Bang! Bang!

 The door breathes open on its hinges, a soft complaint swallowed by the thick, unmoving air. Inside, the house feels abandoned by warmth, as though even the walls have given up trying to remember what comfort once meant. The smell reaches you first—stale tobacco clinging to the curtains, old smoke ground into the fabric of the place, layered over something sour: damp clothes left too long, skin unwashed, time itself decaying in corners.

You step in anyway.

The carpet underfoot is ancient, its fibers flattened by years of footsteps that led nowhere better. It exhales dust with every careful shift of your weight. Somewhere deeper in the house, a pipe ticks faintly, or perhaps it’s just the sound of the cold settling in. The windows are blind with condensation, opaque to the outside world, as if this place has sealed itself off deliberately.

You already know you shouldn’t be here.

The lump hammer feels heavier now, not in your hand but in your mind, its purpose swelling with each step you take down the narrow hallway. A door stands ahead—ajar, just slightly—spilling a thin blade of jaundiced streetlight across the floorboards. It cuts through the darkness like a warning you choose not to read.

You pause.

Listen.

Nothing but breathing.

Two rhythms, uneven but deep, tangled together in sleep. The kind of sleep that comes from exhaustion, not peace. The kind that trusts too easily in the idea that the night will pass without incident.

You push the door wider.

Slowly.

Gently.

Because you don’t want to wake them.

Not yet.

The room greets you with the same suffocating neglect. The bed is unmade, sheets twisted and stained, bodies half-covered, half-exposed to the cold. The air is thick, humid with breath and the residue of lives lived without care. Curtains barely cling to the window, allowing the streetlamp to paint everything in a sickly orange glow.

They don’t stir.

They don’t know.

You stand there, watching, the hammer hanging at your side. There’s a moment—just one—where the world seems to hold itself still. A moment where something inside you hesitates, presses faintly against the path you’ve chosen.

This is where you should have turned.

This is where you should have stepped back into the hallway, eased the door shut, and let the night swallow your presence whole. Left them to their dreams, to their small, fragile existence, untouched by whatever darkness you carry with you.

This is where you should have fled.

But you didn’t, did you?

No.

You did not.

Say Your Prayers - I'm Coming Up Your Stairs

 

     Not the polished kind you recite in daylight, not the tidy sentences you learned as a child, at the boy scouts, but the raw ones—the ones that snag in your throat and scrape on the way out. The kind you whisper when the house feels too quiet, when silence has weight, when the dark seems to lean in and listen.

I’m coming up your stairs.

Step by step, slow enough that you question it. Was that real? Was that the settling of old wood, or something deliberate—measured, patient? You lie there, eyes open, fixed on the ceiling you know so well, suddenly foreign. Your body refuses to move, as if it understands something your mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

Were you thinking that?

That something was wrong long before the first creak. That the night had a different texture, thicker somehow. That your thoughts weren’t entirely your own—that they’d been nudged, guided toward this moment.

Did you say it out loud?

Because sometimes fear escapes before we can contain it. A word, a breath, a half-formed question slipping into the dark. And the dark… it answers. Not in language, not in anything you can repeat, but in presence. In the way the air changes, like a held breath just behind you.

Can you hear it?

Your breathing. No—your breast heaving, sharp and shallow, betraying you. Each inhale louder than the last, each exhale a signal. You try to quiet it, to swallow it down, but panic has its own rhythm. It drums in your ears, a pulse that isn’t entirely yours.

And beneath it—something else.

A second sound.

Not as frantic. Not as human.

How did I know where you were sleeping?

That’s the question, isn’t it? The one that coils around all the others. Because it suggests something worse than chance. Worse than intrusion.

It suggests I’ve been here before.

Maybe I stood at the foot of your bed last night, watching the rise and fall of your chest, learning the cadence of your dreams. Maybe I traced the outline of your room in the dark, memorizing every shadow, every place you might try to hide.

Maybe you felt it then, too—that faint unease, like being observed from just beyond sight. And maybe you dismissed it. Turned over. Closed your eyes tighter.

We always do.

Another step.

Closer now.

The stairs don’t creak anymore. Funny, that. As if the house has decided to help me. As if it’s tired of pretending this is just another night.

You hold your breath.

But it’s too late for silence.

I already know the sound of you.

 

Grey Stones

 The Quiet Machinery of Madness

The road to the asylum is barely a road at all now—just a scar of gravel and weeds that leads nowhere anyone sane would choose to go. The building rises from the earth like something that was never meant to be abandoned, only paused. Grey stone, heavy and unmoving, holds the memory of every voice that ever echoed inside it.

Up close, the paint peels in long, curling strips, like the skin of something trying to shed itself and failing. The windows are blind with dust. No light escapes, and none seems welcome.

Inside, the air is still—too still. Not silent. Never silent.

There are beds in long rows, naked iron frames with thin, decayed mattresses sagging in the middle, as if they still remember the shape of bodies that once lay there. Restraints hang loose from rusted rails. You can almost hear the shift of metal, the restless turning of someone who has long since gone.

