Bloody Red

Alas be gone you demons and let me sleep in peace once more. My resolve cast great fear upon me. Not of myself, but of the very thoughts I let roam free without care. And eating me up from within was the ease with which I succumbed to them.

Before the deed itself was done all guilt and fear had passed. There was only pleasure. This pleasure I fought not, but rather embraced. In the end, the power of all anger, in great sanity its will enacting, but the motive, in greater insanity forbearing. Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

“It must end forthwith. I will be gone by morning,” it was the angriest I had ever heard her.

“For the love of God dearest, why?” I asked ever so naively. A product of my belief in the sharing of my great pain.

“The sight of you reminds me daily. My complacency, quietness and help. They haunt me for these things.”

“It mustn't end this way. I can be fixed, I promise”

“ You belong to them and shall die by them. I will not be taken with you,” she said finally, sealing her fate.

Morning came and at that moment, the broadness of her back facing me, and the sensation of her legs exiting our home, exiting my life. It was more than what mind, body and soul combined could bear.”You leave not,” I uttered in the most unnatural of tones. At that moment, I was sucked inside and so was the last vial of humanity my form bore, the devil himself came out and ripped this form from me and at that moment did his deed. At that moment, took her with him. She bled not, screamed not and with great suspicion feared not. It gave me a filling emptiness. Almost like I had eaten her soul as her lifeless body lay on the floor, eyes open. That gaze, it said lots but among all I realized what was taken first. I stood there glaring, glaring, glaring and asking “what next?;” then came the knocking.

And then my neighbor, ever so intruding, forced the door open and in shock from the sight his eyes met yelled, “What in Christ’s name?”

- “I swear, I know not,” I replied knowing exactly what I had done. In a slight moment before that instance, it all came to me. She had died by my hands as I had wrung her neck like you do birds when they eat your crop. You see I belonged to them, but in all wrong she was to die by them, not I.

And before he could run out and call for help or rebuke me for my practical resort, I pounced. His back touched the floor, and then the tip of my blade that I had always kept on me (seemingly for an occasion such as this) met his eye, then his brain, and finally the rear of his skull. It was a mess I tell you, a real mess. It was all over me. Trickled slowly outside like rain runs down a roof, turning the pearly white snow, bloody red. I remember it all in black and white but the sight of the blood,

its color stays vivid as ever. A darkish red. Very,very darkish. And that is all they have chosen to give.

“Who are “they”,” the psychiatrist asked.

“For the last damned time, I am not mad. Why will you say that I am mad? There are simply certain forces, no urges, well things. Yes things, that come to me in the oddest of ways and stir up this recurring “pestilence”,” I replied.

The Psychiatrist was worse than any demon I had ever been haunted by. It was almost as if he had fathered them all. His attitude was in every sense disdainful, obsessive, the direct opposite of placid. His habit of labeling natural occurrences specific to me as signs of my “madness” on more than one occasion brought out the ever livid, bloodthirsty devil in me. It was a great confusion to me that people were brought to him to be rid of their madness. If there ever was a place where madness was to be inflicted as punishment on the innocent, it was here.

I had been very shrewd or at least I thought. I did it all, dismembered, disposed of, and tracks, they should’ve found none. Now like I said I had been shrewd, apparently not shrewd enough. I cleaned and cleaned but they found it. A little droplet on the snow. And like seeds lead birds into a snare, it led them to it, the bodies. In the ever usual course of events, the genius of my process was ignored and labeled insanity. I thought them ones that appreciate the thrill of the hunt. Even more so those who create it. But the law sayeth “murderers” must pay penance. “Murderer,” for them to belittle me so. Perhaps more than anyone else they deserved this “pestilence” to have been released upon them. Not Claire, or the poor man who stumbled in with pure intent. And so here I lay in a straight-jacket I was horridly forced into. You should’ve seen them. They did it with such efficiency. Fitted the straps so tightly, for fear I would break free and turn their pearly white coats, bloody red. I can not lie, it has been a keen interest of mine to do so. If it’ll free me of their maddening questions and this maddening place.

“Our office has recently received a letter from the uncle, Baron Fitzgerald. It calls for your immediate release into his hands detailing his assumption of the role of sole proprietorship over you as his ward. In earnest he seeks that a lunatic like you be removed from the provision of necessary care and treatment to go work for him in his family home. It is in my great fears that these “urges” you speak of will re-emerge and cause you to find yourself here, again, in a straight jacket, desperately trying to prove your imaginary sanity. It is in my greater fears that you will come back worse, with more drive, more madness, too much in fact that no treatment in the history of psychiatry, even the greater ones, will do much in helping you. And it is in my greatest fears that I can not fix you and because of this more will die,” he said.

‘Ha, ha, ha,” I laughed loudly. I had only ever seen this uncle he spoke of once and it was likely that my story had gotten to him. I was in need of none of his pity and my thoughts remain ever the same. If I had to put on an act of sanity to find my way out of the straight jacket and into a castle, so it had to be.

The day had come for me to take my leave. It was two in the afternoon and I was feeling ecstatic. Those lousy thoughts and demons and urges bothered me not and I had control of my mind and more importantly my body again. But suddenly I crashed to the ground gripping my stomach. The pain I felt was sharper than any double edged sword. A myriad of thoughts engulfed me but above all I wondered; could it have been him? The psychiatrist, could he have figured that the world would be a better place without me, this possessed being?