The door closed behind the two men with a boom that echoed through the room. The light above me, a lone source in a sea of darkness, swayed side to side, making shadows dance. The rounder of the two took a seat across from me, and the other stood behind me. I couldn't see the second man, but I could feel him, feel his eyes as they bore into the back of my head like lasers intent on boiling my brain inside. The silence that followed would have chilled most. It would have set them on edge, nervous and jittery. I wasn't like most, though; I was something so much better. So I stared my captor in the face, taking in every detail, waiting for the silence to finally break while my friends whispers chattered somewhere between my ears. I was the only one who could hear them; the only one who could understand their pleadings and their longings.

"Would you like a glass of water?" the fat man asked, breaking the silence. I didn't speak; I just looked at him, and gave a small, almost imperceptible nod. The man behind me produced a jug of water and a mug from somewhere that I hadn't seen. Slowly he poured the water into the glass, holding my stare. When he was finished, he retreated back to his original place behind me. I assumed he was there to protect this man in the opposite seat from me. Why else have a big, beefy man stand so close? I almost chuckled, protection from me, a slim boy of sixteen years. I couldn't blame them. My "crime" had been delightfully gruesome.

My hand went to the mug, deliberate and slow, and brought it to my dry lips. I let the liquid run lightly between them, over my tongue and down my throat. It had been a long time since I had anything to drink, and the water tasted as sweet as honey to me. Now it was my turn to speak, or so I assumed from the look of expectancy I was receiving from the man before me. Before I let any words come out of my mouth, I gave the man a measuring glance. He looked to be about thirty-five, with some grays already sprouting in his black beard, which I assumed it was one of the costs of the job. He was a little wide around the middle, and his eyes were blue, piercingly blue, as if he could see into the deep recesses of your mind. I wondered if he could see my friends. His head was covered in a thin, final layer of hair, as if it were the last defense in a losing battle against baldness. I was not impressed.

"Thank you for the water." I said politely. I didn't mind the difference in pitches of our voices (his lower than mine), because I knew that I was capable of things that he would never be able to do, nor even think to do. Despite this almost embarrassing difference in pitch, I could sense a tension in the air, a tension that began to permeate when I picked up the mug. I puzzled over it briefly, trying to pick up on what it was. "Fear." came my friends' answer. Yes, that was it, that had to be it, they were afraid of me, right? Of what I was, what I still am, a murderer.

The fat man finally answered, weighing each word, testing how they felt coming out of his mouth, as if he worried what I'd do in reply. "I... assume you know why you're here today?" Oh yes, yes I did. The memory was still sweet in my mind. A dark room, a bed with a still form, a knife. It was as blissful as sexual pleasure.

I smiled, and held back a laugh. "Yes. I suppose I do." I said, holding the fat man's gaze until he looked away uncomfortably. I was enjoying this. They thought they were in charge because they had me in custody. I was running the show though, and the fact that they hadn't handcuffed me left me feeling slighted.

"You smile. Why?" he asked. The question hangs in the air. Why should I share my inner workings with theses two? If I told them, they'd know about the voices, the way I tick. They'd take my friends from me. They couldn't have them, they were mine. MINE. So I remained silent, smiling at their discomfort, and the power to enlighten them or not, and choosing not to. The fat man's eyes flicked up behind me, and the look said it all. I prepared myself, and my head began to rapidly descent towards the metal table, making contact with a loud crack. It hurt, it hurt a lot, but I laughed. I couldn't help but laugh at the childishness of it. This man was like a small child throwing a tantrum.

"Tell us why you did it, you sick little bastard." I heard him say.

The fat man looked exasperated. "Let him go Jack, he's still just a boy." I glanced up angrily at him. I was not a "boy".

"He's a killer, not a boy." Jack answered, but let go all the same. I raised my head slowly, deliberately so, and stared at the fat man. My friends began talking all at once, their whispers swirling rapidly through my head. "Kill." "Just a boy." "We're not your friends." The voices said, being more mean than usual.

"Shut up!" I told them, the words coming out before I could stop them.

The fat man looked at me, a puzzled look on his face. "I didn't say anything." he said. He looked so confused I couldn't help but laugh.

"The kid's a f*ing nut." Jack said behind me. I was. I knew I was crazy, but the voices were my only friends, had always been my only friends. The two men were finally seeing me for what I was, broken.

