SCENE X – By Jack Tullin

ONE. They’re in my mind. Words. Phrases. Ideas. Flying through my brain at a million miles an hour. I didn’t invite them, they broke in. Flicking through my memories and filling it with lies like a marker pen in a children’s coloring book. I know things they don’t know.

‘Tell them,’ one says. ‘It’s not good to keep secrets,’ says another. I can’t tell, I won’t tell. The demons in my mind will not win me over.

Demons, that’s what I’ve called them; the voices of Satan crawling around giving me orders as though I’m a soldier of the underworld. Asking me to think things, tell things… do things.

In a world where nobody’s life is private it makes sense they can see into my mind as easily as a living room. You would have thought the thick bone of my skull would be enough to block them out but no. They’ve learned. Not that they can control me just by my mind alone though… no. The human will power is too strong. So I’ve stopped eating… drinking. The drugs that could subdue me to their power will not… cannot enter me. They will not drug me.

The overpowering static that blocks out the world is deafening. I can hear them now. A gospel. Holy Words. ‘Penetrating’ they’re saying, telling me of God. In days of old he was a force of good. Now he is just power. Controlling power. ‘The light of god, the understanding of God.’ Stop! stop it. Get out of my mind. Stop telling me I’m insane.

‘When you die, there will be nothing left of you except the God man, the God woman, the heavenly man, the heavenly woman, the heavenly child. There will be a song of jubilee waiting for your kin! There will be nothing except your God.’

‘This is all a dream, a dream in the gaps.’ they said. They won.

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