Deepest Fear

It took me a month to figure out the pattern- the pattern It was using to kill us off.

At first it was Jack, who was found dead, lying face-down and submerged in his own bathtub. His mother had been the one that found him, the poor woman. Her lifeless body was discovered a week later, after countless complaints from her apartment neighbors about a pungent odor from her apartment. After breaking into the home, the police found her hanging from a rope from the rafters of her bedroom.

It went after Diane next. Diane, who had been a victim of dog mauling when she was just 5-years old, was discovered just a week after Jack’s mother was found. Her body, lying by the side of the forest surrounding the town, was practically ripped to shreds. There were countless bite and claw marks, courtesy of a pack of stray dogs that had been roaming the neighborhood for weeks.

It went after Kyle a week back. I could tell that Kyle had suspected that something was wrong- his text messages to me grew increasingly frantic as he begun telling me about a strange figure, a clown, he said, climbing out of his closet, night after night, and standing at the foot of his bed. At first I had thought nothing of it- Kyle had always been a pretty high-strung kid since young and was prone to panic attacks, so this was probably just one of his ‘outbreaks’.

Calm down, I recalled telling him, it’s probably a serial killer, Just keep your doors and windows shut and locked. Just calm down, and your hallucinations would go away.

Boy, was I wrong.

Kyle’s body was found just 2 days ago, after he failed to show up to breakfast on time that morning. His mother had gone up to his bedroom to wake him up when she found him, cold and rigid, his eyes glassy and opened wide, staring straight ahead at the foot of the bed. There were no wounds or bruises of any sort. The coroner later on declared Kyle’s cause of death to be a heart attack.

That’s when I realized that something was really wrong. It couldn’t have been the work of a serial killer. It just doesn’t add up. It had to be something supernatural, something that could target and attack our deepest, darkest fears, something that could pit our fears against us.

You see, Jack, who had drowned, was always terrified of water. Jack’s mother, who doted dearly on her son, had always been overly protective over Jack. His death would have been the ultimate blow to her. Next was Diane, who had always been extremely fearful of dogs ever since her childhood incident. And Kyle, who always had an irrational fear of clowns… well, you get the idea.

And as for me, I have always been afraid of the dark.

I can tell It’s coming for me. I’ve recently begun seeing crazy hallucinations, shadows morphing into indistinguishable shapes of monsters and demons, things that no normal human being should be seeing. I’m no fool, I know my time is coming. Even as I am writing this, I can hear It, moaning my name over and over again from the darkest corner of my room. I’ve given up keeping the lights on, I’ve given up fighting. It’s no use anymore. I’m just so exhausted.

Goodbye.

Credit To – Angelica Ng; Author also has a Twitter if you wish to follow her!