They don’t believe me. Nobody believes me. I think they’ve forgotten me, left me in this white hell, all alone, like I’m a kid made to think about what I’ve done. All alone, just me, a super-chunky crayon cut blunt so I can’t shove it into my own brain, and a notepad with rounded corners so I can’t slit my wrists. All this just so I can write down what happened and they can read it and laugh over coffee and throw it away and say “What a nut-job.”

Well, here it is. My story. My biography. The tale of how poor Alistair Thorpe wound up in a white padded hell-hole. You won’t believe me. Nobody believes me, I told you that already. I apologise for the handwriting: as I write this I’m rocking back and forth. It’s soothing, like riding a gentle ocean on a lovely little boat beneath a clear blue sky and a sun with a great big cheery smile. God I hope I finish this before they tranq me. Pills in the food, powder dissolved into the drink. And if you don’t eat or drink the stuff, they turn off all the lights and sneak in and jab you with one of those needles they’ve always got and you get all sleepy and bang your ear as you fall and wake up with one hell of a headache. Can you hear the footsteps outside my cell? No, neither can I. It’s not time yet then. Not time yet. I didn’t eat or drink, you see. I pretended, scooping it up then letting it pour down my neck. I’m a nut-job. Spilling more than you eat is in the job description, at the bottom in small print, right alongside being sedated. But hey, what’s a little mess now and again?

Perhaps now I should write my story. Not that you’d believe me anyway. Nobody believes me, I already told you that. Not one person on this planet believes that a knife can talk, that a seven-inch blade with the name “Suzie” scratched onto it can take over your mind. Tell me that seven months ago and I wouldn’t have believed it either. I was a hot-shot author, you see. I had the money, the fast cars, the big hoses. Believe that bullshit and you’ll believe anything. I was an author, and I had my fans, but I didn’t have the fast cars and the big houses full of women in bikinis and big swimming pools and parties. No, I was just the little guy trying to make himself big to scare the bullies. And my word were there bullies.

It started on a wet autumn day. I can’t remember exactly when, but I know that the sky was grey, overcast, and the world was passing me by as though in a dream. Nobody saw me, nobody noticed. Nobody cared. But what’s new? Everybody rushing around, too busy with their own little lives to see a man like me drifting through them, not really sure where to go, not really sure what to do. My wife just told me about The Other Man, and my kid just told me to Fuck Off and Screw a Goat, Asshole. We’re Happy Now.

So I walked. I just kept walking through the rain, through the umbrellas that tried to scrape out my eyes with their little barbs. And everyone seemed to be laughing. Hiding their eyes so they wouldn’t burst out laughing at me. Lowering their faces so I couldn’t see their grins. And it didn’t make me angry: I don’t really get angry. Even when my wife of fourteen years told me It Was All Over, I didn’t get angry. Just sad. Deeply, hopelessly sad. So sad that I didn’t cry, didn’t fall to my knees and sob, I just turned and floated out into the rain.

And I drifted through all those people for god only knows how long. God knows everything, right? So come on then oh mighty Lord God. Why did I have to find Her? Why? Why couldn’t I have just overlooked Her lying in the dirt, not bothered to pick Her up, and all this would be different, wouldn’t it oh Merciful One? God is a no-good bastard who knows everything but says nothing just so he can watch us squirm.

I bet he was grinning like a madman when I slumped onto that grassy verge. Sure, my ass was getting wet but what the hell? What’s a little wet-ass when the world has turned against you anyway? And for some God-only-knows reason I looked down. And there She was, a tiny glint in the mud. So I dug with my fingers, clawing, digging Her up. A knife. A seven-inch blade with the name “Suzie” scratched onto the blade. And a voice. The second I touched Her there was the voice. It said, “Hello Alistair. Will you be my friend?” like one of those goddam dolls but in my head. I ust have cut myself on Her because I saw a little trickle of blood on Her blade. I wiped it off, stood up and still not one goddam person saw me. So I walked home, not feeling my legs, like a puppet. And I could see what I was doing but I couldn’t move. I was trapped in my own body that was being moved by Her. And first I killed my boy. I watched as my own hand stuck Her into his eye then into his chest and back into his chest again and again and there was blood everywhere and his screaming and the fear in his good eye and blood and jelly in the stabbed eye and my laughing. Oh god that sound still haunts me. My own cackling as I stabbed my son again and again and again.

And then my wife came into the room and saw me and screamed and I pushed the dead boy away and leapt in front of her and grabbed her hair but it wasn’t me. And I looked into her eyes, her wide, beautiful blue eyes and I, no She whispered into her ear in my voice, “What goes around comes around, darling.” And I cut her throat. I pushed that knife through the side of her neck and pushed it across and her blood flowed my god it poured all over my shoes and I lifted my foot up and said “Uck. These shoes are new, goddam it. New.” And then I got in the car and I drove, god knows where She learned to drive, to The Other Man’s house. He was my agent, of all people. And I knocked on his door ever so politely and his wife answered and I killed her and then he came and said “Oh my God. Alistair, what are you-” But he never finished because I cut off his dick and heard him scream like a girlie and waved it in front of his face and then stuffed it down his throat and cut his belly open and all the while I was laughing. And then the police came and they took the knife away and suddenly I was me again and they showed me the pictures and I was sick and they looked at me like was filth.

And here I am, rotting in this white-padded hell-hole because of Her. She used me. She used my own hatred to sate her thirst and then cheerio bye-bye so-long! Can you hear the footsteps outside my cell? Yes, I hear them too. My time is up. She’s found me, the way I found her, and know She’s come back. I was Hers, and She was mine, and now it’s time for that final dance. They’ll say it was an accident or someone was driven mad by this place.

I told you that you wouldn’t believe me. Nobody believes me, but I already told you that.

Mr Alistair Thorpe, convicted serial killer and diagnosed with extreme psychological trauma, was found stabbed in his cell by one an employee of the Institution he was being held at. Police say the man had undergone “severe psychological trauma” at the brutal murder of his late brother. The murder weapon was a knife with a seven-inch blade, and on the blade a name was scratched. It can just be made out as

“Suzie.”