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What is a Demon to a Schizoaffective Mortuary Assistant?

This game hasn’t existed for a week and I’ve written fanfiction for it. I will cross post this to AO3 as soon as the tag for it exists.

TW: nonreality, drug use mention, overdose mention, corpses, description of the embalming process, self-loathing

Description:

Raymond Delver has seen many mortuary assistants come and go. But none of them quite like Rebecca Owens, who comes armed with a lifetime of coping mechanisms and a schizoaffective brain she has never expected to behave.

Conversely, Rebecca Owens doesn’t really mind when creepy things start scuttling around and voices whisper in her ears all night long during her Night Shift. She accepts the experience completely, but doesn’t ascribe it to demons. She just assumes her schizoaffective brain is adjusting to her chosen career path in an. Interesting way.

Seeing the dark figure in the window startled her, but not as much as it maybe should have.

It wasn’t as shapeless as her hallucinations had been when she was a kid. When she was little, she’d see dark shapes dart across her walls and ceiling. Shadows that were shadows of nothing that loomed in the corner and didn’t disappear after she turned on the lights.

Then Dad died.

It got way worse then.

Sharp screams from the other room. Phantom pains in her arms that were caused by nothing. She’d hear him in the closet, talking like he was underwater, and she’d throw open the door and he’d be gone. Then when they started fiddling with her dosage, the whole world got dark. Her consciousness turned into a near-constant frothing torrent of grief and self loathing and rage. Some days she almost drowned in it. Other days she wanted to let it take her under. Then, one day, after a lot of drugs and drawing and therapy, she remembered how to swim. The torrent calmed. There were rough patches in the current, sure, but for the most part, she swam along, or just floated and enjoyed the view.

This time would be different.

The thing in the window stared at Rebecca Owens, and she stared back at it. It leaned toward the window. She leaned toward the window. It tilted its head. She tilted her head.

“Do you talk?” She asked rhetorically. Sometimes they did. Mostly it was nonsense, but sometimes it was the other stuff. About Dad. About Mom. About Billy. About how it should’ve been her, not them. All the stuff she’d stopped believing a long time ago, but still stung.

It didn’t answer.

She turned slowly and walked away. One glance back let her know it was still there.

That was fine. It could stay there if it wanted to.

“Come in if you like,” she said almost to herself. Then the office phone rang, and she dashed to pick it up, half hoping someone was really calling.

“Hi Rebecca,” said Mr. Delver. He sounded tired. No, more than that… sad? She was never that good with placing tone.

“Oh, hi Mr. Delver,” she said calmly. “I know I’m not supposed to do anything without you, but-?”

“I’m afraid,” Mr. Delver said softly, “you’re going to have to tonight.”

Rebecca briefly considered asking if everything was okay, but quickly decided not to pry. “That’s fine- so I just embalm everyone and call it a night?”

“Sort of. You file the paperwork, embalm, just like any other day, but what’s most important is you stay calm. I need you to go into the embalming room, I left some things for you on the desk. I’ll call you when you get there.”

He hung up, and Rebecca tried to piece together what that was. But, she dutifully marched to the embalming room, the thing following her with its gaze as she headed out of sight.

The room was almost exactly the way it had been during the day. Except when she went behind the desk, that was when things got weird.

The desk was a mess, covered in papers with barely legible handwriting and strange symbols she couldn’t identify. Also, there was a massive wooden cabinet, kind of like the one Grandma stored her china in.

The phone rang again. As promised, Raymond was on the other line. “Mr. Delver? What am I looking at?”

It was forward, she knew, but she had to know.

“Rebecca, you don’t have to believe me, you just have to do what I say before it’s too late. The only way to save yourself is to banish the demon before you’re too far gone.”

Ah. Suddenly everything made sense. How many times had she planned shopping with Grandma, only to have to cancel an hour later because “something’s not right”? Grandma had burst into her room terrified the first time, saying she sounded miserable over the phone. The rituals. The weird setup. The mess.

