Things I Dream, Things I Do

They said I’d tried to kill a man in the car park behind the library, sometime after dusk on a Tuesday in March. I was told I’d been found standing over him, my hands trembling, my clothes soaked in something warm and red, my mouth slack and expression blank. There were no witnesses, not really—only security footage that showed me walking into the lot and a man falling seconds later. No weapon. Just force.

They said his skull had nearly caved in.

But when I watched the footage, I didn’t recognize myself. The angle was too far, the figure too grainy, and yet something about the gait—stiff, mechanical, almost elegant—sent a slow dread crawling up my spine like a cold breath in the dark.

And worst of all—I remembered nothing.

Not the walk. Not the man. Not the rage.

Just silence.

Until the voices began.

At first, I assumed it was guilt. I told myself I’d blacked out. That the mind had clever ways of hiding what it couldn’t bear to confront. But the voice was not mine, and as the nights grew longer, it began to speak in full sentences, sometimes even laughing softly before fading into the folds of sleep.

“They kept you sweet. They kept you small.”

“You’re more than their pet daughter.”

“Look in the basement.”

The thing about madness, I suppose, is that you never recognize the edges until you’re already inside it, sipping tea, smiling too brightly.

I didn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell? My mother, with her pressed cardigans and avoidance of eye contact whenever family history was mentioned? My father, who had developed the unsettling habit of watching me from the doorway when he thought I wasn’t looking?

They had been strange for years. But now I began to wonder: Had they always been afraid of me?

I returned to the house I grew up in, the tall, crumbling one on the edge of the woods, surrounded by frost-bent trees and hedges so wild they looked like they might reach through the windows if the wind blew just right.

They weren’t expecting me.

And they certainly weren’t expecting what I found.

The basement was always locked when I was a child. I remember asking once—maybe twice—and being told it was just storage, a mess of old furniture and mildew. But the key was exactly where the voice told me it would be: tucked in the third book on the left in the sitting room shelf, the hollowed-out novel about a governess that had always bored me.

I don’t know what I expected to find when I descended the stairs—dust, perhaps. A trunk full of rotting heirlooms. But what greeted me was a room far older than the house itself.

Stone walls. Carved sigils. Candles burned to stumps that had never been lit in my lifetime.

And in the center—framed on an iron pedestal—was a mirror.

Or something pretending to be a mirror.

Because when I looked into it, I saw not myself, but a girl my age with the same face, only wrong.

Her mouth moved before mine. Her head tilted first.

And then she grinned.

“Almost home,” she whispered.

The voice returned in earnest after that.

No longer content to whisper, it began to speak through me. Not in front of others—not yet. But I would catch my own voice humming lullabies I’d never learned. I would wake in the garden with dirt under my nails and symbols etched into my arms.

My mother finally confronted me. And it was not fear in her eyes—it was resignation.

“You weren’t supposed to know,” she said. “We had sealed her. We thought the blood would fade.”

I asked her who she was.

And my mother cried.

They called her Anja.

My great-grandmother’s sister, though that wasn’t quite accurate. She was something else. A daughter born under the wrong moon, marked by stars that hadn’t been charted in centuries. They said she had a gift. They said she made the house come alive when she walked through it. Doors opened. Fires lit. People told her things they didn’t mean to.

And then, she started listening to the wrong voices.

The story goes that Anja began speaking in ancient tongues. That she stopped eating, except on nights when the moon turned red. That animals began dying around the estate—first the chickens, then the dogs, then a child from the village who wandered too close.

My ancestors tried to contain her.

They didn’t kill her.

They split her.

Bound her soul to an object of reflection—something that would trap her desire to become. That mirror was buried beneath the house. The women of our line were tasked with keeping it secret, maintaining the seals.

And I—I was never meant to know.

But blood calls to blood.

And Anja had been waiting.

The more I learned, the less I trusted my own mind. I started hearing her outside of dreams. In the clatter of dishes. In the hum of the refrigerator. Her voice would curl inside my spine at the most mundane moments—when I opened the blinds or brushed my teeth or answered the phone.

“They used you. They kept you small to keep me silent.”

And part of me—God help me—began to believe her.

Because she was right.

They had known. And they had lied.

It came to a head on the anniversary of her binding.

I didn’t know it at the time. But the blood remembered.

I woke in the middle of the night, barefoot on the staircase, the mirror already in my hands though I didn’t remember taking it.

My parents stood in the hall, silent. My mother weeping. My father clutching something—a knife? A book? My vision was blurred.

Anja spoke through me. But it felt like we were saying the words together.

“We were never monsters. Just powerful.”

My parents begged.

They said it wasn’t my fault.

They said I was sick.

They said I needed help.

But it was their hands that broke the seal.

Their fear that fed her.

Their silence that let her grow.

I don’t remember the assault.

I know one of them lived. I know the house burned.

I know I stood in the woods for three days, alone, holding the mirror in one hand and something warm and wet in the other.

And now—now I walk under a different name. I sleep in abandoned farmhouses. I eat whatever grows near rivers. I don’t speak much.

But the voice—Anja—she’s not just a whisper anymore.

She’s me.

And when I look in the mirror—any mirror—I smile first.

Because I know something most don’t.

You don’t inherit demons.

You become them.