Content Warning
Content on this page may be triggering to some. This story includes violence, graphic scenes, and attempted suicide.
If someone you know is struggling, consider reaching out to a mental health professional or contacting the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
Context
As a child I would have dreams where one person in the house was what I will refer to as a ‘evil’ version of themself. Essentially, they could woo anyone, bar myself, into believing whatever they said. The premise of these dreams was me attempting to figure out who it was before they murder me.
My mother, grandmother, and I were at home. My father, two of my sisters, and a brother were at the grocery store. I kept both my mother and grandmother close to me, watching them both carefully to ensure neither were the ‘evil’ person. After a while of staying close to one another and conversing my mother revealed that she was pregnant and going into labor, requiring her to bike off to the hospital. It’s at this time I realize: my grandmother is the ‘evil’.
I decide to distance myself from her, exiting out the back of the house. Our house was old, and at some point had an extension added to the back: a sunroom, the entire back walls of which were nothing but windows. Standing there, in the yard, my back to the house—CRASH—she burst through one of the windows, knife-in-hand prepared to strike me dead.
She shoved me to the ground, her body riddled in deep lacerations from the glass. I managed to gain the advantage, holding her in a position which allowed me to quickly snap her neck. In spite of what would otherwise be a swift death, she got up from the ground and walked away unharmed. It was at this point two things were revealed to me: the thing turning my family evil is some form of fungal infection, and when you ‘kill’ someone harboring it they do not die but become cured.
My father, sisters, and brother arrived back home after the kerfuffle outback, and a discussion between us all reveals that we are a family of paranormal hunters. This fungus? It’s the biggest baddie we’ve fought. My father has an eye for the supernatural, and the house is screaming at him. He reveals the house is teeming with this fungus, a horrible infection. We decide there’s only one course of action: we will each collect a knife from the kitchen and gather in the living room to kill ourselves.
However, I had made one major mistake. That mistake was trusting them. As I entered the kitchen and grabbed my knife, back turned to my family, they pounced on me, pushing me to the ground. One of my sisters stomped my wrist, forcing the knife from my hand and kicking it across the floor. Instead of killing me though, they had much more sinister plans.