Suddenly it was imperative that Mr. Delver didn’t feel dismissed or belittled. She decided quickly that it wasn’t possible to plant the idea that there might not be a demon in his head. When she was having her episodes, nothing could talk her out of the belief that her father’s ghost was in her closet, that her mother’s ghost was under the bed, that they’d come to murder the murderer and drag her to hell with them for what she’d done, how she’d thrown away all the love they’d given her and tricked them into throwing away their lives for her.

No, she decided, the two of them could toy with the idea that maybe it wasn’t demons another day. Right now he desperately needed someone and she happened to be the one on the line.

“Of… of course, sir,” she agreed, striking a professional, calm tone. “How do I banish it?”

“The process itself is simple. You’re going to need to learn the demon’s name, bind it to its chosen body and burn the retort.” He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry I’m not there. I had years to learn what I know. You have hours.”

Years? He’d been living like this for years? She wanted to ask how many, but decided that was definitely not her business.

“I’ve recorded a number of cassettes to instruct you. I find having a physical object-”

“It’s more grounding to hold something in your hands that’s the same every time. I get it.” It was kind of like her sketchbook, or her notepad. Even now, having its weight in her pocket was enough to comfort her.

Raymond paused. “I… yes. That’s right. I won’t be calling you again. You can’t trust the phones, anything can be manipulated.”

“I know. Is there anything else I need to know?”

“No, nothing I can tell you here. Just listen to the tapes, learn the demon’s name, and burn the correct body. The most important thing in that room is the cabinet. Open it up.”

She did, and was somehow more impressed than confused. It was full of weird glass phials, odd little tokens with the same symbols etched into them as on the doctor’s notes, and massive tablets, like the ones you might find in a history museum. There was also a large stack of little slips of paper, covered in scribbled words she couldn’t make out.

“Good luck, Rebecca. I’m sorry this had to happen.” And with that, he hung up.

~~~

It took a few minutes of listening to the tapes, and then a while on the doctor’s computer, but eventually she more or less knew what he wanted. It was all surprisingly legible- personally, during her episodes, she couldn’t type to save her life. So either the doc was a gifted typist or someone was taking advantage of this poor bastard. Judging by the contents of his desk (she didn’t do too much snooping) he was really into Bible verses. Maybe they calmed him.

Whatever. The tapes explained that tonight, she was supposed to embalm the bodies with the special bottles, then cremate the one the demon was living inside before it could take over her soul and eat her eyes or something. The pieces of paper would help her find the way to spell its name, and she could use the database on his computer to figure out which one it was. Then she’d assemble the name in the tablet thingy (or “mark” if you didn’t have much time) and cremate it with the corpse.

So, you know. Basic Night Shift stuff.

The whole time she was wondering, is this it? Is this the endgame? Is this where I would’ve ended up if I hadn’t been diagnosed?

She briefly considered not doing the ritual, just doing the corpses and telling Mr. Delver she’d done the thing, but very quickly decided against it. When she was in the hospital, in and out of episodes, around bedtime she would ask the nurses to put a spare set of socks out for her mom if she came by, because she always came home with no shoes and her feet would be cold. The better ones indulged her, Kyle even made sure she saw him doing it so she would feel safer.

But Starla.

Hoo boy, Starla.

She would go out of her way to make sure Rebecca knew her request was silly, that her mother didn’t need socks, that she wouldn’t be coming home because she was dead, and also Rebecca wasn’t in her home, and if someone else set out socks and she saw them, she would grab them up and rant about how they shouldn’t indulge her delusions because “it’s not right.”

Starla wouldn’t have wanted to do this ritual for Mr. Delver. She would have thought it wasn’t right to indulge his delusions.

Rebecca clenched her fist, grabbed a scrap of paper, and set to work.

The bodies, for the most part, were fine. Exactly as she’d left them. One of them was marked for cremation. Burning the retort… Had Mr. Delver somehow connected the cremations to his demon delusion? Had the corpses that needed to be burned somehow become something scary that needed to be destroyed?

Focus.

Right. That was the only way she got anything done when she was… like this. All the nonreality talk had her on edge as it was, and she needed to focus on things that were real. Things that were in front of her. Things she could touch.

Still, she took the package of sticky notes and made a note at the top of the four sheets that the person who was examining the bodies was at the start of a psychotic episode, a bad one, and carried on.

The burns and bite marks on the guy who’d died of a stroke didn’t so much as phase her. She just marked them down, in case they actually were there, and-

The lights went off. Thunder boomed and a crack of lightning lit up the room, only to let her see Pete Oliver sitting bolt upright, staring at her.

She jumped back at least a foot, clutching her hammering heart. When the lights came back on, Pete Oliver was back as he should have been. “Jesus CHRIST, Pete, do not scare me like that!!”

Pete, of course, did not answer.

She sighed. “No, I know, it’s not your fault. That was… unprofessional.” She knelt down and picked up her clipboard. “Let’s continue.”

Pete was, from that point forward, a model patient. Silent, no more weird twitching, all there was now was the mumbling in her ears. Which, that was to be expected. All she could do for that one was wait it o-

“Why did you let me die?”

She turned to Pete, whose mouth she had just wired shut, and yet he’d spoken anyway. Except, now he wasn’t Pete.

Now he was…

“Oh fuck, not this one,” groaned Rebecca.

Her brain rudely refused to change the channel. The nerve.

“This is all your fault,” the pale, limp man on the table continued. Then he sat up again, head tilted to the side and eyes stubbornly closed as he clutched her shirt and pulled her forward, making her drop her clipboard. “I regret. EVERY second I wasted with you. Time is running out, Rebecca.”

With a gasp, she was standing where she had been, still clutching her clipboard, and Pete was still on the table, still dead.

She sighed. “Really, Brain? The dead dad is a classic, why go and muck around with a tried and true formula? And what is with the spooky demon voice? That’s so cliché.”

Her brain seemed to get the hint. For the rest of Pete’s consultation, all she got was knocking on the windows, banging in the walls, and her dad’s muffled voice calling from somewhere, “I’ve already died, sweetie.” Or something like that.

