There, i've finished it. I was expecting there to be more than this, but it turned out to be a short story.If you see any problems, feel free to tell me.
I woke up to the blood-curdling howls of the mad man in the room next to me. He seems to have night terrors every night at precisely midnight. In the daytime, he is a shredded husk of a man, the remnants of a once-beautiful specimen of the human race.One day, he looked up from his private musings and straight into my eyes, there was a completely lucid being trapped there behind the dementia and he apparently thought I was the only one who could help. Whoever he was, his mind seemed to further deteriorate. His night terrors grew in number until he would have one every couple of hours. During the day, he would have sudden attacks of mania. During one of them, he took out one of the orderlies. After that, he was classified as a dangerous patient and moved into a different ward of the hospital. Those sane enough or not drugged past speaking whispered that he’d gouged out the eye of one of the doctors and that he was now in a padded room, straitjacket and all. I myself was a relatively good patient and had no real problems beyond compulsive lying so was allowed to wander the hospital after being administered my morning dose of medicine. I had been dumped there by my parents so I was nothing more then one of the many test subjects of the hospital. They would give me a range of drugs that could have anything or nothing to do with my ailment, sometimes they would have no effect. Other times, I would suffer from highs so severe that I would have to sit with my head between my knees until they subsided. It wasn’t nearly so bad as some of the others, and compared to them I was quite lucky. I once decided that I wanted to see where this crazy man was kept, so I set off down the halls, unshod feet padding softly on the cold reflective floors of the asylum as I went. Some of the doors I passed would be banged vehemently. Others would reveal a pair of eyes staring through the small window, watching my progress. I’d grown used to the looks of the insane, the demented, the conflicted, those forced to believe that there was something wrong with their heads so I paid them no mind. What really got to me was that doors that hid cells from which piteous moans could be heard. They were mostly nonsensical, but sometimes prayers to an unknown God could be heard and these are what made me shudder in fear. There was no God in this place; we were dumped here by people who had no use for us, we were expendable.
The hall ended at a single door
The door itself was lacking one of the windows on its’ front and the surface was stainless steel as opposed to the plain metal surfaces of those that came before it. I stopped did I really want to see what was beyond this ominous gate? In my minds’ eye, I saw once again the trapped sane man behind the yes of that boy and I resolutely clasped the door handle and jerked upon it. Even though it seemed to be only accessible by personnel, it opened easily under my hand and I made my way through. This single hall was lined on both sides by doors made of the same material as the first, they loomed like the royal guard and seemed to follow my slow progress between them. I had no idea which to choose until the familiar scream of my boy with the night terrors reached my ears. To accompany these blood-chilling cries, the hall reverberated with a slow thrumming that ran through the fine hairs on my neck and made my teeth chatter, it was electric, ran across the skin. Ascertaining that it came from the second to last door on the right, I stopped there, unsure as to whether I should open it. The screams stopped abruptly and then I heard the sounds of nail scratching on the other side of it.
“Gone, all gone.” He cried.
“Who’s gone?” I asked. His voice was hoarse from his almost constant screaming, it was dark and scratched.
“The gods, they’re gone. Also the demons, nothing left.”
“What’re you talking about? God can’t be gone, he watches over all of us!” As I said this, the boy began to cackle, he laughed so hysterically that it grew and grew until the hall was filled with it.
“Don’t you know? We killed him! How can they’re be a god to watch us if we’ve killed him?” his voice grew piteous, mewling.
“Let me out promise I won’t tell anyone else but you about this. I’ll be good, I swear it!”
“I really don’t think I should.” Maybe I had been wrong, maybe their really wasn’t a shred of sanity left in that head of his.
“But I promised!” He cried, great gulping sobs as he scratched the doors, his fingers raked against the metal with an unpleasant sound.
I stepped backward and began to walk the way I had come. There was nothing but madness here.
“Out of all of us, you’re the one who really needs to be here.”
Suddenly, the boys’ voice became cajoling, the hoarseness of it diminished. It was seductive. “You’re a hypocrite, didn’t you just think that there’s no god here?”
“How’d you know?” the doors who loomed over me like guards seem to edge in closer, hedging me in, keeping me from escaping.
