1

I first heard it on a Wednesday.

It was not a good Wednesday, when the general attitude seems to be that you’re halfway to the weekend, but a terrible Wednesday, smack in the middle of winter with snow that reached your knees and awful, dark things happening all around the world, not just outside your house, in your street, in your alleys. Christmas had come and gone, Jesus had passed unnoticed through the town, leaving not a trace behind him. My friend who was religious said so, anyway.

The town in which I lived was small and nondescript from an outside perspective. Once in a while you ran into people with faraway dialects and accents, come from elsewhere for some strange reason — to visit, one would presume, but one could never understand why. They all acquired the same expression once you asked this very question, an expression that witnessed of their own similar incomprehension. Embarrassed to admit the place was no fun, and disappointed to have wasted time and money, they never continued to make conversation.

From an inside perspective, the tourist centre does not exist. The sun does not shine anyplace but the beach. The smell of cow dung is not rural.

It’s difficult to explain.

It was a Wednesday, and I had left my two weeks notice on my father’s desk the previous month. My mother was at home, in the house, nursing an injured shoulder to the best of her ability. It seemed quite an effort for her to avoid chores like vacuuming, washing dishes and clothes, chasing cobwebs from corners and shoveling snow from the front steps. She found it very easy complaining about the pain in her shoulder, however, and I had escaped her madness by placing myself firmly in the only local coffee place.

I had once been intimate with the owner’s daughter for a relatively long period of time, and so her father, a loud Russian man, tolerated my presence for at least three hours before ushering me out into the snowy street. I would sit in the upstairs room and either read a book, draw or simply look out the window down at the people passing slowly outside. Nobody walked fast. There was nowhere to go.

The coffee was good. It was their specialty. Special beans, said the owner. He always made it sound as if he’d bought and grinded them himself, perhaps even grown them, but I knew they simply put a little cinnamon in each brew, so little you couldn’t identify it. Actually, the coffee wasn’t all that good, it was their bread and pastries that always tasted a bit stale and made the coffee excellent by comparison. One sip after a dusty Danish could really be heaven during the long afternoons I tended to spend there.

I was drinking coffee in a dark corner, staring into the flame of a candle burning on the table before me, when I heard it.

My name is Casper. I’m very young, but still old enough to know that I’m young. Had I been younger I would’ve ignored the fact.

This Wednesday was one of many Wednesdays of a number of years I had not enjoyed. It sounds very dramatic, doesn’t it? It’s not. At first, when I was too young to know I was young, they called me brooding. Moody. Pubescent. That was how they referred to a steady weight of anxiety and simple unhappiness, and later, when they called it other things, they were names for a — for a lack of a better term — black hole that was located somewhere inside me. Around the chest area, I think.

It’s not dramatic at all. I’ve met many who feel worse than me, who feel all the time like I do only occasionally. It’s no big deal, it never was. And they were partly right, with the whole pubescent thing. After puberty I was never the same again. But who is?

The thing is, like the town I live in, I was dark and mad in many ways, but for reasons unknown.

I was drinking coffee with a touch of cinnamon in it, staring at a burning candle, using my free hand to rub the faded scars on my forearms, when I thought I heard a voice in my head. It was very low, like a whisper. Only it wasn’t a whisper. It was a voice. Speaking to me.

When I was born, my mother nearly died. To this day, it’s somewhat of a mystery. It wasn’t that there were complications during delivery, not at all — I came out screaming after about ten minutes — but she got very sick exactly a week before. My father rushed her to the hospital in the middle of the night after he’d found her out on the balcony. She was standing on the railing, naked, singing. My father likes to say she was singing in Latin, but she didn’t know a word of Latin, and the doctors later explained that during a psychosis a person can do what is known as “speaking in tongues”.

My mother was locked up the rest of that week. She says she doesn’t remember any of it, but the doctors also explained that that was only to be expected.

In the middle of the night, it was May and hot outside, she went into labor and had me. Her sickness went away right afterwards, though she had been under the impression the nurses were government agents during the actual delivery, and was never ill like that again. She could also never have children again.

