The Voice and his Boy[]
He had first felt this way about her in 6th grade, when he had looked at her and suddenly realized that he wanted to kill her. But he hadn’t acted on his plan, and perhaps it wouldn’t have escalated farther than him looking at her every once in a while. But about a year after he had first thought of it, a tree had fallen down on his house, crashing through the roof and almost killing him.
This made him rethink his place in the world. He decided to do something drastic to change the trajectory of his life. After mulling it over and looking at his grades, he reasoned that his academic performance wasn’t good enough to do any special activities. Then the girl popped unbidden into his mind, and he realized that he could probably kill her.
He wasted his time trying to google ways to talk to people, probably because he didn’t talk to girls much and he wanted to build her trust in him. He did this for maybe a week, too scared to talk to her, let alone kill her. But he didn't really start until he found a stone amulet in the stump’s rotting wood.
The amulet was an ugly stone face with a giant iron ring on top. He felt energized when he touched it, and so he decided to take it home. When he was in his room, the voice of a boy his age began suddenly echoing from the amulet. “Hey, I heard you’re trying to kill a girl,” it said.
“How did you know?” the boy asked.
The voice laughed. “I know a lot of things, including how to kill people right. You want help?”
“Sure I do!” said the boy, despite the nagging feeling that something was wrong.
Over the next few days, the voice began to instruct the boy on how to kill the girl. The boy got a cleaver and a knife and practiced holding them by the hilt and the blade. Then he started practicing stabbing motions and other things. A few days into that regimen, the voice asked for a favor, albeit a weird one.
“Hey, can I call you ‘dude’?”
“Sure.” Too late, the boy recalled the “names had power” trope in fiction, and he thought of redacting his response. But then he realized that the only reason he had even thought of that was because a magical voice had said it.
Nothing else that even compared happened in the next twelve days, where he started using pillows and a ruler as stand-ins, in preparation for his final fight. He learned how to fight with knives, strangle people, and avoid damage while killing someone. Even though he still felt like something was wrong with what he was doing, he relished feeling like a master assassin, and so he decided to shelve those feelings.
In that time, he and the voice also became friends. He learned that the voice liked nature documentaries, broccoli and fried onions, fantasy stories, and scented candles.
When he asked it why it liked specific foods and smells, it said, “I used to be able to eat things, but now I can’t. But eventually, if you kill the girl, I will.” This made the boy feel so sad that he started buying onions and broccoli so the voice would eventually have food.
He decided to kill the girl on the 23rd. When he asked the voice to teach him things on the 20th, it refused, saying: “You don’t need me anymore. Plant me in the soil near the tree where you found me and keep practicing what I taught you. Bring the girl here, then kill her at the foot of the tree I become.”
“Thanks for changing the plan with only three days left,” he said.
“Dude, you have three days. Is it really that hard to change one part of a plan?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, do it.”
The boy decided not to argue. After all, the voice had taught him how to kill the girl, and he had no right to refuse one of the only favors it had ever asked him. He buried the amulet beside the tree, and he noticed that as soon as he put the soil back over it, a sapling sprouted.
By the time he had woken up the next day, the sapling had grown considerably, but no one seemed to notice. The boy decided to take the knife to school, and he also decided to try and listen to the girl’s conversation. He hadn’t done it before, but he didn’t exactly remember why.
The girl seemed happy. She smiled at times, and even though the boy knew that she might have been sad, he assumed that she actually was happy. He had nothing particularly important to do at school, and so he kept biding his time as the minutes ticked down. At the end of school, he started walking back home when he realized, “I could go and see the girl’s house.” He immediately realized that such a thing wouldn’t be right, and so he went back home.
On the 22nd, the day seemed to pass in exactly the same way, but when he wanted to go to the girl’s house, he tried to analyze why he thought it was wrong. He couldn’t come up with any actual reasons why it was wrong, which confused him greatly.
