Shadows in the Mind

The night whispered with a thousand spectral voices as Leila trudged home under the dim streetlamps. Even their flickering amber pools seemed to twist and distort into jeering, inhuman shapes dancing at the peripheries of her vision.

“Just breathe,” she muttered, clutching the takeout bag of meds like a talisman. “They’re only hallucinations…”

But the shadows only seemed to swell and elongate in response to her dubious reassurances. They coiled in through alleyways and darted across walls like a sinister chorus of wraiths manifesting from the darkest recesses of her own fracturing subconscious.

Leila’s steps quickened until she was almost running, the paper bag crumpled in a pale, sweaty grip. Only when she’d bolted through the sanctuary of her apartment door and flicked on all the lights did the inky phantoms finally dissipate.

In the blinding fluorescence, she sank trembling to her kitchenette floor and fumbled for the pillbox of antipsychotics.

“Just the meds, Leila,” she chided herself through ragged breaths. “Just take the damn meds and it’ll pass like always…”

Yet down the hall, a sinister shape seemed to detach itself from the shadows cast by her bedroom, slinking towards her with baleful hunger.

Leila froze, icy dread congealing in her veins as a pair of smoldering crimson eyes congealed in the murk. The-the thing’s shapeless form blotted out all light, an inkblot demonstrably solid and menacing amassing by the…