A Fractured Mind

It was a little after midnight. Mark woke up abruptly and ripped the blankets off of himself. He flung his bedroom door open, headed towards the bathroom. Just as he reached the bathroom door, he saw someone out of the corner of his eye. Mark turned to see a man in a white shirt and dark blue jeans walking down the hall straight towards him. He opened the bathroom door, threw himself inside, slammed the door, locked it, and held his breath.

The cops searched his house and found no sign that anyone had been there other than Mark. Nothing was missing, and there was no sign of forced entry, but Mark knew what he saw. The next night, as he walked in the front door, he heard a woman screaming. The sound was coming from his room. He heard a man shouting at her. Mark pulled out his phone and called the cops. They searched his house and found no sign that anyone had been there other than Mark. Nothing was missing, no sign of forced entry, and no sign of the distressed woman.

After several weeks of these haunting encounters, Mark's life became a blur of uncertainty and dread. Each night brought new terrors, each day a struggle to cling to reality. He found himself questioning everything—his senses, his memories, even his own sanity. Yet amid the chaos of his unraveling mind, subtle clues began to emerge from amidst his delusions. A misplaced object here, a whispered conversation there—tiny inconsistencies that refused to be ignored.

With each passing day, the line between reality and illusion blurred ever further, until Mark could no longer trust his own mind. He was starting to get used to seeing and hearing random people in his home. He even began to have conversations with the more friendly hallucinations. He no longer left his house; if he needed food he ordered in, he did all of his shopping online, he even had his prescriptions delivered to his front door.

It had been several months now since the hallucinations started. It was getting late and Mark decided it was time for bed. He waved goodnight to Ned, a young scientist with curly hair that Mark had grown rather fond of.

                                                  "Goodnight Jasmine," he said as he walked down the hall.

                                                                                    "Goodnight Mark."

"Haven't seen you before," Mark said to a burly man leaned against the wall next to his bedroom door. "Make yourself at home. The bathroom's right down the hall if you need it."Mark knew they weren't real, but nonetheless he treated them like real people. It helped ever so slightly to maintain his sanity. 

As he lay in bed that night, drifting off to sleep, Mark greeted his imaginary companions with a sense of familiarity tinged with resignation. Their voices echoed softly in his mind, a chorus of fractured whispers lulling him into a fitful slumber. But his dreams soon turned to nightmares, twisting and contorting into grotesque visions of violence and despair. He thrashed in his bed, trapped in the grip of his own subconscious horrors.

Then, suddenly, he jolted awake, gasping for breath as the remnants of his nightmare clung to him like a suffocating shroud. And there, looming over him in the dim moonlight, stood the burly man from before, his features twisted into a sinister grin.

Mark's heart pounded in his chest, a primal instinct urging him to flee. But before he could react, pain seared through his body like wildfire, the cold bite of steel sinking into his flesh. He cried out in agony, his voice drowned out by the sound of his own terror.

As the burly man's knife tore through him again and again, Mark's world dissolved into darkness, swallowed whole by the void of his shattered mind. And in that final, fleeting moment of consciousness, he knew with a sickening certainty that his demons had finally claimed their ultimate victory.