My name is Luca, a 22-year-old guy, shackled by the weight of depression. Life was a monotonous drag; 6 hours of college, 4 hours of writing blog articles for a college degree affiliate, smoking weed all night until I dozed off, and then repeating. But things took a turn when I first talked to her.
Harem texted me on VSCO, a platform I used to escape my reality by posting grunge pictures that I took everywhere I went.
Harem, a final year med student, had an uncanny understanding of my world. Our tastes in music, spiritual interests, and even our aesthetics synced perfectly. She was like a melody in the static of my life.
In the first 24 hours of talking to her, she laid out her life in front of me, painting vivid pictures with her words. It felt intimate like she was allowing me to peer into her soul. The second day, she asked me how I percieved her. With caution, I weaved an image of her with my words. She said I was spot on and no one had ever been able to describe her personality so well. A part of me felt elated, but another part felt a strange, unsettling sensation because of how escalating everything was.
Our bond grew with each passing day. The late-night calls, her voice soothing my anxious heart, became my addiction. She fed my loneliness with her attention, and like a moth to a flame, I was drawn in. The day she coaxed a confession out of me, I bared my heart. Her response was a sledgehammer to my world - she didn’t feel the same way. She wanted us to be ‘something greater’, the meaning of which I was too naive, and intoxicated by desire, to understand at first. Her words shattered me but my obsession for her kept me tethered.
One night, Harem sent me a disturbing picture. Her bedsheets were smeared with blood, and her thighs bore violent marks as if she’d been grabbed by a beast. She asked me to stay on call, and my concern for her overpowered the creeping dread.
The line was filled with eerie static and whispers I couldn’t make out. Then a horrifying scream pierced the night, making my blood run cold. It was Harem. But before I could react, the call was cut. The next day, she acted like nothing happened, and my anxiety escalated into sheer panic.
Sleep began to elude me. Night terrors took over, cold sweats drenched me, and the feeling of being watched consumed me. I needed to confront Harem. I needed to find closure.
The day I finally met Harem, she was even more captivating than I’d imagined. She stood at the doorstep of the apartment I had rented for her to stay in, a silhouette against the warm evening glow. Her hair fell in waves around her face, and her eyes, a mysterious blend of hues, sparkled with a kind of intensity I’d only experienced in our late-night conversations.
She smiled a smile that had an odd edge to it, both comforting and eerie. But at that moment, all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of relief, of being finally able to see her in person, I didn’t wanna bring up the conversation related to that terrifying encounter because things felt normal for once.
That night, however, everything took a strange turn. I was restless and didn’t wanna stay the night over because it was as if the apartment was whispering to me in a language I couldn’t understand. Shadows moved in the corners of my eyes, the silence seemed to be breathing. I was caught in a grip of unease, so I told Harem that I had some work to do and hadn’t brought my laptop and left abruptly, promising to stay the night tomorrow.
The next morning, she sent me a video. It was the apartment hallway, but it wasn’t the bland, beige walls that made my heart race. It was the sight of scattered bloodstains. I was confused and wanted answers. She asked me to return, and against all my instincts, I did. I asked the complex manager about the bloodstains and he told me that some drunk guy living right next to our apartment (75B) was running around with a sharp cut on his wrist trying to find his door. Confused even more, I went back upstairs and found the apartment in question locked from the outside, the residents had presumably left in a hurry.
For two days, I navigated this unsettling landscape. Harem was a constant presence, sometimes engaging, sometimes distant. We talked, we laughed, but behind her eyes, I sensed a darkness that left me cold.
On the last day, I wanted to confront her about that night but my head was pulsating with an unbearable migraine. Harem, with her med student aura, handed me a light blue liquid in a dropper bottle. She said it was lorazepam. I trusted her medical knowledge, so I drank, resting my head on the couch afterward. As the liquid coursed through me, she put on “Schism” by Tool, a song I recognized from my early college days, the psych-rock phase, but this time it felt a little different.
The haunting melody enveloped the room, seeping into my pores, seeping into my mind. As the song swelled, I felt a presence creeping inside me, a darkness attempting to claim me. My heartbeat synchronised with the pounding bassline, my consciousness warped and twisted, much like the room around me. I could see Harem watching me, whispering something, her once comforting presence now laced with something sinister. I resisted, I fought, but it was futile. My world warped, the room spun, and the whispers grew louder. Harem’s face contorted into an unsettling grin. “Relax, Arham. Let it take over.” It was in this warped reality I realised, Harem wasn’t who I thought she was. I was not her confidant, but her prey. The realisation hit me just as everything went black.
When I woke up, the apartment was hauntingly empty. Harem was gone, her presence replaced by a suffocating dread that seemed to pulse with the very air around me. The whispers were no longer distant echoes; they echoed loudly in my mind, forming sinister sentences that made my heart race. Shadows danced menacingly, moving as though they were alive, skittering away when I turned my gaze towards them.
Harem, the girl I had been obsessed with, had trapped me in my own mind, and turned me into a prisoner in my own body. The entity that she had summoned was now my unseen tormentor, a constant dark presence. It felt like an invisible chain, tethering me to a realm I could neither understand nor escape from.
I returned home, hoping the familiar surroundings would offer me some semblance of normalcy. But my tormentor followed me. My parents could see it too; the lights would flicker, the rooms would grow cold and the air would be filled with a chilling sense of unease. They were scared, helpless as they watched their son being consumed by something they couldn’t fight.
One night, a dream added a new layer to my growing horror. In it, I was back at the apartment with Harem. We were talking, laughing, just like before. But as the dream continued, Harem’s image began to distort. Her eyes turned pitch black, her smile twisted into a malevolent smirk and her skin darkened until she was an unrecognizable demon. She was the embodiment of the terror that held me captive.
I woke up screaming, sweat drenching my body. The dream felt like a cruel mockery of my reality, Harem’s demonic form a testament to the nightmare that my life had become.
My life now is a perpetual cycle of fear, anxiety, and battles against unseen forces. My once comforting solitude has transformed into solitary confinement with my demonic tormentor. I left home and haven’t seen my parents in a year. The corners of the internet, once my refuge, are now a minefield of memories of Harem. They serve as a grotesque reminder of the past, of the girl who turned my life into a living nightmare.
I have, however, learned to live with it, in the most literal sense of the word. I have accepted the fact that I’m not alone in my own body. The entities, though unseen, are a constant part of my life. They speak, I listen. They show, I see. I have resigned to my fate, a fate I could have never envisioned for myself. I still don’t understand why she did what she did.
Hell, I don’t even know what she did to me. I am posting this account here to see if maybe someone has any answers at all for me.
Even if they don’t maybe it will serve as a digital imprint of my agony.