The Girl’s Mind
“Let’s try this again, Andrea,” Dr. Hudson said, leaning forward and pressing his finger on the black table between him and his subject, “Tell me why you tried to kill your sister.”
But the girl made no response as her empty, aquatic eyes darted around the room. She focused on anything other than the psychologist who stared at her as if peering into a black abyss to spot the slightest hint of a form. It was no use. She was too elusive, her thoughts scattered.
Andrea would have focused and answered every question if it were not for the sparks and flashes that surrounded her at every second, visible only to her. Sometimes the flashes would be accompanied by voices. Short words, phrases, suggestions, demands…
For most of her life, however, the words were merely words. The disembodied voices held no power over her except in their ability to persuade. But from when she’d turned fifteen eight months ago, the voices had been getting stronger. It was as if they knew her more thoroughly. They knew how to convince her to act.
Dr. Hudson almost cursed in the silence but sighed instead. He wanted so badly to get at the center of what was going through her head. Andrea possessed an odd case of schizophrenia, or what was classified as schizophrenia. She knew things, details that a seemingly innocent teenage girl could not have possible known.
The tests produced perplexing results. She could accurately describe pictures in a sealed envelope, repeat numbers written on a board in another room, and correctly repeat word for word a randomly selected passage from a book she had never read. As far as Hudson was concerned, something possessed her other than schizophrenia — something alien.
“Can’t you tell me anything about that night?” Hudson asked, leaning forward in his chair.
More silence. The girl’s scattered attention annoyed him.
“Anything at all? What did they say to you, exactly?” He said the word “they” with an emphasis of the awe he maintained throughout the entire encounter with this mysterious creature.
At once, the entirety of Andrea’s focus, like a collection of spotlights suddenly shining their lights on one particular point, concentrated on the doctor. He felt his spine shiver.
“They said what I wanted to hear,” Andrea answered, so matter-of-factually.
Dr. Hudson’s breath escaped him as his face went white. It was an animalistic fear that coursed through his veins, the same one that paralyzed his ancient ancestors while looking down the mouth of a predator.
His questions referred to the night Andrea held a kitchen knife against her sister’s throat, pressing the blade so hard against the fair skin it nearly pierced her jugular vein. What provoked the unexpected attack remained a mystery. She had been known to say strange things to herself, as if responding to invisible persons, but the diagnosis did not come until she was reprimanded and sent to a mental institution.
As for Andrea herself, the memory flew through her mind in a flurry of emotions, images, and words that passed within a matter of moments. She recalled the way her resentment towards her proud, intelligent, beautiful, and sane older sister swirled inside her heart like a whirlpool that gradually gained momentum.
It was the little things that collected over time that gave rise to the attack. Every ounce of praise her sibling received, every friend she made, every kiss she had, it all built on top of each other in a tower of resentment. While the older sister got the attention she desired, the younger one sat in the dark, alone, occasionally stared at with subtle contempt as the voices and flashes spiraled around her uncontrollably.
But it was her sister’s quick-witted remarks that stung the most. One night, on that night, when the parents had left the house for the evening, Andrea’s sibling said in a casual tone, “If you stopped talking to yourself, maybe people would like you more instead of calling you weird behind your back.” The comment was intended to get the odd girl in order, to be more like herself. But it hurt… It hurt so much…
With the pain came the resentment spewing forth, and the voices loved every second of it. They would respond to her spurs of anger with theory after theory about how her sister was a wretched demon under that soft skin, those pretty blue eyes hiding coals from hell. Andrea knew not to indulge in the theories. Her sister was family. She loved her. But familial love alone could not stop her ferocity from boiling over.
In a moment of despair and weakness, when Andrea had locked herself in her room with tears rolling down her cheeks, she gave in. The voices spoke about her sister’s evil, and she believed every word. There was no denying it anymore. The being she thought was a beloved sister was really malevolence incarnate, a parasite who fed off her misery, a tumor that tortured her at every second. Once she had given her belief over, the only option left was eradication.
The proceeding moments, the screams, the chasing through the house, the touch of the knife against that vulnerable neck, it unfolded like a disconnected nightmare from which she could only remember select instances. At some point throughout the attempted killing, Andrea ceased to be herself. She was no longer a teenage girl with an undiagnosed case of schizophrenia, but a puppet of forces so far beyond her.
The truth of her puppetry was what she relayed to Dr. Hudson in that moment when their eyes locked. In the darkness of her pupils lay entities gathered together and writhing as if dancing. All this time, the doctor was not speaking with Andrea but other unnamed consciousnesses not of this world controlling the subject’s body. And he saw them. For a fraction of a second, he saw them.
Recoiling, Hudson did not utter another word as he swiftly ended the interview and hurried out the room. Afterwards, he ceased all studies of Andrea’s case.
Throughout the next few days, the doctor tried everything he could to distance himself from any mention of the girl, doing his best to block out that moment of locking eyes with her. Eventually, he did forget Andrea to an extent. But sometimes, when he closed his eyes, those things would appear to him again clear as day. Whatever was in the girl’s mind, some of it had crept into his head where it festered for the rest of his life.
© Noah Lloyd 2020
