Darkness inside us: A book of short stories

The demented

   1.   The sounds of crashing...metal scraping metal. Flashing lights. Screaming. A sudden dark force appearing in the middle of the street. Roaring. And silence.  

  2.   It was five years later. The crash had happened when I was sixteen years old. I remembered it vividly; the sounds of metal scraping metal, screaming, as well as the darkness that made my entire body grow cold, numb, stiff. I had been to several doctors who ruled it out as post-traumatic stress from the event that changed my life, but I knew, that when I started hearing things, seeing dark shapes flit in front of my window as I slept, that something was terribly wrong. I was still going to a doctor, trying to figure out what had happened to me. I explained to everyone the sudden occurrences that happened while I slept, but no one really believed me, saying they were pigments of my imagination. They could've been. But when I was sleeping, and I heard the God awful roaring and snarling and hissing, and saw the shadows flit past my window, my skin grew cold and I felt as if I were being watched. I would awaken from bed and walk into the bathroom, and right there, in the window, I would see the shadows looking at me through the window and I would scream. My dad would race down the stairs and see me curled upon the bathroom shaking back and forth, the shadows gone as far as my dad could see.

  About two years ago, when the doctors didn't work, we went to a priest, though we still kept in touch with Dr. Morgan. The priest said that it was the work of evil demons, but my parents wouldn't have any of it because they were pure bred Christians...though I was not. They stormed out of the cathedral and went back to sending me to doctors. And now here I am, a twenty-one year old living alone, as to not disturb the peace whenever I have one of those psychedelic fits. The house wherein I live is pretty big. The outside of it was painted completely White. The outside was cheery. The inside on the other hand was gloomy. Dark.  

The rooms were dark no matter how well lit they were, the shadows creeping upon me. On the ground floor of it stood to tables right next to each other, glass vases upon both of them filled with roses I had received by girls after I graduated High School, girls who looked past the fact that I had my problems. In the room next to the living room where the tables stood, was the kitchen, a large white refrigerator that had been tarnished with dust over the years sat in the corner next to the shiny stove top. And then branching off from the living room stood a flight of half rotted away stairs that still held weight and that led to the rooms up there that were my bedroom, another bathroom, and several other rooms in which I had not explored in my two years living here.   

Now, I'm sorry for being rude. Talking about my house instead of my own self...I get like that at times. My name is Mike Coonan, a twenty -one year old. I am a part time writer who has an office deep in the basement where it is quiet. I have not a girlfriend because if something ever happened between us I wouldn't wanna freak her out with the screaming of childhood nightmares.   

I was standing in the doorway.   I had just gotten back from the store, looking for some food. In my arms were several paper bags filled to the brim with food. I walked into the house and shut the door behind me, darkness engulfing the whole of the room. I fumbled in my pocket wherein I found a flashlight. The light beam pierced the darkness, showing the individual particles of dust that swam through the air like shooting stars within the deep, dark, cold, vacuum of space. The kitchen was right ahead. I stepped into it and flipped on the light. A light bulb hung from a bare wire above the kitchen table, illuminating that part of the kitchen in the light, the rest of it illuminated in shadows from the reflection of light upon the wall.   

I was a writer, a New York Times bestselling writer at just twenty-one years of age, which is pretty good. The books I write are mainly non-fictional accounts of life crappy life as a child from the beginning, when my dad was drunk, to the times after the car accident in which I saw the strange vision, the shadows in the dark. The books about what happened after the accident were stuck within the fiction section of a bookstore or library, even though I insisted that the accounts were true within the writing, no one seemed to believe it. I had a hard time confronting people who read my books, thinking they were scams to try and get money, but in truth they weren't, I just enjoyed writing, enjoyed the craft, enjoyed words, and the motivation of that was what kept me going. Not the likes of some critics.