Maisie Watson sleeps in fitful doozes, haunts by the hammering in her head and the taang of copper in her mouth. The warmth of the bed quickly become suffocate by midnight, the blanket wounds around her body, tight like a vice. She rolls back and forth, her senses dull to the ticking of the clock. Her eyelids are heavy, her limbs are leaden, however her head cannot blackout. The nervous buzz pulses just at the far back of her scalp, close, as if she can grip her fingers around the whitening spasm and hold it still, yet she can never quite reach it.

She closes her eyes, slowing her breathing to a steady rhyme. The throbbing behind her eyeballs spreads like tumour throughout her body. Every time she closes her eyes, flashes of Doctor Vu’s delicate features shutter across her mind. A long forgotten memory, she thinks, as she grasps the frayed, soft light arcing around her vision. Doctor Vu is facing the window, sipping tea, the afternoon sunlight splashing a saturated shade of mandarin onto the white walls of Doctor Vu’s house, onto his tanned skin, onto his raven hair and marble teeth. His words are soft, floating like a distant symphony, “There is a devil-possessed well in the village I grew up,” Another voice—heavier, scratchier, lower—overlays in the background. The murmuring hisses from a tucked away corner of her head, booming with an enthralling tone that suddenly makes her alert within the dream. The gentleness begins glitching violently. “The villagers would TU swoop down N'ETES PAS to reach for LA VRAIE the water, but as they swoop bits and bits closer MAISIE WATSON  to the non-existing water, the devil reaches up and consumes them.”

She backs away, trying to escapes back to reality, yet the voice entraps her, frozen her in place. Suddenly there’s a trickling sound echoing of to her side. She looks down. Water is creeping along the floor, the crystal clear liquid slinkers around her small feet, the furnitures, rising toward Doctor Vu. She turns, a breath catches in her throat at the black space that seems to spiral into itself. It tumbles from end-to-end, turning and turning, wiggling. The water flows from a black hole’s edge.

“Doctor Vu?” She hesitantly murmurs under her breath.

There’s a gruff inhale pressing between her shoulder blades, then suddenly two strong fists close around her side, yanking her down. The water leaps from the floor, pressing her down with a crushing deadweight. She twists her limbs, flailing against the invisible hold, sinking into a deep body of water.

An ocean, she thinks with a great, slow clarity, as she blinks at the blacken glinting surface, I’m drowning in an ocean.

Doctor Vu’s whisper echos in a surreal sense as if they’re in a cave, the sound resonates into the marrows of her bones. Crystal clear. “I’ve seen him once, the devil. I’ve feel his nails grazing my cheek.” His voice and the screeching devil’s voice blends together, rising and falling as one. She twists her limbs, gasping as the air inside her lungs compress into a dense lead ball. “Do you wonder how that feel like, Maisie, touched my a demon? POURQUOI AVEZ-VOUS BESOIN DE ME CACHER?”

The bottom materializes on the edge of her peripheral, a black, ghoulish seaweed farm with crooked fingers outreach for her flesh. The current drags her down steadily like a sack of stone. She smothers her panic, kicking her feet hard, breaking for the surface. Yet, her palms hit ice-cold texture. She pounds on the ice, growing more frantic as she can feel a present lurking behind her. A small cracks forms on the translucent ice. She opens her mouth to scream, jets of pearly foam twirl escape between her teeth. A dark shape hovers above her, as if bending down, scrutinizing her to see if she worth saving. The person kneels, pressing their nose onto the ice.

And she sees her. Herself. Another Maisie Watson, staring at her. Her lips move in mechanical cracks, yet the line that booms inside her head is of Doctor Vu. “They said my soul is tainted by the demon’s fingertips, yet it feels like I was reborn.”

Then she feels a sharp tug at her ankles, and something rips her away from the glacier surface. The world topples into an uncontrollable spinning motion. A black smoky form pins against her body.

“JE REVIENS.”

Syllables rip out of her throat but nothing comes out.

⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂⠂

“Maisie! Maisie! Maisie!”

The ground is shaking. There are noises, fading and glowing and spiralling around her.

Her eyes snap open, sucking in a mouthful of air, heart kicking in her chest.

“Oh Jesus, you’re awake.” A dark, heavy-set shape spawns above her, panting. A snarling face flashes across her face, and she screams, crawling away from him. A strong, dry palm plastering across her jaws, entrapping the vicious shriek.

