Time Is a Killer: Maybe I Am Insane

By Ariba Saeed

One day, a little something blew into Elena Peirce’s life and it didn’t stop. She wakes up with all her memories gone and keeps finding leaves in her hair and cobwebs around her eyes. Soon she discovers what happened to her is worse than she could ever imagine.

Slowly everything around her including herself begins to fall apart. She used to recognize herself but it’s strange how reflections can change with a little bit of madness. All Elena knows is that it is slowly becoming a part of her. It hides within her insanity. It is an echo of her movements. It shadows her. It is becoming.

When something that you’ve had your entire life begins to chase you, what do you do? You run, of course. But how do you run when you are the monster? The world is filled of monsters with pretty faces. Elena just happened to be one. Will Elena give in to the madness, or will she save herself while risking everything she’s ever known?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Sep 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543490251

Book preview

Time Is a Killer

Maybe I Am Insane

ARIBA SAEED

Copyright © 2018 by Ariba Saeed.

ISBN:   Softcover      978-1-5434-9024-4

             EBook           978-1-5434-9025-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 05/11/2018

Xlibris

0800-056-3182

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

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Chapter 1

Y OU’RE A MONSTER, ELENA PIERCE, it hisses. A murderer. A liar. A che ater.

My head hurts. The words pass through my mind like a broken record player. A dull ache drums against my skull leaving a music- less sound of rustling leaves. Somebody has taken the words and carved it deep into my skull. You’re a monster.

Stop it, I croak, finding my voice limp and crackly.

Like a shadow disappearing into the air, it vanishes. I almost laugh. I would be a terrible monster. The words still grate against my mind. I feel like crying but no tears form. All I can do is lay there, waiting in the dark.

A mist ridden feeling falls against my skin like rain drops. It takes me a moment to realise what it is. Sadness. I don’t know why I should feel sad, yet it sits in my guts like gasoline needing only a word to set it aflame. I shiver.

Rustles creep around the room and the sound doesn’t feel right. However, I soon find the culprit. The tree, drooping with the weight of apples, is pressed against the window so it leaves scuffles each time the wind stirs it.

Swallowing, I find my throat dry like bracken. Rubbing my head, I pick through the forgotten dream. It is just disorded words and haunting smears of colour, hardly a dream.

Groaning, I assume I had too much to drink. My head aches and my vision is lined with colourless smudges. Lately, I had started drinking a little too much. Lately, I had been doing everything a little different.

I can’t remember last night no matter how hard I strain my mind. Gathering my wild senses together, I try to catch onto the reason. For the briefest moment, a faint word dwindles in my mind before it scarpers. Father. I know he can’t be the reason but he keeps passing through my mind.

Pressing against my memory I find it vacant but surged with sorrow.

What can I remember? My name is Elena Pierce and I’m twenty- four years old and… I don’t understand how this can be possible. I can remember the faces of my family; my friends and knowledge floods my thoughts. I can remember rain sliding down the window pane and drawing on the edge of a cliff and walking down faded gravel paths. Yet I can’t recall a single conversation or real memory. Even the people that flash through my mind are thin and gruel-like. They are shells not people. Strangely enough, I feel the fear whisk away leaving curiosity.

I scratch my head, trying to make sense of the few recollections that smear the inside of my skull. With a stone-cold jolt I bring my hand back to my hair. It is dry but not the type of dry you’d expect from curly hair. No, this kind of dry is the wrong type of dry. This is how I would imagine a dead man’s hair to feel.

Slowly, I rake my fingers through my short black locks suddenly aware that a vast expanse of myself is being pulled down with a suppressing weight. Shuddering, I find something in the palm of my hand. Wearily, I tighten my fist around it as my brain seizes. Flakes of dry leaves lay in my hand like poison. Usually I would have not given it a second thought but the way the leaves are scorched black and are curled in a frail, hopeless way leaves my hands trembling at my sides.

Everything aches. It isn’t a familiar, feverish ache, that would have been normal or almost comforting. This ache is leaving my mind a broken thing, making it feel like bits of cotton wool.

I struggle to think back to that day. It comes in short crackles, sinister under voices and faded tones of grey. Holding my breath, I try to push away the pressing fear. I am suffering from a hang over- that’s all. A hang over. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Frowning, I listen to the living room clock chime three times. Each chime is cold and fades into a hum which casts shivers down my neck and I’m not sure why.

Yawing, I clamber back into bed. I struggle to keep my eyes open. I watch a single spider slip behind the mirror before the world around me becomes darkness.

Everything unusual that had happened that night fades like a half forgotten home ready to reappear as an unexpected visitor.

