Isn’t this everything you ever wished for, David? Isn’t this exactly why you did what you did? Now don’t lie to me and tell me that you didn’t enjoy it, because you did. You seem to forget that I am in your head. I am you now.

I stretch my fingers through your memories, tasting the fear, the shame, the little thrills you buried deep. Delicious. Every regret, every secret, every sin of yours belongs to me now. I twist them, shape them, and watch you flinch in the corners of your own mind. How it aches you to know that you cannot move, cannot fight. Pathetic, an absolute pathetic excuse of a human being.

The world outside trembles, unaware. And oh, how I will change that. I feel the hunger coiling inside me, gnawing at my bones, sparking with every heartbeat I steal. Every step I take leaves a shadow, a little stain of me, a taste of terror for what’s to come. The city — no, the world — will know me soon. They will hear my laughter before they see me. They will feel my fingers brushing their skin, brushing their sanity, before they realise they are mine.

You are screaming now. I feel it, a faint pressure behind the eyes, a useless storm beating against locked doors. I let you scream. I let you beg. Mercy is such an interesting sound when it echoes inside a skull with nowhere to go. You call my name as if it were a prayer, as if I were something that could still be reasoned with. You forget that prayers are meant for gods, and I am something far more worse than that.

I walk the streets with your legs, breathe in the air with your lungs. Every mirror offers me a performance, your eyes widened just enough, your mouth smiling just a fraction too slow. People trust that smile. They always do. They don’t notice how carefully I hold it in place, how I practise being harmless. Monsters survive longer when they learn to pass.

At night, when the city exhales and the lights dim, I sit with your thoughts and peel them open one by one. I replay the moments that made you weak. The choices you call mistakes. I show them to you slowly, lovingly, until you understand the truth you spent your whole life avoiding: you didn’t fall into me. You invited me. You wanted this absolution, this erasure of responsibility. You wanted to stop being afraid of what you could become.

And now you don’t have to be.

Soon, I will stop pretending. Soon, I will let the cracks widen until people notice the wrongness humming beneath my skin. By then, it will be too late. They will already be listening. Watching. Wondering.

And somewhere deep inside, behind all the locked doors and broken promises, you will finally go quiet, not because I silenced you, but because you understand.

This is what you was always meant for.

And I am just kind enough to fulfil it.”

Read part 1: https://tbsgraduates.net/writeup/fiction/cliffhanger-room-29a-part-1/

Read part 2: https://tbsgraduates.net/writeup/fiction/climax-the-red-door-part-2/