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Twenty-four different medications, seven doctors, and one suicide attempt. Years of tight-bellied fear, nervous ticks and dizzy spells. Countless lost friends, unexpected mood swings from just being fed up, tired and on the edge. Half of her life feeling like she was running, and sometimes physically running, from what she once thought of as the Devil. All of it finally coming down to this face-off, the dark thing hunkered in the corner of her bedroom, its sharp talons dancing and clicking along the floor and dresser, an excited yet labored panting from its snarling mouth.
Cassie decided it was time three days ago. No longer armed with her doctor’s weapons of choice - a rainbow swirl of pills flushed away - she checked all the windows and doors, turned on all the lights in her apartment, then sat on her bed and cried. She never covered her eyes, though, not liking even the illusion of being in the dark. So she sat there with hot, tired tears dripping onto her jeans, looking like a sad child in a strange place, lost and hopeless.
She was twelve when the whispers started. Cold, slithery incomprehensible words in the middle of the night, the feel of dry, dead lips against her ear. At first she heard them once or twice a week, eventually increasing in frequency. The words began to make sense, fragments of a lost language being pulled from her unconscious. The voice spoke of a pain-free blackness so deep and soothing she could fall forever. It soothed her pre-teen swarm of emotions with guttural songs of yearning, acceptance and balance.
But in the years that followed the voice took shape, a gnarled creature living in the shadows, always watching. The voice took on a purpose, turning Cassie against her friends and family, pulling her closer until she could feel the needle-sharp sting of its grip on her shoulder and smell the thick rot of its breath. By her sixteenth birthday her family took action, kicking off an avalanche of frustrating doctor visits, medications, and tests. Cassie never let anyone know why she was acting the way she was, or how her fear of (and sometimes obedience to) the dark figure made her do the things she did.
She began lying to her parents. There was no apparent motive except the lies themselves. Cassie became easily irritated, snapping at her mother when asked about homework or school or friends. Breaking things became a habit, her anger and the persuasive voice fueling her temper. Dishes, personal items, one of her mother’s precious figurines. Nothing was sacred. Her father caught her trying to pull the television from the entertainment center in their den. A sheen of sweat glossing her skin as she grunted and heaved, a frantic look in her eyes. It was a large television and she was a small girl. Time to try another medication.
By her senior year in high school Cassie had lost most of her friends. She had also barely escaped battery charges after attacking Mr. Poole, the resident Coach-Teaching-Algebra. He had no place teaching that class and, though her interest in any academia had long since waned, Cassie was easily coerced into retaliating against his ignorance and arrogance. During a pop quiz she continued to tap her pencil, knowing he would walk over to her desk, knowing he would lean in close and say, “Looks like we have a drummer in our class,” and knowing he would scream like a little bitch when she sunk her teeth into his shoulder. He dropped charges after talking with her parents about her condition and, yes, Cassie was put on yet another medication.
Regardless of the anger and violence that seemed to consume Cassie, the fear was always there. Regardless of the dark, sweet promises from the figure that haunted her shadows, Cassie remained terrified. Another part of herself - a deeper, vaguely familiar part that remembered the innocent games of childhood and getting lost in her imagination - constantly warned her to stay away from the shadows and the voice. That voice, it whispered, is not to be trusted.
Cassie was seeing the creature, a ragged lump of darkness, several times a day, sliding behind a bookshelf or slithering from shadow to shadow and corner to corner. Once, while walking home from the corner store one evening, a half-gallon of milk in one hand and a Butterfinger in the other, she heard the raspy chuckle of her personal demon behind her. When she turned she realized just how dark the night had become, shadows melting together in the dying light. And there it was, pressed up behind a bus-stop bench, quivering and laughing.
She ran, her heart pounding so loud in her ears she could barely make out her own footsteps and the staccato scritch-scratch of claws close behind her. Cassie scared the hell out of her parents when she burst through the door, no milk in hand, and the back of her jacket shredded and sticky with saliva and grime. She’d told them it was a dog, but when her father drove her back to find the milk they saw no dog, and her parents had not bothered to call the police.
It wasn’t until she was twenty-one that the doctors found a medication that seemed to do the trick. The voice subsided, the looming creature slowly receding back into the darkness, cursing and moaning with each fading encounter. Cassie was grateful, but that tender, caring side from her childhood didn’t return as she’d hoped. Instead, her thoughts blurred into a hazy sludge of apathy and confusion. It was easier to concentrate, but she didn’t care to. Her violent, angry reactions were replaced with a nonchalant carelessness that bordered on stupidity.
Cassie was stumbling through life, a smothered sense of pending doom, and barely sustaining a façade of a relationship with her family and new friends. She missed the sharp edge of living before the new medication. Even though it was dangerous and unhealthy, at least it felt alive. She began to feel as though her brain was dry-stuffed with cotton and sawdust, her heart tacked up to dry and her soul whittled away to almost nothing.
