Caliban

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

One need not be a house;

The brain has corridors surpassing

Material place.

― Emily Dickinson

What does a madman’s mind look like from the inside? Does it look like an empty house with vandalized masonry, broken gates, cracked cement pathways with weeds poking through, or like an old, poorly-tended cemetery with cracked headstones discolored by mildew and mold, leaves or twigs on the graves, patchy or overgrown grass? Does the sickness affect the inside of the mind, or are the effects just noticeable on the outside? I think a madman looks like a healthy-looking fruit from the outside that is being eaten by worms on the inside. Sometimes I feel like my brain is being split into two parts, and I wonder if I could feel the splitting again. Or was it just my imagination?

Madness, to become something other than ‘self.’ To be so separated and outside of yourself that you almost cannot recognize this ‘other self’ or you simply cannot differentiate which self is the real you. It is the death of the ‘old self’ and the birth of a new, unrecognizable, irrational self. This transition from the old self to the new self could lead to the liberation of the self and also to catastrophe.

A few years ago, pestilence had befallen us. The ‘Lurking death’ was what they called it—the insidious reaper of the soul. The deadly plague had infested hundreds of individuals within a span of a few days. It started out with a mild fever, followed by a sharp, needle-like sensation in the chest region, and led to seizures, hemoptysis, and, eventually, death. The mortality rate was just about as high as eighty-five percent. The cause of death was acute airway obstruction and/or hypoxemic respiratory failure, rather than exsanguination.

During those days I used to travel back and forth from the city to the countryside to treat the ones infested with the deadly plague. Watching the plague spread so rapidly, and watching people die every day, one can only imagine how I felt. With each passing day, I was preparing myself for the idea of being infested, of being in the agony of those pitiless chest pains, and at some level, I was preparing myself for death. Control was only an illusion. There was nothing anyone could do about it. People were making all kinds of remarks about the situation. Some said that they have somehow brought upon them the fury of God and that he is punishing them. Others believed that the best way to get past this was to be ready for every conceivable thing, and that nature is risky and ought to be stayed away from. Death was all around the town, bodies piled up over one another. The very air was smeared with a sickly sweet odor of decay.

After a few weeks of tending the sick, I myself had started feeling those chest pains. I was far from home, so I had to remain in the countryside since my health didn’t allow me to travel and I was supposed to quarantine myself. Several people offered me to stay with them but I was supposed to remain in isolation since the risk of contagion was too high.

There was an old, abandoned house just on the edge of the town, and it occurred to me that I could reside there as long as I was ill. I regret that decision now. Why do I regret it? I shall reveal that later. For now, I should depict the state of the house. However, before that, I shall describe the passageway that leads to the house. For if you know the condition in which the house was, you’d know that no man in his right mind could ever step in that house, let alone live there for weeks on end.

There was a main dirt street, overgrown with weeds and grass, that led towards a huge rusty iron gate. The entirety of the passageway, between the gate and the house, was blanketed with dead birds and leaves, which were scattered all around the place. A strange sight, indeed. It was a harsh, barren land. There was a long way between the gate and the house, and with each progression that I took, my chest pain tormented me. I put one hand on my chest and inhaled vigorously. I almost felt like choking. I felt the sickening, tangy taste of blood in my mouth and I spat it out, but it was followed by more and more. I continued to spit it out, in a frantic endeavor to free myself of the coppery taste.

Even though it was daytime, the particular area of the town, occupied by the house, was dark. The house stood there, with an echoing, yet empty silence with darkness all around it. It felt as though the area occupied by the house was not from this world at all, but rather, from another world where the sun doesn’t rise anymore.

The entire burden of the house was on the shoulders of a few weather-worn stone pillars—like Atlas, they stood weary but steady. There were two faceless marble statues in the foyer that lead to the staircase. The wallpapers were half-ripped with old portraits and paintings hanging here and there. Almost all of the furniture was broken and the floorboards creaked with each step that I took. That house was a tired bone, tucked away in a quiet corner of the town like a forgotten memory. It had no desire to be found out, yet there I was.

At first, I thought I was alone, but after some time I realized that I was not entirely alone. I felt a presence. There was another, an inhabitant as old as this house. I was halfway through the stairs when I heard a man’s voice. “You’re trespassing,” he said in a toneless voice. He was an old man, barely even recognizable as a human. His face was chiseled into lines and lines of weariness, his body skeletal. He had a short beard, a red beard that made him look like an ancient priest. His eyes were the color of peat moss, glazed with age. They were as dull as the sky, without any spark of life.

