STARGHOST

Chapter Two

The food taste like absolute shit, which is fine because I don't really give a fuck about eating too much right now. They've started me on this anti-psychotic and Lithium. I take the Lithium but I pull the anti-psychotic into my cheek and then toss it out later and none of these bitches have the slightest clue. Three days. I've been here for three fucking days already.
Courtney, my cousin, said I could stay with her in Arizona. Maybe Ill take her up on that after I get out of here, just long enough to save some money so I could decide what's next. I slept fine last night. I slept a dreamless sleep but I still feel tired, I feel tired all the time anymore. I wanted to believe that all this shit is behind me now but the black bug told me a different story.
The first time I saw my friend, the black bug, was in the cabin. This was the same night I lost my mind in the woods. Prior to this experience I mostly just had a lot of fucked up dreams and sleep paralysis. I woke up what was literally every other night if not every night feeling someone touching me, putting their hands all over my body. Sometimes the number of hands on my body was impossible to count.
Usually the invisible hands simply touched my paralyzed body, on rare occasion they would attack me, smother my face into my pillow. It was always putting its hands all over my penis and around my asshole. It had a tendency of pulling on my leg or arm right as I found myself on the cusp of sleep.
I would dream of that place, under the ground, which reached into infinity with floor after floor, winding stairs, rooms which resembled your typical suburban home and always echoed with the voices of laughter, shouting and sometimes screaming, crying.
I didn't like these things I experienced and I began researching mental illnesses and I discovered a funny little illness called Schizophrenia, and there were many parallels to what I may have been experiencing and this mysterious illness.
As you know, Schizophrenia isn't much like cancer or the flu, it likes to stick around, it doesn't quite offer a light at the end of the tunnel and I didn't much like that thought.
I became obsessed with being in touch with "reality". If it was schizophrenia, then that was a reality I had to confront. No more fairy tales. I read only books on philosophy and science and rejected the notion of any "supernatural" intervention.
Things got better, well, for a minute they got better. I was washing dishes at the lodge, I was just going to go back to the cabin after work, smoke a blunt I had rolled earlier and read Hobbes. Thomas and Eric invited me out to this work party at one of the cabins and I agreed to go.
This cabin was approximately, I don't know, half a mile maybe, from my cabin. Maybe a little further. I drank a lot that night, like a lot a lot. Before I knew it I was rambling off on some incoherent tangent cursing basically every religion or spiritual belief that came to mind. Everyone was laughing at the ignorant, potentially offensive bullshit that escaped my uncensored mouth.
Everyone was laughing until I started screaming and breaking things like beer bottles and smashing cans with a baseball bat. Even then, the majority of people still weren't sure if I was joking or not, I'm not sure whether I was either. Some were still laughing, others seem to grow slightly concerned. I was laughing and shouting before Eric finally grabbed the baseball bat from me, after that I took off out of the cabin by myself and made my way through the woods.
For a few minutes I could hear voices and laughter coming from my co-workers. They were chasing after me and after a few minutes of trying to escape their trailing voices through the tree's, the voices had vanished and I was alone in the woods with my arms extended, running my fingers over the surfaces of the trees until I met the main road.
By the time I made it to the road, away from the lights of the nearby cabins, it was very dark, I could hardly see my hand in front of my face. I knew if I continued on down to the road Id eventually make it back to my cabin. So I began walking, singing, laughing, cursing, stumbling over, swaying side to side.
I hadn't been walking long when I first heard it. It wasn't exactly a laugh, the only way I can describe what I was hearing was more of a 'cackle'. Yes, that's what it was, a cackle. There was a familiarity to it which struck me to the bone. My arm erupted with goose bumps as the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
Then I heard it again, and again... Every time I heard it, it would come from a different direction. I was surrounded by this otherworldly, malevolent cackle and somehow I knew, that despite the various locations of the cackle, it was all coming from one source.
Now this is how ration works in these situations. You start breaking everything down to simple reason, you start looking for the cause behind every effect. Yes, I was hearing what I can only describe as a cackle. So it must be someone fucking with me and that in itself, in these pitch-black cold woods was a scary enough thought on it's own.
Who could have predicted Id come out for a stroll at this time of night? If someone followed me this far, from the party, they would have been incapable of escaping detection. The tree's on either side of me resided above slanted hill and night time navigation without a noticeable flashlight was near impossible.
I just started laughing. Maybe I thought I could fool my growing fear into apathy or anything other than what I was currently feeling. My attempts at rationalizing failed to disguise the strange horror I was experiencing. A few minutes of silence had passed before the cackling started in again. There was something suggested in that cackle which I just couldn't put into words. This cackle, I knew, was specifically meant for me.
I felt my body freezing up, my palms became increasingly sweaty and then I could hear what sounded like light footsteps coming from behind me. The fear was becoming paralysis and there was no doubt in my mind that there was someone following shortly behind me.
I felt the urge to pray to Jesus, but I wasn't about to let myself do that. I wasn't going to give into this fear, to my potential illness. If there was no explanation for the queer occurrences then the explanation was in my mind, my illness, and so instead of giving in, instead of praying, I began to run.
In a similar way in which I've watched myself sleeping from my ceiling, my body began sprinting but I wasn't a part of it. I was simply experiencing my body take flight, running toward the street lamp up the road. I was still within myself but the perspective was extremely objective all the way until my body met with lit ground, offered by the street lamp and I dove into the lights haven.
An uncontrollable laughter which turned into tears came over me. I got up to my feet, dusted off the dirt and ridiculousness from myself and ran back to my cabin without looking back. This time I heard no footsteps. No cackles.
I opened the window to my cabin and laid on the bottom bunk, trying to erase my mind of the recent lunacy I had experienced. I got up to make my way to the hallway when I first saw it.
I had never seen anything like it. It was some kind of strange insect, almost prehistoric in the oddity of its shape. The exoskeleton was pitch black and there was a deviant quality about the insects presence, it seemed to look almost plastic, unreal. It didn't appear to have an antenna. What looked like its head seemed to split into either direction like a hammerhead shark. Tightly clasped over the backside of the insect were two jagged shaped wings.
I took a step closer toward my insect friend to get a better look and what appeared to be its head twitched to the side so quickly I don't recall ever seeing the actual movement. I had never seen anything like it. At first I assumed it was some sort of insect exclusive to the mountains, that seemed rational to me, who knew what kind of fucked up insects resided in the wilderness.
For a fleeting moment I felt as though my mind was on mushrooms as the strange creature majestically spread its jagged shaped wings with a force and specific purpose. A single light began to glow from the head.
The glow must have been its eye, it sort of 'turned on', like a lighthouse reaching out to sea, it reached into my mind, momentarily hypnotizing me and suddenly I thought of that strange place in the ground I often dreamt of. The one with the rooms and I recalled an arcade and a shopping mall and then a room filled with vines. How could I have forgotten about the room-
My eyes became blinded with a white light and I heard a scream inside my head, I turned to the mirror hanging on the wall and suddenly I could see into the mirror, through the mirror, into what appeared to be a spiritual realm where my recent atheism became rendered undeniably naïve and reprehensible. I felt Gods magnificence and hope suddenly pour into my consciousness and some sort of abstruse understanding began to penetrate my thoughts similar to the serenity only experienced within seconds of awakening from sleep and then it came out-
"I've got you by the throat bitch-"
I had said it. I don't recall saying it, it was never anything I had pre-meditated or participated in yet it was undoubtedly my mouth the words had come from.
The jet black visitor set sail from the wall to the window and I stood there, shaking, numb, staring at my reflection. Losing my mind.