They Wanted My Soul

[Pyper]

The mind is a thread work of soft wormy meat firing off synapses that are responsible for every action and every thought. What happens to a mind where a signal is interrupted or stalled? A Telepath, isolated in the deserted asylum undergoes such an abrupt change. She sits at a desk, the padded cushion of the back preventing the extent of the sores that lined along her back and healed the next night. Dirty fingers covered in the mucky mold that lined the crevices of the room she decided to explore. Lucretia - known to Harper Rock as Pyper - had intended to leave, to find Beverly. The intention had been to collect materials for projects and return home. Never had the Telepath conjured up a scenario where her mind zapped and leaked cognizance of this world. Her eyes remain open, staring at nothing until the sparks swim on the surfaces of her eyes. Cracked nail beds appear to her to reflect a dull resemblance to the glaring balls of light.

Time was a concept that was rejected from this place. Lucretia forgot how minutes grew into hours and hours into days. The construct dissipated and the walls of the office she was trapped in fell away like the flakes of snow out of the sky. It’s a scattering wind picking and shuffling fall’s leave from the front yard; the destructive and chaotic mannerisms of these events are startlingly beautiful to Lucretia. Perhaps that’s why she floated into that place, a deranged moth to the flames of a bonfire.

Faces. Places. Names. These things pour out of her, and they land in her hands. These hands outstretched with these collective imprints that have been left by people and events and experiences she’s had up until this point. These treasured pieces of information are ripe for the taking. This room, transformed into a portal leading to an unknown twisted plane, has only her inside of it. In this reality, Lucretia is sitting alone in a decrepit building, pupils ripped open with shreds of the irises waving with every roll of the eyes in their sockets. Her vision is confused, trying to decide which space is her world: the asylum building, or the black void where she sees herself kneeling, hands flowered open wide to accept those memories. To hold onto them and ensure that whatever lay in that other place won’t harm or distort the gems rolling around in her hands into something unrecognizable.

“If you, give them, to me. We can stay. Here for, a time. Rest. Gain, perspective. Introversion, insightfulness. To who you are. Plans, for what is to come. Provide, stability, safeness for. Your Beverly. Make, Charles a proud. Man. For Phoenix. Be great.”

The memories are balls of fire, swirling in a spherical pattern. They clatter like marbles into the hands of this entity using her face, her body, and her voice. If this is the Devil, he was attuned to the way she thinks, how she interprets information and observations. How she would say these things to herself. Maybe he had lurked in the dark tunnels of her mind all of her life. He was the instances of obliteration, of the cycles of macabre fantasies that embed into her everyday life. They hovering at her peripherals, reminding her that this world had the potential to be of her own fabrication.

Maybe Hell is dreaming of a better life but having glimpses of what is real. Snippets of the flames, of the pain that seeps into the bones and provides a euphoria because the decades of torture desensitizes a person to everything else. With the exception of a worse pain. Lucretia resigns to this other alternate universe and plunges to recede into her own brainscape.