"You want to know why I did it?" I asked, and continued before they even answered, "I hated her. I hated everything about her. Ever since I was young I hated her. She thought she was perfect, better than everyone, including me. The things she did to me, the awful, awful things. It was unforgivable. So I showed her that she wasn't any better than anyone else. That's what my father used to do before my mother stole him from me. He put her in her place." I felt a weird sense of release upon saying this, as if a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. "She deserved to die."

That wasn't entirely true, though. I certainly hated her, but my blessed deed would never have happened without the help of my friend. The voice of the man who I once feared; my father. He had come home reeking of alcohol countless times. I was young, but I could still remember the numerous times my mother flew from my father like a bullet from a gun and hit the wall. She would stay there as if glued, and my father would follow. All the while he would shout obscenities so foul could curdle milk. The memory had once filled me with a sense of remembered terror, but now it was as soft and welcoming as a pillow.

The fat man looked at me with a new-found sense of fear. My words seemed to chill the room and everyone in it, except me. I felt nothing for the mother I killed, the woman who cared nothing for me. All the while my friends talked over one another, fighting to be heard. "Guilt.""Mistake" "Damned forever." A silence hung over the three of us, as palpable as the metal table had been to my face.

"You know..." I began, "I used to love her. I didn't know I hated her until I was six, when I started talking to my friends. They told me what she really was. She was an unloving, egocentric b****." The last word flew from my mouth, the way venom spews from a cobra's. A sense of inexplicable anger overcame me. So intense I could feel body tense, my fists clench, my teeth grind. "I can't even remember the last time she told me she loved me." The voices grew even louder.
"Pathetic." "Worthless." "Die."

What I could remember as I stared at the fat man, though, was the closet. I remembered everything about that damn closet. The oppressive, seemingly eternal night, and the way it took away all sense of time away. Specifically, I remember the night I met my friends. She had been locking me away for months by that point. The endless hours of loneliness, of darkness, sadness, and confusion was almost too much to bear. She always told me how I couldn't be trusted, because I was his son. I didn't understand, I wasn't the monster my father was. I had never even thought of hurting anything, ever.

She left me alone anyway, and the last time I was left in there, I met them. It had been a humid, August day, and my mother announced that she was going out with some friends. I screamed. I couldn't help it, as I knew what that would entail. "No, mommy no! Please don't leave! Don't put me in the dark room! Please mommy, no!" I was only six.

She just looked at me as if I was an insect that needed squishing. "You know I can't trust you alone. We both know who your father is." She said, grabbing me by my tiny arms. I pulled and pulled, trying to get away, but I was hardly more than a preschooler, and she was grown.

"I'm not daddy! I'm not daddy! You can trust me!" I pleaded, the tears running down my young face. The words fell on deaf ears. As I continued to plead, she tossed me into the darkness, and before I could say another word, I was plunged into darkness with an overwhelming crash. I heard my mother open the front door, and close it behind her. My small hands found the doorknob, the icy metal, and ineffectively tried to turn it. I was trapped, again, as I had been countless times before. Despite the familiarity of the situation, I sat down uncomfortably on the innumerable pairs of shoes below me and cried. I cried, and cried, and cried, as the darkness overwhelmed me. It choked me; wrapped itself around my childish little neck and squeezed until I was gasping for air.

You can't know true loneliness until you're truly alone, and I had been alone my entire life. The darkness was so intense I could hear it. It was the epitome of silence. It was the most evil of silences. It mocked you, laughed at you, bullied you until you were nothing. I hated it. "Hate..." came a whisper,"All alone..."

Outside I could hear the rumblings of a coming thunderstorm. I could almost see the rolling gray clouds above my head as the first wave of rolling thunder exploded in the sky and founds its way to my ears. "Mommy?" I called, thinking the whispers were hers. "Mommy is that you?" A flash of light came from under the door, briefly and inefficiently lighting my feet, followed by another strike of Heaven's drum.

"Left you..." came another voice, "All alone..." I was scared, and did the only thing a six year old boy could do in the circumstance,I began crying again.

"Don't cry..." came yet another whisper.

"Leave me alone!" I shouted, emphasized by a third thunderous rumble. They wouldn't listen, and the number of voices grew.

"We'll be..." came one voice.

"Your friends..." came another.

The tears stopped flowing. I had never had a friend before. My mother had never let me. This was my chance not to be alone anymore. The voices began to dull, though, growing more and more faint with each passing second until they weren't there anymore. As if even the thought of me having friends was a joke for them, as if they were teasing me just like the darkness I was trapped in. "No!: I shouted. "No, come back! Don't leave me alone in this place!"