“Why did I even think this was a bad idea?” he thought as he followed the girl home. He made sure to keep on the other side of the sidewalk so she wouldn’t see him. He followed the girl over ten roads and into a side road, until she had finally went into her house. He was surprised to realize that she lived in an apartment, because he was so privileged that he hadn’t realized people actually lived in apartments. “You learn something every day, I guess,” he said to himself.
Satisfied, he began walking back home, thinking about how he and the girl could be friends.
Wait, what?
He stopped dead in his tracks, cocking his head as if trying to hear something tinny. The memories were reluctant to come out, but suddenly, his actions before finding the amulet had been unbelievably clear. He had never wanted to kill the girl. He had wanted to be friends with her. He had been looking up how to talk with her. Then he had found the amulet.
His head was too messed up to remember if he’d had a crush on her or had simply wanted to have a friend. His head was too messed up. He opened up his backpack and took out a piece of paper, writing down, “You want to befriend the girl, not kill her. This is the truth. This is the truth.”
Back home, he couldn’t remember why he had written it, only that he had the feeling it was true. He thought about being friends with the girl, only to arrive at the idea of killing her instead. This made perfect sense to him, but when he tried to figure out why, the idea of killing her simply spread through his entire thought process until the only thing he could consciously hold in his mind was the idea of killing her.
He angrily punched his head, but that didn’t do anything. He jumped up and down on his bed, and that didn’t do anything either. Finally, he decided to draw a giraffe. That took his mind off of his dilemma, and when he was done, the thought of killing her was a seed in his brain again. He didn’t question it, but he was inwardly happy that he didn’t completely believe in it anymore.
He had a bad dream that night. In his dream, he was talking with the girl. Then he got the urge to kill her, and he had the knife at her throat before he realized that it was wrong. However, the girl ran from him, and he was filled with rage. He felt his body morph until he looked like a giant black satyr, and he chased after the girl, easily catching up to her and snapping her neck. He was immediately filled with satisfaction, and he watched in human form as a giant black tree erupted from her corpse.
The 23rd had arrived, and he was pumped. He didn’t remember the piece of paper at all, though it was still in his backpack. He did, however, remember the dream. He winked at the giant black tree which the sapling had grown into, and even though it had no eyes, he could swear that it winked back. He got an A in his math test, and he talked with the girl at the end of school that day.
His plan was to ask her nicely to come with him. Except she declined.
That made him feel crummy for not coming up with a better plan. A certain triumphant part of him said, “Hey, maybe if you had practiced talking to her instead, you would have been better equipped than if you had practiced knife-wielding.”
However, that was quickly overtaken by another voice. “I guess I overestimated your charisma, dude.”
“Hi,” he said to the voice with his mind.
“Okay. I have a backup plan for this part, but it’s not a very good one. You’ve got to touch her shoulder for at least ten seconds. Okay?”
“Easy,” the boy smirked. It actually was pretty easy. He took out his knife and threatened her, and then grabbed her shoulder and counted to twenty. When he took his hand off, she said nothing and followed him to his house. As he walked there, he remembered the note in his backpack. He thought about why he wanted to kill the girl. To his joy, instead of the idea of killing her filling his brain, he could actually remember that the voice was controlling his mind.
This joy was soon offset by the bitter truth that his only option was to bring the girl to the tree, or perhaps that he couldn’t think of any other options. So the boy trudged on towards his house, tailed by the girl, and prostrated himself before the tree.
“Tree, why do you need this girl?”
The voice had become deeper. “Isn’t it obvious?” it growled. “The girl’s life will give me my life.”
“If I throw her blood on you, will you be happy?”
“Dude, do you think that ‘blood’ can be substituted for ‘life’? It can’t.”
It had seemed reasonable to him. “What will you do to me?”
“I don’t know. I don’t really care.”
“That’s nice. Thank you. But why do you need to be alive?”
“I just want to be alive, dude. You ever been dead? You ever been turned into an amulet?”
“No.”
