Meet Delusion
“It’s not fair! Charles gets all the attention!”
The eight-year-old girl’s fury burst forth, uncontainable. She was sick to death of swallowing her pride in silence. “Boys have it easy in this world. They get everything!”
“Calm down, Maryrose.” Erna Warner spoke firmly to her daughter. “The landlord is here. We don’t want him hearing your tantrums.”
Erna was a practical woman, quick-witted and sharp, but uneducated. She had learned long ago that this was a man’s world, and that it didn’t pay to agitate the men around you. Erna had grown up in the steep, isolated hills of Kentucky. She and her brother were the incestuous results of an unwed mother inflaming her own passions and those of a close relative. The two of them stood as markers of the place where the family tree refused to fork.
Their neighbors called it rape when her brother was born out of wedlock. But when Erna came along, those hill country folk knew who to blame. Erna and her brother were despised, the whispered scandal of the town during the aught years of the twentieth century.
In the late 1920s, when Erna was a girl of fifteen, a beau appeared: her brother’s best friend, Jack. He needed a woman, and he had no intention of staying in those hills, so the local gossip meant nothing to him. Jack arrived on a mule to take Erna to their wedding and haul her north to Ohio. Years of relentless toil and disillusionment would eventually curdle Jack into a cantankerous man given to bouts of violence. But true to his word, he got them out of Kentucky.
Maryrose’s rage, however, wasn’t really directed at her father—not yet. She would come to hate him later for how he treated her mother. No, at eight years old, her wrath was focused on two people: her puffed-up older brother, Charles, who was stupid but lucky enough to be born a boy first; and her maternal grandmother, Ellen Catron, who had hitched a ride on their escape to Ohio. Maryrose didn’t fully understand why, but she loathed Ellen. Stupid hill woman.
Taking whatever scraps life threw her, the grandmother had become a ruthless opportunist. Sensing Maryrose’s hostility, Ellen seized every opportunity to antagonize the girl while doting on Charles, knowing the boy would be her meal ticket when she grew old.
To make matters worse for young Maryrose, the family had just been uprooted from Middletown—a booming city with storefronts and excitement around every corner, to desolate Farmersville, surrounded by endless, suffocating seas of corn, wheat, and soybeans. Jack Warner had taken up sharecropping to keep a roof over their heads. Little did Maryrose know, Jack was fleeing something far more dangerous than poverty.
Years passed in the dirt and heat, working someone else’s soil for a pittance. An exceptionally bright child, Maryrose continued to nurse her bitter hatred for her brother while her grandmother spoiled him rotten. Maryrose got the dregs, the leftovers, the hand-me-downs.
Her only refuge was school. She devoured it. School was her stage—a brief daily escape from the drudgery of the farm.
She was special. She knew it in her bones. Her sole mission in life was to prove it to everyone else.
How do I know all this? Because I made her feel that way. I planted those exact thoughts in her mind.
At twelve, with war raging across the globe, Maryrose rebelled. She swore she would never remain a victim in a world built by men. It was precisely what I had planned for her.
She marched out into the center of a cornfield, the dry leaves scratching at her arms, and screamed into the empty sky: “I am not less than any boy or man!”
Incredibly clever, she aced every subject, though math was her true love. Numbers didn’t lie. Numbers didn’t favor boys. She knew she was meant to be far more than a man’s toy or a household instrument.
#
I have known Maryrose her entire life. But where are my manners? I am… well, throughout time, I have gone by many names.
My identity is etched onto the crumbling walls of pre-Sumerian temples. Homer sang of encounters with my androgenous malice; Aeschylus called me Gorgon. Later, charlatans and powermongers named me Nephilim, Daemon, or Djinni. Every ancient culture carried a piece of my name. Modern clinical societies prefer to call me Psychosis, Complex Trauma, or Major Depressive Disorder.
They all understood the same fundamental truth: tragedy flows in my dark wake.
