Paranoia and Fear

The gaslight flickered and shadows danced, stretching the already sinister shapes of her furniture. Every creak of the floorboards, every rustle of the wind against the panes sounded like a footstep, a whisper, a threat. The scratching, that constant gnawing at the edge of her consciousness, had become a symphony of fear, a never-ending soundtrack to her unraveling mind.

It wasn't just in her ears anymore; it was in her bones, a vibration that resonated with the thrumming of the Optic itself, a cold hard weight against her skin. Her reflection in the dusty mirror was a stranger, her eyes wide and haunted, the pupils dilated to blackness. The lines of her face were twisted into a mask of suspicion, a permanent grimace of fear. She saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. Her breath caught in her throat, her heart pounding against her ribs like a bird in a cage. It was nothing, she told herself, just a trick of the light.

But the doubt lingered, a snake in the pit of her stomach. The doubt, once a seed, had grown into a vine and wrapped itself around her mind, choking her reason. It started small, a suspicion that her colleagues, once friends and confidants, were watching her, studying her, whispering behind their hands. Their casual conversations now sounded like code, their smiles like veiled threats. Dr. Albright's polite questions about her health felt pointed, his concern a thinly veiled assessment of her sanity. Professor Davies' innocent questions felt like an interrogation.

It is one of those comments on research that takes on, as though deflected upon a subtle rumble, a sinister edge; every word he uttered although containing a hushed knowingness was enough to chill her till she felt as though the marrow had frozen in her very bones. Even among her closest friends now, Emma's distrust was being felt.

Little by little, Sarah, her good mate since university, started to seem different. Instead of the liberating symptom of laughter and confiding, the two exchanged phone calls now held little chance for friends to confide, with her carefully modulated tones sharing what they were actually saying while mirroring Emma's own paranoia.

The once-reassuring words of Sarah became mere verbal jabs, hinting in every syllable that Emma was coming apart. In fact, mealtime had now become a sort of a fugitive meeting, while the scraping of forks against china rang out like a discord in the harmonic choir of suspicion;. Sleep provided no relief, blandishing her into a visitation with visions of morbid corridors and silhouetted creatures lurking there. She imagined voices, she imagined evil, luminous eyeballs watching through the darkness, she imagined hands climbing from the abyss, pulling apart fasteners upon which the weight of her sanity rested. Cold sweat poured down Emma's back, as she woke up abruptly, her heart racing; a suffocating pressure slowly crushed against her chest and she again became a muted witness to the unholy eye that tormented her mental ward.

She began to doubt everything: her memoirs, the perceptions of her senses, even her own storytelling; it was indeed the very object itself that perforced her fears by boosting her nervousness into warlike entities, attacking her self-images. She felt a constant feeling of uneasiness emanating from it-a pulsating energy-that seemed to burrow itself within her very being, corrupting her thoughts, and contorting her perception.

Having it in possession somehow became the same feeling as obliging an outrageously phenomenal creature feeding on her terror, her insecurities, her doubts. It was some kind of extravagant cohabitation of fear and a vicious tango between the one who possessed and the one who was possessed.

She set about recording experiences in backhanded, disparaged fragments of descent into madness. The once-nicely constructed letters had turned into white hot scrawls, as if the thoughts were racing one another in desperate panic.

Somebody clearly made a few notes from watching, thinking, or becoming absorbed in -- chaos on a centrally themed living thing. Once she was done with her notes on every perceived threat, every suspicious whisper, every sickly glance - she would go tell about the slow workings of her own despair in the most minute particulars, desperately trying to elucidate to herself what was going on.

The days and nights rushed together, a whirlpool of constant cloistered fear. She effectively barricaded herself in her study, the flickering gaslight playing upon the walls, turning the familiar place into a prison all her own. All kinds of shadow puppets did plays of escape from here - with a kind of ferocity that only this structure could exude - as if to make fun of her, to taunt her, to reflexively spill algedonate secrets that she could not kick fathom into her own grasp, all filling her with the stabs of unreason.

The scratching began to be more strident; skin rubbed against the plaster with slow obstinance, as otherworlds gnawed at the edges of their realties. Thus, all rational attempts to explain the candidate evaporated, as each attempt to bolster the sanity drew in significant doses of creeps. There were little comforts afforded by logic, little escapes that reason brought.

Each explanation, however plausible, seemed tainted by an indescribably evil itch within, by a gnawing fear that nothing was so real, perhaps it was an intricate set-up driven to shut her in. Once a world of order and understanding, it had now turned into a diabolical labyrinth where every bend hid a threat, every shadow hid lurking danger. She called for help and found it hard to trust even the ones who used to provide her support. A phone call to Sarah had ended without a goodbye.

"Though they had fought against another, the words escaped her mouth for the first time, doubting a woman speaking to a stranger. She felt suffocated, unable to voice her fears; choking on the paranoia that enfolded her to chock her down. The doctors, she feared, could be in league with the others. They were probably watching her, judging her, and gossiping about her behind her back.

Their compassion was just a sham hiding some calamity that had yet overnight turned into her worst nightmare. The artifact that had once sparked an intellectual thirst soon turned into a wicked extension of her fears. It throbbed with sinister energy, evidently filling her with further anxiety: feeding off her paranoia, turning her mind into her world of accusations and persecutions. Every shadow became a threat; each whisper coursed into an accusation.

The line between fantasy and the true world was long blurred out of existence; the very fabric of reasons under siege from encounters with trauma-induced fear. She found herself locked within her own prison, a prisoner of her mind and a captive of her reality, isolated inside that prison with nothing but paranoia and insidious dark whispers for companionship, feeding upon her.

An unyielding weight-The Eye-sullen and cool against her skin, pinched in her own black spirit of despair. The world outside was fading with maddening progress, quickly transformed by darkness from within. In that darkness, she found herself; utterly-most terrifyingly alone."