The Scent of Saffron

My name is Julian, and I’ve spent most of my life trying to make sense of the things that happened to me when I was a boy. I grew up in a small village on the outskirts of Marrakech, where the air smells of spices and the sun bakes the clay walls until they crack. My family was poor, but we had a modest home with a courtyard where my mother grew mint and my father kept a few chickens. I was a sickly child, often bedridden with fevers that left me shivering under layers of wool blankets. It was during one of those long, feverish nights that I first encountered what I can only describe as a presence that did not belong to our world.

It was the season of the saffron harvest, and the entire village was saturated with the sweet, pungent scent of the precious threads. I remember lying in my room, the window open to let in the cool night air, when the sounds began. It was not the usual sound of the wind or the distant howl of a jackal. It was a crying—a chorus of women and infants, their voices rising in a desperate, wailing harmony. The sound was so loud it seemed to vibrate through the very walls, making my bones tremble. I pulled my pillow over my head, but the noise pierced through, filling my ears with its sorrow. I wept along with them, my own fear mixing with their despair.

Then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. The silence that followed was deafening. I lowered the pillow, my heart pounding, and that’s when I saw her. She was standing in the corner of my room, a woman in a tattered white dress, her face hidden beneath a veil. She was holding a bundle that I knew, with a certainty that chilled me, was a dead infant. She began to walk toward me, her bare feet making no sound on the stone floor. I tried to scream, but my throat was paralyzed. She stopped at the foot of my bed, and I could hear her weeping, a low, mournful sound that seemed to come from inside my own head. She extended her arms, offering me the bundle.

‘Take it,’ she whispered, her voice like dry leaves. ‘Take it and end my suffering.’ I shook my head, tears streaming down my face, unable to speak. She took a step closer, and I could smell the saffron on her, mixed with something else—something rotten. She reached out and touched my forehead with a cold, bony finger, and I felt a jolt of energy, like a shock, pass through me. Then she faded, like smoke, and I was left alone in the dark.

I told my mother the next morning, but she dismissed it as fever dreams. ‘You were ill,’ she said, pressing a cool cloth to my head. ‘Your mind played tricks on you.’ But I knew what I had seen. And the smell of saffron lingered in my room for weeks, even after my mother washed the sheets and aired out the house.

Years later, I moved to Canada, hoping to leave those memories behind. I settled in a small town on the edge of the Canadian Shield, where the forests are dense and the winters are brutally cold. I found work as a night janitor at a local hospital—a job that kept me indoors, away from the darkness outside. But the past had a way of following me.

It was during my third winter there that the sounds returned. I was mopping the corridor of the maternity ward when I heard it: the same crying, the same wailing of mothers and infants. The sound echoed through the empty halls, coming from nowhere and everywhere. I dropped my mop, my blood running cold. I followed the sound to an unused storage room at the end of the wing. The door was locked, but the key was on my ring, and something urged me to open it. Inside, I found old medical records, dusty cribs, and a single, rusted metal box. When I opened the box, I found a photograph of a woman in a tattered white dress, holding a bundle. On the back was written: ‘For the one who takes the burden.’

I stood there, shaking, when I felt a cold presence behind me. I turned, and there she was—the woman from my childhood, older and more decrepit, but unmistakably the same. Her veil was gone, revealing a face of cracked, grey skin, her eyes hollow pits. She held out her arms, and this time, the bundle was not a dead infant, but something far worse: a tangle of shadows that writhed and hissed. ‘You escaped once,’ she said, her voice like grinding stone. ‘But you cannot escape your fate. You are the one who must carry the burden.’

I stumbled backward, but she lunged forward, pressing the shadowy mass into my chest. I felt a searing cold, and then everything went black. When I awoke, I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by nurses and doctors. They said I had collapsed on the job, likely from exhaustion. But I knew better. I could still feel the weight of the shadows inside me, pressing against my ribs. And I knew that night, when the moon rose and the hospital grew quiet, I would hear the crying again—and this time, it would be my voice joining the chorus.

Now, I share this story with you, not to frighten you, but to warn you. If you ever smell saffron near a hospital, or hear the crying of unseen women, do not investigate. Leave the building. Run. For there are some burdens that, once taken, can never be set down. And I am proof of that. My name is Julian, and I am still carrying the weight of that shadow, even as I write these words. The scent of saffron clings to me like a second skin, and I fear it always will.