Chills From Within

I was standing at my desk when I felt the stirring in my mind. It..... he…. I was never quite sure of the proper pronoun when I referred to the monster inside my mind. He. Probably. I think. At least that’s how it felt and how it manifested to me. A nightmare in a masculine body. He always seemed to awaken when I was engaged in the most innocuous tasks – tending the garden, scrolling through Facebook, answering e-mails, washing dishes, folding laundry, even stirring creamer into my coffee. I would be at peace and suddenly the tethers tying me to reality would begin to fray. Abruptly, his chaotic presence would spill into my mind, leaving trails of sorrow, despair, and fatigue behind. I had long since given up trying to fight the torment he unleashed. It is and was a pointless battle.

If you don’t have a creature of chaos and bleak desolate landscapes living within your mind and I certainly hope you don’t, it is rather hard to describe the war constantly waged. It’s even harder to describe him and how he got here. I’m not sure when exactly he found the holes in my psyche and slipped through. I don’t know what precise thought or stimuli allowed him to ooze inside and nest comfortably in the dark secret shaded places of my brain. All I know is one day, I simply awoke and instead of just me, he was there too. Just like how dry rot will embed itself into wood or fungus will swallow up roses, leaving unhealthy spots where once there was beauty, he had taken root in my soul and woven tendrils into every blood vessel.

I think it would be easier if I had a method to defend myself or even an inkling of how to stop him overtaking me but before I can ever even formulate a proper defense, he amplifies my natural negativity and causes a disgusting ooze, seep, and splatter over the surface of me. There is no defense, no rewind button I can press that reverses time and quashes the onslaught. Just one minute I am at peace - or more or less so - and the next, I am overtaken.

Imagine, if you will, you are working away at your laptop and suddenly your hand bumps the water cup next to you. The water tips over in slow motion – you know what will happen, but you can’t stop it, can’t reverse time, can’t put the water back into the cup. Suddenly, there is water pouring all over your papers, your computer, your desk paraphernalia. You start to grab for it and then notice the water is morphing into inky bleak darkness. A muddy feeling engulfs you and sadness crashes over you. You are the shore and terrible waves of despondency are slamming again and again against your reefs. While you know you must clean the water; you simply cannot force your fingers to reach for a towel. Instead, tremors begin, and you are too fatigued to move, too exhausted to recall where the towels are kept, too weakened to halt the whispers of failure. Why did you spill the water? How could you have done such a stupid thing? Everything is ruined. It’s your fault. Your fault. Your fault. Failure.

Such is how the monster entraps me. Such is how he always ensnares me.

Already, I can feel his presence growing stronger. The insidious foreboding raises the hair on the back of my neck and sends trails of goosebumps down my skin. He hasn’t arrived quite yet but dark whispers hover at the edge of my consciousness. Long fingers brush gently at my mind. It would almost be seductive were he not awakening little flickers of fear.

People have said center yourself and so that’s what I try. I plop myself firmly into a seat and press my feet against the cold tile. I focus on only the coldness of the tile, the pattern of the tile, the triangular shape of the tile. But he is there, murmuring into my ear.

“The tile is dirty Rae. Because you’re too much of a failure to clean. The tile is cheap-looking Rae. Because you’re too much of a financial disaster to ever move into something better.”

I swallow hard and try to halt the closing of my throat. Fingers run through my hair, twisting the long curls into unrecognizable snarls. People have told me exercise is the natural cure. So, I go to my closet and reach in for shoes. But the mere act of walking from one room to the next is inexplicably tiring. And I am also expected to locate clothing and brush my hair before walking back through my house to my door, unlocking it, walking outside, relocking it, walking down the stairs, pushing open the gate that separates my building from the outside world………all before I can begin this exercise. I take in a gasp of air at the sheer amount of energy that would entail. The monster chuckles darkly in my head.

“Yes, Rae. Too much energy. Shhhhh and I will care for you. Gently and in my own way. Anyway, look at yourself. Fat, ungainly, and ugly. You are scarcely fit to be seen.”

He stirs again, nothing more than a sleepy stretch but I feel a haze drifting over my mind. His subtle spell was cast, a muddled film over my vision blocking out reality and sweeping me deeper into his warped world. Along with it comes a deep-seated terror that this time he would ruin me completely. This time, I would be shattered in such a way that I could not be put back together. This time would be the last time and when he left - if he left - I would be in that state that I feared most, and I wouldn’t ever break out of it.

Alone, broken, exhausted, beyond any use, past the point of salvation, denied all hope, blocked from any semblance of peace, trapped in his wicked prison, and kept captive by chains I myself had helped to fashion.

I was spiraling and I knew I needed to stop. I knew that. My thoughts were spinning wildly in downward revolutions, each spin faster than the next. I was playing into his hands. It was just what he wanted – for me to destroy myself before he arrived. Already, I was jumping at shadows, worrying my lower lip until an iron tang flooded my mouth, rubbing at my arms restlessly, jiggling my leg incessantly.

My brief interlude with peace was very obviously over. That sense of contentment that had buoyed me through the past week snatched away and replaced by this….this…...this horrid sense of desperation, doom, and an overarching sense of inadequacy. Somewhere in my mind - in the small part that still belonged to me - I knew this wasn’t right. I wasn’t inadequate. I wasn’t a failure. I was okay. I wasn’t alone. But that part was so small as to be nearly nonexistent; that voice so quiet under the continuous thrumming from the monster, I questioned if I had even heard anything at all.

