1

I’m writing this as I’m out of options. My final cry for help to whoever would care to read this. This is my SOS as I think I’m starting to lose my mind. I feel a black hole growing inside of me filled with hatred towards this world and everybody in it. I’m writing this in the hope that it might help me feel heard even if it’s just for a few minutes.

My name is Harry Riddle and at the time of writing this I’m 22 years old but the story started a long time ago, exactly 14 years ago.

I still remember it like it was yesterday; my mother crying, my older sister laughing and my father tying me to the bed and beating the living shit out of me using a belt. This was the first time I felt completely alone. Of course, I blacked out for most of it but when I woke up and looked in my father’s eyes, I realized that this wasn’t a one-time thing, him losing his temper just this time, no no, he was proud of himself. He thought he was doing the right thing, that he was disciplining me, turning me into a real man as he always used to say every time, he did something that robbed me of my childhood.

My mother while crying she was the one always telling him how I’m a strange kid that should be disciplined. Finally, my sister who despite being older and should look after me she chose to use me as her replacement for my father’s beating. Despite all that I now understand. I understand that they all acted as how the world taught them to act. My father and mother probably think that they tried their best raising us but they created an opportunist who didn’t care about the fate of anybody other than herself in my dear sister and something far worse represented in yours truly.

The world was cruel to them and the world used them to be cruel to me.

Beating me for every small mistake became the norm in our household. I took a beating from them all until one day I wasn’t alone anymore. I saw two kids who looked exactly like me and were about the same age as me. They told me that they were here to comfort me and to let me know that I’m not alone. At first, I was scared and told my father and he as you might expect didn’t take me seriously and told me to pray or something. Yeah, because God took good care of me up until that point.

Anyway, I kept talking to them about my problems, fantasies and dreams and they always listened to me. One of them had a scar on his left eye and the other didn’t. that’s the only thing I knew about those two back then. I was selfish. I feared that if I knew too much about them, they would disappear. I chose my own happiness over theirs and what happiness it was. For some strange reason, I can’t remember a single nice memory from my childhood just those two, my family’s beating and the holy book. Like everything in my life up until that point, I was taught about religion through fear of the creator. Has anyone ever thought that God maybe has a personality disorder? How could you be the most merciful and cause so much pain. Where is God when there’s a famine or when a child gets cancer or when a child is raped multiple time. Where is God then. I believe that God exists only so that I could face him one day and express my hatred towards him. Like that would do anything.

2

This next part is so hard to write. Because what I’m about to write is probably the reason why for most of my life I was trapped in a room of my own guilt and there were no door leading to redemption, whenever you try to get out, the room gets darker and darker. Destiny has now created the perfect prey; a child scared of everything, alone and has no one to turn to for help. Now it’s time that he’s hunted.

I had a cousin who was in his early twenties at the time and he knew me and my situation. So, he would always invite me over to play and at the time, my parents needed me to be supervised because they were busy with life and our financial situation which was shitty at the time but they didn’t care who was looking after me and what I was doing. Anyway, he told me about porn and made me watch porn with him. The first time I ever watched porn I was in the second grade and I felt my heart beating so fast and I didn’t know what to make of it. it’s like taking a house pet and putting it in the wild.

He would always play house with me and we pretend to be husband and wife and yours truly would be the wife of course. He would French kiss me touch me and finger me and I would do nothing. I never complained because I knew if my parents found out they would kill me like I’m the rapist not the victim. Also, for the first time in my life someone was gentle with me. He didn’t beat me or shout at me. He just held me gently. He was the only one who was kind to me growing up.

I remember one time he asked me if he could fuck me and I was scared (I was in the fifth grade at the time). I refused and he waited until I was asleep and he did it. I woke up of course but I never looked at him while he was doing it. I just closed my eyes like I always do when my father beats me and waited for it all to be over. My mother and his mother walked on us doing it but we were able to fix our clothes before they saw us. I remember my mother taking me to the balcony, looking at me and asking me what we were doing.

“We were just playing”

“What were you playing?”

“Wrestling”

“Why is your undershirt pulled out like that?”

“I just forgot to fix it while I was in the toilet”

She kept staring at me and I could swear her eyes had murder intentions like she will through me off the balcony if I was lying but nothing happened. Nothing. We never talked about this ever again and life went on.