“For fuck’s sake, shut the hell up or I will break your teeth.” The husky baritone voice rings out, follows by a sharp flicker. Light floods her vision, blinding, and her arms immediately shoot up to cover her eyes. He sniffs, shifting to shield her.

Her conscious finally catches up to her. A nausea pushes its way up her throat. She touches her cheeks, tears cutting down her palms in searing paths.

“Papa?” She croaks. She opens her mouth, but her larynx seems too tired to function. Her spine ache and pops as if she had been curling up for too long. She scoots to the edge of the bed, swinging her legs on the floor. Papa stoops, placing a hand on her shoulder, and that’s when she realizes her body is raking with mad, uncontrollable shudders. “There’s a black-face, flat-nose demon possessing me, Papa,” She manages, producing a high, shrill scratchy whisper. She presses the heels of her hands onto her eye sockets, feeling a racing pulse-on-pulse. She can still feel the black, smoky matter prying her mouth and rushes inside her, contaminating her inner organs, her senses, her mind, burning like poison through her veins. The feeling of drowning helplessly fading in and out her perception, real and unreal. “There’s another me in my dream, telling me he would come to find me.”

Papa emits a long, tired sigh, rubbing a side of his face, stepping aside. A faint foul booze smell oozing of him. “I thought you were done with these episodes?”

She squints at Papa’s rigid outlines, then bows her head. “I’m sorry. Did I wake you and Mama?”

He shrugs, examining her a bit as he cracks his knuckles. “Nah. Your Mama is sleeping like a stone. Whatever meds you gave her works. Thank God I don’t have to face her stupid whines every time I go to bed, now.”

“It’s the herbs from Doctor Vu.”

“He’s a good man.” He says carelessly. “Ask him to prescribe you some.”

She nods, although she knows she won’t do it. She doesn’t think she needs to. Doctor Vu must have know. The bitter thought finally brings some lucid senses seeping back to her.

“Did you kill again?” He says, and she freezes up. She can physically feel her blood draining from her body, leaving behind a cold corpse.

“What?” She rasps. “How—? What make you say that?”

Papa shakes his head. “Forget it.”

She licks her lips. “Can you get me some water?”

“Get it yourself. What are you? A baby?” Papa grunts, although he holds her steady as she stands up and stumbles upstairs. He waits until she properly fills up a cup and guarantees not to drop it before he moves away, plopping down on the couch with a great heave.

He curses as he digs his hand through the floppy, stretched cushions, grasping the remote and turns on the TV. Bill Maher’s face pops up, his mouth blaring continuous criticisms on the price of gas keeps skyrocketing to an insane number. Papa scoffs, muttering something indecipherable under his breath, then cracking open a beer, the round cap hits somewhere with a Plonk, sighing sleepily.

Papa had never get her, never understand how the hidden guilt would trigger her hallucinations episodes, he didn’t even care less about what she was. She was a sum of her failures, and that’s it. Yet, he would be the first one to run downstairs, cursing but still shaking her from the entrapping nightmares, pulling her out of the cycles of screams and dreads and continuous replays of the past. Sometimes, she doesn’t know whether to love or to cry over him. He’s her father, strong and reliable and once a prodigy of his generation, but his mind is a dark, dark place that teeters between violence and hatred.

She gulps the water in one long inhale. The cool liquid slides down her throat, does nothing to smoother the jitteriness in her blood. In fact, it initiates a wakening reverberate in her bones. In the distance, lingering at the edge of her hearing, she can hear sharp barks.

“Oh, I’ve have enough screaming for the day,” Papa booms, thundering out the door, roaring uphill. “Oi, McCormick, if you don’t put those bitches in three seconds I’ll do it for you.”

The dogs holler harder.

Mrs. McCormick’s black mutts are sensitive. The old lady claimed her dogs can sense spirits, and Maisie Watson wonders if they have been awoken by the devil inside her dream. If they could feel his presence manifesting in the atmosphere, feel his evilness infiltrates the contaminated air. Her lips quiver as she realizes the mutts have never like her in particular. They yaps at passersby, but whenever she passes Mrs. McCormick’s window, they would be lurking behind the window panel, their fur stand in impossibly vertical strads as if electrocuted, their saggy cheeks pull back to reveal their big, yellow set of teeth, the canines dripping with dark-colour, sticky matter. Their amber eyes glow an abnormal shade of lightning yellow. Somehow, their silence is more frightened than their aggressive snarls.

She shivers.

Perhaps they could sense the demon within her, the one that she doesn’t even aware of.

Or perhaps they already know the facade the demon is contained in is crumbling apart.