Dimly I heard banging on the front door, but I ignored it. I was too lost in my private world of sorrow. I had lost my friends already, and I'd be left alone with my mother forever. "He's here..."came the single whisper accompanied by the sound of shattering glass. I stood up abruptly, scared of what was coming, but when the door opened before me, it was my dad. He stared at me, a mingling look of anger and relief on his face. I was afraid he was going to hurt me, as he had hurt my mother, but he took me into his arms, the first time he had ever hugged me.

"I'm so glad you're alright." He said, a single tear running down his cheek. He picked me up, saying "Let's go, I'm getting you out of here." Before I could say anything, we were out the broken front door and into the pouring rain. The water ran down my face, my hair plastered to my forehead. There was my father's car, parked in the driveway as it had been every day before the divorce five months before. Only now, seeing the car didn't fill me with dread and fear. It filled me with hope.

"How did you find me? Why are you here?" I asked, on the brink of tears again.

"Dan told me that he hadn't seen you in weeks, and always sees mommy leaving the house. Are you hurt?" he asked. I shook my head, and seemingly satisfied, he got into the front seat. As we peeled out of the driveway, a whisper whirled through my head. It sounded like my father. "You'll never be alone again..." Suddenly, my friends were back in my head, and there they stayed.

My mother would never allow him to keep me, would never allow me to escape her, however. She called the police, and filed a charge for burglary and kidnapping against my father. I was confident that he would win, that he would save me from my mother permanently. I'll never forget the day that that didn't happen, the day that I failed my father and sentenced myself to life in misery with the monster they called my mother.

The day of the trial that would decide my fate, it was announced that Dan, the neighbor that had called my father, had gotten into a fatal car accident and would not be able to testify in my father's favor. A wheel had broken free and swerved and crashed into a car before veering into oncoming traffic and being crushed by an eighteen wheeler.

I never believed that that was a coincidence, but I didn't have the proof, and never got the proof, to tie my mother to it. Despite this setback, my father still had the opportunity to win the case, to rescue me when no one else could. I needed to testify against my mother, tell everyone what had been done to me for five months. I needed to admit to this whole room full of strangers that my mother was an evil woman who locked children in dark closets for hours and hours, even days.

That testimony never happened. I had been so afraid. Too afraid that if I testified, and still lost, there would be worse things than the closet that awaited my return to the hell I called home. I remained silent when called to the bench, I remained silent while my father looked at me, wide eyed and unbelieving at my refusal to put away his ex-wife forever. Instead, he was sentenced to twenty-five to life in prison, with no possibility of parole. They cuffed him, stood him up, and the last I ever saw of my father, was the backward glance he gave me, a look of utter betrayal.

The voices grew quiet as the memory returned to the depths of my brain, and a pit opened where my stomach had been moments earlier. The silence was thick in my head. I looked at the fat man, the sweat beading his brow, the mixture of concern and fear plastered on his face. The look dissipated quickly, and once again there was nothing but an overweight cop sitting before me. "You still had no right to murder her. Her life was not yours to take. There are people I don't like either, but I don't kill them." He said, mopping sweat off his brow.

I wasn't listening, I was lost in the silence of my mind. The memory of what I did still as fresh and wonderful as when I did it. The house was quiet, to the point that you could hear air running through the vents below. I was in my own world, enveloped in my head, listening to my friends talk to each other and occasionally joining in. Their whispers were comfort for me, a cushion in the world that never did and never would understand me. I felt lost when the whispers suddenly stopped. I was scared, and all alone in the dark. This had never happened before, they had never just stopped altogether. They would slowly lose volume as the voice that was the embodiment of my father began to speak.

He spoke shortly following the silence, though. The welcoming sound of his voice was enough to get me out of bed. My Father's Voice guided me to the kitchen, to the knife that gleamed when I brought it into the light. I could see my reflection in it, and I was beaming at the things my Father's Voice told me I had to do. It was a big knife, the largest in the house, but it still didn't seem big enough to get the job done. It was the best I had, though, and I'd make the best of it. The things my Father's Voice said filled me with excitement. I was going to be free. Finally, after ten years.

So, silently I crept up the stairs, making hardly a sound except for the slight creaking of each step. The anticipation was almost unbearable; my face was one big grin, the knife firmly in my right hand. I could hardly see, but I had lived in this house for as long as I could remember and had no trouble reaching the door. A pale light shone beneath the door, shifting and changing color as the picture on the television changed constantly.