When I say she nearly died, I mean that she made no less than thirteen suicide attempts, not counting her adventure on the balcony. She has scars on her arms, too.

Anyway, I’m boring you.

The voice.

It was a hoarse voice, like a voice made raspy by cigarettes, and it spoke to me. The upstairs room of the coffee place was occupied only by me and a pair of truant girls sitting way over by the stairs, and I was instantly sure neither of them sounded like that.

Swallowing a hot sip of coffee, I looked up, naturally certain I was imagining. Yet it had been very clear. Quiet, but clear. And — this will sound strange — and I could hear that it had come from inside my skull. Not my head or my mind, not vague like that, but my skull.

“What?” I said, because I hadn’t heard what the voice said. The girls by the staircase fell silent for a moment, but seemed to decide I had answered a phone. When they were giggling and talking again I turned my head left and right but expectedly saw no one.

I blinked once, my eyes wide, and looked down into my mug of coffee. No one there, either.

Now, I have to warn you that I have been diagnosed with various forms of crazy since the age of fourteen. I did not freak out about voices in my head. My skull.

“It’s the mill,” my pot smoking friend would say sometimes when we sat in her room smoking pot. “The smoke that comes out of those chimneys ain’t just smoke, dude. It’s like…gas.”

Huh, yes, it is, but I don’t really know what she means when she says that. I don’t know what she means half the time, actually. The little power plant on the outskirts of town is the tallest formation right after the water tower and the church, but it’s harmless. Well, you know what I mean.

After the truants had left, I was sitting dead still in my chair, hands gripping the edge of the table. My coffee had gone cold, forgotten by the now low candle. One of my headaches had suddenly struck, and I was patiently waiting for the nausea that told me my migraine pills no longer worked. I had to change brands maybe once every other year as I grew immune to them. It had been a while since I’d switched and I was quick to explain the voice with that. That was a mistake.

I had no life.

I’d had a job, but I couldn’t go there. My father had hired me, probably out of curiosity as to whether I could do something as brainless as carry mail. The responsibility of employment had driven me to places I did not want to go, and I’d quit after about five months.

I had friends, but they were sporadic and not very numerous. There was my religious friend, whose greatest purpose of our relationship was to save me; my pot smoking friend, who was in rehab; a number of ex-girlfriends and ex-friends, and a few others. I could see vaguely familiar faces everywhere and think, is that a friend of mine? I forgot about them. My whole existence was made up of phases, periods of time that shifted into other periods of time. I counted my life in periods of months or weeks, not in days or years. People who’d been part of one phase could sometimes not be part of another.

I lived at home, in the house, with my mother who had been on sick leave for about three months. She was an artist, usually. Made pots and paintings and tapestries and sculptures and all sorts of crap. It was all very mediocre, and she sold it in a big red barn a few miles outside of town.

My biggest project of each day was to get out of bed in the morning.

So when I heard the voice I wasn’t rattled enough to think anything had changed.

I had no intention of getting up and going home just because of a headache, so I sat very still for another while, I don’t know how long. I had one of my spells, I suppose, and sort of left my body, disappeared inside myself, went to sleep in my head, like my mother sometimes called it. I’ve seen almost everyone I know do the same thing, but only for a few seconds — they stare at something without seeing it and can’t register anything you say to them. You’ve had it too, I’m sure. It’s just that I have it longer and more often, and it takes more than a snap of fingers in front of my face to rouse me from it.

In retrospect I guess I was listening. The voice in my head seemed like a very curious delusion for someone who had been diagnosed with a lot of things but never schizophrenia. I’d had delusions, sure, but who hasn’t? Once, when I’d been committed to one of the mental clinics my mother liked to send me to when things got rough, I’d been absolutely convinced that there were acrobat pirates in my room, climbing the walls and swinging from the ceiling lamp. There had been a parrot, too.

But I’d been feeling very poorly, then. I was calm, now, calm and civilized, and I hadn’t been committed in over a year. So I listened. Maybe it was time to fall down again.

What eventually did rouse me was a pair of eyes burning into my forehead. I could feel the presence of another person very clearly and blinked again, my wits coming back in a snap.