“Then you don’t – she’s running away!”
The boy looked up and saw the girl running away.
“What are you standing there for?! Get her!”
He started running after her. She wasn’t wearing very good clothes for running away, and he almost felt like not catching up to her. But in the end, he did catch up to her, grabbing her by the arm.
“Get away from me,” she said, panting.
“I think you should listen to the tree.”
“I’m not going to, you sick bastard.”
He recoiled. “Don’t say that word! It’s dirty!”
She looked at him with a mixture of confusion and amusement. “So you don’t have a problem with killing people, but you have a problem with bad words?”
He wanted to argue, but simultaneously didn’t want to waste time. He decided to just say, “Yeah, pretty much. But please come with me.”
She looked like she was about to argue, but instead of doing that, she smiled enthusiastically and she said, “Okay!”
He was confused until he realized that he felt the entire weight of what he was doing. The voice had forced all of its will onto her. He felt like vomiting, and he entertained the possibility of not killing the girl. But he realized that if he did that, the voice could just make him bring the girl back.
He went back, girl in tow, and asked a question. “Why am I free from your control now?”
“I only needed you to touch her to exert my control over her mind, using you as an outlet. I can only do this to one person at a time.”
“Why didn’t you need her name, or to call her by something?”
“I didn’t want to remember your name when I talked to you, and I don’t need to remember the girl’s name at all. Names have nothing to do with controlling you. Are you done?”
“No.”
The tree sighed, and the voice inside his head also sighed. “Look, dude, if you don’t stop stalling, I’m just going to take control of you and kill this girl myself.”
“I’m sorry, but could you do that? I don’t want to kill this girl.”
But he had no problem with killing the girl. He slit the girl’s throat, watching with positive glee as she screamed and then stopped, until the tree stopped controlling him and he looked in horror at what he had done.
Retching, he leaned against the side of the tree until he realized that he was still watching the girl bleed out. He decided to run far away and analyze the situation from a safe vantage point. He worried for an instant that his mother could come home, but she never did, so he wasn’t worried. He ran far away from his usual spot until he reached a park.
Once he had cleaned his shoes of the blood, he tried to analyze the situation. For an hour, he wandered around talking to himself. He could finally clear his head of the tree’s mind control, but to his dismay, he seemed to like the tree and girl equally. Consequently, twenty minutes of angry stomping were dedicated specifically to trying to figure out why he liked a murderous tree just as much as a girl his age. It only stopped with the tree’s voice in his head.
“You know I can hear that, right?”
He yelled at the tree in his mind. “I don’t care! You’re still controlling me! You’re making me think of you as a friend!”
“I’m not.”
“Why should I believe you?” said the boy.
“I don’t make a habit of lying.”
The boy tried to remember a time at which the tree had lied to him. He failed. He wanted to dislike the tree, but he decided he could just disagree with its methods. “Well, you have a body now, right? What were you trying to do?” he asked.
“That’s the problem. My plan was to take your body and use the girl as a virgin sacrifice. But now I’m in the girl’s body for some reason.”
“So what’s the problem? Can’t you just use her body instead?”
“I don’t have any blood, I can’t move, and I’m dying.”
He started running back home. “So why would that happen?”
“I haven’t done this in a while. Maybe I judged your character wrongly? I mean, you seemed like a weak-willed idiot, but maybe your mind was too strong?”
“I want to say I’m not a weak-willed idiot, but I am.”
“Yeah. It’s really easy to control your mind. I mean, you didn’t even want to run from me when I stopped controlling you.”
“But why would I? You would just control me.”
“Well, I thought you’d at least try. But it’s almost like I can control your mind by doing literally nothing,” the voice said matter-of-factly.
There was a long pause, and the boy eventually decided to ask another question. “What are you really?”
“I’m actually a kind of demon,” said the voice.
“Oh. But what kind?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
The voice huffed. ”How should I know my place in the universe?”
“I guess I thought you would know.”
