Letter Five

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

     I have had the most horrendous dream, dear sister. I know it is uncharacteristic of me to start a letter to you with such a fanciful notion as a dream, but this you must hear. I assure you.

     It was pitch night, black as coal or beautiful teeth. I was standing above a body, but the lack of light prevented me from seeing who it was. It was obvious that I had dispatched this person to the nether-sphere. I, as any rational killer, was dragging the body to the bridge at the west end of the propeerty, to toss it in the river.

     This is where it gets weird, dear sister. I finally reach the bridge, dragging my cloth-wrapped parcel behind me and I remember feeling extremely tired and annoyed about the weight of it. But that's for another dream analysis, I'm afraid.

     As I go to haul the body over the bridge, I see I am not actually on the bridge at all. I look down at my feet and I am suspended in the air above the graves of our parents. The body is suspended next to me, floating a good three feet from the ground, yet laying flat.

     My perceived motion of hauling the oddly weighty body over the edge dumps the body onto father's grave and in the process splits his headstone in two. There is a crack right through the characters of his name, in a way that mars his name unrecognizable.

     Weirder yet, when I finally sink to the ground and go to retrieve the interloping body from father's grave, I open the hasty cloth wrapping to find a body-shaped stack of our childhood toys. Specifically our dolls.

     Sister, I have not seen those dolls in twelve or more years. You are younger so you must have seen them more recently than I, but why was I dreaming them in perfect detail? Is this a sign? Is this a metaphor of some sort?

     I have no earthly idea. I wish for your counsel on this matter. I still feel dreadful and perhaps this odd dream of mine was just another one of my ailments. I do not know. I do not like this feeling of not knowing. I do not appreciate it. I detest it.

     There is a worker in the village who has spent the past five days truant from work in the fields. He has been sipping fermented rice wine at home, according to the village gossip. I think I have found the method of clearing my head, dear sister. Perhaps after his body goes down the river, I will have been freed from the clutches of my odd dream.

Best wishes and please get back to me posthaste,

Anh

Letter Four

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

I have received your well wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery from my malady.  I am sure that said wishes arrived long after you meant them, but the sentiment still rings true. I appreciate the concern and know that it comes from a place of care, as you said. Unfortunately, your hopes did not come true and I find myself in a worsened state.

I do not wish to make our correspondence a list of my physical complaints, but since you inquired, I will wax on them just this once. Besides my neck being larger than usual and tender to the touch, there are strange growths and bumps in my mouth.

I do not know what caused the latest development. I have two tasters who test my food for poison, just as father did when he was in this world. I only eat food from vetted vendors and never purchase street food or accept it from someone I do not know. As father did.

But despite all my precautions, new bumps and lumps appear in my mouth each day and there is naught I can do to stop it. I’ve tried tinctures from the herb-woman, suffered through a summoning of spirits by the woman from the village who smells like a goat and secretly saw the witch woman as well. None of their cures did anything for me, they made me cough and gag until I couldn’t keep a morsel down.

I have been keeping up with father’s personal remedy for all ills. But since I have been so ill, I have not ventured far for my kills. I dispatched two servants in an attempt to improve my health and tossed their carcasses over in a ditch left by the rains of last year with the other molding bodies. No one will care two more bodies on top of hundreds. That’s the only good thing to come of this rain, dear sister. No suspicion as to where dead bodies come from.

I have designs to dispatch a batch of useless peasants later this week. They fell ill to a pestilence and have been confined to the old disease hut in the village. I do not think anyone will mourn their passing, and most will in fact bless it. I will leave the bodies there, I think. No need to hide my kills.

 I pace and pace, wearing a pattern into the floor with the stress of not knowing what this illness is as my worry’s driving force, the impetus behind. I surely would drive a man mad with all my frenzied steps, if I had a husband to drive to insanity. Maybe in this instance it is good that I am the unmarried sister.

Sorry to burden all my thoughts on you, but you are the only one who truly understands what I am going through. Sister, I must ask, do you have any intent to ever return here? It’s so quiet.

Anh

Letter Three

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

I apologize for the time that has lapsed between the letter that preceded this one and this. Much has happened. All will be conveyed to you in this rather short missive, apologies again for the time interval.

            I am petrified of water. You, dear sister, above all, should know this. I have to take my yearly bath with my eyes closed and a mild sedation of poppy coursing through my veins. And what could have befallen me in my time of sickness that was worse than the dreaded yearly bath?

            A flood, my dear Nhu. A flood. All kinds of water swarmed the house, confining me to my chambers in fear that the brackish liquid would find me fodder for its perilous grasp. Bodies floated by, bloated by time and gas, in a torrent that seemed to be a surefire deadly omen for yours truly.

            Once, I saw the corpses of what had to be an entire family floating by the crack in the curtains. There was a woman in wedding finery, a man at her side who had to be her betrothed, and two sets of parents, all dressed to the nines. They were at the state of decomposition just on the border of looking human and looking like green creatures of unknown origin.

I think it was a prediction of my future, marriage-less and barren of any happiness or fruitfulness.

            I have not left the house in three months. The waters have subsided significantly, but I still do not want to leave this tenuous haven I have found myself in in these enclosed walls.

            Just the thought of venturing somewhere with the threat of brackish, devil-liquid is enough to send me into a faint and one of the servants going for the smelling vapors. I woke in the middle of my sleep as a child to dreams of being floated down rivers, still alive and screaming for help and receiving no answer, crying.

I remember that you would comfort me in those moments, sister and insist that tomorrow would be better. You would assure me that father would find some hapless soul to meet the kiss of my blade and surely my spirits would be revived after that. I realize it was an odd situation, you the younger, comforting the one who was supposed to be older and wiser, but none the matter.

The flood was a result of a particularly heavy rainy season, the servants talk in their whispers. I believe the sky was weeping for your loss. Or it could have been weeping for father, but I do not believe that such a hateful man would warrant such a reaction.

Enough of these morose sentiments. You have not been adequately forthcoming about your new life with me. Tell all, dear sister, for certainly, I have no one to repeat your secrets and hidden thoughts to. And to answer your question, I have disposed of three more since we last wrote, but my neck seems to be getting more and more engorged by the day. Alas.

Your ailing sister,

Anh