Prose : Welcome Back, Part 1

Welcome Back

I’ve been to this place before. Many times. I still know the hallways like the back of my hand. I know mostly every stain in every ceiling tile and every good hiding spot from here to the actual children’s ward. Yeah, it’s a hospital. I’ve never had to stay here overnight before, because they didn’t think that my “gift” was intense enough. Shows they’ve never really been inside my head.
I remember the day I first had to go there; I was so scared. I don’t really know what of, since now that I think about it, it isn’t scary at all. I think it was because I was so young, and leaving that chilly room of mine was impossible to even think about when I was so small. Just 4-years-old.
The same tinny, metallic smell lingered in the air back then, and even now, after all these years, it makes me want to choke. There’s something unsettling about this old place but I haven’t quite been after to figure out what it is, exactly. But I know that every visit brings me closer.

Its funny, how so many people can be in one building but it’s always so still, so quiet. It feels, sometimes, like there’s a barrier enclosing every individual, shutting their noises inside with them. It’s one of the many mysteries I’ve never figured out; it’s one of the many mysteries that makes one feel so uneasy when you have to stay here. I noticed the lack of noise when I was small, and I just started screaming, uncontrollably, for what seemed like hours. I had screamed so much I passed out a while later. Right before everything faded I saw something, and I still remember it crisply, to this day, like it was burned into my eyes.
But the thing is, whenever I tell anyone about it, they refuse to believe a word I say! The thing that infuriates me isn’t the fact that no one can imagine this existing, but they think I’m making it all up for attention or something.
Let me back up to the day it happened. I remember it much clearer than most of the things I’ve done earlier this week. Of course they say that some traumatic things are etched into your mind better than things we’d like to remember. Its almost like the things don’t want us to forget. To force us to remember they’re always still possible.

My mother had brought home this painting. It wasn’t as old as it looked, I knew, but there was something about it that told me it had seen a lot. It was of a 4-way intersection, lined with buildings with huge windows and lights on in every one of them. It also felt like there was a million people in every one of them as well, watching me, although I couldn’t see them.
“Momma, where’d you get this from?” I asked her, studying it as it was hanging motionlessly over our over-stuffed sofa.
“An art auction. It’s the strangest thing how no one wanted it.” She replied, wiping her hands on a dishtowel she kept on the oven handle. She walked into the room and stood behind me, also looking at it. Except she had a different way of looking at it than I. She was somehow genuinely intrigued by the monstrosity, while it scared me out of my wits.
I stayed silent and just stared at our new belonging, which began to feel like a member of the family within days. Not because my parents talked about it a lot; in fact its like they had forgotten it was even there! They just walked by it and paid it no mind, while I tried to slink through the room in the shadows, hoping whatever was in that painting wouldn’t notice me. Mother told me I was being ridiculous. But there was always something strange about it, and I wasn’t about to take my chances.
Then there was one day that I remember especially well. I was sitting on the hearthrug, tending to my dolls’ hair and I had the strange, 6th sense feeling. The one that you get when someone’s watching you and you can feel it. I thought maybe that maybe someone was playing a prank on me, making sure I wasn’t looking so they could do something mean like always. I looked up immediately and scanned the room, taking in every detail from one side to the other, including doorways and shadows, and found nothing. I was all alone in that room when I got my first feeling. It was just me, and the painting.
Not even a week after that occurred, something similar happened. I was watching TV, remote in hand, completely absorbed in my cartoons. Give me a break, I was 4-years-old. Anyway, back to what I was saying. I got the watched feeling again, and drew myself up into a little ball in the armchair, not more than 10-feet from the sofa that sat under the painting. Slowly I looked over in the general direction, at first not wanting to move my head at all, just my eyes. I cast a frightened gaze up at the suspect of all these weird feelings, and it sat there as it had for days before. Nothing changed and I eased up a little. ‘Stupid painting.’ I thought to myself and went back to watching my cartoons.
During a search scene, where the man was looking for a gigantic squirrel outside I heard something. Everyone on cartoons had funny voices… So what was I hearing just then? It sounded like whispering, close-by. Not just one whisper, many whispers. Millions of them. Right beside me. I shot a look to the painting and it all stopped. Not a sound in the room besides the over-exaggerated sound effects from the TV. The painting was peaceful, but something was different about it. I got up, almost involuntarily, like my feet were walking without my brain telling them to. I stood in the same place I had when that demonic thing first showed up in our house, staring up at it just as I had then.
Something was definitely different.
I stood for a few minutes, but to my legs it felt like hours. I was so sore when I finally realized the silhouette in the window of one of the very back buildings. Had it been there before? It couldn’t just materialize out of nowhere. But I didn’t spend time to philosophize about this new development; I was screaming and running through the house like the devil himself was on my back.
I stayed the rest of the evening in my bed, a shivering, huddled mass of covers and fear. I didn’t sleep a wink that night.

**To Be Continued**

[ Click here to read the second part of the story. ]