There was a particular manner in which that old man conversed. He never, for once, looked me straight in the eye, while talking, rather, he used to turn his head sideways and avoided staring straight into my eyes. It felt as though he was hiding something—a secret, or perhaps a forlorn memory. “I apologize,” I said, as I strolled down the stairs. “I need to stay here for a while. You see, I am ill and far from home.”

“That doesn’t concern me,” he said, as he held the main door open, and demanded me to leave. Before closing the door, the old man said something strange to me, something that still echoes in the very walls of my mind: “Trust me,” he said, “I am doing you a favor. Once you start living here, the house won’t let you leave. It will sink its teeth into your skin deep and it will chew you and swallow you whole. This house is a predator.’”

Now, a sane, rational man would take this as a warning and run the other way, but I was stubborn and tenacious. I sat at the doorstep, for what felt like an hour. The fever had begun to settle in and I felt weak to my bones. The entirety of my body shivered as I felt a profound chill, creeping down my spine. The chest pains were getting worse. They began like a crushing, searing sensation right in the middle of my chest and crawled all the way up to my neck, choking me. Sometimes it felt as though someone was stabbing me time and time again. I screamed my throat raw because of the pain, and in only a matter of a few minutes, I passed out.

Upon waking up, I found myself inside the house, lying on a bed. It was an unattractive house—inside and out—with ugly mismatched furniture, ripped, moth-eaten bedsheets with rotten lace, doors that didn’t open smoothly, and a single rickety, old rocking chair by the fireplace. It was an odd room. A room with no window, just a wall, and a ceiling. The room had no light, no sun, nothing—kind of like a prison or a death camp of sorts—except for a dim light and the warm glow of a few candles.

“This house is a predator.” Those words kept ringing in my ears, and still do. I felt a sense of uneasiness in that house. Although the house was empty, it felt like the entirety of the house was choking with bodies, as if there were too many people inside the house and it would, at some point, gag them out one by one.

As I got up from the bed, my head felt heavy. The old man was not in the room so I started looking around. There was a peculiar-looking antique wood cabinet, half-filled with dainty figurines. There were a number of vintage photographs placed at the top of the cabinet. There was one in particular that piqued my curiosity. The photograph was of a family of five—a man and a woman with their three children—but the face of the woman in the picture was distorted, smeared with black marks. It appeared as a violent attempt to deliberately hide her face as if to steal her identity. On the back of the photograph, were written the verses by Dickinson:

There is a pain—so utter—

It swallows substance up—

Then covers the Abyss with Trance—

So Memory can step

Around—across—upon it—

As one within a Swoon—

Goes safely—where an open eye—

Would drop him—Bone by Bone.

“What do you think you’re doing,” said the old man, and suddenly, I felt hair lifting on my nape and arms. His existence was like a ghost—a body that had no odor and feet that made no sound upon the floor. “How long have you been standing here?” I asked with a quavering voice. “Put that thing down and don’t poke around needlessly, unless you want trouble.”

He told me not to leave the room before dawn. He was very insistent about it and very particular. ‘Stay here until the sun rises, eh?’ He said as he put the bowl of soup he had bought for me, on the table.

I couldn’t sleep at all that night. There was an empty silence all around me. It was the type of silence that gets louder and louder with time. This kind of silence is not peaceful, no. It’s maddening. It echoes. It laughs at you. You beg for a sound—anything to rid yourself of this heavy gnawing silence that clings to your very soul. Before the silence could tear me piece by piece, I heard faint whispering from the outside of the room. I got out of my bed and within a few seconds, I was standing outside the room. Only after stepping outside, I remembered that the old man had told me not to leave the room before sunrise. A part of me wanted to stay inside the room, while another part of me wanted to find out the source of the disturbance. I walked slowly through the narrow corridors towards the kitchen.

As I stood there, at the threshold of the door, I saw the old man standing close to the kitchen window, murmuring something indistinctly. He was holding one of the dead birds—the ones that had been lying just outside the house—and poking needles in the bird’s chest. Why was he doing this? I do not know to this day. What’s more, is that I saw him doing this ritual every night from that day onwards, and upon being asked, he denied it all the same. The image of the old man poking needles in the dead bird’s chest was grotesque and I wanted to look away, yet somehow, I was unable to do so. My head was fixed on the spot as if someone was holding it with such strength. As if someone wanted me to see the whole ritual.