~~~

Luckily, wheeling Pete back into the fridge went pretty much without incident. But she did take a second to walk around before taking another corpse out of cold storage. At some point, she noticed smoke coming from her pocket and had a fun jumpscare where she took the occult bookmark out of her pocket and dropped it when it burst into flames. But she also found one of those sigil things, so there was that. More out of curiosity than anything, she decided to go around and look for the sigils. Mainly because hanging onto the burning bookmarks was really not fun.

As promised, there were four of them- one on the back of the chair in the embalming room, one in a drawer, one on the painting in the foyer, one on the underside of a shelf. And maybe it was because she was engaging in the delusion, but she could hear more knocking the longer she did this.

Voices outside, muttering indistinct things. Rattling on the doors. A loud, metallic clanging she couldn’t distinguish. Even the image of her grandma at the window, pleading to be let in. Even the shadow man made his reappearance. She hadn’t seen him since he was little. She even offered him a, “hey dude, good to see you.”

Eventually, she dragged her sorry ass back to the cold room and found out what the metallic banging was. It was one of the bodies she hadn’t embalmed yet, trying repeatedly to slide itself out of its mortuary drawer and hitting the door. It stopped the second she entered the room, but still, she marched over to Houston Andrade and opened the door.

“Hey, cut that out,” she told him firmly.

He didn’t answer, but she was sure he got her point.

That firmly settled, she loaded up Houston Andrade. He wasn’t as chatty as Pete Oliver, but admittedly the conversation would’ve been nice. Considering the shadow man was insistent on leering over her shoulder at every opportunity, watching her like a hawk watches a baby kitten.

“Sorry about this, Houston,” she said softly as she turned on the Embalmatron-5000. “I don’t usually work with an audience. But this guy is a good old friend, don’t mind him.”

She was fully talking to herself now. That was fine. This was fine.

“Rebecca.”

The sound of her name normally wouldn’t have gotten her attention. But the shadow man, in all the nights he had woken her up screaming, had never once said anything. Not her name. Not his name. Nothing.

Also it was coming from behind her, where the cold room was, and he was standing in the door to the hallway that led to the cold room.

Except when she turned around… oh god.

