THE LITTLE GIRL IN MY HEAD

            I don’t want to do this. I don’t have to.

            Yet, I must.

            I am holding an almost loaded .357 magnum Ruger revolver in my hands—three copper bullets are all that remain in the five steel chambers. I only need just one. What happened to the rest of the bullets—I didn’t want to know. It is not mine. I borrowed—and I use that term loosely—off a friend’s. To be more specific, the gun belongs to his father. He wasn’t a cop but he used it for safekeeping and protection because burglars were forever breaking into his house. They lived in a bad neighbourhood.

            I am in my parents’ bathroom, sitting uncomfortably on the side of the bath. In front of me, there’s a mirror—one of those kinds that substitute for a medicine cupboard. I can’t see my reflection, just the left side of it.

            The boy in the mirror looked like he was on the way to a funeral. My own funeral, perhaps. The reflection’s hair, once golden and shiny like the sun in the late afternoon, was ruffled and seemed to have lost its colour.

            The concept of the five senses of smell, touch, sight, taste and sound lost all its meaning. They held no relevance for me, not in this time and place. Not in this reality. I was numbed right down to the bone. I felt empty, as if a knife had cut me open and all that remained was a huge black cavity inside me. When I touched my cheek, I felt…nothing. When I saw, I felt nothing too. I heard and smelled nothing, except for the faint odour of vomit in the toilet, which unfortunately had been used two minutes earlier. It permeated the air but I pay no attention.

            Seems death is all around me, I thought with a note of irony.

I don’t want to die.  I’m not depressed or have a death wish or anything like that. I look out the window, which overlooks a large proportion of my parents’ balcony on the second storey. In exactly eight minutes, the sun will rise. Though I never had an appreciation for nature, I have never wanted to see the sun rise so much in my life.

            You see, I have this voice in my head. The voice of a little girl. At least it was a girl. Her voice was soft and silky, when she spoke; it was like a harp singing. She may have been the devil for all I care. One thing I know though, is that my mind becomes filled with burning hatred at the thought of her, the little girl. My hatred for her was so strong, it was a battering ram crashing into the gate of a castle. I hated her for what she’d done to me, the things she made me do, forced me against my will to do her bidding as she so much desired.   

I don’t know where or how the little girl appeared. Or why. To this day it still remains as one of life’s mysteries. Maybe, in a few minutes, it won’t be so. But I can remember when it happened, when it started.

            I was eleven, twelve when she came to me in a dream. I was in a cornfield. I was crying because I had lost my parents and was trying in vain, desperately, to look for them. I was alone in the world. I was running, blindly, not knowing which direction I was going.

The cornstalks weren’t helping either. Their long spindly arms grabbed at me, trying to pull me in and trap me so I would never be able to get out. I fought with all I could muster but compared to them, I was a mouse trying to escape from a cat’s grasp. The corns seemed to resemble that of a face, or the shape of a face at least, and they were menacing, their grins cruel.

Then the sky was filled with the most amazing, wonderful shimmering glow. The heavens opened and a girl, with sinuous hair the colour of thunder and the most pure skin I had ever seen, came floating down to me. No, she wasn’t exactly floating. More like walking, as if she was descending down the invisible stairs. She looked fourteen, fifteen and seemed small for her age but the way she carried herself, and her face told otherwise. She was, in fact, older than anyone ever knew. Older than time itself. Maybe even God.

I was trembling and tried to shield my eyes but I could not turn away either. When I saw her eyes, they were not only the colour of sky blue, they were the sky. When she spoke, I was taken by the sound of her voice, it was resonating and so clear it reached the four corners of the globe and beyond.

“Nicholas,” she whispered.

Suddenly I didn’t feel afraid anymore, and a sense of calm and peace washed over me. It was pure bliss. I took her offered hand and she lifted me up, up, up and away from the awful place and took me to a world that had no meaning, no time and no dimension.

Looking back, I realised it may have been Hell, the place of the damned that we went to but at the time I remembered it being a confusion of pulsating purple, white and orange colours, all churning and blending in with each other, like an ocean caught in a thunderstorm except it was different.

It was an abstract, surreal landscape that had no sense of shape, form or size. It was a place that was older than the planet Earth and yet it felt familiar and new to me in some ways, like I’d been there before.