I think of myself simply as a trickster of the mind. I exist for one purpose alone: my own amusement.
Rarely does a victim realize when I am animating their thoughts and steering their hands. Since the first spark of human consciousness, I led mankind down from the trees, into the damp dark of caves, and out again to build their cities. Driven by a desperate need for security, they conquered and multiplied, huddling together in tribes.
Long before your physicists, I discovered the ultimate law of human mechanics: inertia. The status quo. Who knew a weapon so magnificent could be so simple? Equilibrium. I held humanity enthralled with fear, superstition, and paranoia by the shadowy firelight while predators howled in the dark.
I was there, shaping them, playing them for my own delight.
“I am special,” a few of them would cry. Their desperate craving for significance stoked their pride. Doing my bidding, they ruled through tyranny and false promises.
Across the millennia, across the globe, few have ever slipped my grasp. Humans gather up whatever raw principles they find as children—weaving them through trauma and superstition into a fragile framework for living. They think they are building a life. In truth, they are building their own cages.
Delusion is my name. Some call me the Whisper.
#
I take a meandering path through humanity, hunting for those genetically predisposed to my wiles. Don’t get me wrong—I’ll take my fun wherever I can find it. But the maximum entertainment is found in the bloodlines that carry the strain.
Truth be told, Maryrose had survived a lot. The constant moving, the poverty, the hidden horrors no young girl should ever have to witness, let alone endure. But in Great Depression and WWII-era America, that was all the offspring of hill-country Kentuckians could expect.
I sounded Maryrose’s depths; I pulled forth her essence. She lived with a theatrical, tragic flair—Tennessee Williams meets Shakespeare, set to a bitter, resentful score.
After high school graduation, she executed her escape using an unsuspecting, guileless teenage boy: Lowell Hapner. Don’t misunderstand – Lowell was no saint. He was a lusty youth who was looking for an exit of his own.
Everyone gets what they deserve when they dance with me.
By the time they graduated into the post-war boom, both were, in their own ways, completely enthralled by what I had to offer.
But this is David’s story.
Though I had been tethered to him from birth, David will tell you our direct interactions began in earnest around his fifth birthday. The youngest of four, his mother kept him home from kindergarten, clinging to him to wring out the final drops of his dependence. Headstrong David hated it. His brother and sisters teased him mercilessly for staying behind. Mommy’s boy. Baby.
#
The boy loved to read. All the best ones do. Books are rich fodder for the imagination—idea after idea, revelation after revelation. David loved to sit on his mother’s lap while they read to each other in turns.
His parents welcomed me right into their living room. They had grievances – endless, rotting grievances. Easy prey.
They had married young to escape their respective homes, settling into a tiny house on Chicken Bristle Road. Kids came in rapid succession. By the time David turned three, they moved into town. By age seven, he was walking the mile home from school alone.
Maryrose was a homemaker—an accomplished, deeply bitter Betty Crocker. Lowell worked at the local granary, drove a door-to-door milk truck for Royal Crest Dairy, and eventually settled in as an insurance salesman. Joyless, mundane facts of little consequence. David can give you the dry timeline as he remembers it.
I would rather tell you about the mischief I wrought in their home. The poisonous feelings I fed them, the stench of their unspoken resentment, the exquisite spectacle of their slow unraveling.
His mother set David up for me. She filled him with an unrealistic sense of destiny, making him feel uniquely gifted, uniquely special.
And then, when he was just nine years old, she fled.
She ran from her life, from her family, from me. Delusion chased her like a ghoulish phantom down the highway. But I was already inside her head, whispering the whole way: Run. Run. Run.
Both of his parents had inherited the flaw that made them vulnerable to my touch. The delusions I gave his mother… oh, the magnificent delusions. And in his father, I cultivated a deep, simmering stew of anger, hate, and paranoia.
All through a simple whisper.
Shhh. Listen. Can you hear me?
Whiiispeeer…
Leave a comment