Believe Me This Time

NOTE: I do believe that OCD, or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, could fall under a mental health warning, but I’m adding this note as a disclaimer that the main character of my response to this prompt does display some characteristics of a person who lives with OCD, such as living in a constant state of fear that any small thing could result in injury or death. 

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The door. The door is open too wide. It’s the first thought I’m met with when my eyes open to welcome in today’s light for the first time, and I know I’m right this time - I put a mark on the floor where the door is supposed to sit, and I can see the mark, which means the door is open too wide, and something is wrong. I know it. I know it this time. 

Sitting up and turning to put my feet on the floor, I see that my stuffed dalmatian with one bead eye, one button eye, and 19 spots is sitting on my bed. Wrong. That’s wrong. Tim stays on the floor at night. As I get up, I take him off of my bed and set him in his usual nighttime corner while I make my bed exactly as I do every morning: lay my sheet over the mattress, then my quilt that weighs exactly 7.92 pounds over it, and fold them both so there is eight and a half inches of mattress exposed at the head of my bed. Then, I place my two white pillows, the slightly heavier one first on the left of the bed, the lighter one on the right, and then my brown pillow right in front of them, directly in the middle. I pick Tim up from his corner and place him on my bed to complete the process. 

There is not much in my bedroom, because the window has to be open or I can’t be in there, due to the fear of suffocation, so it gets kind of windy, and then things move. Even infinitesimal movements in objects can snag my attention and make it impossible to function until they’re placed back in normalcy, but that’s just the way brains work. Well, I think. I’ve never met another human, other than Mother. She keeps me inside the house, and I’ve never left, but she’s just protecting me from all of the movement of the world, so for her I am very grateful. The only thing in my room, save my bed and its accessories, are my desk and chair, both made out of rounded concrete. They’re made out of concrete for two reasons: they’re both cemented to the floor, so they can’t move; and I previously had wooden furniture that was bolted to the ground, but I was scared to get a splinter, because it could become infected and kill me, and the Sun could’ve also been very hot one day and shone through the window and set them ablaze, so Mother switched them out for me. Anyway, I speak of the desk because after my bed was made, my desk caught my attention. The drawer is ajar. Something is wrong. Someone had to have broken inside the house. I’m in danger. Mother is in danger.

I started to run downstairs to bring to Mother’s attention the security breach within the house, when I stopped myself. One, she wouldn’t believe me. I knew she wouldn’t; I was always thinking like this. While she knew it was the way my brain worked, she still seldom believed me when I possessed worries such as this one. But I knew something was wrong this time. I knew it. And two, I’d taken eleven strides from my bedroom door to the top of the stairs, so I went back to my doorway and took ten strides to the stairs, then walked down.

“Mother?” I called out, walking through the empty downstairs hallway, but I stopped when I heard a faint mechanical sound all around me. The heat is on, which means it was on all night, and I didn’t know, and it could have malfunctioned, and the house could have burned down, and I wouldn’t have known, and I could’ve gotten out through the window, but I would have been stuck on the roof. Something is wrong. Someone was here. I was sure of it now. 

“Mother?” I called out once again, and she answered this time, knowing that I dislike when she answers the first time, because the number one is odd. “In here, Dear,” she called out in her voice that is supposed to always be the same volume, because she got it surgically altered to stay that way, since I don’t like when something has several options, such as the volume of a voice. But her voice was too loud. While it normally sat at a constant sixty-three decibels, I could tell that it was at sixty-five a moment ago. Something is wrong. Something happened.

“Mother, what has happened?” I asked her, and she gave me a puzzled look that longed for elaboration in return. “I am afraid I do not know why you ask this, Child,” she replied. Child. She called me Child. I was Dear. Always. Never anything but Dear. I had never been given a name like Mother, but Dear served as a substitution for a title just fabulously, and I’d grown accustomed to Dear. But she’d called me Child. Something is wrong.

I chose to not inform her of my observation regarding her words and volume at which she used them, as I believed there to be more crucial matters at hand, such as the suspicions of a break-in. “Mother, I believe that the house has been invaded.” I stated my dilemma and awaited her reply. I wanted to watch her eyes as she processed my words, but my attention was seized by the grey, four-cushion couch she sat on, because there were five pillows on it. The normal four sat on it: the two square pillows that both had eight different shades of green worked into their identical patterns rested atop their respective outer cushions, the two solid blue pillows with perimeters of thirty-two inches on the inner cushions, but the grey pillow from the arm chair on the left side of the room sat on the couch as well. This wasn’t Mother’s doing, I knew it wasn’t; she would not do that, knowing I would be in this room. Another person was responsible for that shift, and I was sure of it. Something is wrong. Very wrong.

As suspected, Mother was unfazed by my worries, and attempted to settle my mind in her aggravatingly automatic way, but I would not be swayed. I respectfully ordered her up, placed the grey pillow back on its home chair, and pointed out to her issue number one, the pillow. Leading her through the house, I presented the other justifications of my worries to her, and I continued to find more, like the blind on the kitchen window sitting closed four and seven-sixteenths inches more than usual. My mind resembled a faulty vinyl record as we walked through the house, as the same thought was broadcast through my brain again and again: Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Someone. Was. Here.

I was well aware of how strongly I truly believed my fears this time, but my mental submit button on the application for a true problem was hit when Mother and I reached the entryway of the house. My eyes caught the lock on the front door right away. It was turned upwards three degrees from its usual point. I quickly turned it back to where it is supposed to be positioned, so I could focus in that room. I was moving my eyes up when I noticed the table by the door. There was a piece of paper on it. 

My feet moved automatically towards the disruption of normalcy in the room with the need to eliminate it. I lifted the small paper and unfolded it with caution, as to not receive a paper cut that could become infected, and, once again, kill me. The paper housed five words, twenty-six letters:

Believe yourself. You are right.

I read the words and came to the realization that Mother was no longer in the entryway simultaneously. Panic flooded my body as my eyes ricocheted off of every surface, looking for her. I was at the foot of the stairs, about to ascend them to look for Mother, when I heard footsteps behind me. Too heavy to belong to her, but I turned around anyway, and before me stood a person I had never seen before, clothed wholly in black.

“You were right this time, Beatrice,” the name came out mockingly on his tongue, but I knew, in every part of my mind, that the name was mine. 

Then the world was placed underneath a cloak of utter darkness.