Don't Think It, Don't Say It

1

'Child's play 1998' was the movie that set it all in motion for me. You know how sometimes you have 'something' buried or hidden inside you that even you are unaware of and all it takes is something to trigger it. It could be a sound, an action, a scene or, in my case, a movie.

My cousin had brought home the movie having borrowed it from a friend and, till date, I wondered why my parents let me watch the movie after we had realized it was a scary movie about forty minutes into playing it. I was the youngest in the family and not just that, I was only eight. My mum always had a way of turning things to favor her parenting style, so as we watched the credits roll by, she turned to me and said "this is why I don't want you having any dolls" and true to her word, she never bought me any more dolls and confiscated any I got. I was only allowed to play with monster trucks, airplanes and puzzles, which wasn't weird on its own except I'm a girl. But I never complained. I guess I've never been your typical girly-girl.

The rush of being on the edge with your eyes glued on the screen when part of you wants to shut them as you anticipate the next gore, the next pop-up, the next gruesome murder to occur, your ears itching to hear the characters scream as their lives get taken away from them; I loved it. Child's play was my first scary movie. I wanted to watch it and scare myself over and over again, but I couldn't. Being a minor and thus having no cellphone, I had little to no say about what movies or programs I had to watch, so I had no way of satisfying my hunger for that adrenaline rush. So, naturally, my love for it got forgotten somewhere at the back of my mind. That was until my third year in high school, where I met Sonia. We immediately bonded over our love for scary movies, and she reminded me of what it felt like, and I loved it. We would occasionally stay up late in the hostel past lights out so she could tell me all about the scary movies she had watched.

So what did I do as soon as I graduated and got my first android cellphone? You got that right, I went wild watching any and every scary movie I could lay my hands on. But that wasn't enough; the movies started getting predictable, they didn't scare me anymore, the rush was gone, so I went in a different direction. I began looking up sites, paranormal phenomena.

I was so engrossed in the dark web, but of course I had a limit. I would never indulge in the practice of the black magic practiced on the sites, occultic or anything similar, despite knowing everything there was to know about it. I spent every waking moment searching for something new and that was when I found it. A forum called 'don't think it don't say it'. Seeing it was the same phrase used in the movie 'the bye-bye man', I assumed it was a forum dedicated to the movie, so I joined. Turned out it was not a room for 'the bye-bye man' and definitely not any movie for that matter. It was a forum of witnesses testifying about 'he whose name you must not think about or worse mention'. I wanted to just brush it off because this seemed like something straight out of creepypasta, but then I couldn't as I noticed something. The testimonies were not from victims, but from their loved ones who watched them go through it until their deaths or, to be precise, suicide. The pattern leading to their suicide were all similar; paranoia, severe anxiety, spasms, nightmares leading to insomnia and a few cases of lucid dreams, amnesia and hallucinations and turns out 'don't think it, don't say it' was what the victims would often mumble, some had it written on their walls, across their bodies and when asked what should not be said, they would cry hysterically and become aggressive. Thing is, it wasn't your everyday bullet to the head, jumping off or drinking poison suicide. These were far more gruesome, like something straight out of the Saw franchise. The deaths ranged from victims gauging out their own eyes and bleeding to death, sawing off their own limbs, lighting themselves on fire and there was one incident where a man was found; what was left of him was found in a bathtub of acid. But the testimony which made me cold to the bones was from a single father who had noticed a drastic change in his ten-year-old son and decided to take him for a therapy session. When he was driving him for the third session, he noticed his son quietly staring out the window, which at that point wasn't something new, but that was until he noticed drops of blood on the boy's gray shorts; he had chewed off his tongue.