The curse

Hallucinations

The hallucinations and insomnia had begun to hollow Daisy out from the inside. Today marked exactly one week since David’s death. She hadn’t eaten more than a few bites all day; sleep had become a stranger; her skin had a sallow, exhausted look that made her feel older than her twenty-eight years. The tears had dried into salt tracks on her cheeks. There was nothing left to cry.

She switched her phone to airplane mode and slid it across the bedside table as if distance could keep the world’s demands out. The house around her felt cavernous and hostile—every polished surface, every echo a reminder of absence. “I can’t take it anymore,” she whispered, the words small and brittle in the quiet.

Panic seized her. In a single, frantic motion she rose and crossed to the kitchen. The white, ultramodern room—her little sanctuary of order and taste—suddenly felt sterile, alien. Cabinets gleamed; the counters were immaculate; in another life, this was precisely what she had wanted. Tonight it felt like a stage set for someone else.

She opened a drawer, then stopped. For a moment she merely stood there, heart hammering, palms damp. She felt raw and empty and unbearably tired. “I can’t do this,” she told the room, a confession to nobody. The idea of ending the pain flickered up like a match in the dark.

She took a single step toward the stairs, dizziness lapping at the edges of her vision. The house swam. Her legs trembled. She reached for the banister, but the world tilted; she lost her balance and crashed down the staircase. The fall felt endless and muffled, as if time had been slowed. She landed hard—conscious long enough to register sharp, searing pain—then everything went black.

“Wake up!” a voice commanded, a presence so loud it cracked across the nothingness. Daisy’s eyes fluttered open to a cold, sterile light and the blurred figures of her mother and her best friend, Jessy, hovering like angels at the edge of a storm. Their faces were pale with fear. They cried her name as though whistling could pull her back from some ledge.

“You looked like a corpse,” Jessy cried, as relief and anger tangled in her tone. “You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

Dizzy and disoriented, Daisy tried to speak, but the words came out as hiccuping breath. She felt the metallic tang of blood somewhere against her scalp, sticky and hot. Her mother wiped at it with trembling hands and scolded, “You must take better care of yourself, child. We thought—”

“Don’t,” Daisy said, her voice thin. The sunlight through the curtains cut a pale rectangle on the floor and seemed both obscene and tender, like an indifferent witness. She let out a ragged laugh that surprised her. “I didn’t come here to argue. I came because… I needed to see.”

Jessy knelt beside her, fingers warm and steady. “We brought you back,” she whispered. “You can’t be alone tonight. Not now.”

Daisy closed her eyes and let their presence anchor her for a heartbeat. The house smelled faintly of antiseptic and jasmine tea, an odd, domestic duet that kept her tethered to the ordinary world. But beneath everything, under the mattress of grief and medication and exhaustion, there was something else—an undercurrent of memory the dreams had dredged up, an ancestral ache she could not shake.

“Don’t go back to sleep,” her mother murmured, holding Daisy’s hand like a talisman. “If you sleep now, the dreams will take you.” There was terror in her voice that had nothing to do with superstition and everything to do with generations of stories Daisy had been told as a child.

Daisy wanted to protest, to declare that the dreams were only grief’s cruel invention, but her throat closed. She remembered the last nightmare vividly—the towering figure in red, the voice like iron, the claim that ran like a poison thread through her family’s history: the pact that had tied their fortune to a terrible demand. She had laughed off the bedtime stories long ago; now they felt less like stories and more like warnings.

“You again,” a voice said—not from outside the room but inside her head—a voice that had become all too familiar in the empty hours. She flinched and found herself transported, as if pulled by a current, into a scene that was not the bright kitchen nor the cool hospital room but a dingy, lamp-lit hall from another century.

She watched herself—no, watched an ancestor of herself—stand in a cramped, candlelit parlor. The woman’s face was lined with grief; her eyes were raw with loss. Around her, neighbors and a friend whispered and tried to comfort her. A child taken ill, a husband struck down: the pattern of tragedy repeated in hushed speech.

“I wish I had money,” the friend murmured, grief in her voice. “If I could pay for the doctor—if only—”

Great-grandmother’s shoulders shook as she listened. She was proud and stubborn and exhausted all at once. “I don’t believe in such things,” she finally admitted, voice reduced to a rasp. “But I cannot bear this emptiness. I will try anything.”

They followed a path that cut into the woods at night, a desperate pilgrimage cradled by cold branches and the whisper of owls. The cottage they reached was the kind of place that waits at the edge of towns in old stories: small, crooked, smelling faintly of herbs and resin. The door opened before they knocked. Inside, an old woman sat with eyes like river stones and hands that trembled as if the years had been too much. She named no daughter of the family. She said only, “You are touched by sorrow. Sacrifice is the only trade I can offer: loss exchanged for coin.”

Daisy’s vision blurred as the old woman produced an object—an artifact from another age—and performed a rite that asked a heavy toll. The details dissolved into sensation: the metallic taste of fear, the searing ache, the hush that follows a bargain struck in a hurry. Great-grandmother wept and agreed, and later the house prospered. Sugar mills rose; ships returned with bales; names glowed in society columns. The prosperity came with a finger-tightening price: a whispered demand that daughters be offered, that their unions be subject to a hand beyond human comprehension.

Back in the present, Daisy crouched on the edge of the bed, palms pressed to the blankets, as if the fabric might anchor her to the now. Her mother’s face hovered close—pale, cross-patched with the map of care and weariness.

“Those stories…” her mother began, voice tolling like a bell. “They are old, yes. But our family—your family—has always paid attention to such things. There are records. Not everything is superstition.”

Jessy squeezed Daisy’s shoulder. “You’re not alone,” she said again, but softer this time, as if trying to insulate Daisy from the cold.

Daisy let out a long breath. The images of the cottage and the rite did not comfort or reassure; they simply explained something that had been gnawing at the edges of her life. The dream was a map, or perhaps a summons. Whether it was a supernatural truth or a grotesque manifestation of accumulated grief and inherited narratives, it mattered little. What mattered was that it had taken her—and her great-grandmother, and their small domestic tragedies—into the same story.

“I didn’t come here to argue,” Daisy repeated, not to her mother, not to Jessy, but to the memory that kept shaping itself in her mind. “I came because I need answers.”

Her voice was steadier now, because asking for help felt like an action, and action was the only way out of paralysis. The hall was silent save for the measured breathing of two women who would not let her fall apart on their watch.

“We’ll look into it,” Jessy said. “We’ll find records. We’ll talk to family. And we’ll bring you back to the world one step at a time.”

Daisy nodded. It was not a cure, not a promise of peace. But it was a promise of company and purpose—and for the first time in days, a thin thread of hope threaded through the fog.

The old stories had teeth. Whether they were curse or metaphor, they had a hold on her. But she was no longer going to walk that path alone. She would search the archives, question the elders, and, if she had to, confront the past that had been fed on silence.

She closed her eyes, feeling the pulse in her wrist slow. Outside, the wind eased, and somewhere in the house a clock ticked its ordinary, stubborn insistence that time does go on, even after the darkness.