My left hand found the door knob, cold metal against my flesh, as the closet's had been. Only this time, the door opened when I turned the knob. I felt oddly calm as my wrist twisted and the door unlatched, swinging inwardly without a sound. My breathing picked up, not out of fear, or trepidation, but out of joy and anticipation. There she lay beneath the covers, breathing in the slow, regulated way of those in slumber. Her peaceful look enraged me, she who thought herself so superior to everyone, she who didn't even know the meaning of an apology. It wasn't right.

As I approached she shifted onto her back, exposing her neck to me. Inviting me. I didn't give her the opportunity to hear me, I turned the blade down and plunged it into the soft flesh of her throat, smiling sadistically as the skin split and the blade sunk deep inside. Her eyes opened, and she tried to scream, but all that came out was a bloody gurgle. My eyes seemed to glow as I watched the blood spurt from her neck and her mouth, as her eyes met mine and I could see the pain, the fear, and the anguish I knew she deserved just before the light was extinguished as I finished the deed. I don't remember anything else that happened that night; I must have been too overwhelmed with the joy. The following morning my mother's bedroom looked like a piece of abstract art, and she was dead on the floor, unrecognizable.

The memory receded, leaving a warm and fuzzy feeling. The fat man was still talking, but I had no idea what was being said, and I didn't care, because my Father's Voice began to speak. He told me the things I had to do, and I smiled and nodded, happy to do anything he asked. I interrupted the fat man, "May I have some more water please?" The fat man looked annoyed at having been interrupted, but he nodded his consent to Jack behind me.

"Do you understand what I'm trying to tell you, David?" he asked. I nodded with acknowledgement even though I had no idea, and watched Jack as he poured the water. He was definitely in far better shape than the fat man. His arms were thicker, his shoulders and chest broader. His head was as shiny as the water in the mug, the light glancing off the surface. His eyes were cold, hard stones. I knew how I'd achieve what my Father's Voice told me to do. I thanked Jack quietly and waited until he took his place behind me again.

My fingers found the mug's handle and lifted it to my lips, feigning a drink. My eyes flicked to the fat man as my wrist twisted and my arm extended, and my would-be beverage hit the fat man in the face. I stood up abruptly, twisting on the balls of my feet while the fat man wiped the liquid from his face. I brought the mug up while I spun and hit Jack full in the temple just before he would have grabbed me, and the mug shattered into a hundred pieces. He dropped to the floor, either unconscious or dead. I turned my attention to the fat man, who was just about finished getting the water out of his eyes.

A sense of pure loathing overcame me then. This man was a pitiful creature and didn't deserve to share this Earth with me. I lunged over the table, toppling him backward with me on top. I still held the handle of the mug, now broken and jagged. I pushed the broken piece of mug into his eye, thriving on the shrieks of pain that came from his pathetic gullet. I pushed until it was buried deep into his skull, in his brain, and his screams stopped. By the time the officers burst through the door, I was laughing hysterically, rocking back and forth next to the fat man's still warm corpse, my hands covered in his blood.

Their weapons were raised, pointed at me. My Father's Voice had receded and was replaced by the whispers of my other friends once again. The one at the front said something, but I was too far gone, lost in the deep crevices of my mind. He said it again, but I just continued to laugh. There were five of them, all holding pistols. The on e speaking was youthful, perhaps twenty-five or so. His face was hard, clean shaven, with eyes of a startling dark blue.

"I am going to tell you one more time to put your hands up or we will fire!" he shouted, finally breaking through my daze. I stared at him, a sly smile plastered on my face. I stood slowly, taunting him, denying him the satisfaction of my compliance. They wouldn't fire, I knew they wouldn't, the voices told me so. My hands remained defiantly at my sides. Who was he to tell me what to do? Nobody. He was nobody. He couldn't make me do anything, he-

I didn't see who fired first, but I certainly felt the bullet that bit into the side of my neck. Then another, and another, hitting me in the legs, chest, stomach, shoulders. I dropped backwards onto the concrete floor, I couldn't breathe; I couldn't feel anything other than the red hot points where the bullets had hit. I couldn't breathe, no matter how hard I tried air would not filter into my lungs, and I was dying. Oddly enough, I was fine with that. My mother wasn't in this world anymore. She would never live another day stepping on people she didn't care for. So as the officers approached and surrounded me, I smiled up at them. As I closed my eyes and let the voices that had betrayed me wash over me, I realized I had never learned the fat man’s name, and with that realization, I was no longer there to hear them.