The Mother who Fed the Dark

Chapter 5: The balance never forgotten

Sipho set fire to the house at dawn.

Not driven by rage; rage would have been too loud, too easy. This one was quieter. Thoughtful. He brought the paraffin can from one room to another, pouring it carefully, methodically, as if performing a ritual that he had never signed up for. The floorboards were like a thirsty beast, and the walls seemed to exhale, either relieved or resigned ; he could not tell.

The thing observed him.

It was always there in the reflections; one could only catch a glimpse of it in the windows, see its long shadow on the shiny surface of the kitchen counter, and sense it right behind you when you bent over to strike the match. It did not stop him.

“Fire is a language you speak.”

It whispered.

Sipho struck the match.

For a few seconds, nothing seemed to happen. But then the flame caught and violently spread across the floor. A wave of heat appeared. Smoke started to fizz in the air ; it was thick and black, and it brought the scent of old rituals, old lies, and old blood.

…

As the fire consumed the place, Sipho came out and stood there waiting. The wind was screaming wildly, giving the fire more fuel by lifting the sparks into the dark sky. The fire was so high that the flames formed faces, hands, and mouths opening in silent screams, the sight of which made his stomach turn. Inside the fire, the cry of Amahle echoed.

Sipho.

He felt a shock but kept looking forward.

“You were always my son,” the voice whispered with a great sense of sorrow. “I loved you.”

Tears came to his eyes. “You only loved what you thought I had to be.”

The voice was breaking, and it rose with the sound of the fire.

The creature approached him to stand next to him.

It was a large being, neither a monster nor a beautiful one. With its edges blurred like heat waves, its presence was almost like bending the air.

“You suppose I am the end of this.”

“No, I am convinced that it is the end of the house,” answered Sipho.

The thing considered this.

Houses are only skins, it said. Blood is where we live.

When the fire collapsed, giving way to the roof, a shower of sparks was thrown up into the sky. It seemed to Sipho that the ground beneath his feet had let something go an invisible tether snapping with a loud bang. The pressure he had lived under his whole life was suddenly lifted in one go, like a sudden shock, so unexpectedly that he actually gasped.

Now the air seemed light to him for the first time.

He laughed a broken, frightened laugh and fell to his knees.

"It's over," he breathed.

The thing didn't say anything.

It really should have been his first warning.

Time passed by.

Sipho got out of the village, moved to a new city, changed his job, changed the pattern of his life. And for a while, mercifully, it was a success.

He was asleep without the whispering. He went about his business without the shadows at his heels. At first, he made small successes, then bigger ones. Promotions came. People recalled his name. Doors opened without them being slammed in his face at the last moment.

He started to believe.

Hope, which was once a dangerous thing, became a thing he could recognize.

However, as he found out, balance is a very patient thing.

The dreams came back first—not the ones of Thando screaming, but the ones of Thando, calm and whole, simply looking at him from across vast spaces devoid of any other elements.

"You're running again," Thando told him one night.

"I'm living," Sipho answered.

Thando gave a sad smile. "That's what you think."

Sipho woke suddenly, his heart pounding, his nostrils still filled with the smell of smoke.

Then the signs came.

Mirrors started behaving strangely again ; the images in them were a little slow. Animals were staying away from him. Electronics went haywire whenever he was around; the screens flickered with the symbols that he found in the notebooks—symbols he hadn't consciously learned, yet could reproduce perfectly from memory.

The saddest part was that the people around him started to change.

They trusted him too much. Their secrets and fears came out without him even asking. Their misfortunes were always near him, as if it were static. One of the colleagues had to be fired after an argument with Sipho. Another one got sick out of the blue after borrowing his pen.

The pattern was so obvious.

It didn't torment him anymore.

It was his instrument.

One night as Sipho stood alone in his apartment, the brutal truth seeped into his very being: he had not wrecked the ritual.

It was actually the ritual that he had received from someone.

At first, the thing had been only a shadow and a threat, but now the thing had become a part of him. It was as natural as breathing.

"You were never the one meant to be the sacrifice," it said in a soft voice.

Sipho could not help but shut his eyes.

"Then what am I?"

"The door," it replied.

Suddenly, he got a mental picture of all those times when his being altered the course of events, when people , without knowing, just naturally gravitated to him, when calamity did not come to him but rather just passed him. Amahle had not been merely trying to sabotage him out of spite.

She was merely trying to put off the unavoidable.

"You educated me," Sipho breathed in a whisper. "You had been working on me without my knowledge the whole time."

"It (Amahle) was shaping herself. You were shaping me," the creature spoke in a cool voice.

Sipho let out a bitter laugh. "So what now? Should I just become her?"

The thing looked at him quite carefully.

"Well, that really depends. "

"Depends on what?"

"Depends on what you feed me. "

There was a silence between them.

Looking at his hands, Sipho observed that they were calm, efficient, and endowed with a power he had never before understood. The reality was now so clear to him that the ritual had actually never simply required the shedding of blood. It was a question of will, pointing, choice.

Amahle had instilled the creature with fear.

There was no necessity for him to do that.

Slowly, deliberately, Sipho stepped out of the shadow.

No, he said. I'm not your possession.

The creature did not disappear.

It was grinning.

“Then be watchful as you walk,” it said. “Because wherever you go"

The lamp went out and on again.

"There will always be balance.”

The shadow got smaller, thinner, but never fully disappeared.

Sipho was standing by himself ; his heart was beating loudly, and he was finally understanding.

The ritual was still alive.

Not in the places,

Not in the journals,

But in him.

And for the first time in his life, Sipho grasped the burden of absolute freedom.

It was not running away.

It was going to be accountable.

And somewhere, deep in the darkness that hears choices, there was something ancient waiting

To see what kind of keeper he would be.