This is a story that I wrote for my school's newspaper, though it never got in it. This is the real version and not the dummed down one. Yes , this is the story that you are looking for. A cookie if you can guess where the name Butch Hannigan came from.

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All In Your Head

"The first time it happened was on my sixth birthday. My mother and I had gone to the carnival to celebrate. I had been sitting on a bench by the ferris wheel, waiting for her to return with drinks, when I spotted him. He was a man of at least seventy with wrinkled skin and gray hair obscured by a tall hat. Above his hand a multitude of brightly colored balloons hovered, their colors contrasting with the pure white of the mans suit. I had been young then and easily amazed. I wanted one of those balloons with a want that only a small child could have. I was very obedient in those days though, always doing what I was told, never straying too far fro the proverbial path, but something about those balloons drew me in. I new I shouldn't get up, as the crowd had thickened and even one older that myself at that time could get lost in the throng of people. My internal debate was cut short by kind words spoken.

'You wanted one of these, did you not?'

I looked up in shock and the man held a red balloon out to me a smile on his face. Slowly a smile worked its way onto my face.

'Really! For me?'

He laughed.

'Yes, of course.'

I reached a small hand out and took the balloon.

'Thank you, mister!'

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my mother on her way back.

'That's my mother over...' I trailed off, the man was not there.

The first thing my mother noticed when she saw me was the balloon.

'where did you get that?' she asked me.

I told her about the man.

'That was nice of him. Did you remember to thank him?'

I nodded.

'That's good. Now come on, there's still an hour or two until the sun goes down, lets go enjoy the day.'

We enjoyed the carnival until the sun was low on the horizon. When I got home, my mother turned on the news channel. On the news there was a big story about a car crash and the man that had died in it yesterday afternoon. A picture materialized on the screen. I recognized the man almost immediately.

'Mama! Mama!' I called out to her and she waled out of the kitchen where she had been preparing dinner.

"What is it?" I pointed to the television which was still showing the picture of the man.

'That's the man I saw. The one that gave me the balloon!'

My mother just frowned, 'Don't be silly Adrian, that man is no longer with us. He was in a car crash. Now come on, dinner is ready. I made sandwiches for us.'
I was left there to wonder what she had meant what she had meant. I knew I was right, though. I knew that was the man. My mother always told me I was special, but I guess, in reality, she didn't know how right she was.

Over the next few years of my life I saw many more them. Some of these "ghosts", as I called them, I wasn't sure if that's what they really were, but I wasn't about to ask, were hard to tell apart from regular humans. Others...I don't even want to talk about it. Let's just say that they were the stuff of nightmares.

I told my mother about what I saw a week after my eighth birthday. She laughed and said that she believed me. I was still a child then, so I believed her and, after that, I told her of all the apparitions that I had seen. It took the good part of a year for me to realize that she didn't actually believe me and what I had once thought were smiles when I told her, were actually looks of distress. I stopped telling her about the sightings. She thought that I had gotten over it, that it was just a childhood phase. I let her keep on believing that.

The real story, I guess, started when Hannigan pushed me down the stairs. He said it was an accident. I believed him. He really hadn't meant to do that. He had meant to push me out the window, but I had grabbed the ledge and tripped, causing me to fall down the cold stone steps. I was lucky. I had no broken bones and only a couple of bruises. They let me go home early from school. I suppose it was just to make them look better.

I had told my best friend about the ghosts and he, in turn, had told the whole school. If I had few friends before, I had none after that. Butch Hannigan, the school bully, had taken a liking to picking on me and this was not the first time he had done something like this. The school didn't do anything anymore, and just sent me home without another word.

I think that if it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have met him. Or, maybe, I would have. I'm not quite sure anymore. My house is only a short distance from the school so I usually walked to and from school. I was about two blocks away from my house when I began to hear the music. It was a haunting melody that seemed to draw me in like iron to an electromagnet. I slowly turned the corner, In the opposite direction of my house, I didn't really want to go home anyway. The music grew in volume as I neared the source, and I was soon able to recognize the instrument as a guitar. It was shortly after that when I saw him for the very first time in an empty lot that I never knew existed. He looked up at me and smiled and in that instant I knew. We were the same.

His name was Adam Lang. he was my same age with shaggy shoulder length brown hair and an almost feminine appearance. He didn't go to my school, he told me he went to an expensive private school in town. We were best friends from the moment we met and we will continue to be until the day we die. I was glad that I had filnally found, after a life of searching, someone that could see the same things that I could. Nothing mattered anymore, I knew I wasn't alone."

A pause.

“Is that enough for you, Doctor?”

An oppressive silence blanketed the room, broken only by the ticking of a clock.

"Yes, that will be fine".

The man got up from his chair. His white coat fell past his knees. He turned to go, but stopped just before the door, the light from the hall making the wrinkles on his old face more prominent.

"You know that none of that was real, right, ? There was no Adam. He never existed."

The blond boy made no response and the man walked away leaving the boy alone in the all enveloping white. To him it was all more real than the man would ever be.

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