Agateophobia- Fear of insanity
She was a normal girl, for what is normal you might ask, for her, she was a straight A student with a talent for the fine arts, although she never applied for any Fine Art School, she relished her life, she had normal friends, and never would gossip about others, and she would rarely lie to others, unless she felt it would restrain them from the bitter truth. Her name was Isabelle Riley, an Irish name but her great grandparents were merely legal immigrants, nothing too peculiar about her origin, except for the dementia found in her mother’s genetics, she never knew about it, neither has her mother, but it was just something found every few generations.
“For years,” explained Isabelle to her mother late one night. “I thought I was normal, ordinary, nothing different from other people. But now I’ve been having these dreams, of a forest, but when I try walking around I always wake up before I discover anything, I feel like it’s trying to tell me something, is there something wrong with me, mom?” Her blonde hair, golden with specs of glitter shined in the moonlight from her frozen closed window. Her mother, baffled in worriness, attempts to fall for her daughter’s sanity, tries to keep her heart rate down, and lies to help her sleep.
“It’s nothing baby, it’s okay. There’s nothing going to get to you, how about friday after school we’ll go down to the doctor’s office to see about getting you sleeping pills for the insomnia. Does that sound good?” She asked. Isabelle nodded and laid back into her bed, hoping the problems could be solved by her mother, she was worried that the dream would happen again as the thought of the doctors repeated in her mind like a broken record. She was sixteen years old in a neighborhood with a beautiful family, and a bright future, but this was bringing her whole life down, her nightmares. Her mother temporarily prescribed her some sleeping medicine to help her ease and stay asleep for the rest of the night, only if she knew the symptoms to the medicine would impact her daughter. Drowsiness filled Isabeles vision and continued to make her that way until she fell for a light comatose.
She closed her eyes once, and opened them a minute later. There was no light, she thought she had only closed them for just a little bit, but she hadn’t thought it had been hours or until she heard it raining. She looked up at the ceiling then stopped breathing, she felt like there was something odd about the room around her, she didn’t feel at home, at least not alone. She looked around and tried turning on the bedside lamp, it didn’t come on, so she just looked around, seeing if there’s anything odd about her room, something not supposed to be there, then she saw it, a figure. It was a silhouette of a tall man, he had his head tilted to the side, like a hung man would. He rose upon the foot of the bed, and just stood there. His head then shot up, staring at the ceiling, then back down, fidgeting, looking all over the room in inhuman speed, if anyone was to do that, their neck would surely snap. She pulled the covers over her head, closed her eyes, and then shoved her face into my pillow. She felt so tired, so paranoid, so sleepy.
It happened again, the nightmare, silence filled the air and darkness covered the world in a blanket of hell, but she felt the ground, it was metallic or at least it felt like metal. It was cold and hard, she felt around and found a wall. She stood up and right away she butted her head on the ceiling, falling down automatically in a whine of pain. She rose up but weary of the short space she was given to maneuver and felt her way around, imagery was given to her thinking she was kidnapped but she erased that image from her mind and continued to touch the walls and found a corner, and then another and more, she had found that she is stuck in a three dimensional metallic room, a cube. She sat down and thought for a little bit, thinking of where she’s at, how she got there, and what happened before she fell asleep. She felt like she was hallucinating when she saw a light in a shape of an outline of a door, and it grew wider, opened. She got up and slowly crawled to the light, believing it to only be a mirage, but she began accelerating when she notice it not going away. She pushed open what seemed to be a metal door and when she looked beyond the opening she noticed a scenery with luscious green pine trees, flowers of spring bloom, and a white tailed deer living among a flock of birds of mixed colors of blue, green, brown and red.
Isabelle could not believe the scenery she is seeing, she nudged more and more to the edge of the doorway, she moved inch by inch closer to the end until, she fell. Just like a girl who has been shot by cupid’s arrow, just like a boy with untied shoes, stepping on one another by the other shoe, she fell, not a majestic fall of a newborn child into a warm blanket, more of a crash of reality, a notice of perspective, that her natural utopia was a hoax. The trees, once green and full of life, now sage grey with cinders as ash falls from the sky, no healthy pines are left to the world. Flowers, now wilted, black, withered and charred, as well as the animals, left as corpses on the ground, as the gore of their body spilled out onto the once grassy plains. She rose from the dirt ground, riddled with ash and embers and teared up in the sight of the horrors and disappointment, as droplets splashed the ground, evaporating on sight, she sat on her knees and looked at the ground, avoiding her hellhole she is to accept as reality, or whatever world she was in. She stood up and wiped the tears with the ends of her solid grey sweater of polyester. Her parakeet green eyes darted her surroundings as the sage grey trees chipped off pieces of bark one by one as it falls to the ground of scattered twigs and lifeless leaves. Fog began to surround the girl as she looked up. She stood upon her feet and waved fog from her face, it was uneasy and she could not see through, not even the closest tree can be spotted. Slowly the fog reversed and went back to the black inferno in between each tree, the fog revealed a trail which Isabelle followed. She wandered down the trail and noticed something rustling in the trees, the branches or what is left on the trees.