What led to the cold room didn’t lead to the cold room anymore.

Now, it led somewhere… familiar.

“Rebecca, come here. Come here now.”

She turned and curiously walked down the hall to the dingy old apartment, covered in spray paint graffiti and filth.

“Don’t look… head over to Grandma…”

Dad’s voice, ragged and holding back tears, got louder as she got closer.

She knew what was waiting for you in this apartment. It was always the same. She’d had this nightmare before, since she was six years old.

“Mom…”

It was Mom, or what was left of her. Mom, lying face down on her filthy, stained mattress, which was always on the floor because she never thought she deserved a bed frame. Wearing the same leather jacket and boots she wore when she was performing. Her bright red shorts seemed too colourful, almost inappropriate for what had happened. The smell of old takeout and stale beer, now mixed with puke and shit and whatever the fuck had killed her mother. Maybe ecstasy. Maybe heroine. What did it matter?

Rebecca knelt down beside her mother, turning her over. Her hair was matted to her cheek with puke, her eyes stared on without seeing. “You stupid bitch,” she sobbed. She’d always said, this is gonna kill me one day, Becky. While she was shooting up. Or smoking something. Or letting a pill dissolve in her mouth.

She’d known living like this would kill her. Had warned Rebecca to do everything to avoid being like her.

Why the fuck didn’t she take her own advice?

Her mother’s corpse spoke. “Hate me all you want. I’m dead because of you. We all are.”

“I don’t hate you,” said Rebecca. It never helped, but it always felt important to say.

“I loved you, and you killed me. Dad loved you, and you killed him. Billy loved you, and you killed him. Val loved you, and you killed her. You loved us, Becky. And you killed us.”

Then she started moving. Limbs cracking as they were unnaturally bent and contorted into pushing dead weight upwards, then her head flopping strangely as she floated upwards.

“You should be the one here. Lifeless. Worthless. You’re a waste oF THIS BODY.”

Ah.

The demon wearing her mother’s clothes, shaking her by the shoulders and screaming “GIVE IT TO ME!!!” Was a welcome respite from the usual routine. In fact, it was borderline comical.

She wondered if the exposure to Mr. Delver’s delusion had bled into hers. Maybe learning all about it had put it in her brain like one of those awful pop songs. That happened sometimes- when she was really tired, the mumbling in her ears would sound like jingles for products she didn’t buy, and she seriously doubted her dead family and friends wanted her to buy laundry detergent or Jump Jive an’ Wail, whatever that meant, before she killed herself as penance for their deaths.

Whatever. Within less than a second she was back in the embalming room, standing next to the corpse again. Houston Andrade’s corpse. A stranger. Not her mother.

She took a deep breath, made a mental note to call Dr. Scott in the morning, and went back to work.

The door is open, whispered that cliche devil voice.

“You think I care?” She snapped. “I got a six inch needle in Houston’s guts. The hardwood can wait its fucking turn.”

The demon shut up about water damage.

“Do you take comfort in the dead?” Houston asked in the raspy voice of the demon.

