“I… I don’t know!” she stuttered.
She got to her feet and walked over to the mirror to have another look at her arm, stretching her sleeves up the left arm and holding it before the mirror. The reflection before her eyes, bouncing off of her arm left her absolutely mystified as her father began to pace around the room in worry.
“It is happening to you too”, he mumbled. “It is happening to you too!”
Nora ignored the paranoid man to examine the tattoo of what appeared to be a strange bird, edging up her right arm, but incomplete as at the moment. It looked beautiful and definitely possessed a good degree of allure too.
“How did it get there?” she asked herself.
Her father replied, “I know how! It is those darn cards! You had to get those darn cards too!”
Nora looked confused, but her father seemed to bear absolute assurance in the words he had just spilled.
“First t begins with the tattoos, then you begin to see things too”, he mumbled while he continued to pace dramatically.
Muzin suddenly stopped to look at his daughter.
“Tell me this is a joke and you’re trying to get back at me”, he demanded.
Nora looked flabbergasted and gave no response. He marched over to her, held her hand tightly in his and began to rub hard against the incomplete tattoo, almost as if he wanted it to smear off.
“Papa!” she yelled and yanked her arm free from his. “You’re acting crazy!”
As much as whatever the tattoo stood for terrified her, she wasn’t willing to have bruises on her arm because her father wanted to simply wipe it off. She took another moment to stare at it, wishing for an answer and hoping it would come with a reasonable explanation.
“It is just a tattoo and maybe even some genetic mutation of some sorts”, Nora sounded ignorant but she wanted anything to desperately explain the conundrum.
Muzin shook his head and yanked at her arm as he led her to the door.
“I think you need to see things for yourself”, he said in frightened tone. “Maybe you’d understand my fears and all these nonsense will make some sense to you”.
He marched her down the stairs and towards his room. Lama had just sat up in bed and yawned aloud when they walked into the room. She stared blankly at the father and daughter with a sting of surprise in her eyes to see Nora willing to come into their bedroom.
“I was as naïve as you are right now too, but I knew better after some weeks of first seeing that thing”, he explained without looking at her.
He knelt by his bed and reached underneath the bed while Nora shared the uncomfortable moment with Lama staring awkwardly at her. There was without doubt no love lost between them, but being in her mother’s old room brought the bitter-sweet sting of memories coursing down her spine.
“Shit!” her father mumbled, yanking his arm out with a large metal box.
Nora frowned, sighting the padlocked box as her father struggled to unlock it with a key he picked from inside his drawer. She had never seen the box before or even known of its existence and it was obvious her father had kept it away from Lama too as she looked as lost as Nora.
“You have a floor safe?” Lama sounded out her confusion.
Muzin ignored his wife and began to search through the box carefully while blocking his daughter from having a direct line of sight into the box.
“Dad, you’re scaring me”, Nora informed her father.
‘Yes, Muzin, you’re scaring and worrying us both”, Lama seconded the girl’s words.
Muzin ignored both ladies, and like a deranged man, continued to search through the box until he came across what he searched for. He held out a dusty looking brown leather diary in his hand towards Nora, and right there and then, Nora knew her father was about to make the day a rather unforgettable one for her.
CHAPTER FOUR
Nobody seemed interested in saying a word to clear away the silence, but there were plenty not being said and it was pretty obvious. Muzin paced around the room and bit his lip every single time he stopped to look at his daughter. Nora had been provided some faction of the truth, and handling it whichever way positive was the test for the young girl.
She ground her teeth and looked up at her father for the umpteenth time but the man simply turned his gaze away.
“Are all these true?” she asked, fearing the worst and the possibility that the man would answer to attest to it.
In the diary provided to her and in her own mother’s handwriting were dated information about how whatever was wrong with her progressed, it had lists of doctors’ reports and psychiatric dealings which Nora had never managed to catch whim of through her mother’s life.
“All these things were happening and you decided I wasn’t a part of this family to know of it?” she asked.
Muzin looked at Lama who seemed to be in support of his daughter.
“We couldn’t tell you what we didn’t understand”, he replied. ‘More so, even your mother didn’t understand the workings of that damn… “.
Nora waited for the complete line, but like the other truth attached to everything bizarre going on in their home, he swallowed it fast and chalked it down so she wouldn’t ever have to find out.
“She has a right to know”, Lama said to her husband.
Muzin shook his head fervently and defiance. “No! I decide if or when she decides to know! I will not lay silent this time around and let that thing use her like it used her mother!”
Nora didn’t need further words; she had figured out what exactly seemed to be terrifying her father, even though
