Estimated reading time — 9 minutes

My doctor gave me this journal to tell my story, since it’s easier to write it than to speak it. Dr. Henley says the act of writing might help me process what happened, might help me find some semblance of peace in this sterile white hell they call treatment. And even though they put me in this asylum to get better, even if I’m here for life, my past still haunts me after twelve years. The screams still echo in my dreams, the taste still lingers on my tongue no matter how many times I brush my teeth until my gums bleed.

I assume you all are wondering how I ended up here, what I did to get locked up in this place. The orderlies whisper about me in the hallways – I can hear them through the thin walls of my cell. They call me the Butcher Boy, the Child Killer, the Monster of Millbrook. So many names for one broken fifteen-year-old who lost everything in a single night. So, sit down and get comfy, and I’ll tell you my story. Every gruesome, blood-soaked detail that led me to this padded room where I count ceiling tiles and wait for death.

It was a cold night in October, 1973, when I was pacing the length of my bedroom. The floorboards creaked beneath my bare feet, each step a metronome marking time until my world would collapse. The smell of faint mold and the screams of my parents fighting again made me nauseous. Their voices carried through the paper-thin walls of our decaying house – Dad’s slurred accusations about Mom’s drinking, Mom’s shrill denials that fooled no one. The sound of breaking glass had become as common as the evening news in our home.

You see, for the past month, my conscience has been fogged by this voice. A broken and siren-like voice that seemed to seep through the cracks in my skull, promising me a life full of peace, an eternal life where I am the God of my world. At first, it was just whispers during the quiet moments – when I was falling asleep, when I was alone in the school bathroom, when I hid in my closet while my parents destroyed each other downstairs. But it grew stronger, more insistent, until it was a constant companion drowning out my own thoughts.

The voice told me things – secret things about my neighbors, about the kids at school, about the darkness that lived in everyone’s hearts. It showed me visions of a world where pain didn’t exist, where I could reshape reality with my bare hands. Where I could make the screaming stop forever.

I tried to block it out, using music and everything in my power to just ignore it. I played my radio so loud that Mrs. Henderson next door complained to my parents. I stuffed cotton in my ears until they bled. I even tried praying, though we hadn’t been to church since I was seven. But the voice laughed at my prayers, told me God had abandoned our house long ago, that only it cared enough to offer me salvation.

The cuts on my arms weren’t from my parents’ fights – they were from my own desperate attempts to feel something other than the voice’s seductive promises. Each slice was a small rebellion, a way to remind myself that I was still human, still in control. But the voice cooed over my pain, told me how beautiful the blood looked, how it tasted so much better than the fear that poisoned everything else.

But over time, I just couldn’t take it anymore. The broken glass, the lacerations on my body from getting in the crossfire of my parents’ crumbling marriage, the way my mother looked through me like I was already dead – it all became too much. The voice grew impatient, angry when I resisted. It showed me images of my parents’ deaths, played them on repeat behind my eyelids until I couldn’t tell if they were nightmares or promises.

That night, when Dad came home drunk and started throwing plates at the wall, when Mom started screaming about how she should have gotten that abortion, when the voice began shrieking so loudly I thought my eardrums would burst – I blacked out, letting that thing take over my mind and body, letting it consume me completely.

The last thing I remember before the darkness was the voice whispering, “Finally, my sweet child. Finally, you understand.”

When I came back to, I panicked. The silence was deafening after so many weeks of constant whispers. I saw what I did, but I don’t remember doing it. All I remember is standing in the pool of my parents’ blood and guts, their bodies mutilated and torn to bits by my own hands. The kitchen looked like a slaughterhouse – blood splattered on the yellow wallpaper, chunks of flesh hanging from the light fixture, my mother’s face carved into something unrecognizable.

The taste of something, meat and blood, was stained on my tongue, the feeling of the raw flesh between my teeth forever burned into my mind. I could feel it under my fingernails, sticky and warm. My clothes were soaked through, my bare feet slipping in the crimson puddle that had been my family.

I was only 15, I didn’t know what to do, so I did what I assumed anyone in my shoes would do, I fled. I ran out into the cold night, far away from the horrors I created in my own home. The October wind cut through my blood-soaked pajamas, but I felt nothing. I was numb, empty, like a puppet with its strings cut.

I cowered in the broken and rotting shelter of an abandoned house near the mountains. One no one has ever tried to fix, left there to rot like everything else in our forgotten town. The house had been empty for decades, its windows boarded up, its roof caved in from years of neglect. But it was shelter, and I was tired of running.

For three days, I lived on rainwater and the few canned goods left in the pantry. I thought maybe it was over, maybe the voice had gotten what it wanted and would leave me alone. I dared to hope that I could turn myself in, confess my sins, and find some kind of peace in prison.

But that voice came to me again, but it wasn’t as gentle as before. It was threatening and vivid in what it said, I had no choice but to keep going. It wouldn’t stop screaming at me, yelling and telling me to follow its rules. To feed it. The voice was stronger now, more confident, like my parents’ murder had given it power.

“You think you can run from me?” it hissed in my mind. “You think you can hide? You are mine now, forever. And you will do as I command, or I will make you suffer in ways you cannot imagine.”

