WICKED [H.S]

ONE

***

Harry

The voices, it always starts with the fucking voices. The first time I heard them I was 7 years old. They would whisper things to me, things that left me sleepless many nights, things that still haunts me to this day.

I tried telling my parents about what I had heard, but they did not believe me. They told me that I had watched too much television, my dad always said that it was like poison to the brain after all. That did little to none to settle me down, and more times than not my mom had to search my room with me before bed to assure me that there were no monsters in my closet nor under my bed.

Then it got worse, worse enough for both my parents and teachers to start worrying about me. I would hear the voices more often, and the effects of it got to me more, and one day it peaked.

I was in 6th grade when my teacher had to call my parents in a panic. It had been a normal day. I was 20 minutes into my last class of the day when the voices took over completely and I could not make them stop. They whispered horrible things to me, like a snake's hiss with the promise to bite. I completely lost it in the middle of class and ended up screaming in agony on the floor.

 It would not be until years later that the snake actually bit.

I do not remember what happened next. The next clear memory I have is when I woke up in my bed with a man in a white coat standing beside me and observing me. Turns out my parents had finally taken me a bit more seriously and called a doctor, one that was recommended to them by the church.

See, my parents were catholic. Every Sunday was spent in the church. They were skeptical to modern medicine, and they wanted to have the holy whatsoever to try and fix me before seeing if the chemicals and compounds could. Spoiler alert, the holy spirit could not.

God might have still loved me back then, but not enough to save me.

Then finally after what felt like an eternity of being blessed by priests, of being examined by the catholic doctors, came the pills. Although skeptical, my parents, and me, had some hope that it would finally make me better, that they would fix me. Somehow it got worse. I am not sure if it was the medicine that made it worse or if I was just on a downward spiral but soon enough the voices were not the only thing that was bothering me. Now I could see them too.

It was not the face you would expect to see from a human, no, this was something far more sinister. They were deformed, rotting away from the inside, skin and flesh falling of the bones like the scales of a snake. Sometimes they would be bleeding, sometimes they would miss parts of their body.

At the age of 15 I would say I was rather mature, but it still scared the ever-living hell out of me. My next breakdown followed shortly, one that would change everything.

It was a typical Sunday afternoon. My mom was making us Sunday dinner after church. My dad and I were sat at the kitchen table, my dad skimming through the pages of some magazine and myself busy being fascinated with the cracks in our wooden table.