The Music Of Lies - #1

It was there all along. I never knew, I never realised, barely even suspected. I might have occasionally thought there may exist something like it, but when I was young, when I feared the dark and the monsters under my bed. It's ironic how when I was 6, I knew more about myself than I do now.

It appeared truly around a month ago. Half-way between my sleep and awareness, it crept into my life and destroyed it. Like an insidious rot, corrupting everything I loved and cared for. I met it in that time between night an dawn. I was barely awake, with no intention to get up to the grey-skied Sunday I could see through a gap in my bedroom curtains.

My room was unlike most fourteen-year old girls' rooms. The furniture and bed were old fashioned, the duvet with a faded red and white stripe pattern, the sheet underneath patterned with a limitless rose bush which had also suffered degradation of time. The white walls of the room tainted with posters and pictures, drawings and a Hunger Games clock I made in technology class at school. The big double bed taking up most of the space, the rest of the components in my bedroom were a cupboard, a very ancient desk we found in semi-perfect condition at the tip, a small bookshelf me and my father put together from Ikea and a chest of draws, supporting a small, relatively useless mirror on it's sky blue top. In this patchwork world, I met the final texture to be added to my quilt. And this is he kind of texture you wish you hadn't sewn on, but now it's too late, because at the time you didn't realise it was snakeskin and taking it off would destroy the entire duvet.

It appeared, not in the room as such, but around me. I felt the chill, the way my blood seems to thicken, my skin feeling just that little bit tighter, and, the ever-lasting feeling of something crawling up my back. I didn't react at first, still in a stupor. The stupor became a growing sense of unease and finally, fear. I spun in my bedclothes, thinking it was a spider or something of the sort. Playing host to a mild arachnophobia, having a spider in my bed is a pretty big deal. I swept my arms around under the pillows, in the covers and all around the bed. But there was nothing. And the feeling of something on my back still clung to me like a tick. I whipped my arm around to my back, feeling wherever I could reach for whatever this intruder was. Again, nothing. I flopped down on my bed, hoping to crush it, but the feeling persisted. I couldn't even pinpoint it. It was sort of... Everywhere, making my skin crawl and rise up in goosebumps. The feeling became stronger, more potent, and I began to feel it actually in me. I began to panic. My body was starting to become slow, almost paralysed, like I was losing control something else gaining it.

Then it left my body, rising out into the world, still attached but clearer, like its own entity. And I knew, deep inside me, that I had hatched something terrible. Something dark. Something that wanted to exist. And though I didn't know at the time, I was in the way of that.