Everybody has a voice in their head. When you’re scared sometimes it’s a loud voice. When you’re happy sometimes it’s a quiet voice. But what do you do when it’s an outside voice?
I remember what I was doing when my voice went outside my head. I was at the mall playing with my friends. But they left me behind because they thought it was funny. People liked to do that to me. It happened a few times before that.
So I was alone and sitting on the sidewalk, crying. Then a tall man in a dark suit walked up to me. He scared me right away because his face was weird. It was all dark and cloudy with a big top hat sitting on it.
“Hi Charlie,” the man said, bending down.
I was still sniffling but I said “hi,” very quietly.
“They all left you Charlie,” the man said.
I looked up at him. “Who left me?”
“Your family, Charlie. They all packed up and went away because you’re such a disappointment. That’s why all your little friends left too, isn’t it? Because you’re a stupid little shit.” Then the tall man walked away.
I panicked and began running back into the mall to find my parents. They told me to meet them at the food court at 1:00 so I ran there and stood, out of breath, looking for them. It was another very scary ten minutes before they showed up and I hugged my Daddy’s leg and cried into it, sobbing about the tall man.
“Charlie, what’s gotten into you?” Daddy asked.
I looked up at him with tears all over my nose and said “The tall man – he said you ran away! He said I’d never see you again! He said –”
But my dad cut me off and put a hand on my shoulder. “It’s alright Charlie. We’re here. Everything’s fine. My goodness.” He didn’t understand anything I said about the tall man or his cloudy head.
My friends never came back for me. They’d decided to go drop stuff off of the overpass. You might be wondering why I hung out with them if they did stuff like that, and it’s a good question, but I didn’t want to be lonely. I’d been lonely before and even bad friends are better than no friends. It’s like pizza.
My dad and my mom and my sister and I drove back home, and I lied and told them that I’d had a great time with my friends because I didn’t want them to know about how sad I was because then they might try and help. Parents always make things worse. But Rosie wasn’t fooled. She knew they’d left me behind again. Even though I was 7 and she was 16 she always liked spending time with me. I knew lots of other boys with teenage sisters and none of them were like that. But Rosie was different.
She talked to me about it afterwards.
“You need to stop hanging out with those guys,” she said, sighing. I nodded. “I mean it,” Rosie said.
“It’s not doing you any good.” I nodded again.
I’d almost forgotten about the tall man, or just thought that I’d had some kind of daydream. We ate dinner and played games afterwards, and laughed like we always did. I felt safe and happy and warm, and there was no reason to think about the scary man with no face. My dad had tried to cook and it was really pretty bad, just like it always was when he tried to cook steak. But we laughed about that too.
That night, though, when I went into my room I saw the tall man waiting for me. I wanted to scream, but for some reason I couldn’t.
“Hi Charlie,” he said, and sat on my bed.
I was too scared to say anything.
“Remember me?”
I nodded.
“Your Daddy’s dead Charlie. He died screaming, and so did your Mommy and Rosie and your dog. I’ve never seen so much blood in one place.” He looked at me silently for a minute as I stood there shaking, not able to understand what he was telling me.
“They’re – they’re dead?”
The tall man stood up and yelled at me “Yes! Are you deaf? I just told you they all died!” I ran out of the room to check on my parents and sister. I ran into my parents’ room screaming and sobbing. They turned on the light and asked me what was going on.
“You – you’re not dead?” I asked, shaking.
“No, of course not. Why would we be dead?” Daddy asked, rubbing his eyes.
“The tall man told me –” but Daddy cut me off.
“I don’t want to hear any more about the tall man Charlie. Go back to sleep.”
I walked back to my room, still shaking a little bit, and lay down in my bed. The tall man was gone, and it looked like he’d never been there. But he had been there. I’d seen him. The rest of the night I kept closing my eyes and seeing the scary things the tall man had told me about. But finally, I fell asleep.
When I fell asleep I had a dream about the tall man. He was standing in front of me with his cloudy head, and I shouted at him and asked him why he’d told me my parents were dead. Why did he tell me that they’d run off in the mall?
He looked at me with his scary cloudy head for a minute, and didn’t say anything. I yelled at him again and asked why he had done those things to me, but he didn’t answer me. When I woke up I was still shouting about the tall man and my parents came rushing in to check on me. I told them that I’d had a nightmare, but I remembered what Daddy had said the night before and I didn’t want to tell them what it was about. They told me that it was okay.
***
At school that day I saw the kids from the mall. They laughed at me but told me to come and sit with them at lunch. They said it was just a joke and I laughed but it wasn’t very funny. Rosie was right that I shouldn’t let them do those things to me, but I remembered what it was like to have no friends. It’s hard when you keep moving from one school to another school over and over again. Daddy’s job kept changing and so we kept going to another place. I’d heard him arguing with Mommy about it but I didn’t stay to listen because it was scary to hear them shouting.