You know how you can feel it when someone’s standing awfully close to you, even if you can’t see them? If it’s dark or if you’ve got your back to them, you can still feel it when they’re there, right next to you. You can’t really place why you feel them — maybe it’s the heat of their bodies, maybe it’s the sound of their breath, maybe it’s something else. But you know they’re there. People who’ve been to haunted places feel it, only when they look up they see nothing, or something unpleasant. Ironically, this latter analogy was the one that came to me at that moment, just before I turned my wide gaze up.

He was sitting at the same table where the truants had been. Their trays were still there, even, and I could’ve laughed at the diet cokes and pink marzipan that was left on a plate in front of him. I was surprised, of course, to see him sitting all the way across the room, but my mind was still half unfocused and thankfully I didn’t jump or even wince.

We stared at each other. He had dark eyes, I couldn’t see what color, and the candle illuminated his face eerily, giving it a highly unpleasant orange tint. It was a hard face, all sharp angles and panes, and a wispy beard grew on his chin. His hair was drawn back into a ponytail that lay over his shoulder, and it looked unwashed.

Initially, I wanted to ask him what the fuck he was looking at, but his face scared me. I didn’t say anything for a few seconds, didn’t move, didn’t even have the sense to look away. I felt total confusion sneaking up on me, and I didn’t want to feel like that, not now. I thought about the voice as I stared into his eyes, as I saw how big and rough-looking he was, and wondered if he was indeed a ghost. Had he talked to me in my head and then popped up in front of me, sitting quietly at a café table? Who the hell was he?

In a town as small as this one, people are either familiar or completely alien. It’s not so much their faces as the way they dress, the places they go to, the people they’re seen with. This guy was a complete stranger. His clothes were blue, looked like a uniform, but it was too dark for me to see properly. He was alone. He had long hair, for crying out loud. Only the students at the music school had long hair in this town, and this was no student.

No more than five seconds passed, and I was just about to say “what” when he averted his eyes. Then I noticed the cup of coffee and the big sandwich that sat in front of him. A late lunch.

He began to eat. I watched him, rudely, as he consumed the sandwich with the big bites of a very hungry man. He ignored me, and I felt the confusion growing. Had he been staring at me at all?

A little nervously, I began to gather up my things. I shoved my drawing pad and my comic book into my ugly old satchel, pulled my gloves and hat from the pockets of my coat. Wound the long scarf my mother had knitted around my throat. I was getting ready to leave before I’d even decided to, I’d actually only been sitting there like a waste of air and space for like an hour. The Russian hadn’t even glanced at me when he came up to clean the toilets.

Oh dear, I thought.

Unexpected events are not good for me. I need peace and quiet and some happy people around me in order to stay out of trouble, and if I’m feeling unstable, a pushy telemarketer is enough to chase me to my bed for weeks at a time.

I know this makes me sound crazier than I am.

The truth is, I’m just the sensitive type. I draw odd pictures that most people, girls especially, seem to think are profound in some way. I write poetry when I need to vent my emotions, not very good poetry. The music I listen to is mainly consistent of Bob Dylan, and I play the guitar. I even look the part, with my crazy hair and big blue eyes that look a lot like contacts. And I’m very thin because I don’t like eating, and very short because of bad genes. Well, not very short, but too short for my own liking.

If I sometimes fall off the deep end it’s because I was born with shaky mental foundations, not because I’ve had a bad childhood or because I’m a suffering artist. They don’t know why I was born this way, and by they I mean doctors and clever people in general. There’s nothing wrong with my brain, they say.

Honestly, I don’t care. Most people get used to being who they are, don’t they?

When I was to get to my feet, I forgot to push the chair back first and made a lot of noise that reverberated around the room. The man with the sandwich glanced up, and was there a smile on his lips?

I ignored him, wishing I was out of there already, and slung my bag over my shoulder. Unlike the truants, I picked up my dishes — admittedly just a mug — and put it away on the little wagon that stood outside the door to the kitchen. I thought I felt the long-haired fellow looking at me, but I didn’t check to make sure as I made my way to the stairs and started descending. A strange tension strung across my chest as I got close to him, but it loosened when I got out of his sight.

