Catharsis [Novel]

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

            It's dark, and I'm curled in a ball.  I know I've been here for hours, but I don't want to open my eyes.  I don't want to see what I look like, or accept what has occurred in the last few hours.  Especially what happened after the explosion.  I don't want to recognize what I am capable of doing, but I know I'll have to at some point.  I can't ignore that part of who I am, of who I'm becoming, forever. 

            Even without opening my eyes, I can pick out the familiar scents that tell me this is my dark closet at the warehouse.  I've been laying on the floor in here for a long time.  I'm pretty sure if I want to I could remember every moment of the last several hours and what I did, but I don't want to.  I'm happy to let the darkness have everything, every moment of my life, since leaving that brick house.

            Physically, I know I feel much better than I should.  My skin no longer aches nearly as bad as it did from the blast, and the hunger that had gripped my body previously has released its dark hold on me.  I don't want to move my hands to check, but I'm pretty sure I no longer have gaping holes in my side from the bullets, either.  Aside from the permanent scars that have been etched onto my psyche from what I allowed myself to do to those two men on the lawn, I'm as healthy and as intact as I've ever been (Something tells me the mental images I have of myself fulfilling what the darkness wanted me to do, though, will stay with me a lot longer than any broken bone could ever possibly do.). 

            I'm just tired.  It's not a need-to-sleep tired, but a I-don't-want-to-accept-reality tiredness.  I need to keep my eyes closed a bit longer before I get up and leave this closet and begin the next stage of my mission: ransacking the house on Cummerlin Road.