Enter the Midnight - Advent of the Nightmare

His voice wouldn't stop haunting the back of my head. Sometimes he'd even speak physically through me in that grating, hellish voice that sounded like someone coughing up gravel, or laugh in that maniacal laugh. I could hear it now--"Ye ha ha ha ha ha." It wasn't a cackle, nor was it a mad scientist's victory laugh--it was just evil.

It didn't help that my parents thought I was just going through a phase and didn't find me help. Being a teenager, randomly stopping what I was doing and going catatonic, or suddenly fixating my nightmarish glare on someone for no reason, or even speaking of darkness and ghosts in the middle of class, were all grounds for severe bullying. My small size, lousy social skills, and aptitude for schoolwork only made it worse. Every day was the worst day of my life, except for weekends, when I could be myself at home. I often imagined having the powers that the voice within me claimed to have--the psychic power to rip apart someone with my thoughts, the inordinate strength to punch someone teasing me through a wall, or recalling a person's worst fear in a living nightmare that killed them on sight.

Of course, I had no such powers, even in the moments I believed I did, and any effort otherwise only generated more berating and laughter from the school crowd. I would have done almost anything to shut them up, but I was a whiny, weak little kid and couldn't go through with anything like a school shooting or actually confront someone with a weapon of any sort, so I just kept getting beat up, and kept on speaking in that dark voice for their amusement, for at least sometimes he kept them off my backs.

He told me his name once. He said he was "The Midnight" and he was really me, but trapped in a mortal body. That he was the essence of darkness, darkness itself, and could command various parts of the supernatural with incredible powers. All of this sounded perfectly normal to a bullied kid with ridiculous delusions of grandeur and no help.

One day it was too much. I came home before my parents in absolute tears from the teasing and bullying at school, and though I had thought of it before, this was my first time attempting it. I pulled the biggest kitchen knife from the holder I could find, with the sharpest point, and aimed, then struck right through my sternum, absolutely guaranteeing I hit my heart.

There was a lot of blood--more than I would have expected, jumping out of my chest with each pulse, which was getting louder and louder in my ears. My vision started to blur, then went black as I crumpled on the floor. It was coming fast now. The room spun as dizziness and emptiness took over, and then everything went completely black.

I woke up.

I wasn't dreaming. I could see a dead teenager on the floor with a huge knife in his chest in a pool of blood, and a sort of double vision of everything else, like it was all a shimmering set of mirrors. I saw no light, but I started hearing voices. "My time has come," said that hellish voice I knew so well, but it was me speaking, into the nothingness.

"Welcome, Midnight," said another dreamy voice, distant in the shadows.

"We have been waiting a long time for your arrival, but it came far sooner than we expected," said another. Dark shadows were coming towards me, but I realized I was emanating shadow--or darkness of some kind. I felt my transient body smile.

"Midnight has risen."