Darkness did not know itself here. And I was fooled even back then because I sensed no evil, only tranquillity and contentment. She was clever, that little girl. She sure disguised herself, took on a mask of an angel, which was probably what she intended for me to see. The little girl swayed me and I was captivated by her.

I keep referring to her as the little girl because that was how I viewed her, she had the appearance of an eight-year old child and was so sweet, so caring and seemed to be full of love.

Appearances can be so deceiving. I blamed the girl for picking me out, of all people, for coming to me in that dream and tortured me, day by day, whispering in my ear to do whatever she commanded. She was the stuff that darkness feared, she was the incarnation of all evil and she was poison that you couldn’t get rid of. You would never know all that just by looking at her, staring into her innocent, wide eyes and a cheeky, sly smile and the way she’d beg you to play with her as if she was really a child. I don’t know what her true appearance is, I guess I will never know.

The little girl tainted my soul, corrupted me and made my existence of eighteen years on earth a lie. I was nothing more than a toy for her to experiment with, I was a lab rat.

It took me a long time to discover the truth, to discover her true intentions and even then it was too late. Call me a cult fanatic but I fear that if I don’t move on, more people will die. Moving on into the unknown, that scares me. I didn’t believe there was a God and that heaven exists. I didn’t know that, once I have a bullet in me, if I would just fade away, disappear like the air or become a spirit and join the other side.

I don’t know why I’m hesitating. I sure didn’t want to live, but I didn’t want to die either. And the only way to kill the little girl, get her out of my head was to die and if I did, maybe I won’t have to hear her voice anymore.

I look at the gun. I look at the closed door leading to my parents’ room. They’re not home, they’re not sleeping under the warm comfortable blankets in their bed where they should be. In a few hours, five hours to be exact, they will come home from a weekend visit to my grandmother’s retirement village to find their son lying still on the hard cold bathroom floor, life faded from his eyes and a sticky pool of blood.

I love my parents so much, it hurts. My heart bleeds for them, so to speak. I was born into this world, a crying baby, like a blossoming flower young and confused. As I grew, evolved, I learned everything I could ever need to know from my parents. I learned to love, to breathe, to walk, to laugh. What I want all in the world was to see them again, to see their old faces, the tired and worry lines etched on them, run to them and hug my parents for one last time. But like everything else in life, fate denies you that. I did not want to depart Earth and leave my parents hit by grief and heartbroken. I only wish I could tell them how, to tell them I was fine, that they need not worry about me. It was a lie of course but it was reassuring to imagine myself talking to my parents.

Do it, a voice hissed from out of nowhere. I had been expecting that.

“Go to hell.” I could barely conceal my rage.

Her laughter was horrible. Ah, I wouldn’t be elsewhere otherwise.

I said nothing.

You know, you will achieve nothing by pulling the trigger. I will still live on, a bullet is just a scratch to me. I will prey on other victims, people just like you. Either way, I win.

“Why did you chose me, why the dream?”

You’re wasting time by asking questions you already know. But I will give you this, since I owe you for having helped me all these years: I was bored. Simple as that.

“You sick deprived bitch. One day I’ll find a way to stop you, I’ll track you down and destroy you.”

It’s such a shame. You have unlimited potential. You could have joined me, you know. Her voice seemed to echo off the walls in my brain.

The sun is rising soon. Every second is passing by. It was a pleasure having you as a friend. I could not have done the work without you.

I could not stand it any longer. A silent tear running down my cheek, I fumbled with the gun, put it where I wanted it to be, and finger poised on the trigger, I spoke the last words on earth.

“This is for you, you bitch.”

And with looking out the window, to the horizon where the light was gradually consuming the darkness of the night, I pulled the trigger.

The dog next door howled.

I was dead before I hit the floor.

   I saw a movie once when I was little, it was about this soldier in the middle of a war who had to travel eight hundred miles home because he and the other soldiers lost a battle with the enemy, and with lack of water and supplies, and badly hurt, he and a couple of survivors set out on a courageous trek across the desert for the journey home. The journey was legendary because they had had to endure the hostile environment and sacrificed their lives in order to come home and see their families. The survivors did get their wish in the end but all of them died before they’d had a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones.

Maybe, someday I would do the same.

To live and love is to die and be loved, and to die is to live and be loved in return…