“Oh, I know all sorts of thing,” he chuckled. “I know that at heart, you’re just a good catholic girl, regardless of how much you lie about it. To be frank, I’m not surprised by the fact that you can’t come to terms with the idea of your religion’s god being nothing more than a creation of humanity. Did you know that levels of godlessness are reaching an all time high?”
“No I di-“
“Or that your fanatics are ranting about how the worlds’ inevitable end is coming even closer than before?”
“Well, yeah” I sighed and crouched down next to the door of this strange boys’ cell. What conclusion was he attempting to lead me to? The orderlies would pass through any moment to deliver the patients their daily dose of drugs, but I found myself not caring a whit. I’d come all this way to find the oddest denizen of this place and I wasn’t leaving until I verified whether he was sane, or stark raving mad. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“Don’t you get it? The answer is so obvious!” His breathing grew rapid and shallow as he geared himself up to explain to me the supposed pattern behind the depravity of man, the hall seemed to darken around me as if was in a theatre; The cold halls of the asylum was the audience and the boy and I the actors. Something inside me said that I should’ve walked away from this door while I had the chance. Maybe I really and truly was a religious girl at heart, because the growing feeling of unease in the pit of my stomach told me that what I was absolutely not going to enjoy what I heard next.
“Enlighten me, I am a ‘good catholic girl’ after all, we don’t see much beyond the altar.”
“Oh you disappoint me, Caroline; Out of all the people in this place, your head is the only one that can stand what I have to say, and you don’t even have an inkling of it, do you?” I could feel his resigned shrug through the door. “Ah well, I can’t blame you for being ignorant, the job of those who know, is to teach and teach I shall.”
“Look, I know you’re probably enjoying keeping me in suspense, but can we get on with this?”
“Ah, right,” he said with an almost sheepish air.
“The real truth behind everything is that humans are driven by need. They need food, they need water, they need shelter, in short, they just plain need. When humanity grew more civilized and began to wonder about the mystery that is our existence, they realized they needed something to believe in. That this thing, which for who knows what reason, called a ‘soul’ lasted an eternity and that there was someone out there who looked after them.”
“How stupid, is this what you-“
“Not done! As I was saying, when humanity decided that it needed something to justify its’ pathetic existence, they came up with the idea of an almighty, omnipotent being who can solve all of their problem with the blink of an eye. Before the god who has many different faces was born, people worshipped nature. Of course, after realizing that nature did nothing to abate the constant nagging sense of need, they came up with one with a god who followed human logic and dished out tickets to paradise. If you lived a ‘good’ life by the standards set by your particular god, you got to go off an eternity of bliss in which every need you’ve had during your abysmal existence in fulfilled with the snap of the fingers.”
At this point, he began to cough. His coughs grew in force until they were great hacking gasps for air and then they quickly subsided. After a short pause for breath, he continued his seemingly pointless explanation.
“As the concept of religion grew to truly gargantuan proportions and its’ followers bumbled along after it, slaughtering here and there in the name of the original, and greatest imaginary friend of all, some of its’ retinue began to realize something.”
“What was that?” I interjected on cue.
“Simple, that god was in fact was the collective fairy tale of the nation and that it was well past their time to grow up.”
As he told me his tale, the illusion of me and the boy being subject to the eyes of an audience grew even stronger. The shadows seemed to have grown darker, or had they always been there and I had never noticed?
“Every god, every story, it doesn’t matter; it was made up by the mind of man to avoid the truth of the matter: We are the arbitrators of everything, there is no god, only the strength of the mind.”
There was nothing beyond the dark of this circle of light, the voice of the boy could be nothing more than that, a voice from beyond the door that would never be opened because it was never made to be.
“Want to know something else, Caroline?”
“Haven’t you fucked with my head enough as is? Besides, the orderlies will be her any moment, I should be going.” As I stood and turned, I looked full-on into the shadows and shuddered, the darkness was so thick.
“I made you believe it, didn’t I?” the boy said as he began to laugh once again. I sat down and leaned my back against his door and sighed. No wonder children were afraid of the dark; they’re still young enough to see the truth that lies in the stillness of it.
“Now you’re stuck here facing the truth with me, Caroline. There’s nowhere to go once you’ve realized that there’s nothing there.”
