Hysteria | Complete.

Chapter 6

Clinking of wind chimes was the first thing my clouded mind registered. There were multiple ones, but strangely, neither did I feel any wind caressing my skin nor did the whooshing sound of air made its presence known. There were only numerous strikers hitting the metal tubes, again and again, creating a unsynchronized symphony which soon adjusted itself to create a definite tune, a tune much resembling to that of a musical box.

Jack in the box.

Cold freezing water suddenly made contact with my body, clearing my hazy mind immediately as my body jolted up of the ground it had been occupying previously,

“Oops, my hand slipped.”

Saucer-eyed, I looked at the source of the sound only to find a grinning Hysteria leaning casually against a wall behind me, holding a musical box in his palm,

“Just kidding! the sight of blood was making me nauseous.”

My sleepy gaze slid down my wet form to land on the rough concrete beneath me. Mixture of water and blood had made small puddles all around me on there.

‘Blood…’

The events from before I had lost consciousness started flooding my mind, making me immediately look at my bitten arm and ankle, there were traces of dried blood on my skin which had turned the puddled water under me into a small crimson pool yet there were no traces of injuries left. I lifted my left hand to place it at the junction of my neck and shoulder, patting to see the extent of the damage left by the cursed doll on my neck, but the pad of my fingers could detect nothing but smooth skin resting underneath them.

‘It’s gone. I’m healed.’

Sensing a movement out of the corner of my eye, urged me to turn my head in that direction. The silhouette holding the music box had moved away from the wall he had been leaning against. Towering over my huddled form, his long legs were standing just behind me. I couldn’t see him clearly due to the lack of lamination in the alleyway yet his translucent amber eyes were glowing brightly, reflecting some invisible light that made his irises appear like a swirling lake of gold.

“Mm. My darling likes gold?”

“Shut up.”

I couldn’t believe I had eventually found the courage to say this to his face. Maybe the multiple near-death experiences had finally kicked in, wrecking what was left of my sanity.

“Darling,”

Large warm hands suddenly crawled up my damped tank top from behind, locking just beneath my heaving breasts, tugging me into a hard sturdy chest.

“Don’t you understand, Gia? They don’t believe you. They can never accept you. For them, you’re forever going to remain an outcast.”

His voice had unshackled the countless memories I had been suppressing for years, had kept them bound and locked into a cage deep inside my aching heart. Over the time, I had turned my chest into a cemetery and these painful memories buried deep into it were the remains of my dead emotions.

The horror written on my parents’ face when I had narrated to them my yearly encounters with Hysteria, the pitiful look my shrink had given me when I had told her about my doll coming to life as the reason behind my hiding in the small cabinet, the bullying and humiliation I had faced in every institute of mine because of my unnatural breakdowns, the way I had been cornered all my life, never allowed to become the part of the crowd; everything was coming back, washing over me like tides washing over a defenseless broken flank of wood, trying to take it with them to the deepest darkest parts of the sea.

I had been running from place to place, trying to find an escape from those damned ambers yet in the end those ambers were the place offering me a solace from my tortured past.