It smelled like death in here. You could feel it too, the death. That and the betrayal, the guilt and the sins. This place once held my most cherished memory and now it holds the ones that keep me awake at night in paralysing, haunting nightmares. I had the one and only Zara Jessson to blame for this. 

The wooden floorboards with wild greenery growing all around them, reaching up like viscous claws of nature, creaked underneath me as I stepped further into the abandoned house at the bottom of Earls Street. Up until 2010 no one dared step foot in here for twenty years, apparently the place was haunted. Of course it was Zara Jesson who broke this twenty year streak and searched the house top to bottom when she was thirteen years old looking for the slightest sign of something that resembled Caspar. 

She was the girl. The girl that founded this place, the girl that made it her den. She was also the girl I fell madly in love with. I turned back toward the door seeing myself four years ago from now bursting through those doors aged fifteen hand in hand with Zara. 

"I still think this place is haunted," I muttered to myself eyeing up the creepily half burned paintings that came from the early 20th century and the black drapes hung around the staircase. This place would have been a beautiful mansion once. 

Zara rolled her eyes at me and tugged on my hand pulling me further into the house, she was a full head shorter than me and thin enough to fit through prison bars but I let her believe she could actually pull me about. You did small things like that for the people you loved. "It's not haunted Alex, you god-damned pussy. How many times have we hung out in here?" 

"Not once have I hung out with you here willingly," I uttered glaring at the back of her blonde head. She had that blonde hair that was so light it was actually white. It meant when she stood in front of the light she looked like an angel, of course Zara couldn't possibly be any less like an angel if she tried. 

She chuckled at me and started yanking me up the unsteady stairs, a beaming smile on her face. I wondered what the hell she was smiling about. 

I unsteadily made my way up the same stairs I once raced up hand in hand with Zara four years ago and held onto the cracked bannister for support. One of the steps was particularly hazardous because back two years ago the tree outside had actually overgrown so much that it had pushed through the old, weak wall of the house and up through the stairs. I hauled myself up the rest of the stairs carefully then made my way into the hallway. Glancing at the familiar door. 

Zara pointed towards the mould covered door at the end of the hallway. "If I lived here, that would be my bedroom," she announced. 

I stared down at her with wide eyes, "Zara you live in a mansion, why on earth would you want to live here?"

She started walking toward the doorway and because she was still gripping my hand in hers I had no choice but to follow her into the room. "Because it's big, isolated and has so much potential." 

When we entered the room she shoved her backpack off her shoulder and pulled out a blanket, unfurling it on the dirty ground like a damn magician. She winked at me, "I brought a picnic." 

I pushed open the doorway warily, using my sleeve to cover my hand before I shook my head at myself and just used my hand. I'd had sex in this room and now I didn't even want to open the door with my bare hand? Talk about hypocritical. The room was mainly empty aside from a deteriorating dresser and a now mould covered vanity mirror. Every other piece of furniture by this point had just fell into a pile of wood. 

I glanced down at the spot on the floor where Zara had laid out the blanket for our picnic, that's where it had happened. Where I tumbled into a clinging love I should have never fell into. 

Zara dropped the rest of the strawberry into her mouth, letting out a sigh as she chewed. She was laying on her back with her eyes closed, blonde lashes caressing her cheeks and as usual she looked ridiculously beautiful without even trying. How the hell I'd got her to go out with me I'd never know. She said it was because I was 'pretty darn good looking' myself but when I looked in the mirrors I couldn't see it. At least not anything that compared to her angel like beauty. 

She opened her eyes and saw me staring down at her in what was probably wonder and whispered, "Alex. Kiss me." 

So I did, my lips crushed against hers tongues invading each others mouths, lips sucking on each other. Hands roaming to places they'd never roamed before and lips roaming to places they'd never dare roam before, leaving purple bruises all along her chest. I pulled back when I felt her rubbing herself against me in a delicious rhythm, "Zara I've never-"

"Neither," she said and lifted her head to suck onto my collarbone again making me groan with pleasure. Her hand trailed down to my jeans and she started stroking me through them, before slowly undoing the button and pulling down the zipper. 

"I don't have a condom." 

She sucked from my collarbone up to my neck, "Doesn't matter." 

I frowned, wishing I wasn't so responsible and could just shut up and enjoy this. "We're fifteen." 

"There's always after pills," she replied into my neck. When I tried to argue again she pulled back and held my face between her hands, "Alex. Although you may find it creepy, this is my favourite place, and you're my favourite person. I want this, I want this now and I want you. I love you." 

And that was how fifteen year old me lost his virginity in the abandoned house at the end of Earls Street. And boy did I cherish that memory for the following year when I was actually still in love with Zara. But then during Junior year she grew colder, distant and honestly, just flat out mean. She was angry at the world, she'd been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and she hated it. She didn't understand why she had depression, she didn't understand that people sometimes just got it without having a "valid" reason and mostly she didn't understand how to fight against it. 

It was horrible, but I didn't love her any more. I wanted to, I really wanted to and that was why I stayed with her for a year even when she wasn't the same Zara but a harsher more bitter version. But eventually I couldn't do it any more, I broke up with her. Tried to make the blow as easy as possible but of course it was inevitable she would get hurt. 

