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Why They're Called Sixes


I want to tell you about my life and the strange things I've seen and before I do, I want you to understand that my actions in the end had reasons.

I was born to a single mother. She was only 15 around the time I was born and she wasn't exactly ready to be a mother. Apparently, my dad was even less ready because his parents ened up sending him to boarding school so he wouldn't have to be responsible for me and my mother. We were mostly supported by her parents, but otherwise we were completely alone.

I started discovering my "gift" when I was about 5 years old. My great grandmother had passed away. I felt really confused when I walked into the viewing room of the funeral parlor and saw my gran sitting in a chair next to her own casket. At that point, I already grasped that death meant that you were gone forever, and yet there she was.

My confusion was overpowered with my relief. Approaching her, she seemed different. There, but not quite the same. Like when you're picturing something in your head. Your eyes are open and you're clearly seeing what's in the room, but something entirely different at the same time. She whispered in my ear, kissed my forehead, and disappeared. I walked up to my mom and asked her about the roses in Italy, as Gran had instructed. To this day, I still don't know what that meant, but it was something important enough to make my mother fall to her knees. She held me and it was the only time that I remember feeling like she truly loved me.

As I grew, my gift became a little more apparent. I'd see people I wasn't supposed to see in every day situations. A few would even notice and follow me home. I didn't mind. None of them ever imposed or tried to harm me. They just wanted company until they figured out how to move on or they found someone that was more interesting to follow around. I'd talk about it as if it were normal. My mother put forth no effort to stop me, but still acted embarrassed when I did it around other people. No one took it seriously, though. Not like mom did. Honestly, I think she feared me for a while.

When I was about 8, things changed, and it was all due to mom meeting a man named Mike. He was lanky, he smelled bad, and talked too loud. Still, he had a more stable job than mom did, so she fell right into his lap. He wasn't a horrible guy at first, just kind of greedy. My mom told him about my "gift" and he came up with the master plan to use me as a pay pig. Post my name up in phone books as the "world's youngest psychic". I don't know if he even believed my gift was real at first, but he learned otherwise eventually. That's how I started talking to dead people in a living when I was just beginning to learn multiplication. It was fun at first, when it wasn't the same old "tell my mom I love her" bullshit.

There was case when I was 13 where I was seeing a family who believed the spirit of a 4 year old girl was haunting their house. They claimed that they didn't intend to make the girl leave, they just wanted to learn more about her so they could make her more comfortable in their home. When I walked into the house, there was definitely no little girl. There was, however, a grey non-human entity crouched on their 17 year old son's back. Its skin looked like paper, and its eyes were fully blood red. It came in human-like shape, but it was far from human.

These non-humans were something I called sixes. Sixes are souls that were never human. They're created out of pure sorrow and hatred. They're negative emotion embodied into an evil, spiritual being. They can project the actions of human spirits to confuse their hosts. Make them think they're just victims of a normal haunting. Human souls cannot hurt you unless they're extremely sinister (like Bundy sinister). Sixes, however, can (along with several other non-human entities). They suck every emotion out of you and radiate so much of their own sorrow and hatred until you either kill yourself or commit a crime so horrible that you'll likely get the death penalty. They usually go after evil, corrupt, or just plain miserable people.

They were called sixes because you'd usually only last six months before you lost it.

I think I started resenting my mother when I was 16. I had gotten tired of the job. Everyone in town knew me. All the kids at school called me a freak. By this point, Mike had started to drink away all the money that people had paid me to tell them that their grandmother loved them or that their dead child was in a better place. He became violent. Angry. He hit my mother and she just took it for a while. Then, she started to blame me. "If you never would have started talking to fucking Casper, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation." Completely ignoring the fact that he was her boyfriend, not mine. Not long after that, he stopped hitting her and started hitting me. Then, she did, too.

