I’m not going to start this post like other people probably do, with ‘this type of thing had never happened to me before’ or ‘everything was just fine before this’. In fact, what I’m about to tell you is something I considered normal for the longest time, so normal that I had never even brought it up to other people, just assuming they’d gone through the same things. It wasn’t until last year that I learnt how exactly my family differed from the others.
For as long as I can remember there’s always been me, my mother, my father, my sister and this voice. A voice that would lull me to sleep at night when I was scared, talk to me whenever I was lonely and most importantly, was always there. My parents treated the voice like it was normal so my sister and I did the same, welcoming it whenever it came to talk to us in its indistinct whispers or vague hums.
It really wasn’t until I was older that I started noticing some things, details that I easily glossed over as a child that were becoming more and more prominent as I aged. Like how I never saw my father without a drink in his hand, or how often my mother would disappear from the room only to come back with red rimmed eyes and a sad smile. I remember being confused, not yet knowing what those things meant as I burrowed myself into my old dinosaur bed sheets. That night the voice sang to me, a melody without words that comforted me in ways my parents never had.
Then it was all fine, or at least I told myself it was, I started to ignore my parents strange actions and instead focused on myself, trying to enjoy my life to the best of my abilities. Until one night at dinner a chair stayed empty at our plain old table, “Where’s dad?” I remember my sister asking, always the more talkative one out of the two of us.
“Dad’s going to be away for a little while.” My mother answered with an expression I had never seen her wear before, I could almost swear her eyes were completely devoid of light that night. My sister and I continued our meal in silence after that, both of us simply too nervous to ask anything else.
My mother was right as I didn’t see my father again until nearly two months had passed, including my birthday. When I finally did see his face again it was as if I couldn’t recognize him, physically he looked exactly the same if not a little paler, but the air around him frightened me more than I can put into words. My mother acted careful around him, as if he were made of glass and my sister quickly started to act the same soon thereafter. I was left confused, severely lacking the information everyone seemed to have except for me.
I was desperate to interact with my father again but the voice would warn me, hissing like an angry cat every time I got too close to him. I didn’t know why the voice was acting this way, after years of it comforting me and keeping me company I was shocked at the violent noise it would emit whenever my dad was near. Unsure of what to do, I trusted the voice and stayed away from my father, noticing how my sister seemed to be doing the exact same thing.
Here’s the stage of my life that I constantly think back to, wondering how I could’ve been so ignorant, so naive and so completely stupid that I didn’t notice the signs that were right in front of me. As I’ve said before my sister was always the talkative one between us, the one to fill in the silent voids and awkward silences and in a way it became a comfort to hear her spout some random fun facts of the day, no matter how often I would roll my eyes at her antics. For some reason that I found unbelievably important and yet cannot for the life of me remember (I guess it wasn’t that important after all) I didn’t notice the slow deterioration of my family.
My father was the first domino to fall, no longer just drinking, instead he was filled with anger, it didn’t matter if it was a small inconvenience or not, he would still explode in a rage that shook the house. To me, that was a normal Friday night as I would hide in my room with the door locked and my headphones blasting music into my ears. My mother was never so lucky.
Then my sister, the one who always stood strong for me, was the second to fall. I can only vaguely remember that day, but the one thing that I will always recall is my mother’s screams when she opened the door to that bathroom, not even because of the horror that laced her voice, but because I swear to god I could hear someone laughing while she screamed.
My sister was different after that day, no longer filled with fun facts but instead it was like she was an empty corpse and as the days went by she started to look more and more like one. Her bones became more prominent through her skin which looked as if it was stretching itself thin around her fragile body, but it still seemed like it wasn’t enough for her. I remember watching her leave the table, her plate still full as she retreated into her bedroom where no one dared to disturb her.
But most importantly, I remember the ride to the hospital. I remember the heart monitor, the tubes, the sterile equipment and the look of absolute hatred on my sister’s gaunt face. She wouldn’t talk to anyone as she lay in that hospital bed, filled with anger, for our parents, for the hospital, for herself and even for society in general.