It was earlier last week, almost three years since she had started the latest medication, when she decided to stop taking her pills. Cassie can’t stop reliving that afternoon’s events over and over, as if they are still happening, a continuous loop of film projected on a screen behind her eyelids.
She stood outside of her favorite coffee shop, sipping away the froth on her latte. The warm drink was doing little to wash away the sticky, bland feeling in her mouth and mind. To her left stood two young women, one in a flashy business suit and the other, dressed more casually, with a small girl gripping her leg. The child, no more than two years old, held on tightly, wide-eyed and curious but satiated with her pacifier and mother close by.
From across the busy street a man waved, calling out a name. The mother looked, smiled and returned the wave, then turned back to her friend to finish their conversation. The little girl, however, released her mother’s leg. The beaming grin behind her pacifier could only mean the man was her father. With a slow, numb realization Cassie watched the girl waddle toward the street. The man’s face drooped into a frown and he began yelling and pushing his way through the crowd of pedestrians. Balancing on the curb between two parked vehicles, the toddler bent to put one shaky leg on the asphalt, then leaned forward, arms spinning, and stumbled onto the street. The two or three lurching steps she took to regain her balance forced her into traffic, horror blooming on her father’s face as a large sedan pulled her under its wheels.
All of this happened in just seconds, but in Cassie’s mind it plays out like minutes. In Cassie’s mind, there had been plenty of time for her to do something, to stop the child, or warn the mother. Instead she stood there in her medicated cloud and watched it unfold. She never once felt the urgency of the situation, never felt the tickle of danger that would cause anyone else to react. She just let it happen.
And when the collective gasp of the crowd became a clamor for help mingled with the wail of the grieving parents, she only stood there and watched, dry-eyed and numb and pretending there was nothing moving in the shadow under the blood-splattered sedan, that she didn’t hear the scurrying click of claws or disturbing yet familiar chuckle echoing against the building behind her.
At home she was finally able to cry and it came in painful, choking sobs like coughing up ice cubes. Her tears felt thick, hot and foreign. That night, after flushing the rest of her medication, she sent an e-mail to her boss that she would be out for a few days. Her boss replied with a phone call. Cassie let the machine get it. He was not happy, but pretended to understand, telling Cassie he hopes she works out whatever she needed to. It helped having a medical history, she supposed.
That was three days ago, and now the creature that haunted her youth, twisted her thoughts and sent her running home that one terrifying evening has found its way back home. It follows her around the apartment the best it can, finding shelter in the smallest shadow, slipping between the floorboards and creeping under rugs. It talks to her, whispering once again in that lost language whose meaning has come back to her so easily, singing of the peace of blackness, cursing the world around her. It hisses each time she turns on a light, or shifts a lamp to diminish the shadows.
Cassie has eaten little since locking herself in the apartment, but her head is clear. Her thirst for feeling and life has reawakened, and her mind’s tongue laps at the newfound reality of life with the passing of each hour. Her body is humming and thoughts that seem to have been repressed for years are ricocheting inside her head, anxious for acknowledgement. She is happy to oblige, anything to stop seeing that little girl, her body scrambled and broken before Cassie’s eyes.
I can make it go away.
It is so tempting. Cassie wonders if this is true, but she also knows nothing so easy, nothing so peaceful or promising is without a price. But hasn’t she paid a high price already? Nine years of fear, violence and pain. Three years of walking death, a heart stilled by drugs. She isn’t willing to relive her past, nor can she continue to live without really living.
I’ve always been part of you.
She knows that much is true. She can almost believe that fighting the voice is the same as fighting a part of herself. Her suicide attempt at age sixteen seemed reasonable at the time, but now she recognizes that as contradictory to her desire to live. The only option left is surrender. Even considering that option, lying supine on her bed with the lights in her apartment standing sentinel for her sanity, she feels the darkness calling. The chilly embrace teases her from the bed, visions of her past fading into a cloudy, distant storm.
One by one she turns off the lights in her apartment, her dark twin trembling with anticipation, leaping and lurching in the increasing pool of darkness. Back on her bad, Cassie lies down under the last protective halo of light from her bedside lamp. She can hear the creature’s claws and its jerky deep breaths of joy. It paces at the edge of the light, a hunched and irregular shape, darker than the dark. She forces herself to smile and can see the pinprick glints of her guest’s sharp, yellow teeth.
She reaches over and turns out the light, lies back with her arms to her sides and exhales her last breath of this life with a long, slow sigh. The shadow moves in, hovers over her then embraces her. She takes it into her grip where it waits for Cassie to breathe new life for them both.
End
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