A Scratch of Madness

They started small, these scratches. 

The first time I saw them was at the lake house. My room had always been closest to the water, and I’d always forget to close the window before bed. At night you could hear the bugs outside as clear as if they were buzzing around in your ears. The third morning we were there, little red welts rose up on my arms. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have a bad reaction to bug bites; it seemed I’d been scratching the itch away in my sleep. 

Mom, of course, was horrified when I showed her. But it wasn’t anything a little Benadryl couldn’t fix. “You and your brother always had such bad reactions to mosquitos,” she told me with tired eyes, looking to the empty twin bed beside mine. The heavy-wooden frame wouldn’t easily detach; otherwise, they would’ve moved it out long ago. Sometimes I’d still imagine him there. I could turn over and see him, a mound of long, lank limbs folded underneath the covers. 

The scratches hadn’t ceased for the entirety of our stay. They would disappear by the afternoon, only to then reappear the next day like clockwork.  

By the final night, the bug bites were relentless. Even though my mother made certain to shut and lock the bedroom window, the bugs still found their way to me. 

By the next morning, I woke and padded to the bathroom mirror. I could hear my parents rush in and out of the house, stuffing the car with our suitcases, folding chairs, and left over provisions. As I flicked on the lightswitch and peered at my reflection, immediately I wanted to turn the light back off. 

From my cheeks to the base of my neck, four long red lines grazed down my skin, red and angry. Any deeper and the skin would’ve broken. Tentatively, I raised a hand to touch the skin, wincing at how tender it felt; only to then see scratches all over the tops of my hands and up my arms. 

I stared at myself in the mirror for a long while. I was, understandably, unsettled by the sight, and concerned by my lack of recollection. In fact, I couldn’t remember my dreams for the whole two weeks we had been here. It was as if the nights didn’t exist. 

My mother walked into the room, calling out my name. “Ben, you have to get your stuff packed and in the car. Your father is already revving the engine.” 

I froze, listening to her yank out the suitcase from under the bed frame. I wondered how I could hide this, studying the marks as if they had the answer for me. “Ben?” she called again, suitcase plopped open on the mattress. The mouth of it opened like a growl. 

After a few seconds of silence, she appeared behind me in the mirror. Upon seeing my reflection she went still, like a deer in the headlights. 

We returned home after sundown. A thin layer of Benadryl cream had been applied religiously to my arms and face and chest, despite my many protests; my skin stung the entire drive home. My mother ranted about my need to find a new allergist, perhaps even a dermatologist. Did you see those marks, Jim? For hours my father just listened, the occasional grunt of acknowledgement offbeat to my mom’s rattling nerves. 

We reached the garage in silence. I pulled the suitcases out of the trunk and hefted them inside, past the entryway and the table for our house keys. Family photos lined the hallway; as always, Callum’s face was missing from the gathering of smiles. His high school portrait was gathering dust with linens in the broom closet. It had been that way for nearly four years now, and I knew better than to ask. There were times when I forgot his face, and times when I wished he were still around. I may as well be an only child. 

I started to lug my suitcase up the stairs to my bedroom when I heard the phone ring downstairs in the kitchen. I listened from the banisters, only catching my mom’s string of increasingly impatient “okays,” ending with “For Heaven’s sake, can’t you people keep an eye on him? We pay enough as it is.” She slammed the phone down on the receiver, and I could hear her stomp to the garage, no doubt to tell dad the news, whatever it was. 

I continued my trek up the stairs and rounded the corner to my door, pushing down the doorknob with my elbow and heading inside. With the suitcase off in the corner, I pulled up on the window pane and allowed the summer evening breeze to breathe into the room. Mosquitos be damned. 

A few weeks passed and the scratches never returned. I began to think that it really was a byproduct of bad bites and sensitive skin. My mother calmed down, and my summer seemed to trudge forth in a warm haze of monotonous chores and summer reading. 

“The hospital called again,” my mom said one night during dinner, stabbing a rogue tomato with her fork. It shot from the plate and into my mashed potatoes. 

“What now?” dad asked, his voice a grumble. He was sawing at his steak with a severity that could’ve cut all the way down to the earth’s core. 

“What do you think?” There was a crunch as her teeth bit into the rib of her romaine. 

“Those damn nurses are idiots,” my father said, shaking his head. 

“What happened?” I chimed in, carefully scooping the tomato off my dish. 

“Oh, it’s nothing to worry over.” My mom was always a terrible liar. “Your brother is just causing us more trouble than what it’s worth. The hospital has it under control.”

“How so?” I asked, deciding to press, figuring it was nothing serious. It had been some time since we talked about Callum at the dinner table. My parents had removed his chair from our place setting long ago. 