A ledger lies open on a desk in the admitting room. Patient records, brittle with age. Names written in careful ink. Diagnoses that read less like medicine and more like judgement.

Melancholia.

Hysteria.

Unruly thoughts.

Excessive imagination.

Someone has scrawled over the margins in frantic loops of charcoal. Words layered upon words until they collapse into darkness. Pages torn. Faces drawn again and again—eyes too wide, mouths stretched into shapes that do not belong to human expression.

The art of the tortured soul is everywhere. On walls, on floors, scratched into wood, pressed into paper. It is not decoration. It is evidence. A record of minds trying to escape themselves.

Further in, the corridors narrow.

There is a room where the machines once lived. Industrial. Clinical. Necessary, they would have said. The tumble dryer still stands against the wall—too large, too heavy, its circular mouth gaping open like it is waiting to be fed.

Inside, something once turned that should never have been placed there.

They found the body days later, they say. Folded into itself in a way no living person could arrange. The report called it an accident. The walls, if they could speak, would disagree.

Beyond that room, the air changes.

It carries something softer. Sadder.

A single teddy bear sits in the corner of a narrow cell. One eye missing. Fur worn thin from hands that must have clung to it long after comfort stopped working. It has been left carefully, not dropped. As if someone meant to come back.

No one did.

And still, the sounds persist.

Not loud. Never loud.

A sigh from behind a locked door that no longer exists. A cry that fades before it fully forms. The shuffle of bare feet along corridors that are now empty. Madness does not leave when the building is abandoned—it settles deeper, becomes part of the walls, the floors, the air itself.

At the far end lies the mortuary steps.

They descend into coldness. Into finality.

This is where the journey ended for many, though it never truly felt like an end. Only another form of silence. The kind that presses in on you, heavy and absolute.

Standing there, you begin to understand something unsettling:

Insanity was never confined to those who were kept here.

It lived in the systems that named it.

In the hands that restrained it.

In the quiet decisions that no one questioned.

And perhaps, most disturbingly..

It lingers still, waiting in places like this, patient and undisturbed, for someone to listen closely enough to hear it breathe. 

He is still here, you can feel his presence. 

The blood, still oozing from his curled lip..

The nightmare (...) It doesn't end.

Jackpot!

 The candle was already burning when I noticed it.

Not brightly—nothing dramatic, no roaring flame of revelation—but low, stubborn, and quietly consuming itself somewhere deep inside the corridors of my mind. A thin wick holding on. A small pool of melted wax gathering beneath it, like time made visible.

“To you, aficionado,” I sometimes think, addressing that inner voice that speaks with confidence I don’t quite trust. The one that dresses uncertainty in bravado. The one that keeps me performing even when I’m alone. It whispers that everything is under control, that the flicker is intentional, artistic even.

But I know better.

Because when the candle burns low, it doesn’t ask permission.

It changes the air.

Thoughts begin to stretch and warp, like shadows cast too long against a wall. Focus slips—not all at once, but in subtle fractures. One moment you’re steady, the next you’re chasing fragments of ideas that refuse to settle. A consciousness explosion, not outwardly visible, but internally deafening. Everything moving, everything shifting, nothing quite landing.

And still, you try to keep your mind in motion.

You pace mentally. You push forward. You convince yourself that movement equals control. That if you just keep thinking, keep analyzing, keep going, the flame won’t die out—or worse, won’t reveal how close it is to doing so.

But the candle doesn’t care about your effort.

It burns according to what it has left.

And that’s the quiet truth most of us avoid: sometimes the struggle isn’t about losing control—it’s about running on what’s nearly gone.

There’s a peculiar vulnerability in that space. You start questioning things you normally wouldn’t. Your confidence thins. Even your sense of self can feel like it’s flickering alongside that flame. You ask yourself:

Is this exhaustion, or is this who I really am underneath everything?

Is there any reason to remain exactly as I’ve been?

The bravado voice will rush in here. It always does. It will tell you to stand tall, to keep up appearances, to not let the flame’s weakness define you.

But maybe—just maybe—that voice is part of the problem.

Because what if the candle burning low isn’t a failure?

What if it’s a signal?

A quiet insistence that something needs to change—not in a dramatic, life-altering way, but in the small, honest ways we often ignore. Rest. Reflection. Letting the mind stop moving for once, instead of forcing it forward like a machine that’s already overheating.

We’re taught to fear the dimming. To associate it with weakness, with losing momentum, with becoming less.

But a candle burning low isn’t the end of light.

It’s a moment of truth.

You can keep pretending the flame is as strong as ever. You can keep performing for that inner aficionado, feeding the illusion of control.

Or you can sit with it.

Watch it flicker.

Acknowledge what’s left (...) and what isn’t.

Because sometimes, the most honest question isn’t “How do I keep going?”

It’s:

Why am I trying so hard not to pause?

And in that pause—uncomfortable, unfamiliar, but real—you might find that the flame doesn’t go out after all.