Now when I think about all the events that occurred in that house, I can’t seem to make sense of it all. I don’t know which part was real and which was a mere dream. Despite the fact that my memory is somewhat hazy, I remember one particular sound very clearly—a static sound. It was always there, skulking in every corner of the house as if, following me. Just like Caliban. Who was Caliban? I’ll get to that later.

The old man had an odd nature that I sensed the moment I saw him. His existence bothered me. He had a light in his eyes that was gray, like a ghost, a gray that made it difficult to see what was going on inside his head. It was like he was watching me all the time as though I were a piece of meat. As though he saw me from within.

As time passed by, I was getting more and more suspicious of the old man. There was something about him that used to set my teeth on edge. What bothered me the most about him were his sudden disappearances. He had a bizarre habit of roaming in the corridors, sometimes disappearing from sight for no reason at all, and then reappearing at odd times and places. A strange way to live, to simply disappear at will. With no apparent reason. He was suddenly gone, or he left, maybe a good while before I ever saw his face again. Then he would suddenly appear, or disappear. Something about his manner of life disturbed me so much that it terrified me.

Half of my memory of that house feels like a waking dream. There were times when I used to see an odd figure moving fast through my peripheral vision. It moved across my vision with a screech. Faster. So fast, I couldn’t see it, could only see its outline. Its eyes were large and round, its mouth wide and open. The eyes too, both of them, in fact. Then it turned into something else. Was it my imagination or were the feet moving faster than my eyes could track? Then I realized that the figure wasn’t walking. It was in fact running, straight at me. I took two steps back as it came closer, hoping it wouldn’t reach me and collide with me head-on.

“All houses wherein men have lived and died are haunted houses,” I keep thinking about these words by Henry Wadsworth. In these houses, there are ghosts. Ghosts of people who have lived and died here. People who suffered here when they died. My head ached. There was an odd light, a sort of grayness. Like a fog. An eerie gray. You could not see the outlines of things clearly.

There was a feeling of dread all about the place, a sense of being watched. It felt as though the room was brimming with shadows, that something was watching me all day, every second.

Something was wrong but I could never figure out what. I didn’t know if the eeriness was in my room or in those halls, or even in all that time. Perhaps it wasn’t just me who had lost all desire to understand. There is no sense in a world where I could hear my own screams.

“What are you going mad about?’” was what my mother used to say to me when I was young. “We’re not supposed to understand, my dear, not after all we’ve suffered. We’re supposed to just live and keep on living despite the suffering.”

I think she was right all along. After all, we’re meant to suffer for a thousand years and we’ll never understand the why of it because we can only see life as it happens to us. Our lives are a series of dreams.

Because of the old man’s frequent and sudden disappearances, I was left alone in the house. That house had become my own personal prison, where I felt trapped—like a miserable man who is chained to a chair by his neck and left for months to die. With no one to talk to. Or perhaps, like someone who was sentenced, not to a solitary cell, or to death, but to an eternity without seeing the sun. A cruel, sadistic punishment.

My loneliness felt like a dark room—with old, broken furniture—where not a single ray of sunlight enters. The type of dark that suffocates one’s being. I wanted to get out of this dark room, I had the key to unlock its door, but somehow I couldn’t use it. It felt like I had been in this dark room for so long that I have now forgotten how to use the key—the one which unlocks this door. Or maybe, this whole time, I had the wrong key with me and didn’t know about it. And how was I to know that it was the wrong key without ever using it?

The headache returned. This time, a little stronger than before. My heart was beating too fast. It had never been like that before. I had no idea how long I sat in that room. Perhaps, the entire time that I was there, I would cry out in pain. There was something so eerie about my illness, as though it was coming from someone else. My skin was itchy and I felt a fever in my head all the time. Along with the headaches, there were nightmares too that plagued me. I was constantly in and out of sleep. Often I would wake up soaked in sweat. I was the one who had to face the night, the unknown. It was dark and cold, and I had nothing to defend myself with. I could barely live with my mind. I was left alone with a body that was getting weak by the day, a mind that was rotting from the inside, and a heart that was dying. I was afraid of being alone.