I crossed the downstairs room quickly, not bothering to wave good-bye to Irina, who was working the register. She wouldn’t be offended; she knew me too well.

Outside, the soles of my shoes made crackling sounds against the packed snow on the ground, and my lungs seared with too many degrees below zero. I pulled my scarf up over my nose and paused outside the café doors, gazing out over the town square. The coffee place perched just on the corner of it, and most of the town’s stores and restaurants stood around it, as well. In the centre was a big, very ugly fountain that was supposed to picture purgatory or Dante’s Inferno or some other biblical scene of suffering, and long, deadly-looking icicles hung from the gargoyles and extended limbs.

Overhead, the sky was dark grey. The sun was rapidly sinking behind the clouds even though it wasn’t even three o’clock yet, and the streetlamps had already been lit all around the square. People in many layers of clothes ambled slowly about, in and out of shops, lingering on the benches, warily observing the group of local drunks that sat below the fountain. I observed that the old, weathered faces had many similarities to the sculpted ones above them.

I started to walk towards home, but changed my mind mid-stride. I did need to sneak in to the library to return some books and borrow some new ones, and I did have time to spare now that I’d left the coffee place early. I was in the mood for some Brontë, whichever, and started down the street in the same slow, infectious manner as the people around me. I wanted to get home before dark, but the library was just five minutes away.

I put my iPod in my ears nonetheless, as I had enough time to hear at least one song. It was ‘All Along The Watchtower’, one of the few songs I liked off the John Wesley Harding album, and I felt immediately calm. The unpleasantness at the coffee place ran off me like water, and I smiled at my own eccentricity.

The library was swiftly entered and exited, and nobody complained about my presence this time. I still looked like a vagrant in my second-hand clothes, but they knew I tended to come earlier if I was planning to hang around and let me leave with Jane Eyre clutched to my chest.

When I stepped outside into the cold again, it was much darker than when I’d gone in. I was surprised, stupidly, and felt a trickle of panic. With hurried steps, I began to walk back the way I’d come, as my parents’ house was on the other side of town. I didn’t get far.

A streetlamp stood a few feet off, and it was the only one in sight where I stood, for I had abruptly halted and stood staring at the silhouette that stood framed in the cold yellow light. I recognized it within the fraction of a second, even though he had been sitting down when I last saw him. He was standing, now, standing very straight, and he was head and shoulders taller than me. About twice as broad, too. Not fat, not even husky, but big. He looked like a goddamn wrestler.

I don’t know why I stopped. I should’ve kept walking, undaunted, right past him. I imagine myself he would’ve let me pass if he saw I wasn’t scared. Only I was. Shitless.

My eyes quickly got used to the shadowy darkness, and I could see him more clearly. He didn’t move. I wondered how he’d gotten there so fast; I hadn’t been in the library more than a few minutes. He must’ve wolfed down that big-ass sandwich, chugged his coffee and sprinted after me. Unless he’d left it all as soon as I’d gone and followed me. Because I knew, somehow, that he was there for me. I didn’t for a second believe it was a coincidence.

“Hi,” I heard myself say in a voice much stronger than I felt. The guy didn’t speak. He shifted his weight to one foot, and I saw he had his hands in his pockets. It did not make him look less dangerous. His eyes were on me, I could feel them as much as see them, and he seemed to be waiting for me.

I’d had a friend once who’d been mugged. It had happened behind an old gas station in a run-down neighborhood a bit outside of town. The guys who jumped him had never been caught, because he hadn’t seen their faces. They’d been very discreet and very quick, and in reality it had lasted about five minutes. To him it had felt like five hours.

Somehow, like I knew he was there for me, I knew he was going to jump me like my friend had once been jumped. Take my wallet, my iPod, my phone and my shoes and then beat me senseless. I knew the odds were the same, because I was way scrawnier than that friend of mine, and this guy was crazy, obviously crazy. I couldn’t see why he thought I had anything worth stealing, especially so worth stealing he had to stalk me for it, but if he was crazy that didn’t matter. Nothing matters when you’re crazy. I should know.

Then he spoke. It was a raspy voice, a voice used to cigarettes, but it wasn’t deep like the one I’d heard. Or maybe it was, I was too scared to be sure.

