Creature of the night

A shared silence

The asylum wasn't a place of padded cells and straitjackets, but a quiet, sterile facility with white walls and soft-spoken nurses. It felt less like a prison and more like a tomb. We were given separate rooms, but our days were a blur of group therapy, art sessions, and long, silent meals where we sat together, not as friends on a trip, but as a group of patients. The doctors and nurses saw us as a single, puzzling case, a collection of young adults who had all experienced the same "psychotic break" after a "traumatic event."

We quickly learned to stop talking about it. The more we spoke of the Rolling Calf and the duppies, the more the doctors nodded and scribbled in their notepads. They saw our shared story not as a terrifying truth, but as a clear sign of our collective delusion. They called it "folie à deux," a madness shared by two, and in our case, six. So we fell silent. We learned to tell them what they wanted to hear: that the forest was just a forest, that the house was just an old house, and that we missed our friend who had "gotten lost in the woods." The silence, in a strange way, was a new kind of bond. It was a secret language, a silent agreement that we knew what we had seen was real, even if no one else did.

For me, the diagnosis was more specific, and far more chilling. They said my terror, my conviction that I had been hunted and chained, was due to schizophrenia and personality disorders. They said the tingling sensation I felt as I approached the house was a harbinger of my illness, a sign of the "psychotic break" to come. I wasn't a survivor; I was a patient, a broken mind creating monsters from fear.

The others were given similar diagnoses, all linked to different forms of schizophrenia with vital hallucinations. The doctors explained that our close bond had caused us to see the same things, to create the same terrifying narrative. Our reality had become unhinged, they said, and we were all a part of each other's delusion.

My friends were shadows of their former selves. Elijah, the meticulous planner, was now withdrawn and quiet, his eyes often staring into a middle distance only he could see. Zanelle, the confident one, was timid and fragile. Olydia's vibrant personality was gone, replaced by a constant, quiet fear that she couldn't hide. Omar, who had once been so easygoing, was now paranoid and jumpy, flinching at every sound.

We were survivors, but we were also prisoners. Not of the forest anymore, but of a different kind of institution, one that was slowly but surely trying to erase our shared truth and replace it with a diagnosis. We knew what we had seen, we knew what we had lost, and we knew, with a certainty that chilled us to our core, that the true monsters weren't in our minds. But as the days bled into weeks, the line between what was real and what the doctors told us was becoming dangerously blurred. We were trapped in a new nightmare, one with soft walls and a calm, clinical voice that told us we were insane.