She didn’t answer. Because if the dead speak and you ignore them, it’s like they never said anything.

~~~

As it turned out, the door was open.

Whether demons had opened it or the storm had blown it open was debatable. But since she was in the lobby anyway, she couldn’t keep her eyes off her backpack any longer (thankfully, it was dry). She flipped open the burlap sack and stared down at a dented metal water bottle, a box of cheesy, whale-shaped crackers and a colourful package of eldritch horror themed gummy candy.

No, said the spooky demon voice as she took out her package of candy from beyond human comprehension. Don’t you dare, little girl.

She paused, and thought about it. “You’re right. I’ve been mucking about in corpses for like an hour. I gotta at least wash my hands.”

She turned and marched into the bathroom, ignoring the pale, white thing with black lips on the ceiling, watching her as she scrubbed formaldehyde and icky corpse stuff off her hands.

As she knelt down by her backpack and dug out her snacks, she patted herself on the back for this idea. After all, Gummi Wyrms and Whales Made with “Real Cheese” were never not considered food, and her episodes were always worse when she was hungry. Besides, on the off chance she was being possessed, she didn’t want her new demon headmate to be hungry.

Pig, snarled the voice in her head as she popped a few cheesy, crunchy morsels into her mouth. Disgusting, greedy, slobbish, fat PIG-!!

“Fat?” She said out loud, then she realized her mouth was full. “Fat?” She said again after a quick swallow, aided by a swig of water. “Look I’m no Miss Connecticut but I am a cool 122, thank you. I am not fat. In fact, my grandma is fairly sure I’m addicted to meth. I’m not, by the way, I don’t even drink anymore.” And with her point firmly made, she took a worm in her teeth, bit off the bright blue half with too many legs, leaving only the red half with the snarling mouth and a dozen eyes.

The voice apparently had nothing to add.

Nileen Beufon was last on the slab tonight. She was also the one slated for cremation. “So you could say this whole thing is your fault,” she half joked.

Nileen didn’t reply, which was nice. A nice little break from the nightmare. A calm before the storm.

It didn’t last long.

Nileen started speaking in a tinny, soft voice. Like she was on the other end of a phone. And her voice was all-too familiar.

“Hey, bitch,” she said in a female voice that sounded like its owner was having a great time. She hesitated, then, “Becca, I know you hear me. Come on, quit being boring and get over here. Billy’s got the good shit. We’re both through about half of it already.”

“Tell her about the fuckin’-” a young man’s voice spoke up in the background. How you could have a background in your voice, she did not know.

“Yeah, I’m gonna,” said the girl again. “Billy’s got Bojack, babe, I told him I don’t even wanna know where he fuckin got it, but he got some, enough for all of us, so get your hot ass over here and let’s see what all the fuss is about! We’re at Billy’s uncle’s house, the one with the pool and shit? We can all go swimming, it’ll be sick!”

Nileen went silent. Rebecca felt herself shaking, but she managed to get herself to breathe. In. Then out. Back in. Then back out.

“I… I remember that voicemail,” she said shakily. Then she half laughed. “Oh yeah, I remember that voicemail. You know I used to hate them both for it. Like ‘why’d you call me, you knew I was going cold turkey’ kinda thing, but,” she shrugged. “They were drunk. They were high. They wanted to talk to me. And who can blame them?”

“You killed them,” said the spooky demon voice, Nileen’s jaw cracking as it was moved. As it spoke, the room filled with water. It smelled sharp and chlorinated, like the water in a pool.

“Oh yeah, I thought so too. It was really hard to accept that I didn’t.” She moved through the water to get the eye caps, ignoring the way two human-shaped things bobbed around lifelessly in the water.

“You could have saved them.” One of the things floated towards her, long hair moving lazily like snakes in the current caused by her walking.

“That’s the thing- they didn’t wanna be saved, and I was busy trying to save myself. There wasn’t a lot I could even do.”

She’d had the dream about Billy and Val. The one where she went out to be with them. The one where she was lying in bed and they appeared, dripping wet and dead and telling her that she could’ve saved them as the voicemail rang in her ears. But this one was new.

It still wasn’t scary, though.

“And don’t talk through Nileen, it’s rude. She’s not a puppet.”

“You’re going to die, Rebecca.”

“We’re all gonna die.”

The phone abruptly rang, cutting Nileen off before she could speak again. “One sec, girl, I gotta take this.” And Rebecca darted over to answer it. “Hello?”

The man on the other end sounded harried and hopeless, but still desperate. “Hello? I need to report a missing person. Her name’s Rebecca (Rebeccaaaa) Owens, she’s fourteen… she- she has a drug problem. (Should have diiieeed) I-uh-I-I don’t know, she, she was here, at the house. (Slit your wriiiiists) I understand that, I need you to check them!… alright… alright, I’ll keep an eye out. Thank you.”

Rebecca sighed as the phone disconnected. Even all these years later, she failed to understand the purpose of playing her that tape. To shame her? It couldn’t have been to gain information. Bizzare.

More cracking drew her attention back to the slab. Nileen was raising her arm, and slowly bending her fingers, until she was pointing back into the hall leading to the cold room.

She considered going back there. But then she wondered, why? Why would she do that? She knew what would happen. What always happened. She’d slide down the hallway that had suddenly turned into a muddy embankment, then she’d shatter her leg on impact, lie there in the rain for a bit, then see Dad for the last time. There might be some twist about demons or something, but her head would be abuzz with he wasted his life on you and he died regretting you and you killed him you killed him it’s all your fault.

She didn’t think it was the kind of night to put herself through that.

So, instead, she sat at the computer and charted on the corpses, and eventually, Nileen’s hand went down.