“Ben.” Dad turned to me, speaking firmly. He held his knife straight up in his hand. My name was a command, and I ignored it. 

“Is he okay?” I asked, looking to both of them for an answer. They looked to each other, a silent conversation between them. I could hear the ice clink and shift in my glass. 

“He’s fine, Ben,” mom said, her smile wavering. Dad just shook his head, forking a fatty piece of steak into his mouth.

A month later, the scratches had returned. Small angled lines gracing the flesh of my lower arms, marked over and over until a layer gave way to blood. I had left the window open for the first time in weeks. Scabs had formed by the time I inspected myself in the bathroom. 

I didn't want to give myself space to think about it further and only wanted to ignore it. That’s what my family did best. I was fine chalking this up to sensitive skin; all things superficial. How could I approach it any other way? I didn’t have the luxury to. 

But still I stared at the marks on my body. I knew they were wrong. 

My insides twisted. Was I slipping just like Callum? 

I hid the marks under a long-sleeve shirt, despite the 90 degree weather baking the concrete outside. Of course, this did not go unnoticed. 

“You’re going to die of heatstroke out there with that on,” mom said from the kitchen sink. She was scrubbing away last night’s meal. I had only come in to steal some granola bars before meeting friends for a short hike near the high school. 

“I’ll be fine, ma,” I said, unwrapping one of the granolas for breakfast and sticking one into my mouth. I grabbed my house keys at the entryway table and almost made it out the door before I felt a tug at my back. 

“At least roll the sleeves up, will you?” She grabbed my forearms and began to roll up the fabric. I made a sound of protest, but I was locked in her grip. 

She stood still for a moment, eyes scanning the crooked lines cast on my forearms. “How long has this been happening?” Her green eyes were calculating. “Have you been leaving your window open again?” She paused, then whispered to me as if someone was listening to us through the walls, “Have your night terrors returned?” 

I pulled at my arm, felt the heat rise up to my ears. She let me free. “I just noticed it today. It’s no big deal, ma.” She looked at me expectantly. “And I’m sleeping fine.” I was sleeping like the dead. 

“I’m calling a doctor. Maybe we can get you in with Lepsky,” she said, scribbling on the notepad on the entry table. She ripped off the paper and turned to me with a pointed finger, “This happens again, you tell me immediately.” 

“Yes ma’am.” 

The scratches wouldn’t fade this time around. Even my friends glanced at me sideways when I rolled up my sleeves, asked if I was “doing alright.” By nightfall they still covered my arms like a brand, and I could only hope they’d disappear by morning. 

But two days later I woke to a terrible stinging on my chest. These scratches were long, violent, repetitive from neck to waist; parts of the skin were peeling and sticking to my bed sheets. I looked to my hands, which were shaking before my eyes. My nails were clean. 

I turned to the window, it was closed. But I saw it; a little bend in the screen—where the hatched metal curved up from the corner. Several threads of a white fabric stuck to its ends. I stared at this evidence for a long while and swallowed hard, fingers poised to touch it, examine it further. I wanted nothing more than to turn away and erase it from sight. There was no use blaming anything but myself for this. For all I knew, my shirt could’ve caught on the screen when closing the window nights ago. My only solution was to forget and get help. To find a logical, fixable explanation; something my brother couldn’t. 

And so I did. 

Or, at least I tried to. 

By the afternoon I was sitting in the doctor’s office, the paper below me crackling loudly with every movement of my body. My mom was with me, sitting on a wooden chair in the corner, furiously scrolling through something on her phone. I couldn’t quell my heart from beating so audibly. It filled up my ears. 

She’ll leave you too, I thought. She’ll cast you aside the moment you prove to be just as defective. 

I started to fear this was the wrong plan. 

A quiet knock sounded from behind the door and my body recoiled. 

Dr. Lepsky, a man with thick, blacked-rimmed glasses, entered the room, bug-eyes examining my file. He flipped the page, up and back, up and back, until he finally looked at me. My mother was holding her breath; I could see the red creeping up her neck. 

“What brought you in here today?” he asked me. I wondered if he could see behind my eyes. 

I opened my mouth, only to have mom cut in, “He’s been scratching himself in his sleep.” She looked to me, “Ben, show the kind doctor your arms and chest.” 

Dr. Lepsky turned to me with a frown. Silently, I pulled off my shirt, gritting my teeth at the tender spots. The marks were just as red as before, a beacon of instability. 

He prodded at my skin with long, cold fingers. Caterpillars for brows pinched together in a wild, distracting mess. After a minute, he stepped away and pondered. 

“I wonder whether it’s dermatographia, or skin writing,” he finally said, jotting down his observations on the clipboard. “Though it is odd for it to only begin now.” He adjusted his glasses, shifting the size of his eyes. “Have you been under stress lately?”

