Fiction: In the shadows of their turbulent pasts, three women find their destinies intertwined

And just like that, one dark early winter afternoon, when the fog had begun rolling in from the distant mountains, bringing with it the damp, unsettling sensation of being underwater, there was a frantic knock on the front door. A woman’s voice called out to Teja, begging him to open the door, to let her in. I recognized the voice, it came from the woman who had come to meet me a couple of days ago, asking for a room to live here, a request I had thought absurd but had strangely found myself acquiescing to despite all my initial misgivings. I could be a sucker like that. Teja had returned after two weeks away just this very morning, the beard thick on his face, his eyes heavy with the lack of sleep from being on the move for the past fourteen days. Part of the job, I told myself. If he wanted a settled life he should have become a bank clerk.

“I went to ten different places before I could come back to you,” he told me. I smiled. If he expected gratitude he wouldn’t get it. He hadn’t left me as I constantly worried he would. And anyway now, the woman he would have left me for had come here, following us. Or had we followed her here? I would never know. It would be interesting to see how he reacted when he saw her. I hoped I wouldn’t need to kill him too.

Outside the windows, the fog began glowing a strange flickering orange and red, the condensation trickling down it, like someone was breathing heavily on the windowpanes, on the house, on the path, on the entire town.

A low growling rumbled the floorboards, making them quiver, a growling that seemed to come from deep within the bowels of the earth and higher than the clouds, a feral snarling. I felt my heart freeze with an unnamed dread of what unholy thing had reached our doorstep, a dread I could not comprehend, given I had lived with strange things in this house for the past many months. There was the creature that had tethered itself to me from the Professorni’s basement, now in its bottle, up in the tin trunk in the attic, vaguely discontented and angry, emerging occasionally to reassure me that once I gave birth, I would be permanently bound to it, to him.

Then there was that other thing that had once been here, crawling up the face of the cliff that it had fallen from, the gunshot wound in the middle of its forehead now with the scalp falling off, the rotten flesh and bones showing through where flesh had fallen off or eaten by creatures of the wild, hiding in the basement, crawling back down the face of the cliff, crawling up again when it felt like, revealing itself to me when I was alone, and helpless, and begging my forgiveness for what it had done to me when still alive, asking to be set free, to be released into the afterlife. The ghoul, once the man who called himself my father, had no power over me anymore now.

Teja was upstairs when the first knock sounded on the door. When the voice called his name, he rushed down towards the door. I put a hand out, stopping him, the dread of what was outside sliced ice through my spine, chilling the blood in my veins.

“Don’t open the door.”

He looked at me with anger and pushed my hand aside.

“How can I not? It’s Noor.”

As he threw the door open, a sulphurous fetid stench rolled in and almost made me gag. It overpowered even the fragrance of roses. Noor stood there at the doorway, leaning heavily against the door jamb, looking at him for a long still moment. Around her the light rippled, broken and in pain, a cocoon of moving pulsating energy, now dimming, ripped and slashed by claws we could not see. The sky outside was dark with the fog, a strange reddish-orange light lit it up, an eerie otherworldly son et lumière that pulsed with a life of its own, framing her in a way that seemed to swallow her up, her light and her body.

There was blood flowing from the gashes in her arms, her clothes ripped by the force of whatever it was she was fleeing from. She was no longer the siren I feared, but a tired, traumatized woman I felt pity towards. I surprised myself. Pity was not an emotion that came easy to me these days.

Excerpted with permission from The Moon in the Lining of Her Skin, Kiran Manral, Hachette India.