Ready Or Not — Here I Come !

The voices started before he learned how to spell his own name.

At first, they whispered — thin and breathy, like someone speaking through wet fabric. Soft enough to mistake for wind slipping through a cracked window. They said small things. Meaningless things.

His name.

Laughter.

A warning he never fully caught.

He thought everyone had them. He thought this was what thinking sounded like.

Then he started seeing things.

A rabbit standing upright in the corner of his room, its fur matted and damp, its glassy eyes too large for its skull. It never blinked.

Its gaze never moved — just stared at him with something like horror frozen on its tiny face.

A cat dancing slowly at the end of his bed, its joints bending the wrong way, smiling without moving its mouth.

Then a body.

Face down in the hallway. Still. So still. The carpet beneath it dark and spreading.

When he blinked, it was gone.

It wasn’t until he asked his mother why the walls talked at night — why they scratched and breathed — and why everything was red sometimes, dripping red, glowing red, soaking into his hands — that he understood something was wrong.

Her face didn’t look confused.

It looked afraid.

Terrified.

She tried to pretend — pretend she heard nothing, pretend it wasn’t real.

But it was.

After that, he stopped asking.

The voices grew older as he did. They deepened. They lost their softness. They learned patience. They learned cruelty.

They waited until classrooms were quiet and the fluorescent lights buzzed just loud enough to hurt. They waited until the world felt almost normal.

That was their favorite word.

Normal.

They stretched it out like a joke. Like a threat.

They showed him things no one else reacted to.

Rotten teeth in the sink.

Bugs crawling beneath his skin.

The teacher’s smile splitting too wide, revealing rows and rows of red.

Sometimes he heard scratching inside the walls — slow, deliberate dragging, like fingernails testing the surface. Sometimes he saw shadows blink when he didn’t. Once, he woke up with dirt under his fingernails and something warm drying beneath them.

The voices told him not to worry.

They told him he had done what was necessary.

That it was the right thing to do.

He didn’t know what that meant.

He tried to live like the other kids. Smile at the right times. Laugh when laughter was expected. Keep his hands folded so no one would notice the trembling.

Ignore the red stains that sometimes appeared on his palms.

Stains that vanished when he blinked.

The doctors called it imagination.

The teachers called it distraction.

His mother called it a phase.

The kids called him a freak.

The voices called him something too — but never the same thing twice.

And lately, they had started asking him to do things.

Small things.

Open the window.

Lock the door.

Stand closer.

Don’t tell.

Sometimes they said things before they happened.

Sometimes they described things that hadn’t happened yet.

He tried to ignore them.

He really did.

And for a while — a dangerous, beautiful while — the voices went quiet.

No scratching.

No red.

No rabbit.

He slept through the night.

He almost believed he was normal.

That’s when he realized something.

Maybe he wasn’t insane.

Maybe the voices weren’t inside him.

Maybe this place was wrong.

Maybe the walls were pretending.

Maybe the people were pretending.

Maybe the world he was in wasn’t real at all.

Because sometimes, when everything went silent, he could feel something else.

Something underneath.

Waiting.

And when he looked at his mother one evening — really looked at her — her smile seemed practiced.

Like she had rehearsed it.

Like she was afraid of him remembering.

For the first time, that thought didn’t comfort him.

It terrified him.

Because if this place wasn’t real…

If the walls were only pretending…

If the people were only pretending…

Then the blood hadn’t disappeared.

It had only been hidden.

Maybe nothing he did counted.

Maybe none of it was real.

Or maybe—

he was the prisoner.

Trapped inside his own mind.

Locked in a reality that didn’t belong to him.

And if that was true…

Then who, exactly,

was walking around in his body

when he wasn’t looking?

A