~~~

The paperwork was particularly annoying.

Not because it was hard or anything, but because her brain just wouldn’t shut up the whole time.

The white thing with black lips and bulgy eyes and cracked skin peered at her over her monitor. It stared and stared and stared and refused to get the hint that she wasn’t going to make eye contact. The shadow man touched her hair and shoulders and neck more often than she’d have liked. The lady who was always wet must have been standing next to her, because she could feel wetness dripping onto her. That was, quite frankly, more annoying than anything else.

They touched her. They whispered in her ears. They made voices she had become okay with echo from inside her brain. But, she kept at it. Because really, what else could she do?

Around the time she finished paperwork, she decided it would be prudent to have one last swig of water before she sent Nileen back to ashes and dust. And as she made her way to the foyer, she could’ve sworn the hallucinations were getting angry. Like they were affronted that she had the audacity to completely ignore them.

The cracked thing scuttled around on the ceiling like a lizard. The lady lurked behind corners, glaring at her, the faceless thing outside banged on each window as she passed, and the shadow man insisted on turning out the lights in every room. But none of these things actually stopped her from putting the files in their appropriate boxes, so Rebecca remained unmoved.

The thing at the door had made its way back to the door, and it had no face but she was pretty sure it was angry. She ignored it and took out her water bottle, only to abruptly realize she’d drank more than she thought. It was empty.

She absently muttered “excuse me” as she opened the bathroom door and realized the wet lady was standing behind it, watching her. She flicked on the faucet, and what came out was dark, dark red.

Ah. Blood rain. She knew this trick. Blood coming out of the taps, spooooky. Except blood wouldn’t have been ice cold like this. Blood didn’t have this consistency. Blood didn’t slowly fade from dark red to pale orange back to crystal clear within a few moments of the tap running. She shoved her bottle under the running water, and took a swig. Perfect.

As she put it back, her book of matches fell out of wherever she’d stuffed it. Puzzled, she picked it up and stuffed it in her pocket, planning to put it back in a minute.

Nileen didn’t say anything, but she could hear other people talking to her. Mom. Dad. Grandma. Val and Billy.

She stared at the crematorium, then at Nileen.

She did something strange. She knew it was strange, but she did it anyway, without any idea as to why. She knelt down and grabbed a handful of ash, scattered it across the corpse, then lit a match and dropped it on her.

It lit up like gunpowder, leaving the skin burned into a strange sigil.

Sure, why not.

She knew, as she loaded her in and slammed the door shut, that she had the right body. Even as the spooky demon voice asked her if she was sure. She also knew that the thrashing and rattling in the crematorium was just the result of the tendons abruptly drying and snapping, causing the body to flail and convulse.

That was it. That was all it was.

The rattling on the door sounded real. The screaming sounded real. It sounded, to the uneducated ear, like there was really a person in there.

But it had also sounded like there was really a person in her closet as a kid.

The door flung open. She felt heat, hotter than anything else she’d ever felt. The light was blinding, like staring at the sun, but she still saw the dark figure, heard it screaming as it crawled towards her. It told her that she was the most filthy, tainted creature that had ever walked the earth, that she was going to die, that it was going to hollow out her body, and when it was done, she was going to stay in Hell with it.

She wasn’t.

“NO!!!” She screamed, struggling backwards and ramming into the wall. “YOU AREN’T REAL!!! YOU AREN’T REAL!!! GO AWAY!!”

It roared, crawling towards her with all the desperation of a dying animal that was intent on taking someone with it.

