They Killed her with her own rib bone (3)

https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/67a4ba/she_spoke_to_the_wind/

Nobody can measure the power of faith, because those who could won't. Everyone who has it has described it to me the same as anyone who talks about their anger. It's this bubbling mass of hot air that has to escape you. It has to express itself through unwitting devotion and blind necessity. Faith is an ugly, vulgar trickster. Calliope understood her destiny, because it's what Grzuul told her. She was an important piece, but a piece all its own. She could make her own choices, but needed to make this one. What she chose to do is lie to several doctors, trick them into believing she was better and sacrifice her life.

In a matter of months, Calliope made remarkable improvements in her health, as well as her communication skills. She became much calmer once they found the proper medications, but still maintained that ‘aloof’ caricature of herself. The doctors could find no reason to keep her. There had been no incidents to cause concern over the past few months, so everyone (including me) believed she was ready. My one cause for concern revolved around the fact that I’d known her as this unpredictable whim of nature for so long. We’d neglected to find her the proper care when it could’ve done more for her and now that was over. She’d gotten the proper care and, after years of neglect, her departure, to me, seemed abrupt.

I tried to point out that she’d been this ‘aloof’ person for as long as I knew her. The doctors didn't seem concerned. When I asked if she might be faking or toning down her psychosis, I insulted her psychiatrist and received a few long-winded diagnosis' that were meant to 'put me in my place'. The joke was on them, because I hardly understood any of what they said!

Studying her condition (or what science had to say about it) since she'd been found, did little to put me at ease. I understood more than before, but it didn’t explain her. I'd studied her for much longer than her disease, as if they weren’t mutually exclusive. She couldn’t be anything but ‘Calliope’ in my mind. I believed that Calliope was infatuated with her mind's ability to respond to her... and, most of the time, only to her. She wasn’t talking to the world. Calliope saw and spoke through the voices. They acted as a barrier between her and the rest of the world.

(I regret making this assumption. It wasn’t my place. I should’ve listened and accepted whatever the doctors told me, but I was stubborn. I had mismanaged our friendship and needed any reason I could to protect her.)

Before they let her out of that place, I tried to convince her to stay. I said, "Calliope... are you sure you're ready to leave?"

She replied. "I am. I miss you all. It's been too long. I need you all around me."

"Calliope... is there anything you're not telling me?"

"I tell you everything, because I love you."

"I love you too, Calliope."

She'd never said she loved me. I always assumed, but hearing those words did everything to lull me into a fanciful illusion of us settling down with two kids and a nice house with a long, white picket fence. My guard was up, so I assumed the voices told her to say it. The truth, which I had to admit right away, was that Calliope never had to say, “I love you”. Everyone knew her love. She went around to different rooms around the psychiatric center and would ask patients how they were and hug them after. She smiled and waved like a princess greeting her devoted followers, before returning to her room with a complicated smile.

The center supervised all of its patients around the clock. I requested a review of the security videos from her room. They allowed my request, so I occupied one of their rooms for several hours and made it my mission to figure out what was happening in her mind.

There was a pattern. Her first few days, she sat by the window. She'd stay up all night and pass out in a chair. She'd wake up when the light came up and go to bed. What happened from there, well, I can't explain. She'd rest nicely with her eyes closed and to all who saw you'd assume she slept like an angel. She'd wait every morning for the doctors to come in before she could get up. After several nights of waiting by the window, she stopped and found something else to occupy her time. She wasn't allowed pens, but she had plenty of crayons. She went between black and purple, writing and drawing in a composition notebook. She'd work all night, falling asleep before the sun came up and waking with the return of the medical staff.

I showed them the footage and demanded to see what she'd written. The medical staff agreed, but when they approached Calliope she hesitated. I couldn't believe the voices would do this to her. I suddenly had the notion that they'd led her into a trap... I mean... she had to understand that the physicians would want to know what was going through her mind and would do all that they could, including reading her diaries. She gave it up without a fight. She looked so sullen and defeated, as she handed it over to the chief medical consultant.

