Vision in Red by Sajjad Rasool - HTML preview

Chapter Two: The School of Small Fears

Part I: The First Drawing (Continued)

Sleep came for Amal in fragments, like shards of glass scattered across the floor of her consciousness. Each time she closed her eyes, she saw the drawings—the red eyes, the dark hands, the car with its empty back seat. Each time she started to drift, a sound would jolt her awake: Fadi turning in his sleep, a car passing on the street below, the distant thrum of something mechanical that might have been a generator or might have been something else entirely.

At three in the morning, she gave up.

She padded to the kitchen in bare feet, the tiles cold against her skin, and retrieved the drawings from the drawer where she had hidden them. Eighteen pieces of paper. Eighteen variations on the same impossible figure. She spread them across the table, arranging them in a grid, searching for patterns she might have missed.

The overhead light was too bright, casting harsh shadows that made the crayon lines seem to move when she looked at them from certain angles. Amal turned it off and switched on the small lamp above the stove instead, letting its softer glow illuminate her work.

In the semi-darkness, the drawings seemed different. More alive. The red eyes caught the light in ways that made them appear to glow from within, like embers waiting to be stirred back into flame.

She studied each one, looking for differences, for clues, for anything that might explain how seventeen children who had never spoken to each other had all drawn the same thing. But the more she looked, the more identical they became. The round helmet. The bulky vest. The weapon that was too long, extending past the body like an accusation. The hands that looked like they had been dipped in something dark and never washed clean.

And always, always, the red eyes.

"Amal?"

She startled, knocking one of the drawings to the floor. Fadi stood in the kitchen doorway, his hair rumpled from sleep, his face creased with concern.

"What are you doing? It's the middle of the night."

"I couldn't sleep."

He crossed the kitchen and looked down at the drawings spread across the table. For a long moment, he said nothing. Just stood there, his expression cycling through confusion, recognition, and something that might have been fear.

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