The drugs never helped as they only made his visions worse. He wasn’t schizophrenic either, as the doctors and psychologists often said he was. The visions in his head weren’t imaginary they were real and they often came into tangible existence. His head would constantly throb when they happened to him. His mind would leave reality and drift to other dimensions entirely.

Stan grew to hate these visions as they often caused more discomfort and became more unwilled over time. As a young boy he remembered them being fun and entertaining and completely controllable. He hadn’t had many friends so he learned to use his own imagination. He would create his own worlds and his own friends. He had control over the visions. But as he grew older Stan eventually lost control and the happy worlds he once created grew darker and menacing.

They caused him to become more and more withdrawn. He never went to school anymore in fear of a vision happening there again. He could picture what happened the last time. Sitting at his desk in the back of the room paying attention to his teacher, he suddenly was thrown out of his own body and into a vision. It was dark with menacing shadows grabbing at him, pulling at him. There was one with a white face and no eyes or nose screaming at him to die and kill. He tried to run but couldn’t move, he tried to scream but couldn’t make a sound. The shadows had overwhelmed him and he finally got a scream out.

When he had come to his hands were around another students throat as he was screaming murder. The school principal walked in and carried him out. His mother was called and he was no longer welcome into the school. Other schools hadn’t heard the story and he was allowed into one a week later but hadn’t shown up a single day. His father yelled at him and threatened him but nothing got to him. He couldn’t take it anymore.

That’s when he started taking pills. Happy pills angered the shadows more. They became more violent when he used them. The pills for the schizophrenia made the shadows come out of his partial reality and into the reality he was used to. His room would be filled with them as they attacked him and clawed at him and left him with marks, scars, and bloody wounds.  

Frightened and helpless nobody would listen and understand. Other kids would call him names and laugh at him. Mothers would hustle their kids past him on the street shielding them away as if Stan would lunge at them with a knife. Once a store clerk threw money from the cash register at him screaming to leave the store. People were afraid of him and it left him with more and more of a want to be normal.

Today Stan was sitting in his own closet with the door shut in the darkness. He had heard his mother walk into his room but made no efforts to move. He only closed his eyes wishing she would just go away. He wanted her to just go away and leave him alone for just a minute and stop acting like he was some helpless baby boy who needed to suck on his mothers teat every second of the damn day. He grew angry, as she wouldn’t leave the room.

Frustrated he was thrust into a vision. He was falling and hit a floor. The pain seared into his back as he stared into a blacken void. Shadows spiraled around his feet and up from underneath him. They hovered over his body as he tried to wiggle his it up but it was no use, he couldn’t move. Thousands of the shadows had gathered watching him with no faces. The one with the face descended down and lay parallel over his own. There was a mist that followed as it set itself upon Stan’s body burning his flesh. The shadows face grew closer and closer to Stan’s own face as it reached out arms and grabbed onto Stan’s mouth and opened it. The shadow started to turn into an intangible mass of mist itself as it entered into Stan.

No more did Stan control his body. His mind was there and his eyes saw everything but his body moved on its own as it climbed up. The shadows no longer pestered him but instead moved out of the way. Walking he seemed to leave the dark void. In a fuzzy new place he saw his closet again. Reaching out for the door he thought his vision was over.

He became more frightened when he still couldn’t move his arms or his legs. He wanted out. The closet door opened as his mother had finally found him. She was saying something with her hands on her hips but there was no sound. Stan watched her but couldn’t move. He watched as his own hand lunged out and grabbed his mother by the throat. His body pushed her to the floor and sat upon her chest gripping with both hands now upon her throat.

Inside Stan began to cry. He had no control as his body acted on its own. His mother was going to die. His hands would kill his own mother and he had no control. Her body wiggled around trying to escape but it was no use. Her hands wrapped around Stan’s wrist trying to get free but that wasn’t effective as well. Her body began to stop moving. She laid there limp, dead. Stan was horrified.

His body leaned over with his mouth pressed to his mothers. He felt the same feeling as he had with the mist in his vision. He began to feel himself again. He seemed to float out of his own body. His eyes could see his body now lying over his own mothers with lips together. He stood and looked around. His body was white and translucent like a ghost. He moved toward his own real body trying to touch it but he couldn’t. Instead it stood up facing away from him.

Slowly his body tuned looking at him. His face wasn’t his own. It was the same as the shadows in his visions. His ghostly presence emanated from what he thought was his body. The shadow had taken over him. Stan was confused now. The room began to spin as it went dark. He was back in the vision world. The shadows now surrounded him flying around him. He felt connected to them now. They soon dispersed to reveal his mother standing in the distance. He tried going toward her but still couldn’t move. The faced shadow came flying down from above and swallowed her whole. It then flew toward Stan stopping inches from his face. The mass now had presence and a darkened feel to it. It was more then just a shadow now it was a being. Stan was the one that felt like a shadow now. There was nothingness about his own self that he couldn’t understand.

The shadow slowly transformed into him. There he stood looking into himself a young boy who was haunted by his own self. He seemed to become distant from that person he thought he was and instead seemed to be nothing. The shadow was now him. And he was now the shadow. Just as it had transformed into him it had transformed back again. More mist followed. Clinging to Stan’s now ghostly body but now there was no burning feeling but rather a sense of cool and chilling.

There was more darkness consuming all presences. Stan’s mind was falling from itself as his thoughts were beginning to die. His mind was becoming lost as he heard a voice call out to him; “I own you now…” it drifted away as Stan’s only thought became blackened darkness. He fell into a blackened darkness, he saw a blackened darkness, and he was a blackened darkness.