I would often sit in the chairs outside of her room while our parents would sit inside, I couldn’t bear it, because while she looked at them with a burning rage, she looked at me like I was barely there. I understand how selfish that all is, but it scared me, terrified me to my very core. It wasn’t until our parents were talking with the doctor about something important that I couldn’t fully understand that my sister finally looked at me like I was actually there and she said these exact words, “Don’t listen.”
That was the first time she had spoken to me since her admittance to the hospital, hell probably for longer, but I couldn’t focus on that after she spoke such cryptid words. I tried to talk to her again, but she went right back to looking at me as if I were simply a boring painting on the wall. When I got home that night and stood in the very same bathroom she once tried to take her very life in, I looked at myself in the mirror trying to place myself into my sister’s shoes and figure out what her cryptid message meant.
I stared directly into my own eyes and heard a distant whisper, like it was coming from an entirely different side of the house, a side that no one currently inhabited. It was coming from my sister’s room, a part of my brain supplied. As I walked closer and closer to her room, the whispering got louder until I could practically feel the vibrations of it. It was the voice, and it wanted to show me something important.
Opening the door to my sister’s room I was greeted with almost complete darkness before I fumbled around for the light switch, once the light was on I immediately preferred it pitch black. The floor was covered with dirty clothes and old food could be seen buried underneath shirts and different pants I couldn’t even recognise. The one thing that truly did stick out to me though was a book on my sister’s unmade bed that was barely hidden by a pillow on top of it.
Carefully tiptoeing my way through dirty clothes and old food I made my way towards the book, a basic pastel blue notebook with a cheesy ‘You can do it!’ printed in white on the cover. I opened the book and realised quickly, this was her diary. For the sake of privacy I’m not going to go into too much depth here, but it became clear almost immediately that my sister knew much more than I did.
She went into details of this ‘curse’ that has been haunting my father’s side for hundreds of years now. She wrote of it like it was a joke, but the further I read the more it all pieced together. My father’s father died young, only a couple years after my father was born actually, it was declared unsolved but all those who knew him claimed he had killed himself and had been attempting for many many years. My sister joked that he was cursed to never succeed and forever be tormented by it, with his pain being passed on to his son as the ultimate torment.
The second I finished reading, the voice laughed, it laughed like the best joke in the world had just been told and everything clicked into place for me. It was the curse and this, it was the beginning of my torment. Its cackles sounded like lightning strikes as I processed what I had come to realise. It is what sent my father away, it is what happened in that bathroom and it is why my sister was in the hospital. Fuelled by pure determination I came to the decision that this curse would end with me, no matter what it took.
That was about a year ago now and things have certainly changed. My sister came back home from the hospital and I realised quickly that she will never be the same person that she was all those years ago. She’s eating again and I can tell that she’s in no real danger, but I still can’t help but worry that one day I’ll open the bathroom door and see something terrifying.
My father is… pretty much the same, still drinking and yelling his days away, but my mother, my poor pitiful mother who married into this disaster, cries every chance she gets. She cries for her husband, for her children and for herself as she spends every day getting ready for another fight where she loses parts of herself every time.
As for me, I’ve had the voice keeping me company. Every minute of the day I hear it whisper in my ear, indistinct but nonetheless threatening as it tries to wear me down. I like to think I’ve held myself up pretty nicely despite it all. If you can manage to ignore the circles under my eyes and my incredibly greasy hair, I almost look like a decent member of society. I’ve been spending all my time trying to come up with a way to end the curse on my family, and I think I’ve finally figured it out. That’s why I’m writing all of this, as both an explanation and if it ever comes to it, a guide on how to deal with the voice if it ever comes back after this.
I’m currently in my room typing this all up, so forgive me if my text starts to become a little sloppy, after all the pills should be kicking in soon. The voice is laughing right now, the noise bouncing around in the four walls of my bedroom. It’s almost like it’s laughing directly at me, like I’m a clown in a circus performing tricks just for its amusement.
I don’t think it fully believes me
Guess I’ll wait until the laughing stops then