Paranoiac Read Online Free PDF Page B

known any better, I would have thought a bomb went off
inside of the giant parlor. The black leather furniture, including
the couch and reclining chairs, were tossed over onto their sides.
All of the cushions were missing along with the giant Oriental rug
that used to be at the center of the room.
    An antique
coffee table was pulverized and sitting on top of a neat pile of
broken glass. Bits of splintered wood, torn fabrics, and other
miscellaneous trash were heaped into the corners of the room. Each
brick red wall had several empty bronzed, frames hanging half
hazardly in suspended animation.
    It was so odd
seeing these empty, decorative frames. Who would have taken the
time to dismantle each frame, only to put them back on the wall
empty and soulless? Would my sheepish stalker really do something
like this? What was the point of destroying a house that I loathed?
As I filled my journal with questions, staring at the destruction
in the room I realized something. All of the collective heaps of
debris were in a sort of organized chaos. Even though the room was
ripped to shreds everything was swept up and in neat stacked piles.
Aside from the pieces of trash here and there around the
baseboards, everything was clean. It was so clean that the smell of
cleaners was overwhelming, as if someone opened a dozen bottles of
bleach and dumped them all over the furniture and floors. Who could
have done all of this? It must have been recent judging by the
pungent odor that soaked into my nostrils.
    From across the room I stared at the white marble fireplace
and noticed something stuck to the wall in the center of an empty
frame. I angrily walked over to the still-warm fireplace, a few
dull glowing embers illuminated still, within the crackling,
charred wood. I placed my hands on the warm, marble mantle and
looked up to see a small yellow note stuck to the wall. The note
was smack-dab in the middle of a giant bronze frame where a mirror
used to be. I tore the note off of the wall and quickly read my
stalkers' beautiful penmanship, ‘ Illusion is the first of all
pleasures. ’ I
repeatedly read the quote famously coined by Oscar Wilde and
originally written by Voltaire in his satirical poem La Pucelle
d’Orléans . I tried
to make sense of the quote and how it related to the room or
anything else for that matter. Staring at the empty frame where the
mirror once sat, I thought once again about my mother and her
countless creepy mirrors that littered this fatuous
mansion.
    The mirror
atop the mantle used to eerily reflect the entire room. I remember
staring into that mirror as a child and imagining it as a gateway
to another world, just as my mother had taught me; a world opposite
to the terrible things I had to suffer. It would be a parallel
dimension, where my parents and life were perfect. I used to
daydream, sitting on my bed, wishing everything were different.
Looking back on it now, if that mirror truly did reflect another
world that was opposite ours, I probably wouldn’t even
exist.
    Like so many
children in this world, I was an accident. My parents, under the
pressures of their own conservative families decided to keep me.
Every day since then, dad treated me and my mother like rubbish,
unable to accept the only thing he truly hated, himself. I wish I
could have been there to see him read the book I published after
graduating college. It was a book that hit bestseller lists across
the globe; a little fiction about a young boy terrorized by his
belligerent, alcoholic father who eventually kills his mother. Not
unlike my juvenile self, the young boy in my novel travels through
mirrors. Each one took him into another world where he could escape
the torment. Eventually the young protagonist commits suicide to
escape his father once and for all.
    Every terrible
act of mental or physical violence the main character endured was
ripped straight from my life and my dad knew it. As soon as the
book became famous he would constantly call me