I knew then that what was going on wasn’t just some manic episode, but something beyond what our human mind can imagine. This wasn’t mental illness – this was something ancient, something hungry, something that had been waiting for a broken soul like mine to inhabit.
The voice showed me my first target – Sarah Michelle, a girl from my school who had always been kind to me. She was walking home from her job at the diner, alone on the dark mountain road. The voice told me exactly what to do, where to strike, how to make it quick so she wouldn’t suffer.

But it lied about the suffering part.

I spent over ten years trying to keep it silent, a desperate and silent cry of regret in my actions as I slaughtered and mutilated the innocent souls in my town. Eating and carving into their flesh like some mad, rabid animal. Each kill was supposed to be the last, each feeding was supposed to satisfy the voice’s hunger. But it was never enough.

Sarah was followed by old Mr. Thompson, who had taught me to whittle when I was eight. Then came the Martinez family – mother, father, and two young children who had done nothing but exist in the wrong place at the wrong time. The voice grew stronger with each death, more demanding, more creative in its requests.

It got easier over time, all feeling leaving me, my emotions numb and my body moving on its own. A mindless drone, a slave to the hands of a vengeful creature who prayed onto my feeble mind. I stopped thinking of my victims as people and started seeing them as the voice saw them – as meat, as fuel, as stepping stones to whatever dark purpose it served.

The town of Millbrook lived in terror for a decade. They called me the Mountain Butcher, the Ghost Killer, the Devil’s Son. Police came from three states to hunt me, but the voice always knew where they were, always helped me stay one step ahead. It would whisper their plans in my ear, show me their weaknesses, tell me which ones deserved to die screaming.

Twenty-three people died by my hands over those ten years. Twenty-three souls whose faces I can still see when I close my eyes. The voice kept count, celebrated each milestone, promised that the next one would be the last. But it was never the last.

But when the guns were pulled on me, the blinding red and blue lights making the blood on my skin sparkle like tiny diamonds, I felt my mind clear. That dark and evil fog fading, leaving me to feel every emotion and memory come crashing down on me like a tsunami of guilt and horror.

They found me in the ruins of the old church on the outskirts of town, covered in the blood of Father McKenzie, who had tried to exorcise the voice from my soul. The poor man had no idea what he was dealing with. The voice had laughed at his prayers, mocked his faith, and used my hands to show him just how powerless his God truly was.

When the police surrounded me, when their flashlights cut through the darkness like judgment itself, the voice simply… disappeared. One moment it was there, whispering encouragement, and the next I was alone in my own head for the first time in over a decade.

The silence was deafening.

They locked me in this place for twelve years, and over that time, I haven’t heard that voice. I can still taste the raw meat, feel the blood on my skin even though I’ve tried to get rid of it one too many times. My doctor has tried many times to make sense of what I went through, but to no avail.

Dr. Henley is a kind man, patient in ways I don’t deserve. He’s tried every medication, every therapy, every treatment known to modern psychiatry. But how do you treat something that isn’t mental illness? How do you cure a soul that’s been hollowed out and filled with something else?

The other patients here are broken in their own ways – some hear voices too, but theirs are different. Theirs are products of chemical imbalances, traumatic experiences, genetic predispositions. Mine was something else entirely, something that chose me specifically because I was weak, because I was alone, because I was desperate enough to listen.

Though, I’ve recently started noticing how my doctor has been acting… Strange. He’s more on edge and paranoid, distant and easily annoyed. Dr. Henley used to spend hours with me, genuinely concerned about my progress. But for the past few weeks, he’s been cutting our sessions short, avoiding eye contact, his hands shaking when he writes in his notes.

I thought maybe he was just tired, maybe dealing with problems at home. But then I started noticing other things – the way he stared at the other patients with hunger in his eyes, the way he licked his lips when they talked about their pain, the way he’d disappear for hours at a time without explanation.

But it was when I watched him slaughter and mutilate a dozen patients and a handful of staff members, when they dragged him off the pile of bloody flesh, still chewing on the raw meat just like they did with me years ago is when I knew it was back. The voice had found a new host, someone with access to vulnerable people, someone who could feed it more efficiently than a scared teenager hiding in the mountains.

I watched from my cell window as they loaded Dr. Henley into the same kind of transport vehicle that had brought me here twelve years ago. His eyes met mine for a moment, and I saw something familiar looking back at me – that same hungry, ancient intelligence that had lived in my head for so long.

And then he smiled, and I heard it – faint but unmistakable – the voice whispering in the wind: “Did you miss me, my sweet child?”

I fear what’s going to happen when it gets its fill, and if it’s going to come back to finish what it started with me. Because I know now that I was never cured, never free. I was just abandoned, left empty and hollow while the voice found someone more useful.

The new doctor they’ve assigned to me is young, eager, full of hope that she can succeed where Dr. Henley failed. Her name is Dr. Sarah Chen, and she has kind eyes and a gentle voice. She reminds me of Sarah Michelle, the first girl I killed all those years ago.

I’ve been trying to warn her, but she thinks it’s just another delusion, another symptom of my fractured mind. She doesn’t understand that the voice isn’t gone – it’s just waiting, watching, choosing its moment to return.

Sometimes, in the quiet hours before dawn, I can hear it calling to me from somewhere far away. It’s patient now, confident that I’ll always be here when it needs me. And the terrible truth is, I think it’s right.

I am not the first person it has chosen, and I won’t be the last. The voice is eternal, hungry, and it will never stop feeding.

God help us all. If he even existed at all.

Credit: A. May

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