Deadly Secrets

Chapter 34: Hysteria

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap

Zara tapped the end of her pen against the edge of her desk, her eyes trained on the Calculus homework before her. She had never considered mathematics to be a difficult subject, because it was her favourite. She absolutely loved the way each problem had a fixed answer that could only be reached following a specific set of calculations; this was unlike some of the other subjects—such as History—where most of the information was biased, opening a window to a world of different perspectives and possibilities.

Mathematics gave Zara's life fleeting snippets of uniformity, making her forget, even just for a moment, how really chaotic it was.

In that moment, Zara longed to find the limit for the function under the first question, but she couldn't hear herself think.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The inside of her head was like a lecture hall. The voices talked over each other, each one trying to be heard over the next. There was yelling, whispering, moaning—they talked about each other, about her, about random shit. Zara was the professor at the front of the room, her weak voice attempting to shush the hundreds of others. She couldn't think, she couldn't speak, all she could do was sit in her claustrophobic room, rereading the first question dozens of times in order to make some sense of it.

Yelling, more yelling. Her ears rang and her head began to spin. She ground her teeth together, she furrowed her eyebrows, she clapped her hands over her ears, wishing that she could just shut them all out.

Please... her own internal voice mewled. Zara squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, again and again until the letters and numbers before her began to tremble before her.

The numbers bunched up together then flew apart; the letters shook violently until one by one they began to fall off their respective lines and into a pile on the bottom of the page. Moments later, they began to snake upwards from the broken heap, hypnotised by the inaudible music of a charmer.

Everything else on the page bounced around madly: a few numbers jumped off the page and onto the floor, rolling away from Zara and under the bed. Others danced around, growing and shrinking in size, contorting into shapeless black blobs that stained the white page.

Zara watched the entire scene with widened eyes, her mouth gaping open in fright.

She didn't know what to say or do. Was she hallucinating? Was she dreaming? She pinched herself, but the crazy scene before her didn't seem to go away—

Suddenly a "pi" figure broke out of the now slithering serpent of words that moved around the page, and Zara's eyes went to it. It too began to grow—more and more until it was so large that it began to push everything else off to the page, their fates similar to their companions.

Meanwhile, the voices in her head had momentarily subsided. But then, their volume immediately began to rise together, a choir singing a crescendo in time with the growing "pi".

Once it had reached the size of a full page, it began to shimmer and to transform into...a house?

It looked like one of those crudely drawn ones, done by a kindergartener in an art class. Zara stared dumbfounded, willing herself to speak, to say anything, except no words seemed to want to come out of her mouth.

Something began to burn her hand, and she yelped, pulling it away from the flame that had taken shape on the bottom left-corner of the page. Zara could feel her hand pulsating with pain—she turned it over and saw that a large gash and formed on her palm, the skin raw from the burn. Tears began to pool in the corners of her eyes, and she clasped the wrist of her injured hand with her good one and looked back at the page which was now completely enveloped in flames. 

They rose into the air and into the shape of the distorted house, the voices in her head yelling at a pitch so high it was unbearable. Zara screamed, or at least she thought she heard herself scream, and attempted to stumble out of the chair, but it tipped backwards sending her crashing to the floor and hitting the back of her head.