It was the most horrible dream I have ever had. I woke up from it profusely sweating, my heart pounding against my chest like a wild bird trying to break out of a trap.

An old-fashioned zero-watt bulb was casting an eerie red glow over the otherwise tastefully decorated room. “I am at my in-laws’ house,” I recalled.

Every picture from that dream was still fresh.

Lost in a dark wilderness, I am trying to find my way. I suddenly hear a growling sound and, at a distance, discern an unknown creature ferociously tearing apart its prey.

As I come on the scene, the creature leaps into the darkness.

In the light of my torch, I see the corpse of a young man—his elegant face intact, but his limbs half mutilated. Horrified, I shine my torch into the darkness in search of the predator.

The beam of my torch carves a garish hole in the dark and suddenly I catch a ghastly figure.

It is a woman standing just a few yards away from the corpse, staring back at me—her eyes reflecting the beam of light like a cat's. Her face, nightgown and hands are covered in blood, but I cannot mistake her.

It is Maria, my wife.

Sitting up in bed, I reached for my bottle of water.

I could still hear the ferocious growl, still see the mutilated body, still feel the suffocating darkness pressing against my skin. For several minutes I remained motionless, listening to the slow ticking of a wall clock somewhere outside the room.

The silence seemed unnatural, as though the entire house had stopped breathing.

Maria was in a deep sleep on the gigantic bed that had probably been part of the dowry from her first marriage. I moved my face closer to Maria's and stared at her in the red glow of the night light. The expression on her face was impenetrable, though there was a trace of a smile playing across her lips.

We had met only a few months earlier.

She was a candidate for a senior management position at our company.

After the interview, I found her on a popular social media platform. However, she was the first to send me a friend request—actually on the very day she joined the organisation.

Maria was strikingly attractive—dark-skinned, tall and slim, her dark eyes often concealed behind oversized sunglasses. She dressed with impeccable taste, wore an overpowering perfume and carried herself with effortless elegance and quiet wealth.

She had a great knack for marketing and quickly established herself within our team, much to the annoyance of some of our colleagues, who viewed her credentials with scepticism simply because they had never encountered her in their small, elitist social circles.

One of them gossiped with malicious relish that she had never seen Maria at the university where she claimed to have graduated or at the business school in New York where she had supposedly earned her master's degree.

"She is a mystery woman. She has come from nowhere," she once said with a knowing wink.

Maria was indeed a mystery woman who had come into my life out of nowhere like an unexpected boon. My wife had died several years earlier, and the long years of solitude had filled me with a strange angst. Maria had eased that loneliness.

I was at least fifteen years older than Maria but felt irresistibly drawn to her.

In retrospect, I realise that the attraction was partly due to her elegance, partly due to her bold playfulness, and partly due to the fact that, like me, she had also lost her previous spouse.

Our affair had begun with a mildly flirtatious message from me. Her response was swift and calculatedly encouraging. Thus began an endless exchange of messages that drew us steadily closer.

Given my natural lethargy and passiveness, those messages might have continued indefinitely had Maria not taken the initiative. One cloudy evening, she appeared unannounced at my doorstep in a ravishing black dress—and turned our affair into something serious and irreversible.

We tied the knot last week. But now I was staring at my bride in the dark.

The previous night had been rather turbulent. While we were having dinner in the house that Maria had inherited from her former husband, a deranged woman had barged into the garden.

She was raving mad, cursing the residents and calling them all kinds of names. It was not difficult to gather that she was Maria's dead husband's sister. While my wife had gone numb all over, her father had called the police. Maria soon developed a fever, and I stayed the night.

By morning, the events of the previous night seemed like a distant memory. Maria had woken up earlier and was probably in the gym.

After taking a shower, I decided to stroll in the garden. The morning was bright and pleasantly cool. Dew still clung to the neatly trimmed hedges, and a pair of sparrows hopped across the lawn.

It was a sprawling house located in one of the most expensive and fashionable neighbourhoods of the city. It was very generous of Maria to present such a precious gift to her parents, I thought as I reached that part of the garden which lay outside the dining area.

I suddenly recalled how the mad woman had cursed at my wife the previous night. Two policemen had dragged her away by force, and there were signs of struggle on the grass].

As I examined the ground, I came upon a small album that had probably fallen from the woman's purse during the struggle.

It contained pictures of Maria's first wedding. In the first few pictures, she was posing alone, but in the fifth picture her first husband was looking at her with a loving gaze.

The album slipped from my trembling hands.

I had recognised Maria's first husband.

His handsome face belonged to the mangled corpse of my dream.

 

This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious

The writer can be reached at farrukhkamrani@gmail.com