I never talked about this with my imaginary friends but I began to notice the one with the scar started to get angrier with time. He began to direct this anger towards me calling me a coward and a nobody and that I will be the reason for our demise and I was a kid back then so I never understood why but I believed him. I mean look at me I didn’t feel a thing at this point in my life. I dealt with every abuse by letting it play out and can you blame me. What was I supposed to do? Kill my cousin, my father, my mother and my sister then what? Will life stop throwing glass in my path? I didn’t think so at the time.

3

How does it feel to hurt somebody? Should a person feel guilty, ashamed, like he lost the right to call himself human?

Should a person feel joy, should he feel some sort of orgasm from his deed.

I guess I can’t claim that I felt anything from hurting people and I hurt a lot of people. Why I did that you might ask. I just hated some people in my life. The liars, the oppressors and the worst of the worst, people who are empty. People who have no opinion or ideology and don’t try to understand and they do evil deeds anyway. Those empty evil vessels wandering aimlessly without purpose. All those people didn’t deserve to live in my opinion and I took upon myself to punish those people.

I was in prep school at the time when I first became a hunter.

And my first target was my mother. The crying wolf.

Stolen novel; please report.

One day, I came home from school to find out that my mother was looking through my computer and she found my porn so she told me that she would call my father and I begged her not to do that. I cried, got down on my knees and begged for my life but it didn’t matter to me like she felt pleasure by making me beg and I saw it in a small smile she let escape uncovering her true self. She told my father and this time it wasn’t like the usual. I waited for him for three hours to get home from work. in those three hours I discovered that I’m not afraid. I’m not anything just a punching bag. When he rang the bell, I opened the door and as soon as I did that, he punched me in the face, dragged me across the floor and hailed on me with punches calling me a devil. I looked at my mother and what I saw broke something in me. I saw her crying while touching herself. Is this what a mother is supposed to be I asked myself before I blacked out. That night I woke up bruised and with a problem in my right leg. I dragged myself to my parents’ room and it was empty but there’s a light coming from the balcony and there I saw mother hanging washed clothes to dry. I picked an old iron pipe and hit my mother with it on the head. What I felt at that moment would drive me insane. I felt nothing, no pleasure, no relief and no pain. I realized that she just deserved to die noting more and noting less. So, I picked her up, kissed her on the forehead and threw her off the balcony. That’s justice I kept telling myself. I cleaned the pipe, threw on the roof of a building next to ours then I went to bed and I couldn’t catch a good moment of sleep from then on. To this day I only sleep after taking two to three sleeping pills.

Next morning, the police came. They ruled it as an accident; that she slipped and fell to her demise. Of course, as a kid I was hardly a suspect and I acted as if I was in total shock while I was actually planning my next hunt but how would I go about it and who would it be? My father was a mess of course and my sister of course didn’t give a single shit but cried crocodile tears of course. Look at us what a happy family.

4

Five years passed after I killed my mother without me killing anyone. My father fell into drunken depression and my sister fell into verbally and physically tormenting me for pleasure but I didn’t mind because at the time I had a hobby that felled some what the void where my heart used to be.

I started drugging my father and sister at night and at those nights I finally felt free. I started to strip them naked, put “Introduction and rondo capriccioso in A minor, Op 28” on, lay beside them and then hugging them and I would feel my heart beating strong and my breath becoming heavy. at the time this was love to me and nothing else. One of my imaginary friends would appear (the other one not the one with the scar) when I did so. he would dance in front of me and when I ask him where the other one went, he wouldn’t answer and apparently, I never cared enough to keep on asking him. I kept on doing so until I went to college and those nights were the only reason, I haven’t killed my father and sister yet but I’ll and soon because that’s justice. The world has to be cleansed from those deranged and evil victims of life.

5

I used to have dreams about meeting the perfect girl. Kind, gentle and with a heart empty of human hatred but after a while I believed that this isn’t possible and even part of me believed that if a person like that existed, they shouldn’t grace this shit hole we call life with their presence. This all changed when I met Mary. A woman that made Mary mother of Jesus appear as cruel as Stalin. I met her in my first year of college. She and I chose the same major which is art and that is the only time up until now that destiny graced me with a gentle touch. She sat next to me on a bench at a green area of the university. I had my headphones on listening to dogs by pink Floyd and was smoking a cigarette. she came close to me, took my headphones off and said “Hey pretty boy, can I have a cigarette?”

I’m not that sociable and that moment when I looked at her, she seemed so happy that I wanted to strangle her. So, I gave her a cigarette, put my headphones back on and took my eyes off her. She removed my headphones again “A lighter, please. Can’t you be nice to a lady? What happened to being a gentleman?”

“Believe me ma’am I’m no gentleman?”