“Well, I’m not a demon important to monotheism.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m not important enough to be mentioned in the Torah, Bible, or Qur'an.”
There was another pause, and the boy stopped to think for about a minute before giving up.
“Norse mythology?” the voice prompted.
“Well, then I guess you’re from Norse mythology.”
“I’m not from Norse mythology either, nincompoop,” the tree growled. “In fact, I’m not from any mythology.”
“Then why did you hint at Norse mythology?” asked the boy.
“Well, you stopped running, and I thought that I could get you to start again by prompting you.”
“But couldn’t you have just said you weren’t from any mythology?”
“Shut up and start running,” said the voice, audibly fed up.
He ran in silence for a while until he was almost on the path he took to school, so he stopped to catch his breath. That reminded him of something. “Tree, could you have mind-controlled me while I was going to the girl’s house?”
“No.”
“But then how are you talking to me?”
“The question you want to ask is, ‘Why didn’t you stop me from following that girl?’”
He started to ask that question, but then he realized that he hadn't remembered his findings when he had gotten home.
“Bingo,” said the voice with more than a hint of smugness. “Also, mind control takes more energy than this. Honesty, I don’t think I could control your mind in this state.”
“Oh dear,” said the boy, still wondering why he cared.
When he reached the tree, he saw the dead girl’s head jerk up. To his surprise, the boy found this only mildly creepy. He reasoned that it was probably because the blood had gone by this point. “Why did you want me to come here?” he said.
“Actually, I didn’t,” said the girl in a deep voice. “You just ran here because you wanted to, I guess.”
“Oh.”
“You would make a really good evil henchman, you know.”
“Or a superhero’s sidekick?”
He winced as the voice made an exploding noise inside his head. There was a smile on the girl’s face. “Now that you’re not talking about something unimportant, can you help me figure out why this didn’t work?”
“Do you not know?”
“Well, I never said I knew everything.”
“Well, you must have some idea of how your own powers work, right?”
“For most things, yes. But I’ve never been trapped inside a dead body before.”
This confused the boy. “Has this really never happened? I feel like this would happen more.”
“Well, what usually happens is that I get a boy to sacrifice a loved one for me.”
“But you did that.”
Annoyance flashed upon the girl’s face. “I know! But it didn’t work. Maybe it’s because you ran away.”
The boy felt a pang of guilt at hearing this. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do to fix it?”
The voice sighed, then the girl. “I don’t know.”
The boy thought about it for a while, and then it came to him. “When you say a loved one, do you mean in the sense of romantic love?”
“It can be someone’s friend or something, and – wait.” The girl looked shocked. “Are you telling me you didn’t even know this girl?”
“I sort of knew her –”
“Has she ever even talked to you?”
“I think she smiled at me once.”
“So you didn’t know her! Why?” said the voice, accusatory.
“Well, why did this elude you?”
“Do you think I can read your mind?”
“I think you did once.”
“Well, I can’t. Maybe I did once, but the best I can do is guess at your emotions and hear what you tell me. You were so in love with that girl that I thought you and she at least knew each other. But no.”
“I’m sorry.”
She started to fume and then she suddenly stopped. A blank, dead look came over her face, and the boy found himself nauseated again. He looked away, sneaking glances at her for a minute until the light came back in her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“I think I’m trapped in this body now. Great job.”
He felt unreasonably sad, and he tried to figure out a way to save the girl in the little time he had left. He tried to think of anyone else he could kill, and he ended up with one person.
“Kill me,” he said.
“Why?”
“So that I can be the sacrifice.”
“I can’t control you anymore.”
“But then why do I like you as a person?”
“Because you’re an idiot? I’m drawing a blank on that one.” The girl’s face was happy, but the voice sounded foreboding.
“Wait, it’s because you were nice to me.”
“Well, I didn’t want to be. If I had a choice, I would have just not picked all of those random things you asked me about.”
He felt sad. “You don’t like broccoli or nature documentaries?”
