Before My Tears Could Even Fall Chapter 2

"I am sorry. I just wanted to hold your hand."

Laura’s soft, innocent voice immediately replied.

My heart felt like it had been crushed by an invisible fist, beating so violently it physically hurt my ribs.

It was not a hallucination.

This was real.

The camera had captured the interaction, and the audio bug had physically recorded the sound waves of the boy's voice.

I collapsed back onto the sofa, my shirt completely soaked in a cold, clammy sweat.

Early the next morning, right after dropping Laura off at kindergarten, I drove straight to the psychiatric clinic where I worked.

I canceled my morning appointments and knocked directly on the door of Dr. Evans, the clinical director.

Dr. Evans had been my mentor in grad school. He was one of the most respected diagnostic psychiatrists in the state.

I slid the digital recorder across his mahogany desk.

"Dr. Evans, you need to listen to this."

When the playback finished, Dr. Evans furrowed his brow slightly, but he didn't look nearly as horrified as I expected.

He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses and took a slow sip of his herbal tea.

"Sarah, have you been taking on too many trauma cases lately?"

"This is a physical, digital recording!" I pointed at the jagged audio waveform on the screen, my voice trembling.

"I am not accusing you of fabricating it," Dr. Evans sighed. He used the exact same tone he used to pacify hysterical patients.

"But given our profession, you should know this better than anyone. Children between the ages of five and seven frequently create elaborate 'imaginary friends' as a coping mechanism against environmental loneliness."

He paused, his gaze sharpening slightly.

"That boy's voice is highly likely just Laura altering her own vocal cords. She is playing both roles."

I stared at him, stunned.

"That is impossible. I watched the live feed! When that boy spoke, Laura's lips did not move a single millimeter!"

"Cameras have blind spots, Sarah."

Dr. Evans stood up, walked around the desk, and patted my shoulder gently.

"You have been wound tighter than a piano wire since the divorce. You are obsessed with being the flawless, perfect mother."

He glanced down at my hands, which were unconsciously, furiously wringing the hem of my shirt.

"Go home and get a full eight hours of sleep. Stop trying to diagnose a paranormal event out of standard childhood development. If you are really losing sleep over it, bring Laura in next week and we will run a sandbox play therapy assessment."

When I walked out of the clinic, a freezing drizzle had started to fall.

Dr. Evans’ words hadn't comforted me at all. In fact, they left me drowning in a suffocating sense of helplessness.

He didn't believe me.

No one was going to believe me.

Because I was a licensed therapist, they would just assume I was a textbook case of a shrink losing her own mind.

That afternoon, before picking Laura up, I made a detour to the security office of my apartment complex.

I lied to the manager, claiming I had lost a highly valuable diamond necklace, and demanded to review the hallway security footage for the entire week.

I sat there staring at the monitors frame by frame, my eyes burning with exhaustion.

Absolutely no suspicious individuals had stepped off the elevator on my floor.

Even the food delivery drivers just left the bags in the lobby locker downstairs.

If no human being had physically entered the apartment, then where the hell was that voice coming from?

When we got home, I started putting the groceries away in the fridge.

Every single tomato had to be arranged in a perfectly straight line, ordered sequentially by size. I couldn't stop myself from doing it.

When I finally walked out of the kitchen, I found Laura sitting cross-legged on the living room rug, playing with her craft scissors.

Snip, snip, snip.

I walked closer, looked down at the paper scraps surrounding her, and violently gasped for air.

The floor was covered in dozens of red paper dolls.

Each cutout featured two figures holding hands. But the proportions were grotesque and terrifying.

The figure on the left was tiny. The figure on the right was stretched unnaturally long, with a sharp, pointed, triangular head.

"Laura, what are you cutting out?" I crouched down, forcing my voice to sound warm and casual.

Laura stopped cutting. She looked up at me, her pitch-black pupils entirely devoid of emotion.

"My brother said he wants new clothes."

A vicious cramp seized my stomach, a biological reaction to pure terror.

"We do not have a brother in this house, Laura." I corrected her, pronouncing every word with deliberate weight. "It is just you and Mommy."

"He is here." Laura stubbornly pointed her little finger at the empty armchair next to the sofa.

"He is sitting right there, watching you. He said you hold the knife very steadily when you cut the apples."

My scalp exploded in a rush of cold prickles.

Cutting the apples.

When I cut the apples yesterday afternoon, Laura was still at kindergarten!

Aside from me and the hidden cameras, it was physically impossible for anyone to know I had cut an apple.

Right at that exact second, a sudden, suffocating pressure wrapped around my neck.

It felt exactly like two freezing cold fingers had gently rested against my carotid artery.

I violently jumped backward, stumbling away and clawing at my own throat.

There was nothing there. But the icy, phantom sensation of being touched lingered against my skin.

My breathing grew ragged and shallow.

Tactile hallucination.

It was written right there in the DSM-5. When psychological stress breaches a critical threshold, the brain can manufacture phantom physical sensations.

Was I actually losing my mind?

No. That made no sense.

If I was the one going crazy, how do you explain the paper dolls Laura was cutting?

I had to get to the bottom of this.

I dropped to my knees and grabbed Laura by the shoulders, my grip tight enough to make her wince.

"Laura, you tell Mommy right now. What else did this brother tell you to do?"

Laura stared at me. Slowly, she stretched her mouth into a wide, unnatural smile.

It was a hideous, grotesque grin, stretching far too wide for a child’s face.

She pointed at the scattered red paper dolls on the rug. Her voice was dripping with a sickening sweetness.

"My brother said... these are the burial offerings for Mommy's grave."