“Oh yeah and why is that pretty boy. You’re handsome, well dressed and the only thing stopping you from being nice is you”

“Clearly the saddest thing that happened in your life is that you cat died or something. You know nothing of what life can do to stop a person from being “nice”” I said with an angry tone in my voice.

“First of all, a cat’s life is still a life. Secondly, you have no idea what my life has been like, you self-centered bastard” she shouted.

I was speechless for a couple of seconds because I knew she was right. I broke the silent and said “I apologize if I hurt your feelings. I’m just not used to people being nice to me so being a bastard is like a defense mechanism or something. I understand if you want to leave now”

“See, you can be nice and it cost you noting. I’m sorry I shouted at you. What your name by the way?”

“Harry Riddle”

“Nice to meet you harry. I’m Mary Willems.”

We sat in silence for a couple of seconds before I broke it and said “Can I ask you a question? Why did you come to talk to me? I notice people look at me. They think I’m weird, a lone, etc.”

“Honestly, I haven’t really thought it through” she took a drag from her cigarette and continued “I think I see darkness inside of you and I know how lonely it can get so I wanted you not feel lonely. Maybe I want to feel good about myself. All is possible”

“You know I see it in you too.”

“Because it’s like a scar. No matter how hard you try to hide it won’t go away so it’s better to own it and prevent others from experiencing the same ordeal” said she then smiled and looked at me and in that moment, I stared into the eyes of an angel. Eyes that shine like the sun. a light able to scare away the strongest of woes.

“How can you be this kind in this jungle?”

She looked at her phone and said “that’s a story for another time. I have a class now but I can tell you over a dinner tonight. Can I take out to dinner Mr. Riddle?”

I couldn’t help but smile “sounds wonderful”

“So, you do know how to smile. Anyway, see you later”

“See you”

I looked at the sky. It was as clear as ever. I’m in love?!

6

When I got home that day, I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. I had no control but this about to pass any way because I had to visit my family later that day. Ever since I started college, I got my own place and became more independent. Living alone brought me a little peace but loneliness started to drive me insane. I can’t be alone for a long time. I have to surrounded by people even if I’m sitting alone at a coffee place. Even my imaginary friends stopped showing up which made my loneliness even worse. When I sit alone at a coffee place or in college and look around me. I see people sitting together; talking, laughing and joking and I think to myself; have these people ever felt broken? Have the weight of life ever crush their spirits? Are they all strong and I’m weak or is life just this unfair?

Anyway, I went that night to visit my father and sister. When I entered the house, I saw my sister sitting on the couch smoking a joint which took me by surprise

“Hey, look who decided to show up, the murderer”

“Nice to see you too sis”

She looked at me with disgust and said “You’re no brother to me. You’re a murderer. The scum of this earth.”

I understood that she is high and emotional so I didn’t say anything and headed for parents’ bedroom to say hi to my father.

“Don’t ignore me you bastard” said my sister as she was getting up. She ran towards me and started to hit me “You’re not human. You’re a monster. You’re the reason we are this miserable. It’s all your fault. I hope your death is slow and painful”

I don’t know what came over me but I grabbed her hands, looked at her dead in the eyes and said “If I’m a murderer then you’re still alive out of the kindness of what’s left of my heart so don’t test me”

My father got out of his room with a bottle in his hand and it seems he hasn’t got out of his room in a while. He looked at me then threw the bottle at me and shouted “Murderer”

“Miss you too, father”

“don’t call me that you’re no son to me”

I thought to myself ‘have you looked in the mirror. You’re not a father and should never have been one’ but I just stayed silent.

“You have nothing to say huh, coward”

I swallowed any words I had and any anger I could project towards and I simply turned around and left. They kept on shouting but I didn’t care for what they were saying. I simply left before I kill them both which was something I felt repeating in my head. It’s like there was a voice in my head saying ‘kill them, they don’t deserve to exist. This world should be for the good only. Not for those demons. Well, I think I’m one of those demons now. Maybe I should take my own life too. I went home later that night after I bought a bottle of vodka and I drank myself blind. People should know about my pain. People should try to understand. Why am I alone in this? Another voice in my head kept say ‘coward, you don’t have what it takes to live in this jungle. Just keep feeling sorry for yourself. That will fix it’ and then it laughed. I wanted to feel that pain is real so I grabbed a box cutter and ran it through my arms so deep that I saw the fat layer of my arm. It calmed me down a bit. I washed it with water then went to bed and in the middle of this darkness I saw Mary’s face shining like the sun. it made me smile a bit, shed a tear or two then I fell asleep.