The Red String Pact

It began, as these things often do, in the liminal space between sleep and waking. I live in a quiet town in the Australian outback, where the red dust stains everything and the silence is so profound it hums. The house I share with my partner, Lila, is an old miner’s cottage, its corrugated iron roof baking under the sun. We’ve been here for three years, and aside from the occasional stray dingo and the relentless heat, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened. I’m not a stranger to the uncanny; I’ve seen things I can’t explain since childhood. But those were distant, fragmented memories. Here, I felt safe. That safety was shattered in the first week of March.

Lila started waking with marks on her skin. Not scratches, exactly, but precise, paired lines, as if something with two fingers had dragged its nails across her. They appeared on her arms, her shoulders, her back. Always in twos. She’d wake with a gasp, her heart racing, unable to remember the dream that caused it. She became forgetful, misplacing keys, forgetting appointments, staring blankly at familiar objects. And she slept alone, due to the quarantine restrictions. I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t comfort her. I watched from the doorway as she writhed in her sleep, her face twisted in terror, and I felt a cold dread coil in my gut.

I tried logic first. Fingernails? Hers were trimmed. The sheets? We changed them daily. Some sort of allergic reaction? The doctor found nothing. I checked for insects, cleaned the house top to bottom. Nothing. But Lila’s condition worsened. She’d speak in her sleep, uttering words that sounded like a language I didn’t know. She’d wake with blood under her nails, her own blood. One morning, she showed me a string of red thread wrapped around her wrist, tied in a knot I’d never seen. She had no memory of putting it there. I tried to remove it, but she screamed and pulled away, saying it was a promise. A promise to whom? I didn’t know.

Desperate, I delved into old folk tales, spending hours in the dusty library’s archive. I found a reference to a creature from local Aboriginal mythology, the Mumuk, a spirit that imitates human voices and seduces the lost. But the marks didn’t match. Then I stumbled upon a European legend, the Red String, a pact with a malevolent entity. The creature, a shape-shifter, would tie a red string around its victim’s wrist as a claim, feeding on their mind and body. The marks were from its claws, the two fingers it would use to pierce the skin. The forgetfulness was the entity erasing the victim’s identity. I felt a chill despite the heat. This was it. But how to break the pact?

The legend said the string could only be cut by the one who tied it, or by the victim themselves, but only if they remembered who they were before the pact. The entity was a trickster, delighting in confusion. I had to help Lila remember. I confronted her, but she was distant, her eyes glassy. That night, I crept into her room, not touching, but sitting by her bed, speaking to her in a low, soothing voice. I told her stories of our life, our first meeting, the day we moved in, the time we watched the red sun set over the outback. She stirred, her brow furrowed, as if fighting something. The red string glowed in the dark. Then I heard a whisper, not from her, but from the corner of the room. A voice, sweet and seductive, mimicking Lila’s tone. ‘She belongs to me now. You cannot save her.’

I turned to face it. In the corner stood a figure, a twisted silhouette, its face a shifting mass of features, borrowing from every person I loved. It smiled, and I saw two long, bony fingers extend from its hand. It pointed at me. ‘You’ve been a nuisance.’ The air grew cold. I rushed to Lila, breaking my quarantine, and grabbed her hand. The string burned my skin, but I held on. I screamed her name, telling her to remember, to fight. She thrashed, but then her eyes opened, clear and terrified. ‘I remember,’ she whispered. ‘I remember the night I saw it in my dreams. It offered me something, and I accepted. I was so tired.’ She reached for the string, but her fingers passed through it. ‘It’s not just a string,’ she said. ‘It’s a piece of my soul.’

The creature laughed, a sound that grated like metal. ‘Too late. She is mine.’ But I had an idea. The legend also spoke of a simple, unbreakable truth: the entity cannot exist where there is no doubt. I had to make Lila believe, unequivocally, that she was stronger. I looked at her, and I said, ‘Remember who you are. Not the fear. Not the exhaustion. Your name is Lila, and you are a fighter. You have overcome everything life has thrown at you. This is just another obstacle.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘Fight it.’

The string began to fray. The creature shrieked, lunging at me, but Lila sat up, and her eyes were steel. She grabbed the string with both hands and pulled. It snapped with a sound like a breaking bone. The creature howled and dissolved into black smoke. The string crumbled to dust in her hands. We were both covered in sweat, shaking. The next morning, the marks were gone. The forgetfulness lifted, and Lila was herself again, albeit shaken. We burned the dust, and for the first time in weeks, she slept soundly, her dreams peaceful. I stayed at her side, holding her hand, no longer fearing the quarantine, because some fears are stronger than others.

But as I watched her sleep, I noticed a small red mark on her wrist, in the exact spot where the string had been. It look like a faint birthmark now, but I knew. The entity might be gone, but the pact had left its mark. I haven’t told Lila. I don’t know if it will return. But I keep a pair of scissors by the bed, just in case. And I wonder, in the quiet of the night, if the red string was ever truly destroyed, or if it simply waits, in some dusty corner of the world, for a new soul to bind.