It steadies.

Not brighter. Not louder.

Just… truer.

So what happened.  What happened that night?

The hammer falling on the sleeping bed, the horror,  the sounds of hell.. In a small house not far from you.

The son of the devil himself,  covering his tracks.

And now we sleep. 

But does he sleep?

No..

The Road by the Bay

 

     The bar closed slowly that night, the way coastal bars often do—reluctantly. Laughter faded in uneven waves, glasses were stacked behind the counter, and the last conversations drifted out into the salt-damp air.

She left a little after midnight.

Her moped sputtered to life outside the bar, its small engine buzzing softly against the stillness of the sleeping village. She wrapped her jacket tighter around herself, glanced once toward the dark water beyond the rocks, and pulled onto the narrow dirt track that curved along the bay.

It was a lonely road.

On one side, jagged rocks fell toward the sea. On the other, low scrub and shadows stretched back toward empty land. The moon hung thin and pale, barely lighting the path ahead. The only sound was the moped’s engine and the slow rhythm of waves brushing the stones.

Somewhere along that track, a man stood waiting in the darkness.

Later, investigators would say he stepped from the shadows and raised a hand, signaling for her to stop. He told police he had asked her for a cigarette. It was a small, ordinary request—the kind strangers make every day. But not on deserted dark roads late at night.

But the night turned violent.

He attacked her there beside the lonely road. When he was finished, he picked up a rock, smashing it into her head, he then dragged her toward the water and pushed her into the bay.

By morning she was discovered floating among the rocks.

Face up.

Her eyes open to the sky.

The sea moved gently around her, the tide rocking her body as if it could not quite decide whether to claim her or return her to the shore. The early fishermen who saw her first said the water was calm that morning, eerily calm, as though the night had swallowed its own secret.

The investigation moved quickly. A local black man who had been hiding along the road was arrested and later, under duress confessed. In court he told the story of how he stopped the moped, asked for the cigarette, and what happened afterward. He had only wanted sex, he hadn't meant to kill her.

He was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.

Yet one small detail of that night has always lingered in the background, like a quiet footnote in a much darker story.

Just two minutes away from the bar where she had her last drink stood a modest hotel. Its windows faced the same rocky bay where the waves carried her body until dawn.

Inside that hotel, in a room overlooking the water, sat Dr. Jimmy’s father. He was chain-smoking nervously. He was rocking back and forth in his seat, he had been in the bar that night, he had been speaking, laughing, and drinking with the young, dark haired attractive woman. Now she was dead, her skull crushed, her beautiful face destroyed. 

The moped’s engine, the confrontation in the shadows, the splash in the dark water.. Her desperate pleas for her life.. "No, please Jimmy no..."

History often feels distant and dramatic when we read about it later.

But in reality, it happens close by.

Sometimes at home.

Yes, sometimes.

From Locked Rooms to Open Skies

  Escaping a Difficult Beginning..

Some people begin life with a safety net. Others begin with walls.

A difficult upbringing has a way of shaping how a person sees the world. When parents are irresponsible, absent, or lost in their own struggles, a child learns very early that stability is something they must build themselves. Instead of guidance, there is confusion. Instead of safety, there is uncertainty. And instead of trust, there is often a quiet fear that follows you into adulthood.

For many years, I carried that fear with me.

One of the strange remnants of my childhood was a deep discomfort with locked rooms. Closed doors, small spaces without an easy exit — they made me uneasy in ways that were hard to explain. It wasn’t just about physical space. It was about the feeling of being trapped, of having no control over what might happen next.

Children raised in chaos often grow up searching for freedom.

But freedom does not always come from changing your location or your circumstances. Sometimes it begins in the mind.

The biggest journey I have taken in my life has been a mental one — moving upward from the patterns I inherited. I had to learn that the way I was raised did not have to define who I became. The habits, fears, and sadness that were passed down to me were not permanent.

For a long time, depression felt like a shadow that followed everything I did. It whispered that happiness belonged to other people — people who had easier beginnings, stronger families, clearer paths.

But slowly, something changed.

I began to understand that happiness doesn’t have to be dramatic. It doesn’t have to look like wealth, status, or a perfect life. Sometimes happiness is incredibly simple.

It is waking up and feeling calm.

It is walking outside and breathing fresh air.

It is having a small routine that belongs entirely to you.

It is realizing that the chaos of your past no longer controls your present.

A simple lifestyle became my form of freedom. When you grow up with instability, simplicity becomes precious. A quiet home. A cup of coffee in the morning. A walk in the afternoon. These small things carry a kind of peace that once felt impossible.

Healing did not happen all at once. It happened slowly — through small realizations, small choices, and small acts of kindness toward myself.

The locked rooms that once existed in my mind began to open.

And beyond those doors, I discovered something unexpected: a life that may not be perfect, but is truly my own.

Escaping a difficult beginning is not about erasing the past. It is about rising above it — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

The past built the walls.

But we still hold the key.