“Come on Charlie, it was funny” Paul said to me when I looked like I was getting upset.
“Yeah, it was, kind of,” I said, trying to smile.
I wished that we didn’t have to keep moving. I hated Daddy for having his job. Why did he have to work in the circus? Why couldn’t he have a normal job, like any other adult? Why didn’t Mommy make him get another job? I talked to Rosie about it, and she didn’t want to complain about it either. I hated her for that too. But now I had to stick around with these terrible friends because of them? How was that fair?
“Hey Charlie?” Paul asked, and I looked up.
“Yeah?”
“Wanna see something cool?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
Everyone stood up and I followed them into the hallway outside the cafeteria. Paul was leading me and I was following a couple steps behind him. We got to the bathrooms and suddenly all the guys jumped on me and started to pants me.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at them, struggling and trying to get away. But they just laughed and took off my pants. Then Paul got me up and shoved me into the girls’ room. I tried to get out but he was leaning on the door from the other side and it wouldn’t budge. All the girls in the bathroom looked over, and some started to giggle and laugh.
I pounded on the door and said “This isn’t funny Paul! Stop it! Cut it out!” But he kept holding the door. All the girls had surrounded me at this point and started laughing and pointing at me. “I said cut it out Paul!” I shouted again. But he didn’t.
Eventually he got tired of holding the door, or maybe a teacher walked by, but he let go of the door and I ran out to grab my pants. I ran to class as fast as I could and buried my face in my hands so no one would see me crying.
Why did we have to move here? I hated Daddy so much right then, and Mommy and Rosie. I hated them more than I’ve ever hated anyone, even more than Paul, because Paul was just a stupid kid. I felt so alone. I knew that I couldn’t go back to those friends anymore after this. They’d never been my friends. Rosie was right. They just wanted to laugh at me.
I’d heard some stuff people tried to whisper behind my back, about Daddy being a circus freak. I heard that stuff everywhere I went. It wasn’t his fault that he was short. He’d been born that way. But I hated him for it anyway. I wished that he would die.
***
I cried the whole walk home. I couldn’t stop myself. But about halfway through I ran into a man on the street. I’d never seen the man before, but when he ran into me I stopped right where I was standing. Then I looked up and he had turned into the tall man.
“Who are you?” I shouted at him.
He stared at me with his weird, no-eyed face and handed me a note. It read: “You’re an ungrateful little bastard, and I’m here to teach you some respect. You don’t care about your family? Why should anyone else care about them either? Signed: The Gratitude Doctor. P.S. If you aren’t grateful enough to them I will come back and I will kill them in front of you. I’m watching.”
The Gratitude Doctor was gone when I looked up. But the note was still there. I crumpled it up in my hand and it started shaking as tears fell down my cheeks. What was happening to me? Who was this man? How did he know what I was thinking or feeling?
I ran home and I was about to push open the door when I saw him again, standing, silent, at the window and pointing a gun at Daddy’s head. I shouted “No!” at him. He held up 3 fingers, then 2, then 1. I shouted at him over and over to stop as the gun went off with an unbelievable bang! But nothing happened. The window didn’t break. Daddy didn’t fall over.
I ran into the house and hugged Daddy’s leg, trembling all over.
“Daddy! Are you okay? Did the Gratitude Doctor get you?”
Daddy looked down at me, surprised.
“The Gratitude Doctor? What are you talking about? Did who get me?”
I looked up at him and realized that nothing bad had happened. He was fine. But then what was the bang?
“Did you hear the bang?”
“What bang? What’s gotten into you Charlie?” he asked, annoyed.
I was still sobbing, but I stopped asking questions. He didn’t know anything about what was happening. He got me to calm down, but it took an hour, and I was still crying a little at dinner when everyone was talking about their day.
I didn’t want to say anything but Daddy kept asking and I mumbled something about the math test. He didn’t ask anymore and I was happy when he let me go to my room afterwards. I pulled my legs up to my chest and kept crying. I thought Daddy was dead. I thought I saw him get shot. What would I do if he died? I wished that he was dead before that but I didn’t mean it! Of course I didn’t! Well, maybe I did mean it then, but I didn’t really want to see him get hurt.
At that exact moment, I saw something on the wall. It looked like it was written in blood. It was a message that said “Look under your bed.” I reached down under my bed and I felt a piece of paper. I picked it up but almost dropped it because I was so scared. When I put it in front of my face I saw that it was a picture. It was Daddy and Mommy and Rosie and they were dead. They didn’t have faces. They didn’t have arms or legs. They were just a big pile of red and bones and skin. As soon as I touched the picture I saw how it happened to them. It was like a movie playing in my head. I saw my parents getting torn apart by the Gratitude Doctor, and I heard him laughing and laughing and laughing.
I dropped the picture and saw that on the other side somebody had written in red
“Are you being a good boy?”