And then just over a week later she hung herself in the exact same spot where we first made love on what would have been our anniversary. Yeah, that sent me quite the message; she was all but blaming me for her suicide. And honestly: I blamed me too. I remembered she'd gone missing for two days so I raced to the first place that sprung to mind. 

Storming up the stairs and actually breaking one of the boards as I did so, I wasn't expecting what I found when I burst through the mouldy door to her favourite room. Zara, paler than usual, beautiful white blonde hair covering her face and in the slight breeze she was swinging with her feet a foot from the floor and the rope clinging to her neck.

I was completely, wholly paralysed. Until the police found me too, a day later curled up into the corner of the the room staring at her weak, pale, body. My eyes were red raw, maybe because I didn't stop crying for 24 hours or maybe because I was so paralysed I never blinked. I felt dead, and then I realised when people die they also kill the people around them. This was her payback, she'd killed me. Sadistically, painfully, heartbreakingly she'd killed me. I looked over my shoulder at the girl who was once the reason I bothered getting up in the morning.

And she was. Still. Fucking. Swinging. 

And that was how Zara murdered both herself and me. Because it's the people around you that truly suffer when you die. What hurt the most was that right now, as she watched me mourn her, she was probably rolling in her grave. Because I'm the reason she's gone.

"You know not what I now know."

Nurse Riley raised an eyebrow at me, silently asking what the hell was wrong with me but not actually daring to say the words.

I leaned forward smiling manically, "I know everything and you know nothing."

She continued to stare at me with a blank face but you could tell she was massively freaked out in her eyes. If I freaked her out I couldn't wait until the newbie Nurse met Chronic Masturbating Ben. "You're trying to scare me," she said, "It's not working." Oh but it so obviously was. "You're just crazy, like everyone else around here," she muttered to herself.

I'm not crazy. I promise you I'm not crazy. Granted, I occasionally introduce myself as my favourite fictional character, here and there I talk to inanimate objects, one time I forgot the difference between inflammable and flammable, oh - and once I ate glass. But nevertheless I'm still not crazy.

Promise.

"Levana?" Nurse Riley repeated, she'd been calling out to me a for at least a minute now. Turns out I'd dosed off again. She leaned into my personal space. I had to remind myself that there were better ways to tell the newbie Nurse that you didn't like people in your space than biting their nose's off. That was just considered impolite... or at least that's what I'd been told. I reeled backwards from the Nurse who smelled of a dog-like odour. Someone needed to tell this woman to stop trying to fit in with her pets by attempting to smell like them.

"Are these the correct pills you take everyday at 8 am?" She asked, glancing down at her clipboard before shaking the orange bottle of pills in front of me. I can't read, so I didn't have a clue. But I nodded anyway because pills are always good. Always.

Nurse Riley handed me the pill and watched me chug it down with the plastic cup of water before inspecting my open mouth. She leaned in real close again and I caught the distinct smell of Labrador.

Do not tell the newbie Nurse that she smells like an unwashed puppy Levana, that's just bad manners.

"Do you wash?" I wondered aloud. Nurse Riley glanced at me over her shoulder with a bemused frown on her face. She nodded. "So then do you sleep with your dogs?" I asked curiously. Her eyes blazed with obvious fury and her mouth tightened. Something else I knew that she didn't: she smelled like god-damned dog and needed a wash ASAP. 

See turns out crazy people do know things that others don't. Of course I'm only hypothetically crazy, we've already covered this.

I wondered if this Nurse would maintain control like most of the other Nurses did or would violently attack me like one of the patients would. If she attacked me then I'd bite her nose off. Self defence right?

She spun away from me and stormed out of my bleak, pale room with an angry jerk in every step. Oops. I hopped off the bed, the tiles feeling deliciously cold on my bare feet and wandered out into the hallway where a bit more action was to be seen than the dullness of my room.

Wall-Screamer Maddie was being led down the hallway with two male nurses at either side looking heavily drugged up. Hallucinating Harley sat tracing letters on the white walls that weren't there, Chronic Masturbating Ben was sat in the corner facing away from the room with his arm conspicuously jerking and Leila was curled into the side of a very uncomfortable looking Dr Harrison. Didn't look like she was going to be letting him go any time soon either.

He'd probably just prescribed her with some new really strong antidepressants and she was showing her thanks. And then there was someone else who I'd never seen before sat on one of the heavily stained leather couches facing the window. I could only see the back of a head, so curiously I wondered around the couch until I came to stand by Holloway Asylums latest patient.

He was a boy. And he was really, really pretty. He had dark brown hair cut too short to be shaggy but still long enough for it to be naturally wavy and all over the place, his eyes were a golden hazel and he had strong sharp facial features. His hazel eyes travelled to me and I swear to God flames were dancing in those eyes, bright yellow, boiling hot and angry flames that would burn to the bone if need be.

He stared at me, clearly waiting for me to explain why the hell I was staring at him. And at loss for words because he was so damn pretty all I could think to say was, "You know not what I now know."

Stupid. Crazy. Bitch.