He who Lived Inside Me

There's a monster inside of me. One that I cannot comprehend. My name is Silas; I'm seventeen. I still go to school; everyday, I yearn to get out of it, not because it's boring or hard, but because I, Silas Verdugo, have better, more important matters to attend to. There's always been something inside of me, something darker, deadlier. Unfortunately, my unpaid job doesn't allow for me to explore...my interests.

The night it happened, was the night my demons started. It was November the seventeenth, 2003. I was twelve years old when my mother murdered my father in cold blood, claiming that she was my guardian angel sent from the heavens. Since that, a graveyard-like coldness ran through me, something deeper than the deepest vengeance. I remember that day like it was tomorrow and yesterday blurred in a hurry.

"Dad? What's happening? Why are you locking me-"

"Just stay here, Silas."

His eyes mirrored mine, full of fear, despair, but he hid it with a mask. A mask almost as iron-clad as my mother's alibi.

"Don't leave your room until the sun is down. Do you understand, Silas?" My father asked, his voice filled with urgency.

I nodded. His nod mirrored mine. Then, my father did something he almost never did. He hugged me, he told me he loved me, then he disappeared...forever.

Screaming echoed through the new, near empty ranch house. By the time the sun went down, I wasn't sure if all the sounds I heard were just in my mind, or if something had really happened downstairs. I listened to my dad. I stayed upstairs. As the sun fell, and the moon rose, I opened my door, walked along the wooden floor that seemed to creak extra loud that night, and I inched down the steep, attic-like stair set.

"Dad...?" I called out hesitantly into the dining room, where the dim, flickering light hung over the kitchen island.

"Silas! You shouldn't be down here," My mother chided me softly, wiping a red fluid that I assumed to be fruit punch at the time on a regular dish towel.

"Where's Dad?"

My mother ran her fingers through my jet black hair, a colour and style exactly identical to my father's.

"He went to...he left, Silas."

Left? What did she mean by that?

"Left?! He- he's going to come back, right?"

"Sweetheart," she spoke so softly, it disgusted me. "your father left for good."

Sure, my dad was a pain sometimes. Yes, he had his own issues that he struggled to fight off. But no, there's no way he would leave his son and wife that he loved so dearly just for...good. I frowned, unconvinced, but I went with the lie. I wasn't the biggest fan of being next.

"Hello, sir."

"Hi, I'm here for Sierra Fieldyn."

I slid a polaroid of my mother and her ice blue eyes across the table to the armed man on the other side.

"I'm sorry, we don't have a Sierra Fieldyn at this facility."

I inhaled sharply.

"Sierra Verdugo."

"I'll need to check if-"

"Please,"

I took a glance at his dusty name tag.

"James. That's my mom...I- my grandmother just passed yesterday...I-"

I tried my absolute best to sell it, but even so, every time I rehearsed it in front of a mirror, it sounded exactly like the way she used to read me my bedtime stories. Screwing up wasn't an option, and neither was leaving without red on my ledger.

"Sir, I still need to check if Ms. Verdugo is mentally and physically prepared for a visit."

My jaw clenched, my hands fisted, my vision blurred. As my breathing grew rapid, I gripped the edges of my chair for support. Why now? When I reached the point of hyperventilation, nothing was in my control, but I remember every single detail.

"Ms. Verdugo is my mother! She doesn't belong here."

The tone of my voice shifted drastically; it was nothing new to me, but at the same time, it always felt like the the first. My fist was gripping the collar of the man's shirt as tightly as I could. I wasn't thinking straight. He had a gun, I had a weak fist.

When I woke, I was sitting in a hospital room with no other than Sierra Fieldyn sitting in a chair by my bedside. Her face made me scared that I'd have another outbreak.

"Mother."

I kept my chill, like Dad taught me to. If there was one thing the man was good at, it was hiding his emotions, hiding the deepest darkest secrets behind the already sullen eyes.

"You grew...you look exactly like-"

"Dad when he was young? Maybe if you hadn't put the knife to his chest, I'd actually hear it from him."

The demons had always lived inside of me. I spent half a decade running from them, thinking they were the ones to be scared of. It was plain, simple naivety.

My mother reached out to stroke my arm, I pulled away before she could get any closer to me.

"Sweetheart, you know I was just protecting you," she said with a smile that haunts me in dreams, in nightmares, in real life.

By killing the one person that actually cared for me.

"I'm done running, Mother."

"Silas...your father, he taught you how to-"

"Seeing that he was an NPC in your grand scheme to end up locked in a dungeon, I don't see how this matter concerns you."

The look on her face was horrified, and I loved it. My father taught me how to get my vengeance on people that couldn't be trusted because he missed the target first. He was the one who taught me the art of lying because his truth devoured his being. My father, my father who broke free, he who lied taught me everything.

You know why you're here. You know why I'm still talking to you. Reader, you and I are the same. Broken in our own ways, still running in our own ways. By the time you're reading this, my so called 'demons' don't live inside me anymore, I live with them as one.