Mental Snare
Audiobook: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vspJGNoWFhk
A man follows me; or less than a man, a figure of a man; and worse than following me, he also subdues me with a permanent stare, while I try to run away from him. I can feel his face, dark and ghastly, upon me at every step; at the same time every deformity of his countenance blending with my body and his dark eyes, of changing colours, piercing my neck. I know he watches me from the top of that mountain, as if I were just another little mouse, just another prey, waiting for the hawk to decide to swoop down on it and tear its flesh apart with cold and merciless claws. Still I run, regardless of any future that may exist, time that passes or has to pass, or even the long journey to be experienced and even more! if that were possible. Through that dense and unknown forest, I run with a single goal. But he seems to play in my mind with confusing whispers and knows that I move forward more by inertia, than by will, and I end up with the urge to go back or at least stop. So I thank my only instinct which is to run, because there is a city on a plain, that, although I have not visited, I am certain it exists.
The whispers turn into even more predators; they make me shiver. His every word, tone and pause seems to shape my environment. I try my best to avoid the obstacles he puts in my way, jumping or crawling through the worst possible places, trying to leave behind those huge and poisonous spiders, frogs, snakes and other hidden beasts, impossible to see… But one after another they manage to rupture through my consciousness and tear open my world that I thought I knew, silently deformed by him from within since the very beginning…. Then I suddenly jump off a cliff, and see the lights of the city in the distance with hope; I fall rolling down a very steep hill.
But what if these predators are also human? Little children trained and desensitized by him who surely don’t understand that we are of the same kind. Or at least that’s what I think I am, until I look at my body and see only a paralyzed deer eaten alive. In this state of putrefaction I focus on an image that has been forming while trying to survive: A large dark room in which I am on the floor, being absorbed by gigantic rounded structures. Here his deep voice sounds again, echoing off the walls, telling me that I’m not broken yet, that he hasn’t had enough fun, that I’ll keep going until he sees me suffer the worst conceivable death.