November 1965
I found him waiting for me in the corner of the cellar, sitting cross-legged on an overturned crate like it was a leather armchair in a Parisian office.
He was me, but cleaner.
His lab coat was perfectly pressed, the white of it untouched by dust or blood. Beneath it, a beige shirt, sleeves rolled once with care. His shoes gleamed, his posture was serene. He held a fountain pen, poised above a blank notepad on his knee, and watched me the way a surgeon studies a patient before the first incision.
"Talk to me," he said gently. "You look like hell."
I blinked. He didn't disappear.
I haven't spoken to anyone in weeks, not even to myself. But something in me responded—not in words, but in motion. I sat down across from him, legs stiff, spine curved like a question mark. I wrapped my arms around my knees, and my skin felt like parchment stretched over stone.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
I shook my head, or nodded, or maybe both.
"You were a doctor once," he said. "A good one. You believed in containment, in boundaries. You listened to the cracks in people's voices, and you made maps of the mind."
I stared at his face. Familiar, but wrong. Uncreased, and human.
"You are very sick," he said without judgment. "But not gone."
His words struck something deep, like sonar pinging an ocean floor.
Not gone..
Not gone....
Not gone...
"I've… hurt things," I whispered, my voice sandpaper and smoke.
"Yes," he said. "You've fed, you had to."
"But I wanted to stop."
"And you still do." He flipped a page in his notebook. "Which means the part of you that can choose is still alive. That's the only part that matters."
I closed my eyes, but I could still see him—that white coat like a lighthouse through fog. The psychiatrist I had once been, now returned to drag me from the cellar of my mind.
---
It began with a line drawn in dust.
I used my fingertip to mark the cellar floor, a boundary. One side was death, the other restraint. One side instinct, the other intention. The line would not hold me—not physically, but it was a start. A ritual, and a reminder that I was more than what I had become.
"Rules," I told the figure in the coat. "I need rules."
"Good," he said. "Make them clear. Make them brutal, if you must. But make them yours."
---
I. Do not touch the living
Human living, specifically. Not even to speak, not even to warn. The moment I touch their world, I endanger it. I am no longer one of them. Any contact—any hope of contact—must be severed.
II. Feed only from animals, and only with restraint
No young, no infants, no fledglings, no calves stumbling on new legs. Only adult creatures, fully grown, capable of flight or fight. Even then, only when necessity demands. Let hunger stretch its claws—I will not feed from innocence.
III. Do not speak unless spoken to
I do not trust my voice, not yet. It warps too easily. Lies too easily, I do not know what I would say to the world if it asked me who I am.
IV. Remainunseen
I am no longer human, the sight of me would rupture their minds. I am not cruel, but I am danger. I cannot forget that.
V. Keep the journal
Even if language fails again, even if it becomes nothing but scratches and sketches. It is the only proof that I am thinking, choosing, being.
---
I read the rules aloud that night, voice trembling but intact. My reflection in the wine bottles watched me with glassy stillness. It felt like taking an oath to no nation but myself.
The man in the coat stood in the corner and nodded approveably.
"Good," he said. "Again, tomorrow."
---
Madness does not announce itself. It does not arrive with trumpets or flames. It drips—quiet and colorless—through the seams of the self.
But I had mapped madness before.
In patients who believed they were clocks, or saints, or rotting from within. I had drawn diagrams of dissociation, webs of fractured identity. I had learned to walk those landscapes like a cartographer of the mind.
And now I had to walk mine.
So I began again, from nothing.
I labeled objects in the cellar with chalk and charcoal.
Chair.
Wall.
Trapdoor.
Moon.
Words returned slowly, one by one, like birds to a thawed branch.
Sometimes they flew away again. Sometimes they brought others.
I whispered them. I mouthed them. I etched them onto my skin in ink and spit and ash.
Language was not just memory—it was defiance.
---
One afternoon, I found myself standing in the doorway of the cellar, the trapdoor open for the first time in weeks. Outside, the sun hung low and cold. I felt its heat dimly through the shadows. Dust swirled in golden spirals.
The hunger curled around me like smoke. It told me to run. To chase, and to tear.
But I remembered the line.
I pressed a hand to the stone and said the first full sentence I had spoken in months:
"I will not kill."
It didn't echo.
But I didn't need it to.
---
The man in the coat faded after that. Slowly, like a dream forgetting itself. Some days I still caught a glimpse—an elbow, a pen cap, the edge of his patient gaze. But he no longer needed to speak.
I had become the voice.
Not stable, not whole, and not sane, by any usual measure.
But sovereign.
---
I am still starving.
I do not know if that will ever end.
But I know now what I will not become.
And sometimes, in the silence between thirsts, I can almost hear myself thinking again.
Not the old Sylvain.
But not the beast either.
A man bound in blood and rules, treading the threadbare path between.
A mind in ruins—but one still drawing maps.