Only months later did I start seeing Sixes roaming around whenever my "parents" were near. I watched this without a word. Still allowing them to escort me to jobs. At first, the sixes would stay far away. I'd see them out the window, across the street. They creeped closer as time went on. Very slowly. My curiosity heavily outweighed my fear. I had only ever seen them on peoples backs. I became a bit more startled when they stood at our windows. They knew I could see them, but they disregarded me. I said nothing to my mother the day I watched one crawl onto her back and latch its gaping, teethed mouth onto her shoulder. I wasn't surprised when I saw another on Mikes back later that day.

I thought about telling Mike and my mother. Calling up a specialist to help get rid of the sixes that had only just begun to drain my sad excuse for a family. Then, I thought about finally being alone. Never having to do jobs that they told me to do. Never being subjected to a drunken lecture about my "responsibility" to "support my family". Never explaining my bruises away to teachers.

So, I didn't tell them. I just sat back and enjoyed the show.

***

Well, I'm back. I really wasn't going to come back here and write again but so many of you wanted to hear more. More about my "parents" ultimate end, or about different kinds of non-human entities. I guess a part of me was afraid that I was going to get into trouble. Still, here I am again. I guess I'm here to let you know exactly what I observed between the point that the Sixes latched onto my mother and Mike.

First, I wanted to clear a few things up that popped up in the comments. No, I'm not a Six. That doesn't make any sense because being human is the one thing sixes crave, but can't really have. They can't communicate, use computers, pretty much do any basic human thing. I don't think they even have the capacity to consider communication. I also haven't been a victim of a Six. To be honest, I think it freaks them out that I can see them, so far they've stayed away from me. Lastly, I didn't mean to sound so apathetic in my original entry. To be quite honest, I was horrified, but my internal defenses told me that this was the only way that I had a chance to get away from the beatings. The curiosity in me wanted to document what I was seeing.

This won't be much like my previous entry. It will be a little less personal and a lot more "documentary style" I guess you could say. I wont being going much into the "faux haunting" parts that the Sixes create because it's mostly uninteresting. I want you all to know how Sixes affect human beings, not their surroundings.

MONTH 1: The first month was mostly normal, other than the fact that my parents became tired, and very reclusive. The beatings slowed down a lot, to the point where it was only around the time where I would get to close or talk too much, which would annoy them both. There were times where they would both wake up screaming, and constantly make comments on feeling as if they were being watched. I reassured them through gritted teeth that they weren't being watched as I stared into the eyes of the being that only began to feed on them.

MONTH 2: My parents began sleeping unreasonably long. Like, 17 hours at a time. Sometimes, they'd even wet the bed. I had to clean it. Absolutely inhuman, but usually normal for a subject of sixes. Attempting to wake them would be incredibly dangerous, but then again it was kind of like that before. Only now, it was amplified. At one point, I woke my mother up to ask her if I could borrow some bus fare to pay my way to a meeting with a family that was dealing with a supposed demonic haunting (which was actually just poltergeist activity caused by a 17 year old boy with acne problems). She shot up, turned her head slowly, and began to scream the most deafening, inhuman scream imaginable. After that, she launched herself at me. Thankfully, at this stage, they're mostly drained of energy. She slapped me a few times before crawling slowly back into bed, falling asleep as soon as she hit the pillow.

MONTH 3: The depressive stage, which is usually when we're most commonly called in to treat a case if we're not already called in by the first month. My parents had cut back the sleeping a few hours and just began sobbing about the absolute worst things almost all the time. They both began to self harm as well, right in front of me. While this was the least harmful month for me, it was the worst to watch. There were several points where I wanted to tell them, but I knew they would be angry. Additionally, the both claimed to see red eyes behind their shoulders. Once again, I reassured them that I saw nothing. I felt bad.

MONTH 4: This is where things started to turn. They stopped sleeping almost entirely and talked almost constantly. I had never seen this phase personally, so I had no idea what to expect. I was sitting down on the couch when my mother sat down next to me and looked me in the eyes for the first time since I was little, but there wasn't love in her eyes like there had been at one point. I couldn't quite pin my finger on what it was, but she started to speak. She spoke so fast that it took me a minute to make out what she had said. "I never wanted you. Never once in my life have I ever wanted you. When you were a baby, I thought about smothering you with a pillow and claiming SIDS. The only thing you've ever been good at was being a freak." This broke off into a month from Hell, one that I'll do my best to forget after this. My parents lost their filter entirely. They could have been making things up to be intentionally hurtful, but it didn't seem like it.