“No, I do, but it’s not important. See, this is the kind of thing that made me think you knew this girl I’m stuck inside now. But you don’t. You’re just a stalker, and you only like this girl because she looked at you and smiled once.”
“But you could have just not talked to me.”
“What do you mean? You were the only person I even had access to. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to be a social butterfly, but you’re on another level. You can't even talk correctly! Do you realize that? Thanks to you, I’m not sure how to talk either!”
“Wait, I just realized that I only liked that girl because she looked at me and smiled.”
“Yeah. It was really stupid. I guess that should have been a red flag.” The voice was starting to sound distorted, and the girl’s voice was getting softer.
“Why do I even exist? I don’t understand the point of my life, considering there are people like you who deserve it more.”
“You don’t have anything to live for. It’s just random–”
Then the boy heard high-pitched screaming and realized that the girl was lifeless again. Looking at the cadaver, with screams in his head, he imagined what pain the thing inside must have been going through. He took the knife and tried to cut himself.
It hurt, but he gritted his teeth and tried to remember whom he was doing it for. He watched in agony and disgust as his blood trickled onto the body, and watched in awe as the blood shone.
The girl’s eyes snapped back open, and when she saw him, she shouted, “What the hell?” She tried to get up, but she fell down again. As the blood flowed, he shouted, “Please, voice of the amulet and the tree, come back.”
“What are you talking about?”
The boy didn’t answer her.
“Are you insane?” she roared.
He looked down at her. “Were we ever friends?”
“Yes, yes, we were!” she screamed. But she was lying. He remembered with a start how she had looked at him. From his point of view, he was a horrible stranger.
As if sensing this, the girl screamed, “What do you want?”
“I made a friend, and I want her back.”
“You can have me! Just let me go!”
He vomited the caustic words he had only thought of in light of the disappearance of his friend. “Not you! Never you! I romanticized the idea of you beyond comprehension. You were never my friend. You were like an angel. I’m sorry for dragging you into something that I don’t understand. You can leave.”
The girl ran away, blood on her clothes, leaving the boy standing somberly. He wondered for a moment how he would get out of the situation, but then he blacked out for what felt like an eternity. When he came to, he heard the voice inside his head.
“That was nice of you.”
“You’re alive!” said the boy, feeling happier than ever before. But then he realized that it might not have worked.
“Good news!” said the voice. “I’m inside your mind now, as according to plan, so all you have to do is relinquish power to me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I will take your body over now.”
The boy felt sad. “So we won’t be able to talk anymore?”
“Nope. But don’t feel bad. It won’t hurt when you die.”
The boy thought about it. “You know what? I don’t even care. Even if you’re controlling me into making this judgment, you could do more with my life than I ever could.”
“So we have a deal?”
“Yes!”
The boy’s body jerked, and then the voice controlled the body. It straightened and surveyed its surroundings. There was blood in front of the house, but that could be fixed. There was also the matter of the girl, but he was only planning on staying alive for a short time. As it went inside and ate the broccoli and onions, it thanked his former host for the easy defeat and death. It looked through its mind, and upon finding no trace of the boy, it smiled in delight.
It wondered if they could have possibly been friends. The voice had to admit that the boy had acted nicely towards it. The boy had obviously thought highly enough of the voice to kill himself, and it could feel the power of this sacrifice surging through its veins. But then it remembered how the boy had stalked the girl and never talked to her, and decided that his clingy and overly attentive nature made him a better servant than friend.
So the voice dismissed those thoughts. Or at least, he tried to. It soon realized that such thoughts were stuck in its head, even if they weren’t always at the forefront of his mind’s eye, when it tried to focus his entire attention on a task and the thoughts continued to intrude. Perhaps the boy was too lazy in life, it thought, or perhaps it was not in full control. To test this, it dislocated all of the bones in his arm, then relocated them. It felt no reluctance or pain, and was sure that the boy would have felt these things, so it carried on with its preparations.
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