BLACK DEVOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

Normal kids have teddy bears; I had Stephen King novels...

I was what you'd call a precocious little monster movie connoisseur from a laughably young age. Around 12, I was utterly obsessed with all things slasher flick and found footage nightmare fuel.
And just like any well-adjusted tiny weirdo, I damn loved every minute of the night terrors that would leave me shrieking myself awake in a cold panic, sheets drenched through with nervous sweat.

Really set the ambiance, you know? The grand finale was occasionally even blacking out from fear only to groggily resurface in the ER with an IV full of sedatives. Now that's some peak psychological trauma right there - the cornerstone of any well-balanced childhood.

Speaking of which, I definitely had a textbook upbringing scattered with all the hallmarks of A+ parenting fail. Things like a doting mother so convinced her daughter was certifiably deranged.

Mom, bless her heart, dragged me to more therapists than there are Linux distros. They’d scribble notes, nod sagely, and prescribe “normalcy” like it was a magical potion.

Direct to where the chaos began.

See, I had a twin.

However, she died when I was nine. I don't have that memory, which is unexplainable, and I would never have known if I hadn't accidentally found a photo of two identical girls in my mom's "private" memory box. Two girls that Bella was not a part of.

Definite red flag for a sane person, right?

Having a biological twin you knew literally zero about, despite sharing her personal batch of amniotic fluid for the better part of a year? Nothing to see there, clearly! No plausible reason to be even a little bit concerned or feel massively gaslit.

Anyway, long story short - I start having these gnarly fever-dream night terrors that feel...off. Like I wasn't just witnessing some scripted horror flick, but legit re-living some repressed traumatic memories on a constant endless dopamine loop. Like getting front row seats to my own personal psychological torture chamber.

The first time I had the same nightmare I'd been having for months, my mother, like many parents, blamed the movies I watched. This was extremely frustrating, as I knew my nightmares had nothing to do with the films in question. I'm particularly sure it was not about the movies because I saw how she died in one of these dreams.

It was always the same damn dreamscape too: tucked in my sad little hobbit hole bedroom, that eerie dead silence you only get in the harrowing 3am witching hour. Until it started - those unmistakable, stomach-twisting whimpers echoing somewhere deep in the winding hallways of our bizarrely massive suburban labyrinth of a house.

Like a dumb blonde bimbo in a slasher flick, something sick and twisted inside compelled me to go full Leeroy Jenkins chasing those cries for help. Creeping down those dim corridors, my heart jackhammering being the only real soundtrack as I traced the muffled wails to the guest bathroom...

Forget Freud; this was some next-level gore scene.

Mom was drowning my sister in the tub. She was kicking and calling for me, weirdly, without really talking. It was something like telepathy, and then afterwards...I also started feeling like I was being smothered, and I woke up short of breath and coughing out bits of water. This was how the dream always came, and at some point, it got so intense that I passed out and woke up in a hospital bed.

I never mentioned to mom she was the one drowning her in the dream and she never told me in detail how, she drowned.

The dreams soon stopped, and what followed was feeling her talking and even touching me sometimes. I always told Mom maybe it was her ghost trying to reach out, and the next thing I knew, I was locked up in the loony bin getting my head shrunk because I was "running mad."