The Yellow Cake Incident

I’ve told this story to countless people, and they always smile and nod, thinking I’m spinning a yarn. But I know the truth, and there are others like me out there. This happened when I was seven, at my birthday party in the old farmhouse my family rented just outside of Stillwater. The house creaked with age, and the fields around it were dotted with decaying windmills that whined in the wind.

It was a warm, golden afternoon. My parents had set up a long table in the backyard, with plates of sandwiches and a big cake with seven candles. The neighborhood kids were there, along with my aunts, uncles, and a strange woman I had never seen before. She wore a faded yellow dress, and her eyes were a shade of blue that seemed to have no depth. She approached me as I was about to blow out my candles, holding a slice of cake on a chipped plate. ‘Happy birthday, little one,’ she said, her voice like dry leaves. She extended the plate, and I, being a polite child, took it and ate the piece, which tasted of something like almonds but bitter on the tongue.

That night, I woke up with a terrible thirst. In the dim moonlight, I padded to the kitchen, but instead of feeling my own small feet, I felt tall, as if I were walking on stilts. When I looked down, my hands were long and bony, the veins like blue rivers under pale skin. I screamed, but the scream that left my throat was a woman’s scream, hoarse and ragged. My parents rushed in to find me standing by the window, my hair matted, and my voice – which had been a child’s – now speaking in a low, guttural tone that was not mine.

At first, they thought it was some sort of prank. But the next morning, I spoke in a language none of them recognized. I called my mother ‘a stranger’ and spat at my father. My strength was that of a grown man; I broke the wooden chairs in the kitchen without effort. In desperation, they called a local pastor, but he was helpless. ‘This is not a demon of the church,’ he said, trembling. ‘This is something older.’

Days turned into weeks. I became a prisoner in my own body. I would wander the fields, speaking to the wind in that foreign tongue. I remember seeing my reflection in the window and seeing the face of that woman in the yellow dress staring back at me, her lips moving in ways that didn’t match the sounds I was making. My parents, desperate, sought out a woman named Madam Olesya, who lived at the edge of the county, rumored to be a witch. She came with her bags of dried herbs and iron bells.

She performed a ritual, binding me to a chair with ropes that burned my skin. As she chanted, I felt something powerful pushing against my soul, trying to break free. She poured a dark liquid over my head, and I began to convulse. The last thing I remember is that woman’s voice, whispering in my ear, ‘You think you’ll be rid of me? I am part of you now.’

When I woke up, I was my old self, but the memory of what happened stayed. Madam Olesya told my parents that the woman was a spirit that lived in the fields, waiting to attach itself to a child. She said it had been feeding on the birthday cake, which was an old custom – to offer a piece to the dead. I had unknowingly partaken.

Years passed, but on every birthday, I feel a strange pull towards that old farmhouse. When I went back last year, the farmhouse was gone, replaced by a housing development. But as I stood there, I saw a figure in a faded yellow dress standing at the edge of the field, watching me. She smiled, and I heard her voice again, not in my ears, but in my mind: ‘It’s almost time to come home.’

I’ve told this to my friends, but they laugh and say it was just a childhood nightmare. But I know it was real, and I know she’s waiting. I don’t know what will happen when I turn thirty. I’ve already started to notice my voice becoming deeper, and sometimes, my hands look older. The yellow cake was a doorway, and I’m afraid it’s still open.