"A Sanctuary Safe and Strong"(Marianas Trench)

Chapter 11

In the meantime, he walked back through the house, avoiding looking down at the carpet as he paced into the kitchen and pulled a soda from the refrigerator, struggling slightly to get the cap off one-handed, finally relieved when got it open. The hiss of the carbonation settled his thoughts a bit and it was almost comforting. But that didn't last long.  

The slight fizz against his tongue quickly triggered a panicked feeling of dread. The scenario was too similar...too similar to what he'd done the night he'd been hurt. Fuck the senses of taste and smell for bringing all of that back, not that the memories had left him or anything, but at least he'd been able to put everything aside, to some degree, so far. All it took was one fucking sip from the bottle of soda in his hand for him to dump it down the sink, leaving the empty bottle to deal with it later. 

Not this. Not again. Fuck no. No, no, no. Josh quietly slipped through the first floor of the house, turning on every light that the police hadn't left burning so that almost no corner was left darkened. "I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm okay. There's no one here but me," he repeated to himself as he peeked cautiously into closets and behind doors, feeling extremely ridiculous and childish. "If this was a slasher flick, I'd have already be dead. Fuck, I was close enough anyway, so I'd just be the fuckin' cripple who slowed everyone down," he continued to ramble to himself, just to fill the silence with some sound. 

Josh was too jittery to sit now that he was alone. The random creaks and clunks that truly were typical noises of a settling house seemed to echo and make him twitch a bit, even though he knew for sure what each of those sounds were. He'd heard them before, in the rare moments when the world around him was still and he wasn't craving loudness as a companion. 

"Anybody here?" he finally called out to the empty house, already sick to death of worrying about being the next victim in a remake of a "Friday the 13th" movie. He heard nothing but the sound of his own voice, not that he ever actually expected anyone to pop out from behind a door wielding a large butcher knife to announce that they were there to murder him. 

"Knew it," he mumbled, ending his search for another living being and coming up empty. Flipping on one last light in the living room, he decided to extinguish the quiet around him by turning on the stereo. Josh had always found solace in music, and this was no exception. He hoped that any nervousness fluttering around in his stomach like butterflies would ease once he was able to relax to whatever songs pumped through the speakers. 

"You try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it/ You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes...," Michael Jackson's voice sang, clear and sharp. This close to Halloween, he wasn't surprised. Normally, if asked, Josh would tell anyone that he was a major fan, respecting the artist, the lyrics and the creativity, but this was not the time for that song. In fact, it made things worse.  

"No," he said aloud, shaking his head and pressing the button to shut the system off. "That's not fucking helping." The cliché phrase "deafening silence" held an incredible meaning for him just then, and it felt like electrified white noise, getting under his skin and twisting itself around his bones. 

Until then, Josh really thought he would be okay, coming back to the house by himself, but it turned out that he was very wrong. At first, he blamed the problem on everyone else who had spoken to him - the cop, the doctor, his parents, and especially Matt for talking him into being afraid. He internally raged at them for explaining over and over that he could have died, mentally threatening them with everything he could think of before he realized that it wasn't their fault. They'd only been reiterating things he had known but was choosing not to think about until he had to. 

Now, he had to. He was legitimately afraid of his own shadow, and all those people had done was innocently remind him that he'd been lucky to survive. They didn't talk him into jumping at every noise. They didn't have him assuming that every darkened area where light failed to reach held imminent danger. The bastard who'd attacked him had done that. He was the one who, in less time than it took to make toast, had made sure that Josh feared for his life every second of every minute, and now that he was alone, it's all he could think about.