Inside of every mind there is the potential for psychotic behavior. Not that every person will become psychotic; many people are never exposed to the "triggers" that will set them off; but the potential is there. For most people, the trigger is stress. Whether it originates at work or at home, unmanaged stress builds up like hot gas in a glass bottle, until the pressure has become too great and the bottle -that is, the mind- shatters. The trigger that sets insanity's ball rolling may not even be connected in any way to the problem itself; it simply overloads the circuits and the whole mental grid goes up in fireworks.
For others, the trigger is some sort of trauma. If either viewing traumatic events or experiencing them firsthand, these people snap under those strenuous circumstances. If stress can be compared to bottled gas, then trauma is something like a stick of dynamite in the bottle. The mind is there one moment, functioning properly, and the next it is completely gone, creating a macabre magic show of sorts.
The first time I met Lucy (I still don't know her real name; she never told me, but seemed to accept the name I gave her) I was taking a short siesta around three o'clock in the afternoon. Suddenly, I was aware of something that could not be seen, only felt. Call me crazy, I probably was... am... whatever, but I felt what I can only describe as Evil, capital E, oozing from the corner of my cramped bedroom, right beside the giant oak dresser with the mirror on the back.
I sat up in bed, staring at the shadow beside the dresser. There was nothing there to cast the shadow, nothing blocking the passage of light from the dim overhead bulb on the dirty ceiling fan to that corner of the room; the shadow simply was. I sucked in a deep breath, and it felt like I could have inhaled every bit of air in that apartment, and half the air outside, too. I'm not sure how long I had been holding my breath, but it must have been quite some time; if I had had the presence of mind to look in the mirror over the dresser at that point, I'm sure my face would have been red or blue or purple or some other unnatural color. As it was, my eyes were firmly fixed on the ethereal darkness in the corner.
I could have sworn it moved.
I sat looking at it, staring into it, for ten minutes or an hour, trying to catch it moving again. I don't think I blinked once. All this time, those horrible Evil waves kept washing over me, never moving the air. I was soaked in sweat. I know that whenever someone describes that sort of situation they usually say it gets cold in the room, or that they feel some sort of a chill run up their spine, but this thing was hot. The closest thing to that feeling I can think of was having pneumonia. I had that once, as a child, and my lungs never have really recovered from it. It was like that- a hot, humid, infected feeling. I got up and turned on the fan, and that helped a little, I guess. Finally, I was convinced that there was an It in my room, but whatever It was was just part of my imagination, brought about by extreme exhaustion. I laid back down and tried to relax, but all I could do was stare, hypnotized, at the filthy ceiling fan and the old light as the blades continued to make a soft whistling noise, barely audible above the hum of the motor. My life was about to go straight to hell, do not pass go, etc., and I somehow knew it.
Stress? Trauma? Or Something else?
I don't know or care anymore.
Because that's when she spoke to me.
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