THE MONSTER INSIDE ME (#ONC2024)

CHAPTER ONE: ARABELLA

My name is Arabella. I am twenty-four years old, and I have been confined to a psychiatric asylum for several months.

Life here follows a rigid rhythm. Medication at dawn. Therapy sessions that peel open old wounds. Long corridors that smell of antiseptic and resignation. The routines are meant to stabilize us, to keep the chaos contained, but they also serve as a constant reminder that this is where the broken are stored. The walls protect me from myself, even as they trap me inside the consequences of who I have become. Sanctuary and prison share the same architecture.

You are probably wondering why I am here. What terrible illness has earned me this place.

The doctors have names for it. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Borderline personality disorder. Labels neat enough to fit into files and charts, diagnoses meant to explain the emotional volatility, the self-destruction, the fractured sense of identity. I am medicated. I am analyzed. I am corrected. They believe these things define me.

They are wrong.

I'm not insane. I'm evil. Darkness claimed me long ago, and it has never loosened its grip. If you are willing to listen, I will tell you how it happened.

I was once a terrified child, and fear does not grow in a vacuum. My father, Fenton Dagon, was my first prison. His drug addiction and warped desires poisoned everything he touched. Our home was thick with dread, saturated with secrets and cruelty. On nights when he brought strangers home—men and women reeking of chemicals and hunger—he locked me in a closet. They moaned for hours. I learned to associate pleasure with terror before I even understood what either meant.

The sounds were unbearable, but worse was the atmosphere. There was something rotten in those people, something that seeped into the walls and soaked into my skin. Their laughter carried an edge. Their pleasures were cruel. In the dark, alone, I felt their malice pressing in on me, filling my lungs until breathing hurt.

My father never allowed me to attend school. A private tutor educated me at home, distant and detached. I passed my exams. I completed my studies. I excelled. Knowledge was the only clean thing in my life, the only space untouched by his corruption. But intelligence does not teach you how to be human. I had no friends. No peers. No understanding of how to belong.

Eventually, I stopped wanting any of it.

The outside world became irrelevant, incomprehensible. I lived between bookshelves and cleaning supplies, erasing the evidence of my father's excesses, pretending that isolation was a choice rather than a sentence. Loneliness hardened into indifference. Detachment became survival.

The closet remained my refuge. A narrow, airless sanctuary where I could disappear. Yet even there, the darkness followed me. It coiled around my thoughts, whispering, shaping me. I could feel something growing inside my mind, fed nightly by fear and silence.

Then the voices began.

They told me I was weak. That I would be taken. That I would be remade.

I was fifteen when one of my father's friends pulled me from the closet. His hands were rough. His breath was sour. He called me names as he touched me, stripping away whatever remained of my innocence. I should have screamed. I should have fought. Instead, something inside me fractured.

I felt desire.

Shame wrapped around it immediately, but the desire remained. I hated myself for it. I labeled myself filthy, corrupt, deserving. That was easier than believing I was a victim. I let him use me because part of me believed this was my purpose—to be consumed.

After that, it became routine.

I belonged to my father's friends. I offered myself without resistance, convinced I deserved nothing else. Each encounter hollowed me further, eroding any trace of worth or hope. I stopped caring when the darkness took me. I welcomed it. It explained everything.

Then, one day, something broke beyond repair.

Years of terror, humiliation, and rage converged into a single moment of clarity. The darkness I had carried so carefully finally spilled out. I felt it surge through me, violent and intoxicating, transforming me into something new—something merciless.

That was the end of the girl I had been.

So no, I am not mad. Madness implies confusion. What I became was precise. Deliberate. I am what fear creates when it is nurtured long enough.

And this is the story of how darkness claimed me—and how I learned to wear it as my own.