The Calling | The House of Voices #1

Thirty Four - Help

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Parish:

Parish dropped to the floor, gasping. His vision blurred ad his head felt heavy, like it was going to fall off at any moment. His hands were still shaking from the episode.

It had started when October had begun to mutter to herself. He’d had to press his ear to the door to hear her, but it had sounded like she’d told someone to go away. Those had words told him what was about to happen before he’d even felt the tell-tale feelings of annoyance and anger creep up on him.

Just like always, he’d become irrationally angry as, inside the office, October battled with the voices in her head. But when she began screaming, something changed. Like a glass shattering, the anger shattered too, suddenly replaced with a raging sense of concern and worry. He’d stood up, prepared to storm into Dr. Larkson’s office and help October. Those screams weren’t like any he’d heard from her before. They were the screams of someone who was being tortured.

Ear-splitting, mind-numbing wails of pain and anguish; they seared a hole through his body, right to his soul.

He had stepped forward only to be knocked back by a physical embodiment of his own nightmares – his mother. She’d stood silently in front of him, shaking her head in quiet warning. Her lips had moved, but no words came out.

“Don’t.” He’d read her lips.

“I have to.” His response had been a threadbare whisper. Why was he even talking to it? She wasn’t real. This was just a trick, a game the voices were playing on him. This was all just a hallucination.

Without waiting for the hallucination to reply, he’d stepped through it, causing her form to break up in the air as he passed through it. Almost simultaneously, he’d been hit with a slew of different, high-intensity emotions. Pain, anger, sadness, fear and hysteria. Caving under the pressure of all those hard-packed emotions hitting him all at once, Parish had sunk to the floor, cradling his head in his arms, fighting against the heavy throbbing in his head.

The pain had come first. Like nails on a chalkboard it had resonated in his head, sending uncontrollable shivers all over his body. It had shaken him; taken control. He’d felt like his skin was being set on fire, like someone had taken a hammer to his bones and was breaking them, snapping one limb at a time. He’d wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t. He hadn’t been able to find the strength to open his mouth.

The anger, bubbling and toxic, had come next. It felt like venom in his blood, urging him to do unspeakable things. He’d wanted to scream out in fury. He’d wanted to hit something. Soon, the boiling rage within him had given away to a feeling of complete and utter emptiness. It was as if someone had reached within him and taken out everything that mattered to him and replaced it with a heartbreaking sense of loneliness, abandonment. He’d felt lost and incomplete, like he’d been robbed of a large, important part of his soul.

The fear was the worst. It was paralyzing, haunting. It threatened to drag him down; threatened to pull him under a thick blanket of terror. He’d felt suffocated, and that had quickly morphed into an overwhelming bubble of hysteria. He’d felt like laughing and crying at the same time. He began to see things that weren’t there, as the fear and hysteria slowly intertwined, merging into a air-sucking emotion that nearly sent him over the edge.

It’s the voices, he’d told himself firmly. They’re messing with your head.

That hadn’t helped to subside the hysteria. He had been slowly going delirious with the emotions that were hammering him from all sides when, from somewhere on the other side of the building, he heard a series of running footsteps. The sound had woken him up and he’d somehow had the sense to scramble on all fours around the corner and duck into the shadows.