As the days passed by, there came a time when I was not entirely alone. There was another inhabitant, he goes by the name Caliban. I never liked his presence in the house but he simply won’t leave. He used to follow me everywhere and still does. My existence is tied to him, he’s my prison. He knows what I have done.

Caliban is a strange creature, he is not like you think he would be. There was something about him that was haunting the air, like an odor that permeates the entire house. And I was the only one who felt that. Caliban was cruel and manipulative and he made me feel small and insignificant. He could see all my flaws, see my darkness. He could see the inside of my mind like a map—with my thoughts scattered all about. He used my thoughts to his own advantage. He could read my thoughts and know the place that would hold me from all sides.

At night, my fever used to get worse. I could feel an odd pressure on my chest, and against my neck. There was a burning sensation in my eyes, and it felt as though I could go blind, and then suddenly, I couldn’t feel anything at all.

There was this dream I had time and time again. In that dream, I used to hear the creaking of the door, and moments later, a voice called my name. “You are free to go”, the voice used to say. And then the door opened and I used to see my mother standing there—she looked very tired every time, and her voice was so thin and weak. “Now I know why they made you this way,” she says, as she moves away from me. Her voice goes like ice.

I had this dream for seven nights. Always the same. Always my mother standing at the threshold of the door, weak as she was, telling me that I was free to go. Telling me that I wasn’t in a prison by force, but by will. Telling me that my body was not too heavy to move, after all. But how could I tell her that even though my body was not too heavy to move, my soul was? How could I tell her that she was too late for me, that by that time, my soul was already tied to that place? I could not leave, even by will.

I have found myself trying to hold on to that dream, trying to pull it close to me, where I can feel its shape and to feel the memories of its presence. Sometimes I wake up and all I want to do is to return to that dream. Return to my mother.

The eighth night arrived. My fever got worse and my head ached. Again, I heard the creaking of the door and a voice calling my name. Then I heard a muffled cry. My body started to shiver and my throat felt as if I were about to choke, and there was no air in me, as if it was not as big as it used to be. My heart was beating so fast that it was hard to breathe. I closed my eyes but the feeling was still there, and so was the figure, standing at the threshold of the door. It was dark, so I couldn’t see the face. Could only see the outlines. The figure felt wholly unfamiliar, unlike my mother. It moved closer. As I lit the candle, I saw that it wasn’t my mother, but the old man. He was holding a dead bird in one hand, and a cleaver in the other. Only this time, it wasn’t a dream.

I screamed my throat raw. His hands started shaking, and he dropped the cleaver on the floor. The bird fell too, with a thud. I looked at him for a second and his eyes looked out of his head at me and I felt there was some kind of emotion that could only come from his heart. Then I sensed his hands trembling and the entirety of his body began to tremble as well. All of a sudden, the old man fell to his knees and put his ear on the floor. “Hear the voices that I hear,” he said, “people have been here since before us”.

“Why do you do this?” I asked him. “You leave me alone in the house whenever you please, roam in the house at night. You killed all these birds, didn’t you? And now you’re here in my room with a cleaver. Were you trying to kill me too?” I said all that in a frenzy of rage. The old man got up and walked towards the door. Before leaving my room, he turned around and said that he did not know any other way to live because it had been that way for many years and now there is no way out for him, only to keep on doing the same things.

Could it be that he was here to kill me? This thought only occurred to me once, and I didn’t pay attention to it much. It was Caliban who dwelt on it incessantly. “You must kill him before he kills you,” Caliban used to say. “And how do you suppose I will get away with it?”, I once asked him. “You can get away with anything, assuming that you plan your actions cautiously.’”

Sometimes, Caliban would awaken me in the middle of the night and tell me such elaborate methods to kill him. Caliban had decided not to let me be unless I killed that man. “Why haven’t you done it yet? You’re such a coward, a weakling,” he used to say time and time again. I was scared of death to such an extent that I was considering Caliban’s suggestion of killing the old man first before he had the chance to end my life.

What is it about death that scares us so much? When we die, we will all die. No one will come for us. We’ll all be erased from history. Is that really so bad? It’s not the pain or the loss, but the anticipation of it. The fear that it will come and nothing will happen. Death, in the end, is a mere physical event.

I think that it isn’t the fear of death itself, but the fear of not having the chance to live that haunts us. It is the feeling that the time has come to die and we have not lived the way we wanted to. Life, like water, is heavy but it is also precious. Life has to be lived. That’s why I was trying so hard to make it as long as I could. Because I didn’t want to go down without a fight.

