When I was younger, I was told I was never allowed to leave my room after 9pm, one night I discovered why. (Part 4)

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I was frozen to the spot. The body twitched for several minutes before it slowly got up. It got up!

There was blood all around it. I whimpered as it turned its blood soaked face toward my fear stricken one. I sat still for a moment before it began to slowly shuffle toward me. It’s arms reaching out.

As it edged closer to me, I screamed, I screamed till my throat was red raw. The body, the animated corpse. It was my mother.

The red room was small, quite rectangular so I didn’t really have many places to run to. The good thing was, the corpse that was my mother was slow so I was able to get away from her by walking to the other side of the room. I knew that I couldn’t do that forever and it wasn’t sustainable but for now, it would do. I just couldn’t bear to look at my poor mother’s face.

‘’Mum, please.’’ I pleaded with her.

‘’Mum. What happened to you. Where’s dad?’’

I knew that she would be incapable of answering my questions, due to the fact that she no longer possessed a tongue. Could she understand me? I didn’t know.

This clearly wasn’t my mother anymore. She was staggering towards me, her stance likened to that of a zombie. Hell, she was a zombie. Blood oozed out of her mouth, her teeth black. Her eyes were entirely devoid of any life, any emotion. She was empty, a husk. All that was left of her was the awful essence of the Baba Yaga. These were the consequences I was telling you about.

Let me tell you a bit about my mother. She was always kinder to me than my father was. Sometimes when my father would order me to my room even though I was hungry and they failed to feed me, I’d catch these little sympathetic glances from her toward me. Little sideward looks of pity. Still, she did very little to help me.

My mother was always the one to leave me food outside my room though, always the one leaving me bottles of water to drink, especially in the summer when temperatures were stifling and I was still confined. I always had a feeling that my father attempted to forbid these somewhat kinder gestures but she continued. I really appreciated her for that.

But other times, she could be just as cruel as my father was. She could be unkind and that would confuse me. She was the one that bestowed the gift of the Russian book that first introduced me to Baba Yaga.

My parents barely ever spoke to me, aside from the usual ‘Go to your room, Anna’ or ‘Stop crying, Anna’ So when I received the book, I took it as a kind gesture, from my mother. I had no idea that it would turn into my being pursued and haunted by something that was supposed to be a simple, kind deed. The receiving of a good book. How was I supposed to know that this would happen to me. All I ever yearned for, was love and I never got it. Was she cruel to me? Yes. Did she love me? I doubt it. Nevertheless she was still my mother and I loved her. I never wanted to see her like this.

The dead thing that was my mother continued to pursue me in slow, deliberate motions but I managed to dodge her advances every single time. I knew I had to get out of the red room, but how? I didn’t even know where I was. I was sure I was no longer in our house since we didn’t have any rooms that resembled this nightmare.

My thinking was shrewd, fast. I picked up several candles and threw them at the corpse and watched as it writhed in agony but still, it was relentless. It just kept coming and coming. Trying to grab me at every turn. Strangely, as I threw the candles at my mothers corpse, I noticed that nothing else in the room was setting alight. The candles would hit the corpse and then just extinguish after hitting the floor. It wasn’t normal but then nothing was normal here. I decided to try something else.

I ran towards the scattered books. I picked up my fairy tale book and I quickly moved toward the spell book before my dead mother got too close to it. I picked it up, thinking the reanimated corpse of my mother was the doing of this spell book so I wanted to burn it. I tried to set it on fire but it just wouldn’t burn. I picked up several candles and tried to set it ablaze but nothing happened. The book stayed perfectly intact.

Then suddenly, I heard a piercing shriek. It shook the room like an earthquake. The dead body of my mother fell to the floor, lifeless once more. The red room crumbled around me and as I shut my ears to stifle the sound, I noticed they were bleeding. I fell to the ground, the books scattering around me. Before I lost consciousness, I vaguely remember Baba Yaga flying across the collapsing room towards me on her mortar, aided by the pestle that also doubled up as her ‘wand’. Her spindly knees touching her crooked chin as she flew.

I saw her blood soaked mouth and her wide, demonic eyes coming toward me as my own eyes fluttered shut.

I awoke startled, disorientated and completely engulfed by fear. I touched my face, my eyes, my mouth, everything was still there, still attached. I felt for my pulse, it was beating, albeit erratically. My heart was still intact.

I looked around me and cried out. I was in a forest, a deep birch forest surrounded by thick trees. The body of my mother was there too, it lay, surrounded by candles not too far away from me. The body was limp, unmoving, dead but I was cautious about taking my eyes off of it, just in case. My attention was stolen away by a slow but monotonous chanting, the same chanting that I heard when I was back at the house. Amongst the chanting, I could also hear a plethora of different sounds, whispers and cries. It was the cries and whispers of children, men and women. I could hear the anguish in the voices of those lamenting. I stood up and that was when I saw the hut. The hut that was supported by giant blood covered chicken legs.

I stared at it, horrified. The sight was picturesque, it looked just like the painting at the house and frighteningly resembled the illustrations from my book. I took a step backward when I saw it’s legs begin to...move.

Final Part