Something to Bond Over || Until Dawn Jossam

The Healer [Part 03]

I nearly had whiplash from how quick I turned around at the voice behind me. I definitely have pain on my back now from throwing myself back to the face of the cliff behind me.

I can't breathe. How do you breathe? Just inhale and exhale, right? But why is it so hard to do? I'm like a YouTube video that buffered halfway due to half-ass WiFi.

Because how... I mean, why... I c-can't believe this. It's...

It's Jess.

"Josh?"

How could she still be here?

"Josh, please."

Why didn't she go back to the corner she was curled up in like the rest of them?

"Josh—"

"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? HUH?" I finally shout at her, making her step back in fear at my raised voice. "WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

Like the others, she has been away from me, curled up on the other side of The Lair, avoiding me after I managed to save myself from their first attack. She's been quiet all day—so different from the others.

So different from the real Jessica.

And she's as scared of me as I am scared of her. Unlike the others, she's not critical or mean. She's genuinely scared of me. I can see it in her wide panicked eyes—the eyes of a prey looking at a predator. She's looking at me like that right now.

I killed Jess and now she has come back to haunt me.

Sorry, I mean 'it'. It has come back to haunt me. It, not she. It is nto human. No, it is just a pigment of my imagination—here to hold on to my guilt. Its lingering presence is here to drive me insane.

If it tortures me with guilt, then why don't I just stop feeling guilty over killing her?

Walking away from where I stood still, I slowly walk over to it, and it walks backwards in fear. I let my hand linger on the cliff behind me—too dizzy but I don't let that stop me.

This is the first time I've come to really look at the new addition to the whirlpool of people I've killed.

The others are already decaying, burnt, and sinister. They can peel their faces off. They're completely covered in fresh pig's blood. Their bones are visible. Their muscles eaten. They're not human. They're corpses—all ugly and terrifying.

Fake-Jess, on the other hand, is so... alive—dried blood, wounded, beaten down, and broken. That's how Fake-Hannah and Fake-Beth started out, too.

The first time they appeared, they looked exactly how they did on the day before they disappeared—mischievous and clean and alive... but just as timid as Fake-Jess. Fake-Hannah would cry on her bed back home, and Fake-Beth would comfort her.

Slowly, they started decaying, but the change was much more drastic when the term "missing" turned into "dead" whenever people kept talking about my sisters when they thought I wasn't listening.

Hannah and Beth—my little sisters—both of whom I killed.

Same with Jess now, too. I killed her, didn't I? Mike said that, didn't he? That I'm a goddamned murderer? I just didn't remember it? God, that's messed-up. I'm messed-up.

I probably killed Mike, too. He was down here with me, right? Then he just disappeared in the water? Did I drown him? Choke him to death underwater?

Was Mike even with me last night?

"Josh?"

Is this what she looked like when I killed her?