“Where am I going?” She mumbled under her breath. “Am I ever going to get out of this place, I just want to get out of here.” She continued to walk down the path and later found the trail continuing a long way. There was a sense to this scene, a sense of eeriness, something was watching her, more than one. Silhouettes of darkness could be heard from around her, something was talking, rhyming, no, they were, singing.
“Say your prayers. We come for your eyes. We hunt in layers. And cause your demise.” a vortex of small mammalian animals, bats, with small yellow eyes and askew beige fur, wing- spans reaching to five feet and rushing out of the brush of trees. She saw the flood of bats and began to ran, she was never fond of bats, more likely to be under the category as a fear. She ran to the end of the trail and noticed one sign with two arrows, she was ahead of the bats a far enough distance to focus on the writing, it said Notherland on both arrows. There were two ways to go, left or right.
“Well right is right, right?” She forced out a small chuckle and heard the rustles in the trees and decide to hurry on moving her way down the trail. She ran until her heart couldn’t match the need of blood pumping, it was too much for her to run so much, so far, for so long. She stopped when she ran into a bog, the ground kept getting more damp each step she got closer, but she noticed a light cloud in the sky, it is smoke Isabelle thought. She rushed down into the bog and found light in the distance. She bolted to the beacon in the distance and discovered the rest of the connection to the light, a cabin. She ran out of the bog and heard a loud knocking, she walked around the house until she found the origin of the noise. There was a man, maybe in his forties, on a rocking chair on the cabin porch, a double barrell shotgun sat by his side, pointed upwards to the ceiling. The door to the cabin was loose and continued to bang over and over. She walked up the oak steps and went to the door until the man murmured something under his breath, loud enough for the girl to hear.
“It sad how the biters will hurt your feelings but not your soul?” The man said, his silver beard flowed in the breeze as the girl shot him a confused look. His blue eyes stared into thin air and he continued again, “It sad how the biters will hurt your feelings but not your soul?” He repeated. He repeated once more, then another, until he rocked the chair faster and faster, more rapid every second. One click followed by a bang answered the girls plead for him to stop. The shotgun went off and blasted the man’s brains against the ceiling as well as announce the monsters in the forest. The bats who have lost their way to the girl have now been told where her location were by a beacon of noise. The bombardment of bats came once again and Isabelle froze in her steps. She then realized then that the bats were only feet away she turned around and bolted into the house and closed the door, the vortex of bats bursted into the single roomed house and surrounded the girl, spinning around the girl over and over. She covered her eyes in prayer and then felt her surroundings change. She had woken up to the hell she was taught to be a dream, she jumped up in happiness, in relief and rushed down the stairs of her home and smiled as she went to the kitchen. Her mother, black hair to her shoulders, her peach apron pulled over her front. Isabelle pleaded in happiness as she saw her beloved mother and heard her father coming into the house from a night of work. Her joy filled her body like a hot days temperature, then she grabbed her mom’s shoulder and she fell apart, literally. Her body exploded in a detonation of a thousand bats and swarmed around poor Isabelle once more. She froze and was forced to her knees as she saw the scenery change, piece by piece. Her sweater became splattered in blood, as well as her hands. She discovered a knife on the ground in front of her as she noticed the bats became thinner between her and the outer world. Her parents are lying dead on the ground, slit up with cuts on their wrists, throats, and stomachs. She cried into the blood on her hands, as the police sirens surround her.
“For years,” explained Isabelle to her mother late one night. “I thought I was normal, ordinary, nothing different from other people. But I’ve been having these dreams, of a forest, but when I walked around, it ruined me, my mind, forever. Is there something wrong with me? Of course there is, I am a lost soul.” Isabelle, sixteen and now insane, lives at the Junction City Mental Institution for the Criminally Insane, a girl who supposedly went to a land called Notherland, a state of mind where some people with dementia and other mental disorders have when they hold in their insanity too long.
“Laughing, laughing, the sound of children goes, the Devil I may be, for now I eat their souls,” She say in rhyme, rocking back and forth in her straight jacket. “Laughing, laughing, the sound of children goes, for hell this world shall be, where all the demons roam.” Isabelle moved her head around in a circular motion, as a impaired person would, then stopped and looked at the door; she heard something. “C- Can’t you hear it? The singing” She began ranting, laughing every once in a sentence. “They’re singing. They’re singing! You can’t stop them! Nobody can! Haha! Nobody can! Nobody!” Her voice echoes in the halls as other insane members laughed and screamed along. She is forever locked in there, in her dream.
“Forever lost, life and love, beautiful just as, the brightest dove, lost in her mind, a lawful grasp. The titillating pain, forever trapped. The songs the bats, will together all send. You won’t escape, your Notherland. For when she tried, to hold it all in. She had to have killed, the rest of her kin. Now forever trapped, in her horrible cell. Her mind is now, her wonderful Hell.” whispers say in the intercom, over and over again, into the night.