I lunged for the basket on my dresser - a pretty pink square basket that held tiny yellow plastic bottles with white caps. I fumbled through the array, barely stopping to read the names and dosages. None of that mattered. Not really. Please. Don’t let him take me. Shaking some of the small white capsules down my throat, I swallowed desperately. Please work.

I shivered and batted at the shadows that swirled at the edges of my vision, a hallmark of his passage. Air strangled in my lungs and the bottle fell from useless fingers. I eased backward, away from the dresser. Back, back, back, until my butt hit the wall. I clenched my fingers in the fabric of my dark blue dress and my eyes stung hotly as I prayed for the sweet rushing relief the pills were supposed to bring.

All to no avail……because he was here.

His aura choked me with sticky darkness as he strode through the corridors of my mind, down the pathways of my spirit, each deliberately silent step bringing him closer to where I shivered against the hard white wall of my room. I had the fleeting thought of hiding beneath the bed or in the closet - as a child, I had never been afraid of monsters in such places. After all, I knew that’s not where they truly lived, at least not for me. The ghost of a smile played at his lips as he listened to my thoughts.

“Indeed Rae.” His velvety voice wrapped me in shadows as he fully formed. “I am your nightmare and I do not hide under the bed nor do I choose to duck into closets. Not when I have your mind as my personal playground. Not when I can so easily tangle and twist your fragile body as I please.”

And then he detached from within and stood, unveiling his full height and the staggering weight of his malevolence. He was cruel chiseled perfection, impossibly handsome with huge muscular wings that glittered like the night and expanded just as far. His eyes, whirling orbs of silver, seemed to swallow light rather than reflect it and the ebony horn jutting out from his head of dark curls was wickedly pointed.

A monster. The demon who lived inside my mind. The creature from the abysses of my spirit. The savage beast who dwelled in my brain, ate away at my core and fed best only when I was locked in a type of wicked torment. My own psychotic mania given form. He smiled at me, a cold chilling baring of teeth, and I felt my face crumpling as I started to break under his stare.

A box formed around me, a clear crystal prison with a delicate lace pattern running up its sides, a terrible contrast to the blocks of concrete that sat atop the roof of the structure he had trapped me in. I stared breathlessly, swallowing again and again, tears obscuring my vision. Cracks appeared in the roof of my cage but his smile didn’t waver as he turned away from me and bent down to inspect the floor.

“Rae. Oh how precious.”

He gave a delighted chuckle and waved the discarded bottle at me.

“Were you trying to hide from me sweetness?”

He hummed in amused disapproval as I stood trembling against the walls of the icy cold crystal prison, fear seeping into my skin, dread freezing my bones. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. He had taken my voice when he had arrived. He usually did.

Somehow being able to observe him but not communicate, not engage in the basic human form of connection lent further horror to this situation - made me even more aware of my powerlessness, of my hopelessness, of my inability to ever extract myself from his grasp. I watched closely as he juggled the pill bottle in his hand and then tossed it into his mouth.

He flashed sharp fangs at me just before crunching down on the plastic with a horrible crackly sound that rang in my ears. I shuddered as his teeth made quick work of the bottle and whatever was left inside before he gulped it. It bulged in his throat as he swallowed it down.

He strode back to me and reached through the glass prism to stroke my face. The gentleness of his touch was at odds with the darkness in his eyes as he ran the back of his pointer finger down my skin. His other hand tangled in my hair and forced my head back so we were staring eye to eye. Brown eyes to dizzying molten swirling silver. Frightened auburn pools into spinning discs of metal.

“Silly girl. Those don’t work against me. You should know that.”

He gripped strands of hair and yanked - hard, too hard - and I winced as pain exploded in my head and spots danced in my vision. A fistful of curls scattered to the floor at his feet as he allowed the hair he had snatched from my head to fall. The concrete groaned against the crystal. Crystal was strong but strong enough to withstand the poundage resting above it? I didn’t know. I could feel a whimper building in my throat but locked in silence as I was, there was no way to release it. The sound seemed to swell until it became like a soda bottle, vigorously shaken and forced to stay corked.

Would I explode when the building crescendo of noise was finally released or collapse under a crushing weight when the glass splintered fully? Perhaps the strange mix of terrified adrenaline, fear-induced rage, and stinging devastation pumping through my veins and overloading my synapses would be my end.

The monster strode to my desk and sat. The gray wooden chair groaned under his weight. He adjusted his wings and swept a glass bottle out from a hidden pocket. He looked at me thoughtfully as he uncorked the decanter. An oaky scent filled the room and he tilted his head back to allow some of the rich golden liquid to flow down his throat. My eyes moved around the room, bouncing from place to place, landing on him, flicking upwards to the concrete just over my head, across to the window, back to him. He leaned forward, capturing my stare.

“Are you scared Rae? You should be.”

This short story was borne in part from a particularly bad depressive episode and in part from the latest 500-word flash fiction challenge prompt from my super amazing #momswhowrite group. I ended up running with it all the way to this short story. I just want you all to know that depression is nothing to play with but there is help out there. I encourage you to seek it. It is not easy but you are worthy of help. You deserve to feel okay and to have more good days than bad.

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