Ex addict: it started out as what I called the bush people. Sometimes, when I would look at a bush I would see someone crouching down next to it, just staring at me. Sometimes i would see them repossession themselves or stand up really quickly then squat back down. The movements were always jerky and the images hazzy around the edges.
After a few months of the bush people, it progressed to more vivid hallucinations. The first time I had one of these more vivid images I saw a girl walking down the street. As she got closer to a makeshift parking lot for a rundown fourplex, she ventured into the light of a lamppost.
She was just about to step back into the darkness when a man appeared behind her, got her in a choke hold, and started to drag her towards one of the cars in that shitty parking lot. She bucked and kicked but it didn't help. Her bucking made it easier for the man to lift her up for a few feet and drag her closer to the car.
As I looked on in horror, I saw a glint of metal as he roughly grabbed her chin upwards, and effortlessly slit her throat. Her head lolled back then forward, her hands balled into fists and then she shook. He had moved his hands from her chin and shoulders to under her arms and started to drag her body, still spasming, towards the trunk.
By the time he unlocked the trunk with one hand, her arterial spray had painted the compact dirt of the lot and she was limp. He tossed her in the trunk as if she weighed nothing. That is when I noticed more men emerge from the shadows, hoodies up, as all five of them pilled into the car. I screamed and ran towards the car but it seemed like I could never run fast enough.
The image kept getting farther away as I tried to get closer until soon the image just dissipated into the darkness. The people I was with told me over and over that there was no car, no girl, no sinister men with hidden faces and no knife.
It was hard for me to believe them but as Iooked back on the vision later that night it occurred to me that, like the bush people, the movements were not fluid, occasionally they skipped. Like a very slow strobe light. The outlines of the images were slightly blurry and they would be moving in and out of shadows, even where there was no light.
Slowly, they became more frequent and the images worse. We would be walking in a group, laughing, chatting, not a care in our addled minds, and all around me I would see people dying horrible, violent deaths.
A few feet ahead of me a man would be disemboweling someone, the steam rising from thier spilling intestines. A few feet on the left of me, someone would be stabbing thier victim through the eyes with a spoon, until all you could see is the handle sticking out of the socket.
A few feet on the right, there would be a young boy chewing on a woman's neck, blood bubbling around his lips and teeth, as her mouth gaped in a silent scream. After I would pass them, they would play in that place between light and shadow making depth perception hard to grasp, until they were just slowly gone.
After about six months of this the things I called the Presence appeared. As death was swimming around me, in the air would be these things flying overhead.
Swooping in-between tree branches, glidding out of alleyways, and fluttering around corners. I could never really make out the images, they blended in too well with the darkness and the muted shadows.
Every once in awhile I would see where they hung in front of something lighter then themselves and I could almost make them out. The only thing I knew for certain was that they were filled with a cold hate.
They radiated menace,pain, and a deep longing. They were always there, watching, patiently waiting, for some unknown signal. I often casually wondered what the signal would be.
I knew what I was seeing was all in my head, that these images were just for me. Outwardly, I never skipped a beat. Kept up conversations, made plans and schemed. Laughed, smiled and joked. All the while I was running hells gauntlet.
Ironically, as the phantoms became worse and more disturbing i started to become desynthesized to them. I would casually see them in the same manner as someone who has to walk by the same out of control, barking dog every day.
These malevolent creatures lasted about two to three years total. Then I switched to heroin and they were gone. Poof, disappeared, as if they hadn't been living with me that whole time.
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