The doctors didn't know what to make of her drawings. At first glance, they were nonsensical jargon from a paranoid, delusional, schizophrenic mind. Upon further inspection, which took about an hour of sifting through one-hundred and seven pages, we realized that Calliope had written out every last detail of how she thought she would die.

I

Calliope wouldn't explain to anyone what she had drawn. It became clear to her that she wouldn't be leaving, so she shut down and cried. She cried on my shoulder for about an hour, before asking when she could expect to be released. I'll never forget her transformation. She turned up from her faithless whimpering and immediately elevated her joyful, infectious beauty, as she asked, "When can we all be a family again?" I told her it's going to take a little more time. She didn't like that answer, but she understood. She seemed to calm down, but her eyes were busy as usual.

I asked her to explain the drawings. She spoke with such joy for what she'd done. She knew exactly how she was supposed to die, but wouldn't tell me why. When I asked why she couldn't tell me, she said she wasn't allowed to. In my mind, that means she didn't want to tell me, because she thought it put us in danger.

The third page was the diagram of her death. It showed a female form, not unlike Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. In the top-right of the third page was a separate diagram of something that looked like a jagged rock. A black line connected the rock to the diagram of the body, where a gaping wound was drawn in red. I asked her about that. She said that she would die by the hands of some sacred tool. I asked why it was sacred. She said that it was sacred, because it would create a paradox that would 'open the first gateway'.

She wouldn't explain what that meant and continued along with her story, until I demanded to know. The look in her eyes, always busy, returned and I saw the shudder of dozens of voices screaming inside her. They told her which road to take, how to evade my questioning, how to give up, how to run, how to escape. I felt bad for waking them, as she stood over her drawings and cried. I apologized and she let me hug her.

"You're one of the only ones that the voices listen to," she said.

"Who else would they listen to?" I asked.

"Grzuul," she admitted. "But he was full of promises."

II

I wasn't the one that caused her pain. She and the voices understood that, but where we all differed was in finding that delicate middle ground, where we work to make everything better. Nobody knew, especially Calliope, why she had to suffer. Her mind was a curse. It was crippled as much as anyone in a wheelchair. The voices thought they could help Calliope and also, well, I believe her in that they might’ve wanted her help as well. Instead, they only caused each other greater harm. It was a parasitic entanglement. I wanted the doctors to care for her, maybe for the rest of her life, but really, the thought of her being imprisoned in such a place for the rest of her days, away from us, her family, was too much for me to bear.

I asked her about the stone. She told me it was a sacred relic that belonged to her. She said it was piece of bone, but not hers. It belonged to a version of her that I knew much better, because it was a chunk of ribs from when she was a child. She claimed that in another world Grzuul killed her and took her rib. He found her in this reality and killed her with the rib of her ten-year-old-self. When I asked why he would need to do such a thing, she replied,

"Because it's the only way to kill me."

I fought for her to stay, because I thought it would be in her best interest. It wasn’t my intention for her to be there forever, but as long as the doctors thought she would need. The doctors understood after they saw her drawings, but her parents took a lot of convincing. All they wanted was their daughter back, but I assured them that we had to be patient. We made a vow to care for her, because we hadn't when she was ten. We lost her then, but I wouldn’t lose her again.

It took several hours to convince them. We stayed at the facility all day. I think everyone was pretty annoyed with me, but I wouldn't budge. Calliope had to stay. The people in charge of the facility agreed, which helped Calliope's parents. They agreed. They trusted that I wanted only the best for her, but still made me be the one to tell her.

Calliope took the news and appeared disappointed, though she shrugged off her dismay in a matter of seconds. She went right back to her drawings and slipped deeper into her abysmal silence. We expected something along the lines of hysterics, but the calm in her eyes appeared permanent. She was such a good actress. It terrified the hell out of me.