“No,” I responded. “I don’t think so… It’s summer break.”

“I see,” he offered. I could tell the answer made him wary. “No less, the condition is not considered dangerous. Since it only occurs in your sleep, I wonder if your dreams are causing anxiety. People with the condition often pick and scratch at the skin unknowingly during moments of high stress. Your skin gets angry from all that pressure, and releases histamines… and thus the markings.” He studied me. “Have you been having any bad dreams?” 

“I don’t remember. I haven’t been remembering my dreams.” There’s an uncomfortable silence. My eyes shifted over to my mom. Her eyes were planted on the floor. She wouldn’t look at me. “Should I… Is it a problem that I can’t recall doing this?”

Dr. Lepsky had been writing on his clipboard. “Not necessarily; not if it feels like part of a dream at the time. Have you suffered from sleeping problems in the past?”

“Paralysis,” I muttered, “but only when I was younger.” I closed my eyes, trying not to remember those nights, the black shadow with yellow eyes that stood watching in my doorway. I could do nothing but stare back. My parents considered these episodes as night terrors. 

They started after my brother had been sent for permanent psychiatric help. We had been so close when I was little, before everything; my doctors blamed separation anxiety. But I knew it was simply fear. 

My parents didn’t want him back. And I didn’t want to become him. 

On the drive home my mother ranted her worries in an endless bubble. We had a diagnosis, but not a solution. And to be honest, the diagnosis didn’t sit well, even with me. 

As far as I was concerned, my nights had been dreamless—when they’d always been so vivid, enough to remember the following morning. And it didn’t explain the fabric in the window, the lack of skin in my nails. I felt deeply unsettled by it all. 

That night, I fought sleep. Paced the floor and blasted music in my ears. If not to unravel these supposed anxieties, then to stop myself from driving my skin through a cheese grater. 

I looked at my alarm clock: 1:30 AM. 

I was beginning to feel sleep pile up under my eyes and needed something to keep me distracted. I sat down in bed and traced the red marks on my arms. They had calmed down over the past few hours. I padded to the bathroom and examined my chest. The marks here had calmed down as well, albeit still raised. I allowed myself to peer more closely at them, pretending to drag my hands over the skin as I would’ve done in my sleep. 

And that’s when I noticed something.

Certain angles of the scratches seemed to connect behind the length of others. It was possible I was losing my mind at this moment (by now it was nearly 2AM), but I had the impression that the scratches on my arms, and most especially on my chest, were interspersed with chicken-scratch lettering. 

Moving from left to right — N-I-E-M-T-E-L. I traced them over and over again with my fingers, just to be sure. 

It made no sense until I flipped it around, realizing I had been looking at the reflection. 

L-E-T-M-E-I-N. 

I scrambled to alert my brain, tell it that what I saw was merely a product of forced sleep deprivation. I was only seeing things. I was merely tired. 

I left the bathroom and caught sight of the door to my brother’s bedroom down the hall. I hovered in the hallway. Since Callum left, I had always avoided his room, afraid that whatever consumed him would find me too. I ignored the warning signs now, glossed over by a deep, childish curiosity. 

I walked quietly to his door, turned the knob and set foot into a room that smelled of cedar and dust. The walls remained gray, the sheets tucked in like hospital corners. The only sense of life was the piles of notebooks stuffed in the drawers of his desk, pushing out like an avalanche. I took one from the floor. I could remember him pouring over these journals, pencils snapping as the lead dug too deeply into the paper. I always wondered what he was writing about so ferociously. 

Turning to the first page, all I saw were hatch marks, long and crooked. They covered the page, and every page after it. 

I pulled out another notebook and saw the same. 

And another and another. 

Nothing but scratch marks. 

I pulled out each and every notebook. Even the inside of the drawers were carved in long lines, and a repeated phrase LET ME IN LET ME IN LET ME IN

I felt sick, questioned the possibility. I’d never seen his notebooks before. Never tried… And yet, the evidence was clear, written on me like a testament in stone. 

I stumbled back to my feet and out of his room, my mind a blur. 

No, no, I wasn’t like him… 

Was I broken too?

God, no wonder they were terrified. 

The scratches were exactly the same. 

It was like my mind had been invaded, an itch that wouldn’t go away. 

I passed my parent’s bedroom, panic dripping through my shirt. 

Did they all know? The thoughts bounced around my skull. Could they sense it on me? 

I told myself to get a grip and entered my room, wanting to reset. 

Maybe this was a long, drawn-out dream. 

Just bug bites and overly sensitive skin. 

But then I saw him.

Callum, looking over my empty bed, a shadowy figure from my nightmares. 

He turned to me, eyes yellowed and watering. 

A scream choked my lungs. 

“Why won’t you let me in?”