The Pattern in the Ivy

I had spent most of my adult life in places that smelled like diesel and dust, but when we moved to the outskirts of Seville, I thought we’d finally found a patch of calm. My husband’s engineering contract extended unexpectedly, and we took a small villa with a courtyard overgrown with ivy. The house itself was a stucco box, white as bone, with iron grilles over the windows that threw lace-like shadows onto the tiled floor. Our neighbors were few, and the nearest was a stooped woman named Señora Alba, who only spoke to me once, to warn me about the ivy. ‘It will grow into your sleep,’ she said, and then she crossed herself and went back inside.

I dismissed it as the rambling of a lonely old woman, but I soon learned that the ivy was not ordinary. It seemed to pulse with a rhythm of its own, especially when the afternoon heat shimmered off the pavement. At night, I would lie awake and listen to the sound of it scratching against my bedroom window, a sound like dry fingers tapping. My husband slept soundly, but I would watch the pattern of the leaves—how they formed shapes in the dim light, shifting and re-forming as if they were trying to spell something. I told myself it was the wind, but there was no wind in that suffocating still air.

One evening, I noticed a cluster of leaves had arranged themselves into a perfect spiral on the wall above our bed. I reached out to brush them away, but the leaves were not attached to any visible stem. They adhered to the wall as if they had been painted. I scraped at one with my nail, and a sticky, green-tinted residue came off on my finger. I wiped it on my nightgown and tried to forget. But the next morning, the spiral had moved—it was now positioned directly over my husband’s side of the bed, and the leaves had turned a deeper shade of green, almost black.

Over the following weeks, the ivy’s behavior grew more aggressive. It began to invade the interior of the house, threading through cracks in the mortar, creeping under doors, and lining the edges of the bathroom mirror. Whenever I turned my back, I would catch a glimpse of it inching forward, and when I looked back, it would be perfectly still, as if it had been there all along. My husband, ever the pragmatist, said it was just a pest problem. He called an exterminator, who sprayed chemicals that smelled of rot, but the ivy thrived, and the exterminator never returned my calls.

It was then that I started to have the dreams. In the dreams, I was walking through a hall made entirely of ivy, and at the end of the hall stood a woman made of leaves. She had no face, but I could feel her staring at me. She reached out, and her fingers were long, twining vines, and she spoke without a mouth. ‘You have what is mine,’ she said. ‘Your blood, your breath, your bones.’ I would wake up gasping, my throat raw, and always, always, the ivy had inched a little closer to my bed.

I tried to dig it out from the root, but every time I cut a stem, it wept a thick, sap-like fluid that smelled faintly of copper. And my cuts—small nicks from the leaves—would not heal. They festered and turned a sickly green, and I began to wrap them in bandages to hide them from my husband. But he noticed the way I flinched when the ivy brushed against my skin. He suggested we move, but I knew it was useless. The ivy had already taken root inside me, in my thoughts, in my veins.

One night, I woke to find the ivy had formed a perfect handprint on my chest, pressed directly over my heart. The leaves were warm and slightly wet, and as I looked closer, I saw that they were pulsing in time with my heartbeat. I tried to peel them off, but they clung like a second skin. Tears streamed down my face, and I whispered, ‘What do you want from me?’ The room was silent, but in my mind, I heard the woman’s voice again: ‘Your name. Give me your name.’

I had always been proud of my name—it was my grandmother’s, a name that meant ‘little bird.’ And in the dream, I saw the woman’s leaves stretch out to claim it. I shouted my own name out loud, over and over, as if to anchor myself to it. But the ivy only tightened, and I felt a sharp, tearing sensation in my throat, as if a hundred tiny roots were pulling my voice out of me. When I woke in the morning, my mouth tasted of earth, and I could not speak. My husband panicked, but I just sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the ivy that now covered the entire wall opposite, forming the shape of a face—a face that was slowly becoming mine.

Within a week, I had lost my voice entirely. I could feel the ivy growing inside me, threading through my lungs, my vocal cords, my tongue. My husband made us move to a hotel in the city, but I could still see the ivy wherever I went—in the corners of hotel rooms, in the frayed edges of my pillowcases, in the writhing lines of my fingers. I stopped eating, because the taste of soil was always in my mouth. I stopped sleeping, because every time I closed my eyes, I saw the woman of leaves, and she was no longer faceless—she had my face.

On the last night, my husband fell into a deep, unnatural sleep, and I was left alone in the hotel room. The ivy had followed us, and it was there, crawling up the walls, dripping from the ceiling, forming a cocoon around my body. I no longer fought it. I lay back, and the leaves wrapped me in a suffocating embrace, pressing into my skin, into my mouth, into my lungs. I felt my name being ripped out of me, torn from the root, and in its place, something else took hold—something older, hungrier, that had been waiting in the soil all along.

When my husband woke the next morning, he found the hotel room overrun with green. But the bed was empty. My body was gone. All that remained was a single, perfect rose, its petals the color of blood, nestled in the center of the pillow. The ivy had receded to the walls, but if you looked closely, you could see a pattern in the leaves—a spiral, a handprint, a face—and if you listened, you could almost hear a voice whispering your name, over and over, as if it were trying to remember it. Señora Alba was right. The ivy will grow into your sleep. And it will never let you go.