I began to imagine, all night long, the perfect crime. Made the crime my only focus. And the more I thought about it the greater the guilt grew and yet the desire for it to be done grew too. You would think it was a wicked idea, but life, it seems to me, that we have to do all that for life.

“I hope you don’t enjoy it too much, or you won’t know your place,” said Caliban, almost in a whisper.

“We must have the right to our own lives,” I said.

“But I do not think you have it now,” he said as if, ridiculing me.

“It’s smarter to kill him than to let him live and give him the chance to kill me. I have the right to protect myself from such a possibility.”

These words echoed in my mind. Killing the old man was Caliban’s idea but in a matter of a few days, it became my only focus. I became so obsessed with the idea of killing him, that I was unable to think about anything else. I lost my sleep, and couldn’t focus on anything else. I would imagine all sorts of ways of killing him. The idea was so strong that it dominated my mind. By the end of that week, in the heat of my madness, my questions were completely incoherent. And the idea of evil had entered into my very soul.

People, for centuries, have been trying to come up with all these speculations to try to understand why someone would lose the ability to reason or to think. “Is this madness?” They keep asking over and over. Maybe the answer lies in death and the fear of it. After all, it is the only thing that can truly explain the madness of life.

The night of the crime arrived. It was a terribly dark night. So dark that not even the light of morning could penetrate it. I stood in the kitchen, behind the door waiting for him. Caliban was with me the entire time.

The old man entered the kitchen and stood close to the kitchen window, again, holding a dead bird in his hand. Suddenly, a gust of wind struck the window and the little windowpane shattered. While murmuring something indistinctly, he started poking needles in the bird’s chest. While he was doing this, I grabbed him by his neck and hit his head against the floor repeatedly until his skull was split open and the brain lacerated. He was lying on the kitchen floor in the pool of his own blood, and his eyes stared at the ceiling. All at once, I became very aware of what I had done. My heart was beating like a drum as if the devil himself was trying to persuade me that there’s not a single being who can save my soul now. At that moment, I could feel Caliban standing behind the door, watching me from the shadows, and deriding me to the last degree. “This house is a predator,” these words echoed within the walls of my mind.

Time, as we speak, is not linear, it’s cyclic. What’s more, the events that occur throughout our lifetime don’t simply occur once, but rather they repeat over and over again in a perpetual loop—like a melody that has been put on repeat by someone—and now you don’t know how to stop it. There are three versions of all of us; the past version, the present version, and the future version. These three variants of our being coexist in time and space. That is to say, that there is a past version of me who is entering that unholy house for the first time, there is a present version of me with blood on his hands and a guilty conscience, and then there is a future version of me who is reviling my very choice to venture into that foul house. All of these variants of me are coexisting simultaneously, and they’re doing what they have as of now done, in their time, over and over. And as time elapses by, the past variant of me wouldn’t cease to exist just because I am now my present version, but rather the past me would continue to blackout at the doorstep. He is still lying on that bed, looking around the room with such curiosity. There is only something inside the mind that has no sense of time.

“You know a secret about humans?” whispered Caliban in my ear. “You humans are naive and so gullible,” he proceeded, “people like you don’t know how to fight back and resist. All you can do is walk into another prison and then another. Your only punishment is to be judged by the person you were before. You’ve eaten yourself up”.

I realized that even though it was Caliban who put the idea of killing the old man in my mind, maneuvered me into thinking that it was the only way to save myself, still, I was the one who submitted to such a detestable, accursed thought. I was the one with blood on my hands. I could never rid myself of this thought. I buried the body, but could never bury it entirely. That blood-drenched body still follows me everywhere, for when you put a body in one place and another, it feels like a bad dream. A cruel dream with a terrible past. No one would want to go there. The pain of that time will never go away.

The thing about Caliban is that he is a being without flesh and bone. I could never really see him. His voice, it creeps from the back of my head, no, my ear. He lives in my mind, or the entirety of my body perhaps. He is like an itch at the back of my brain. Like something crawling inside my brain that isn’t supposed to be there, like a parasite living inside my brain, eating it up piece by godforsaken piece.

Credit: Arisha

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Please note the author of this creepypasta does NOT give permission for it to be adapted into any other form of media.