“Hey there,” he said in a tone that was deeply unpleasant. It was a low, level tone that suggested I was a particularly tasty big-ass sandwich he was about to eat slowly and with great pleasure.

I couldn’t get another word out. I wanted to tell him to fuck off, leave me alone, but my voice was dead in my throat. I dared to tear my gaze from him for a moment to look around, but to my disappointment not a soul was in sight. I was too far away to be seen through the library doors, and there hadn’t been anyone in there besides a guy who’d been hiding behind a pillar of books, looking like he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I was lost.

Can I help you, asshole, I wanted to ask when I looked back at him, but I found that he had taken several steps closer and couldn’t even find a scream. My windpipe felt cramped, suddenly, and I had to pull deep gulps of cold air into my lungs so I wouldn’t get dizzy. I noticed that the headache was still pressing behind my eyes.

I would be one of those tragic victims of a madman, my picture would be plastered all over the news for several weeks, I could see the headlines and articles already: Teenager brutally slaughtered in peaceful small town — His head is yet to be found — Might have met his killer in a lunatic asylum —

And they would go on to debate the state of the mental healthcare, and put the blame on the hospitals, the doctors, the politicians. They would use me as a poster child for tragic acts of random violence and madness, dig up my soiled past, harass my parents, maybe even publish my drawings, my poetry, my old suicide notes.

I felt a nervous tic developing in the corner of my right eye. The big guy was really rather close now, and I realized that I had nowhere to run; behind me was a bicycle parking and a fence. It was still the Christmas holidays, so no students had any bikes there that I could steal, and there was no way I could get past this guy on foot. I had smoked Marlboros since I was twelve and was in no shape whatsoever, while this guy looked like he was in the best shape of his life. How old could he be, twenty-five, maybe? I was as good as dead.

If only I could’ve said something! I could’ve begged for my life, anything. But my voice was gone. I couldn’t understand it. It was completely gone. I was struck totally dumb.

What I did do was back away. It was useless, but I guess I was stalling. I backed away into the bicycle park, but he began to walk towards me as soon as I started moving. I stumbled on a bicycle stand and nearly fell, and the sudden movement seemed to startle him. He darted for me.

Discovering reflexes I hadn’t known existed, I danced sideways, hitting a wall but narrowly escaping his outstretched hands. He cursed wordlessly, growling like some sort of animal, scaring the shit out of me. I started to slide along the wall, but he turned and leapt for me again. In an attempt to duck, I fell and somehow managed to crawl away from him. I don’t know how, but I got to my feet and suddenly had a clear escape. The big guy had already turned again and had his dark eyes on me, and his face was terrifying. He looked like the Vikings I had drawn as a child from pictures in history books, the whites of his eyes showing like he was a scared horse, his teeth bared, a low growl still coming from his throat. What were they called? Berserks, was that it?

Stupidly, oh so stupidly, I was momentarily frozen by that look on his face. My head suddenly filled with the image of those teeth biting into my neck, tearing out my throat like a rabid dog, and I could not move. Half a second later, my feet came unlocked again, but by then he was already on me.

His big hands closed around my upper arms like vices and dragged me back, away from the light of the streetlamp. When he had me fully in his grasp, he jerked me towards him and placed one arm about my neck, cutting off my air. I still couldn’t speak but wanted to scream so badly, and now I couldn’t breathe. He was almost crushing my windpipe, and it hurt like a bitch, but I forgot all about that when he suddenly slammed me face first against the wall in the deepest, darkest corner of the bicycle park.

Instead of strangling me he now removed his arm and quickly pinned both of mine behind my back. My satchel and Jane Eyre fell to the ground at our feet, but I didn’t notice. Even though he was no longer strangling me I still couldn’t breathe, for the little air that had been left in my lungs had rushed out at the impact with the wall, and I gaped like a fish as my face scraped against rough plaster.

Through the panic and blinding fear I could still feel him behind me, how he easily pinned both my hands with only one of his own, how he used the other to do something I just couldn’t comprehend. My mind wouldn’t grasp the fact. It couldn’t be happening. What was he doing?