3rd Eye: Message Left On An Answering Machine

"They may have told you things, things they will have assured you are the truth. But they lied. No one ever tells the truth anymore. I’m not sure they ever did. I could be lying to you now. I hope I’m not.

Just listen. Make up your own mind, you can still think for yourself can’t you? Shutup! Shutup!
No! Not you… Its hard to explain. Please listen and well… just listen.

I was like you once, normal things happened to me. I had friends and people I trusted. Yeah count them on your fingers, how many people in your life do you really trust?

With your life? Your money? Your wife?

Yeah now you see some truth, flipping the bird and there is only one person you have left. Did you include yourself?
I did. Now I can’t even count one person that I trust implicitly.

I know it sounds crazy. Paranoid too. But have you ever stopped to consider that maybe….just maybe there is some truth to the paranoiacs? Something must be making them afraid.

It started out strangely enough with nothing out of the ordinairy. I was driving to work two mornings ago and in the usual stress of rush hour traffic a new voice suddenly spoke with a quiet intensity in my head. "Kill them all." It said. My rational mind hardly noticed, it was a passing gesture, a flash of road rage. Yes killing every other road user would have made my morning commute easier – but there was no urge to act on the suggestion.

The morning passed uneventfully, in a post lunch meeting something worse than that voice.

It happened while a visiting exec, one of these new breed of college educated, don’t equal men, destroy them blonde goddesses. She was all tits and ass. But she talked sense and held my attention. Held it that is until an image of her naked, tied down with barbed wire, covered in filth and screaming while some shadowy figure did things to her that I don’t even want to begin to describe, flashed in my mind.
I started, sure I had dozed off into some stress induced nightmare. But it was real, I could smell her fear. I awoke to laughter, but it was not directed at me. It wasn’t even coming from anyone at the table.

For the rest of the day I was nervous and flinched at every sound and sudden movement. By the time I lay down to sleep that night I was hearing snippets of words and conversations, like the half-heard echoes of a crossed phone line. I checked and double-checked that radio’s and stereos and TV’s were switched off. My wife assured me several times that she had not spoken, and I only believed her because the voices I heard were predominantly male.

Dreams came last night, terrible lurid fantasies of rape and murder, of torture and cannibalism, living bodies writhed and rotted, screaming at me with torn black tongues. And with the visions came a stench I can't begin to describe.

By this morning I was feeling sick and fevered. I made it into the office, despite the fact that every few moments in my peripheral vision small black shadows like cats, or large rats would scamper past while the voices ordered me to stab and crush and burn and cut and rape and strangle and impale.

I spoke calmly to myself, concluded that I was coming down with a bad flu, or even worse some kind of nervous breakdown. I decided that I would apply for some early vacation time, perhaps even take a long weekend, make an appointment to see Dr Greenlane…
I did none of those things.

I did however bash my secretary’s face in with a desk lamp. One of those solid metal based ones. Of course it wasn’t my secretary I was battering to death. It was something horrible, something with eyes that leaked stinking pus and leprous hands that groped for my clean flesh.
No one noticed.

I came home early and found my wife dead on the floor. I remembered then that she had become something horrible that morning too.

I sat down then in the den. I sat with the shades drawn and the lights off. I sat in the midday gloom and listened to what was going on around me.

I learned some things, things I can’t share, not even with you. I learned that I have demons in my head. Demons for want of a better word. Demons that corrupt and twist and destroy anything pure and good and clean. They are laughing even now. They have won. They are goading me to go on and do more for them, destroy children and attack women. Torture, kill, rape, eat living flesh off the bones.

So take my story as a warning. Or a guide. Or a moral lesson.
I know what must be done now. I have cleaned my gun already.

Now I am loading it.

Tell the coroner it was not a suicide, it was an assassination."

Then there followed the sound of a gun shot and then moments later the tape ran out and stopped recording.

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