III

The next day, Calliope was missing. Her parents, having finally found her after all these years and now having her torn away from them, acted as one would expect. Her father assaulted the head physician, while Calliope's mother collapsed. She was conscious when they got to her, but she wouldn't move. She begged them to leave her alone, but the doctors picked her up and dragged her body over to a couch.

The police reviewed the security cameras, but a clip between 3:35A.M. and 3:57A.M. had been cut clean. No one would admit to tampering and the police assumed that the facility was hiding something. They thought that Calliope had been ‘disappeared’ for some reason. There was no build up to anything significant. Calliope slept through the night. She was much more peaceful than ever before. The doctors had no reason to want her gone. By all accounts, Calliope was a model patient who made it her duty to cheer up everyone in the facility.

Between 3AM and 3:30, the security camera shows her moving around. She doesn't reveal herself to be awake. Instead, she rests and waits, hides from us, until 3:32AM. She moves up in her bed. It appears as if she's moving around for a moment, before settling in place. She couldn't hide her excitement, for what she saw. The camera didn't have a clear line of vision, so I couldn't tell what she was seeing. Her bed looked out a window, which stood five stories up from an emergency wing of a medical institution. She's looking for something, lying in desperate wait, as that thing for which she remains so patient appears and then everything gets scrambled.

It took whoever it was twenty-two minutes to have her out of there. No other cameras caught their escape. For some reason, their service 'kicked out' and went black between those times.

We had no clues. We lost her again. Calliope disappeared without a trace. Her parents had this hollow look in their eyes, as if their spirits faded into the backdrop of a dire emptiness inside them, retreating from the pain, devolving into a sensible 'automaton' state. Calliope left a single clue: her drawings. Everyone else assumed they were ramblings of a schizophrenic, but I thought I could make sense of them. I was one of the few people that 'the voices listened to', so maybe, in a way, they might be trying to get a message through her to me.

Calliope wrote down every thought. I think she did it to be purposely misleading. Not everyone was meant to see this journal. At first, I thought she wrote it to get all of her thoughts in order, but as I read through some of her notes I assumed it was all for me. It would’ve made sense for her to write this journal to achieve a sense of control over her fate, if, as we thought, she was the one writing it. We forgot to consider the voices. They were trying to get a message to anyone that would listen. That happened to be me.

They had her draw out a building, a seven-story tower with a bell that rang a few times a day. She drew out the bell and wrote, 'Bell of San Pietro'. Under the name, she wrote 'Transfiguration' and then below that 'Transmogrification'.

It was the only building in the journal, so I looked it up to find others and found one within twenty miles of the facility, 'The Bell Tower of Saint Peter'. I called the police and told them to meet me there. I didn't give them time to tell me not to go. I wouldn't have listened. A trail of blue petals led along a dirt walkway to the tower. The door was open. I heard the police cars pulling up, as I ran into the building.

I found Calliope on the third floor with a hole in her chest. Whatever 'sacred tool' they used was strong enough to cut right through the rib cage and stab her in the heart. Blue petals were all around her. The police pulled up behind me, as I noticed a man stepping out of a dark corner. He held the sacred weapon in his right hand. The police shouted for him to drop it and put his hands behind his head. He followed their commands, but his eyes were on me. He had a design carved into his forehead that reminded me of a star. It was a cross with two lines intersecting at the center to form a sinister scar.

His eyes followed me everywhere, as he managed his own mind, trying to find the right words. "Nobody wanted this," he said. "But, this is the way it has to be." I felt the weight of my soul drifting from my body. I felt myself sinking. "The Promiser would've come for her... we had to erase her... he'll never get her... he'll never touch her again." The smile on his face made worms squirm at my center and chew on my insides. The police took him away. Calliope looked so pristine, so peaceful. I like to think that he brought her a tranquility that she was never meant to feel in this life. It's a nice thought to block the terror I feel for decades of regret.