‘I’m in this dark room. There are voices. Screaming.’
‘What do they say?’
‘It’s your fault! Why did you do this? WHY DID YOU DO THIS?!’
‘Do what?’
‘I don’t know. They won’t tell me, but it’s... something terrible.’
‘Who are they?’
‘They know me. They know what I’ve done.’
‘What happens next?’
‘The light goes on. And they are... They surround me. They’re dead. Three dead bodies on the ground.’
‘Try to focus on the room. What does it look like?’
‘I can’t focus. I’m... I have killed them.’
‘Why do you think that?’
‘Because of the mirrors. The wall is covered in mirrors. I see them in it, and I see myself. I’m covered in blood. My hands are shaking.’
‘Why are they shaking?’
‘Because... because I have a knife.’
‘Okay Cathy, I’ll count to five and then you’ll wake up.’
‘1’
There is an iron staircase. The door at the end opens.
‘2’
I see a silhouette. He comes down.
‘3’
I recognize him. He stops in the middle of the staircase and screams.
‘4’
‘Oh no... What have you done?!’
‘5’
It’s my brother. He runs up the stairs again and leaves me.
‘Cathy? Cathy?! Wake up! Cathy!!!’
‘I tried to save you’, I answer.
When I wake up I’m with my psychiatrist, Nick.
‘I won’t put you under hypnosis again, Cathy. You were asleep for way too long. You get in too deep. You should let go of it, Cathy. It didn’t happen, okay? It’s just a bad dream you’re having repeatedly.’
‘You must! I need to know what really happened, and why!’
Nick is actually not a real psychiatrist but he aims to become one.
‘I can get in trouble for this, you know that?’
I nod. He is only in his first year of Psychology and learned to hypnotise people by watching YouTube-videos and by reading a hell of a lot of books.
I take my handbag and leave his apartment. I let myself sink in the whoosh of the traffic and I succeed in clearing my mind for a while.
That didn’t last very long.
I’ve been having these dreams since I met Daisy. That happened almost three months ago. She didn’t grow up in New York City like I did. She moved to NY because she had to escape the war in her country. They destroyed her house and she lost her mum because of it. She doesn’t like to talk about it though, which is kind of understandable.
She doesn’t like New York very much. She used to live on the countryside, near a forest where she could play, run and climb into trees as much as she wanted to. She told me endless stories about her and her little brother in the woods. But when I ask where he is now, she shuts down. She won’t talk for a day. That only happened once, but I certainly won’t ask her again. I know there are things which shouldn’t be said out loud. Simply because they hurt too much.
She told me that the little flat she now lives in is haunted. The basement is communal, but as empty as ever. Daisy once asked the old lady from next door why nobody uses it. The lady explained that five years ago, in that very same basement, a massacre had taken place. Everyone was still in fear, which was ridiculous of course, because the murderer - an 18-year-old girl - was still imprisoned. But hey, the old lady simply didn’t use the basement herself because she didn’t have enough stuff to put there. ‘Go ahead’, she told Daisy. ‘You can build a club house in there! Nobody will notice it anyway.’
After the old lady gave Daisy some cookies with milk and talked about her dead husband, Daisy called me to explore the basement together. She and her dad needed extra room to put all their junk. She told me to bring a flashlight because the electricity had a habit of breaking down, so I did.
However, she hadn’t told me about the whole murder-history. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have gone down in the first place, but hey! That’s what friends are for. So when we went exploring, everything that could go wrong, oh well... When we were halfway down the stairs the door behind us was shut by a breeze. ‘Don’t worry’, Daisy said. ‘The door can’t be locked.’ Then the light flickered and went out. When I turned my flashlight on, I screamed and Daisy screamed too because someone was standing right in front of me. Daisy ran upstairs and left me. I couldn’t move.
When I finally noticed the person in front of me, was actually me, I calmed down and moved nearer. This room had once been a ballet room, the bar was still attached to the wall which was covered in mirror. I touched the wood of the bar, and let my hand slide over it. Then I saw it as in a vision. Me standing in this same room surrounded by three dead bodies.
When the light flipped on again, and Daisy was calmed down and came looking for me, I was shedding tears. Daisy said “I’m so sorry!” a thousand times. She thought I was crying because she had left me alone. I didn’t tell her what I had seen.
Since that day I experience the murder every night, over and over again. In the beginning every single day. Later on it became once a week. But the nightmares never completely disappeared. And this has been going on for three months now. Later on, when Daisy finally told me about the history of the basement, everything fell into place. There once was a girl who was found by her brother in the basement after murdering three people. But I know there’s more to the story.
(Feel free to mail what you come up with to creativewritingugent@gmail.com)
Write a short story or poem based on the first paragraph of Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King (2014): “Augie Odenkirk had a 1997 Datsun that still ran well in spite of high mileage, but gas was expensive, especially for a man with no job, and City Center was on the far side of town, so he decided to take the last bus of the night. He got off at twenty past eleven with his pack on his back and his rolled-up sleeping bag under one arm. He thought he would be glad of the down-filled bag by three A.M. The night was misty and chill.”
😄 (And maybe send in what you came up with to creativewritingugent@gmail.com for feedback!)