“GO AWAY!!” She screamed again, clutching her ears tight. She squeezed her eyes closed, as if she could block out what was happening. “GO AWAY GO AWAY GO AWAY!!!”

The thing screamed again, this time in protest. Its screams quickly became more and more distant, as if it was being dragged away, and then there was a loud BANG, cutting off its final shriek.

She opened her eyes. Everything was as it should be. There was no evil monster. No demons. No weird white thing. No shadow man. No lady. No ghosts. It was just her, and the corpses, the way things were supposed to be.

Rebecca slid to the floor, gasping and panting as she caught her breath. The quiet was nearly deafening, but still she clutched her head tight. When she could bring herself to let go, her hands were shaking so hard she just hugged herself instead. “Okay,” she said out loud. “Okay. Okay. That… that was really not fun. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever had a fun episode but that was really not fun. Fuck, that was a bad one.”

Was it an episode? It felt so real. Pointed out her intrusive voice, which had thankfully dropped the whole spooky demon schtick. Speaking of which, considering this episode had given it a themed makeover, it did sort of have a point.

Well, she thought through her mental checklist. She didn’t feel possessed, at least she didn’t think so. She just felt like she always did after a big episode. Shaky, headachey, sick, like she might puke or cry or both, and more than anything she wanted to go home and go to bed. But… no. No, not yet.

“I think the worst is over,” she said out loud, “but I am not driving like this. Fucking- no wonder Raymond cancelled. I get in the car I’m gonna fucking kill myself.”

She hesitated, daring the voice to speak up, to tell her why that was a good idea, maybe treat her to some Vietnam-style flashbacks of Daddy in the trees.

Nothing. Just the usual, quiet, peas-and-carrots mumbling that always preceded episodes like this. It was a bit louder than usual, but that was to be expected. For the most part it felt like she had water in her ears.

Somehow, she managed to get herself back to her backpack in the foyer. She didn’t know how much of this whole demon thing she believed in, but she did believe in one thing, she thought as she pulled out her sketch pad and pencil.

Everything is more manageable once you draw it.

~~~

“Rebecca?”

She hadn’t even realized she’d been asleep until Mr. Delver’s voice jolted her awake. She scrambled to her feet, sketch pad and pencil clattering to the floor.

“I’m- I’m so sorry, Mr. Delver, I must have dozed off, is everything alright?”

He didn’t answer immediately. He just stared at her, like he couldn’t quite figure out how she was still here.

“Well… yes. For now, anyway. But it never stays that way.”

She nodded sagely. She knew that better than anything. “Are you okay?”

“I should be asking you that.”

“I’m fine, I’m- I’m more used to this than I maybe should be.”

“Rebecca, I don’t know what it showed you, I just know it shows you the worst parts of yourself, parts that-”

“Lemme guess. It shows you stuff about yourself that makes you feel worthless. Like somehow you failed to be a person. And even if you know you did everything you can do, it still twists everything around so it feels like it would be better to just give up.”

“… How do you know that?”

“It’s been a long life, hasn’t it?” She almost laughed at his look of stunned amazement. “Are you gonna be okay here until my next shift?”

“Next shift? You mean- you’re coming back?”

“Of course, I didn’t go to school just to quit after one rough night. But I am gonna go home and eat some waffles and then go to sleep first.”

Raymond was obviously thunderstruck, but agreed Rebecca should go home and sleep. As she was packing her bag he said, “Rebecca?”

She turned to him.

“How did you do it?”

She thought hard. Hm, how to cram over ten years worth of therapy into a sentence? “I tried to remember that no matter what I was seeing, I was going to come back. Like, no matter what I’d always end up in the room I started in, I never actually left. It’s not perfect but it helps.”

In her car, she stared at her new sketches. The lady. The white ceiling crawler. The window lurker. The shadow man.

Oh yes. This was going to work just fine.

~~~

Author’s Note: and there you have it! This was a weird impulsive story that needed to be written immediately, but I hope you like it :)

PS: I did my very best to convey schizoaffective brains, but please please tell me what I did wrong or what I can do better. I’m always learning and growing and being told when I mess up is important to me.

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