MONTH 5: I had to be absent for a lot of this. They both became extremely violent, to the point where I was almost killed. I had been brushing my teeth when Mike burst into the bathroom. By this point, both of them were completely spastic almost all of the time. He grabbed me by the back of my hair and kicked me in the back of the legs until I was down on the floor. He dragged me by my hair over to the toilet. There, he attempted to drown me. I don't know what caused him to stop, but he got distracted before he could finish the job. That's around the time I decided that I couldn't safely stick around. I couch-surfed a few days until a friend with one of the "gifts", Melana, let me stay with her indefinitely.

I told her what was going on, and she agreed that we would wait it out and keep an ear out. Melana can see what I see, but she can also read moods and basically the "aura" of a place. We talked about how to handle the end of it all. She was completely against going around during the final day, but I just had to at least see what happens to Sixes when they've finished the job.

MONTH 6: We showed up outside the apartment complex around 6 AM. There were other inhuman entities outside the building. These were called Watchers. Watchers are pretty much explained by their name, they like to watch people do bad things. Not just murder & suicide either. Molestation, abuse, sexual assault, etc. They feed off of that until the deed is over. They look almost like normal people, but they're yellowed like an old photo, and they have these awful grins on their faces. The only parts of them that move are their eyes. I've never seen them on a job, but I've seen them out in public in various places, which worried me to the point where I had to go home. I can help with dead people, and I can even do a little about inhuman entities, but I can't make humans not do fucked up shit.

It was around 9 AM that Melana became to overwhelmed by the awful feelings she was getting, so I told her that it was alright to go park down the block while I went inside to check on them. She protested, but only for a second. I think she knew how important this was to me. The Watchers eyes followed me from the car into the building. As I exited the stairwell into the hallway of the floor my parents lived on, I heard an absolutely horrifying shriek and I knew that it was happening. I bolted, fumbling to get my keys out of my bag. I undid the lock and swung the door open as fast as I could.

The Sixes were no longer on my parents backs, I think that was the first thing I noticed. They were crawling around them in circles. Mike was on top of my mother, pinning both of her arms down with his knees. God, it was such a bloody scene. I had seen some horrible things, but this kind of brutality was an entirely different chapter for me. I could tell that she was already gone and the Six that had been using her was only absorbing what was left inside. Mike turned to look at me, a horrible grin on his face, not unlike the ones I had seen surrounding me outside. With the knife he had only just used to kill my mother, he slit his own throat. I stood there, frozen. Not really sure what to do. I had imagined what this day would be like, but I never thought it would be so brutal. I guess a part of me assumed that they'd just hang themselves, but that would be the least violent and not in their nature. The Sixes circled around their bodies a few moments more before I caught their eyes. The both became startled and quickly crawled up the wall, past me, and out of the door.

I dropped to my knees and sat for what felt like an eternity before a police officer dragged me away. One of the neighbors called the cops, I guess. I was brought down to the station, but all I could tell them was that my parents had been acting strangely for months. I was cleared to leave and Melana took me back to her house, where I broke down and cried in front of a human being for the first time in what felt like years.

I haven't worked a Six job since then. I got emancipated on my 17th birthday, dropped out of high school, and moved into a small apartment across town. I quit doing jobs, but only for a short while. I needed the money and nobody was going to hire me for normal work, not with my reputation. People in the "gifted" community knew that I allowed it to happen. The few people that were close enough to know that my parents were tyrants were understanding, and even somewhat grateful. I was a walking documentation of how it all happens. Everyone else was afraid of me.

I guess I've grown from the situation. We now know a lot more about Sixes and know how to stop them before it's too late. There are a lot less cases now that escalate fully. Still, I have this awful fear in the back of my mind that watching my parents die will break my spirit and eventually put a Six on my back one day. I'm even more afraid of being condemned to hell for what I did, where I know my parents are waiting for me.

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