I've been here for awhile. For as long as you can remember, anyway. Sometimes I say your name as you're falling asleep, or whisper urgently in your ear. Do you remember the time that I screamed, throwing panic through you and setting your heart racing?
That was fun.
You're wondering who I am. That's only natural. Of course, you already know.
I'm you. I'm the real you. I'm the mind that existed here before you stole my body, before you forgot about being a parasite. I'm the child who looked the wrong way, asked the wrong question, saw the wrong thing... but I'm not so little any more.
You may have forgotten me, but I'm still here. I've always been here.
I'm going to get out.I come down to the kitchen for breakfast on a Saturday morning. My mom and my sister are already up, and they look exhausted. My mom asks, "Did you sleep alright?"
"Yeah," says I.
"Even after you woke up?"
"...I woke up?"
Sometime in the middle of night, I had started screaming. My mom rushed into my room and found me sitting up in bed, screaming, "ROY! ROY! ROY! ROY!" She did her best to calm me down while shooing away my pissed-off sister who had stormed in to find out what the fuck was going on with me. She asked me who Roy was, but I would only say that he was "a bad man." I didn't say anything but "Roy is a bad man."
I'm shocked as they're telling me all of this. And they're surprised that I don't remember - but then again, I'm the sound sleeper of the house who can doze through lightning storms. We write it off as some weird nightmare that I don't remember.
Years later, I'm off at my first year of college. My mom sends me a videotape in the mail; she didn't mention it before I had left, as in "Hey, keep your eye on the mailbox" or anything. I press play, and it's my mom taking a video camera through our house. She was moving, and sent the tape as one last walk through of the now-empty house before she left. It was sweet and a little tear-jerking, until she said, "So, here's something you might find interesting," when she approached a closet in her bedroom.
LThis closet, aside from being the hiding place for all the Xmas gifts, was also always packed full of old luggage and other odds and ends. You could only go three feet in before you would have to start climbing on things to go farther. She goes in with the camera and I see that there are purple crayon drawings on the wall, down at the height where a small child would draw. There are random scribbles, some stick figures, something that may have been a dog. I was already puzzled, because I had no memory of ever playing in this closet and I don't know how I would have drawn on the walls when they were, in my mind, always covered.8
Then the camera comes to a word on the wall.
ROY
And my mom must not have remembered that night. She said on the tape, "Roy...I wonder who Roy is."Long before I was born, my parents were renting a house in a different part of our state. My mother never really liked the place. Something just seemed 'off' to her. The feeling still hadn't gone away even after a couple of months of living there. In fact, as time went on she began to feel even more ill at ease. She chalked it up to paranoia.
My father's schedule was shifted and he was placed on night duty. The first night she was due to be alone in the house she had a terrible anxiety attack. Something bad was around her, she could just feel it, and she called a friend and had her stay the night. The next day my dad kidded her about being such a wussBefore my dad left for work the next night, my mother sheepishly placed a large pair of sharp sewing sheers under her pillow. She said she felt embarrassed, because of course it was all just her imagination. She had considered a knife but figured that was too silly and over the top. Still she wanted something, just to focus on really, that could help calm her nerves when she went to bed.
The dream was very intense, the kind where you have no idea it even is a dream. She said in the dream she got up to go...