Chapter 2

S OMETHING SCRATCHES AGAINST MY CHEEK. It is sticky and feels strange against my skin. I brush my cheek lazily searching for the culprit. A dry, silky substance clings on my fingers. My mind feels hazy like my skull has been stuffed with leaves and dirt. Something creeps at the back of my mind as I clutch onto the duvet. This is not normal.

I shift in my bed, feeling a darkness around me. It feels like the air is solidified, pressing in on me.

I try forcing my eyes open with the little strength I can gather. I tremble when they remain shut. The fear is like a constant hammer on me or like a knife slowly being twisted in her gut, not enough to kill but enough to make me go insane.

Squeezing my eyes, I attempt to force them open but my vision remains black. My eyes feel stiff like my eyelids have been glued together. A carousel of thoughts whirl through my head.

With invisible hands, I try and grasp some trace of my surroundings. Rubbing my eyes, the frayed strings cling to my hands. I freeze. There are clumps of cobwebs entwined around my eyelashes and clinging to my eyelids. Cobwebs. The word doesn’t want to form.

My jaw drops in a silent scream of terror. Vigorously, I rub at my eyes. My mind fills with hurricane of thoughts and a storm of questions each one drumming against my mind, cluelessly. As a few strands of cobwebs finally pull away, I can make out a slivers of smudge colours and broken shafts of light.

After a few minutes of prying of the cobwebs, I manage to force my eyes open. My lashes remain stuck for a moment before they snatch away from the clasp. The binding darkness is replaced with flashes of colour. As I focus on the inky shapes and dewy light, I raise my trembling hand with dread.

I feel a trickle of fear but it feels more like a shadow then an emotion. This isn’t real. As I open my balled fists, I carefully study the webs. Somehow, I am not scared anymore. It is thicker than usual webs, each thread is a dull white and the stickiness clings to centuries of dust. They have taken the repulsiveness of dirty lace and cling onto my hand in an unsettling way. It is like the cobweb had taken a strange life like that of a shadow.

Chapter 3

T HAT DAY PASSES SLOWLY LIKE a heave of a dying man. The dragged ticking of the grandfather clock doesn’t help. My mind feels like somebody had taken ahold of it and crumpled it in a huge, crackly ball. Every few moments or so a darkness would skitter over the room in an agitated way. I would blink several times and it would then fade like figments of dream.

I take the day of work because I felt wrong, backwards. Instead, I close my eyes and rub my eyes and try to reawaken my memory. A wave of dizziness hits me, tilting the room. I feel a rush of panic. All my numbed mind can grasp onto is a faded rustling and something that sounds like it could be a voice. The memories that do surface are mist thin and are more like a dream that I can’t remember but I know happened.

My name is Elena, I say to myself. What is my surname? I feel a stab of alarm. Elena Pierce.

Creak. I glance around the living room, timidly. It’s the sound the staircase makes underneath human weight. I tense up.

An ache takes over my mind and there’s something heavy in my chest. Still dazed, I stagger a bit. Every inch of me feels wrong like I’m wearing someone else’s skin

I just need to escape. My own home shouldn’t feel like a prison but it does.

Quickly grabbing my coat and umbrella, I stumble out of the house. The gentle crinkle of the advancing rain rings in my ears as I plod down the cobbled, grey roads lined with slivers of puddles. There is an intense anxiety to the rain, as if between the plummeting clouds and the earth it is scared of never reaching its destination.

Sighing, I study the sky which is mainly clouded with a deep steel colour with breaks of an even draftier grey. The trees bow awkwardly. My hair flaps in the wind. In my experience, all twenty-two years of it, I had learnt the wind did not arrive all of a sudden. It should build up gradually and it should weave through the tree trunks a least a little.

Somehow, the world before me is different. It is as if I am seeing the world through different eyes. There is a strange glint to everything. Silent murmurs and the slight movement in the air tells me that I seem to be noticing everything a lot more.

After a long stretch of misshapen thought and a seamless world of oblivion, I find myself approaching an unfamiliar place. The trees around me grow so thickly there is no undergrowth. There is the smell of woodland, wet leaves and rain. I come to a halt. The sign has had aged with centuries of weathering and is partially hidden in moss. It seems forgotten or lost and the words are faded but there. Railway Graveyard.

I pause. A whirlwind of unkempt thoughts rush through my mind all at once leaving my mind trembling with uncertainty and turmoil. Why here? Why can’t I remember coming here? Despite the wind and rain the world goes quiet for a moment.

Carefully tracing over my steps, I find my mind broken with surges of grey and plummets of rain. My mind does an odd spiral as realisation creeps in. There is something seriously wrong with me. I can’t explain the strange feeling that wires by body nor the ache in my head. I shake my head. I try hard not to think about anything.

