belong to the “us,” no matter how many sandwiches she shared, or dresses she complimented, or jokes she laughed at. Because those sandwiches would always be more tasteful than the food from her culture, the dresses more charming, the jokes at her own expense.
It was dawn now and, inside, frost grew over the windows, and each breath rose as white-puffed clouds. Standing at the bottom of the stairs again, a long, broken mirror was faced down on the tiles, and glass detritus crunched beneath Nazar’s feet.
In the empty hallway, large, silver candelabras held lambent flames, an arc of gold in the darkness that brought a natural hallowed glow of flickering yellow to the walls. She’d always known that her father would take Faridah’s life, caring more about his reputation than his offspring. Blood will have blood, as her mother would say.
“Do you know how the story of Qabil and Habil ended?” Faridah’s fragile voice floated on a cold breeze, bereft of life, the air stagnant with the smell of blood. She was here, somewhere, and soon, Nazar would join her. If she tried hard enough, she could see her still, her uniform bloodied and bemired, her nose dripping crimson down her neck, and wild, bloodshot eyes unable to focus on a particular thing. “After Habil’s murder, Qabil, in his shame, begins to curse himself, full of guilt and deep sorrow.”
“And he became of the regretful,” Nazar whispered, a cold tear running down her cheek. A black, inky crow perched at one of many windows, its sleek wings flapping against the glass. Nazar had read in a book, once, that humans were not the only ones who held funerals and mourned their dead. Crows did, too.
A black-garbed group of watchful figures, congregating nearby the lifeless corpse. Referred to as the particularly apt “murder,” crows were vigilant over their deceased. God sent a crow to bury the corpse of Qabil’s brother, as he had been unable to.
Nazar wondered who would bury her. Would her parents bury her, dressed in white? Would her body be dissolved to ash despite her wishes to return to the earth? Like her ancestors in India who starved in the famine, would she be abandoned in a mass grave by the side of a crowded Delhi highway, left to rot in a small, walled cemetery?
The crow left in a swooping arc for the newly defrosted grass, its black plumage soaking up the early morning sunshine. What did death look like to crows, up in the sky, as they passed the angels, one leaving, one coming?
Death came, quickly, quicker than it had before.
She could still see, though not through her own eyes. She saw things as an onlooker would, detached yet somehow there, faded into obscurity.
Her teacher, Mr Moore, came to the top of the stairs, stared down. Immediately, he was aghast; the only comparison fitting was that he’d “seen a ghost.” Still, he was cooler than most, emotionally removed.
You took a knife to Moore’s class, spoke to Alfred, Faridah’s voice, again, but you never killed him, did you? Or Thomas—
Nazar realised then that a voice constructed entirely by your own mind was particularly easy to silence—if necessity arose. Faridah could not force her to address any worldly truth she’d already fashioned to be false. Self-delusion was a powerful thing.
Moore spoke in a dull, baritone voice. “Everyone, return to class.”
“What happened, sir?” Alfred cried in the distance; Thomas stood next to him. And Nazar knew that they cared about as much as one would if it were an obituary in small print on the fifth page of a newspaper after the crosswords and celebrity gossip.
“It seems likely that she couldn’t handle the grief of her sister’s untimely passing,” said Moore. “When twins get separated, their spirits fly away to look for the other.”
“We need to call for the policemen via radio, quickly,” one student exclaimed, her black skin as rich and deep as English oak in spring rains. Did she realise that she was next? Nazar thought.
Her name was Mary, and she was strong and intelligent, having descended from merchant seamen living in port cities in London’s East End. Like Faridah and Nazar, she’d always had something to prove; existing wasn’t enough when even your existence offended others. Nazar wished she could warn her. “They will never be your friend,” she would say. “She may have been attacked—!”
“I saw her jump,” Thomas said, quickly. “It was suicide, sir.”
They took her to the mortuary. Her body never returned to the earth; instead, it was burnt to ashes on a cold, lonely night where even the crows dared not leave their homes.
“That’s not what happened,” said Faridah, “is it?”
“You’re here, again,” said Nazar. “Why are you here?”
“The living fraternize with the living, the dead…they have only themselves. But,” she smiled, “some connections can never be severed. You and I are twin souls, embers from the same flame.”
