The Coming | The House of Voices #2

Eight - Rest

Rest

 

October:

I squeezed my eyes shut, praying that the boy would go away. Unluckily for me, my encounters with the voices didn’t work like that. The boy kept talking, taunting me. “You wanted him to hurt that man, didn’t you? You wanted him to hit him. To keep hitting him. You should have let him, October. You should have let his rage take over and not stopped him from pummeling that guy to the floor. Now he’s just going to find the cops and tell them about you. Do you miss our company that much that you’re willing to get caught just to hear us again?”

Go away, I thought.

“You know it’s true. It’s what you wanted.”

“Come on.” Parish’s snapped, fingers closing roughly around my already bruised hand and dragging me forwards. I tried to focus on the pain in my arm and the anger rolling off Parish. Anything but the unspeakable things the boy was whispering inside my head. He stormed through whatever mental barricades I tried to put up against him and filled my head with his words. I let Parish haul me out of the park, deciding it was better not to say anything. For some reason, his voice induced episodes always seemed to get worse whenever I tried to speak to him while the voices were around.

“I could feel it, you know,” the boy said quietly. I froze in my tracks and Parish cursed. “you wanted him to kill the man. Wished he would. The thought was there, the seed.”

I opened my eyes to see Parish fixing me with a pained expression. To his credit, he looked like he was doing his very best to control his voice-induced temper. His knuckles were white, from clenching his fists so hard and the vein in his jaw was pulsing in anger. But he wasn’t yelling or trying to punch anyone, which I thought was a definite improvement. The anger in his eyes was at war with the concern in them. I watched carefully, curious to see which one would win out. Steeling myself, I concentrated on the voice still talking in my head and hissed and angry, yet forceful, “Go. Away.”

The boy cackled, an ugly, mean sound. But he sounded far off, like he was on the other side of a tunnel. “We’ll make a killer out of you yet.” He hissed, sending chill bumps all over my body. With a violent shudder, I felt the wave of cold wash past me, like someone had turned on a giant vacuum cleaner and sucked the voices presence right out of my body – along with whatever remained of my energy reserves. The voice left and the world tittered around me, swirling and churning itself into a hazy nightmare. Dizzy, I tried to take a step forward but stumbled on my own feet and fell forwards. I would have landed flat on my face if Parish hadn’t reached out and caught me by the shoulders.

“What was that?” He asked, blinking confusedly at the air just above my head. Had he felt that whoosh of feeling too? The vacuum-y sensation that had zapped up all of my strength. I shook my head, trying to clear out the sudden fog that had settled over my brain. All it did was make me dizzier.

“I don’t…” I squeezed my eyes shut. I finished weakly, “I don’t know.”

“It felt like… Like… Like, I don’t know, something just got sucked out of me.” He said, slowly easing me up into an upright position. I hadn’t even realized that I’d been hunched over. Nodding, I told him that I’d felt the same thing. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”

I blinked a couple more times before I answered with a determined, “yes”. I was still a little dizzy, but I could walk. I had to walk. We needed to get out of this blasted park. Parish looked a little unconvinced and seemed like he was about to argue but I stopped him. “I’m fine. Let’s just get out of here.”