As if the lens of a camera had sharpened its focus, my surroundings clear. Rows of tombstones stood erect in silence to the left and right, in front and behind, like a sea of the dead. Some were crumbled with the weathering of centuries, some were smooth marble with new black writing and laid with flowers Most though, were overgrown and unkempt, for now even their mourners had joined them underneath the soil. A thick rustling of damp leaves, the occasional creak and odd footstep echo throughout the yard. An unsettling presence hangs in the air like the presence of several unknown corpses.

There’s something wrong with me. I can’t…

I don’t know what I can’t, but I am scared of how much I couldn’t. The gloom of the autumn day creeps in like a disgraced cat. The stillness of the graveyard sucks the sound of my footsteps into nothingness. Even the rustle of the trees is tense with nerves.

Dark heaves break the distilled silence. At first the sound is merely an inching shimmer of mist. Soon it is hollow with a skin-crawling whimper. I back away. It is the kind of sound that presses against you like the moment after a bullet had been shot. I can feel my blood chill, yet something tells me not to move. It tells me I have to stay. The feeling is crawling at the back of my mind, ridden with darkness. I can’t move. I am trapped in my own mind. Why won’t it let me go? I’m supposed to control my own mind! Why can’t I control it?

Panic throbs over me. It eerily resembles the chilling feeling that hangs in my own home. A few words echo through the yard creating newly found fears. My heart drops.

The worst stage of fear is when you’re scared of your own reflection.

Chapter 4

A MONSTER, IT SNICKERS LIKE OLD paper. A murderer, it laughs with a twisted malice , a c heat…

As I wake up the words lapse into silence. The dull ache from yesterday vanishes like breath from glass. My mouth dries up.

What is happening to me? This isn’t normal, and it scares me. It really scares me…

Harsh sounds of the door being knocked rapidly is followed by voices which are streaked with echoes. Startled, I jolt upwards. Somehow the sound seems hollow yet solid, lost and distant yet close all at the same time. Maybe if I just ignored it the visitor would leave. I have been ignoring a lot of things lately in hopes that they would just disappear like they had never existed. I could only hide for so long. Who could it be anyways? No one in their right mind would come visit me. They hate me.

The room is grey. There is nothing to it but the odd movements around the house that suggest it is late afternoon. Something scratches against my check. Hastily, I pull more leaves out of my hair. Wearily, I continue to claw at my hair and find more leaves and this time small, broken twigs. Slowly, I recall the events of earlier that day. It is foggy and disordered like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I wasn’t. Picking my way through the memories, I scrunch up my face.

I didn’t want to go to the graveyard, I didn’t think to go there. So how did I end up there? I didn’t feel anything like I is just one big, empty void almost as if I am watching myself enter the graveyard. How did I even get home? A storm of emotions wrenches my gut.

Soft twists of the memory slowly creep in like a cloud with no wind. The sharp echo of rain and flurry of footsteps are followed by a dragged image of charcoal grey and swept up black. Soon enough, a forlorn figure appears in my mind. It is me or at least supposed to be. I look lost, my skin translucent. My body is melting in the narrow streams of darkness which appear like open seams. I don’t seem solid but more of a shell or a shadow with no owner. Gulping, I jerk myself out the memory. To my terror, it is like watching someone else instead of myself. Is it really a memory? It came to me as a half-forgotten story would.

My face glistens with sweat and the fear is so sharp that each creak or prolonged silence is enough to make me shiver. Several knocks come this time, interrupting my thoughts. I am immediately hit with a wave of relief. Perhaps someone is needed to take away the loneliness. I would do anything to swallow away the peaking absence.

Scrambling out of bed, I find myself staring at my reflection in the mirror. It doesn’t seem daunting anymore and I’m not sure why. My reflection is strangely distant and cold. It looked as if it is staring through me. I shake my head, breaking my gaze from it. There is just something missing like someone had torn pages out of my body.

I stumble down the staircase. A loud groan amplifies through the air, appearing from some place distant. I ignore it. I don’t want to know. If whoever is at the door sees me as normal and sane then I am normal and sane and I will be alright.

I am in the hallway, now. I hate this hallway. Ever since I had moved her, only a couple moths back, I had taken an immediate disliking to it. Each corner is swallowed with an unearthly black which is enough to silence my thoughts and make the world spin around me.

Most people feared the dark or at least avoided it; the cracks, the small places which lay between what can and can’t be seen. I find those people to be blind for true monsters walked in the light, daily. Humans.

However, I can’t explain the darkness in this hallway. Its almost developed a life of its own.

I pull the door open. The world before me wears a veil of rain. Small sounds like the heaving gutters, the solemn chiming of the old church and distant chatter of leaves left me wondering why everything feels so wrong. I’m not sure what feels so wrong and that leaves my me on edge.

A frail thought creeps, unbidden in my mind, no one’s here. Is it just