The sun was setting. I'd been out on my bicycle for a ride, as was my fashion after we'd eaten. It helped me to burn off the sluggish bloated feeling of overindulgence and also allowed me feel free with my little friends. Nothing had changed over the years. They still spoke to me all through the day and night. I still had minimal sleep and no real friends. My mother had died and my father was so involved in work I had become what was known as a 'latch-key kid'. It was something else to be made fun of. Not only was I crazy but I was also practically an orphan. I used to shrug it off. At least my parents love each other and mum did exactly leave dad, she died. In many cases, those that taunted me came from homes where they only saw their father every other weekend and their mothers watched endless daytime TV, drinking cans of beer with hands covered in home made tattoos.

The rush of air as I pedalled gave the voices substance, as if they were no longer bodiless but had a sense of form. They were carried along beside me and I could almost see them, legs spinning as we freewheeled into the movie ET: The Extraterrestrial. It was a good feeling. I no longer held them at bay. I couldn't tune them out so I, finally, accepted them.

Then I found the little girl.

For the past four years, I'd avoided the woods. I'd sort of forgotten about the incident. The memories were still there, but I'd buried them under a thick layer of excuses and misdirections. It was a movie set. It was a stupid prank by kids. To ensure the pseudo-memories remained front and centre, I stayed away from where it had happened.

It had been a warm day. The air was fresh and energising, with each breath giving me an boost. I had been cycling for a few hours, going where luck and the toss of a coin took me. The voices were there with me, as ever, but I hadn't noticed their guidance. They were just there. There'd been no push this way or that. No indication that they were not simply there.

The line of blood, as if scrubbed into the road by a toddler learning how to use a wax crayon, stretched from the middle of the road to the verge. I stopped and dismounted a few feet away. I watched the blood. It watched me back.

Yes? it didn't say. Can I help? Have I got something in my teeth?

Hesitant to follow its path yet unable to stop myself, I walked along its edge, careful not to get too close in case it could somehow elongate and grab my ankle. The long grass at the edge of the road was soaked in the blood. I had no choice, no matter what I was telling myself, but to step through and see where the blood was coming from. I felt the bile rising in my throat as the dogs ripped through the shroud of my memory and bounded, dead eyes shining, into the present. Was that what I was going to see? Was that...

No.

NO!

I fell to my knee and pulled the girl close to me, holding her in an embrace of wishes, desperate for her eyes to be there so she could look at me. They were not. Her stomach was sliced open, tearing her pretty summer dress, and the cavity of her stomach had been stuffed with the surrounding long grasses. She looked like a macabre Scarecrow, waiting for Dorothy to chance along and take her to the wonderful wizard over in Oz.

But Dorothy was never going to chance by. It was me. I came and I was suddenly sure I had not arrived of my own volition. I never rode along this road. It went nowhere I was interested in going. A whole raft of tiny villages was dotted along its length. Most had little more than a pub and a corner shop. Some didn't have the shop. Even lost in the freedom of cycling, I couldn't see myself riding along here. So. The voices had been subtle. Sneaky.

I'd hate them later.

The girl must have been only about four years old. Her strawberry hair was reddened even more from the blood which was sticking it to her smooth face. I touched her cheek. A drop of water fell on my finger and I looked up, expecting rain but realising it was my own tears.

I was still there, rocking her in her eternal sleep, an hour later when the car drove by. I didn't hear the brakes or the driver speaking to me. I barely felt the hands of the police when they arrived. I know I was questioned but can't remember my answers. Mum came at some point and took me home. They'd want to question me further, they said, but they didn't. It seemed they knew I had nothing to do with it. I'd just found her. I was almost a hero.

I didn't feel like one. I felt as if I'd had something to do with her death. Her name was Audrey and I thought the voices had somehow made me kill her. I had spoken nothing of the dogs so many years before, having the sense to know things like that weren't coincidence. You didn't find two separate murders, so similarly committed, twice just because you were unlucky. Lightning would strike the same spot more often than murders would be discovered 'accidentally.'

I don't think I spoke too much for a long time after that. A hole had opened up below me and I felt I was being sucked into it, molecule by molecule. The voices were still there, but I ignored them. I couldn't listen or be guided. I didn't want to find more... DEATH. Leave me alone. Just leave me alone. It was all I wanted. From being terrified as a child to actually enjoying their company to hating them, I'd had enough of their constant mumblings. I couldn't even understand them properly! Why were they there, taunting me? Why show me these things? I thought, after so long, they were my friends!

But, I had no friends.

"GO AWAY!"

They ignored me. I did my best to ignore them. I found a method on the internet which described how to create a 'calm space' around me. It wasn't an easy exercise as I had to try to push the things which bothered me away. When you've stumbled across a desecrated child, they don't want to leave you. It's as if you are their only way to cling on to the corporeal world and they keep a tight hold on your thoughts, continually finding ways to turn your attention back to their ravaged corpse. Dogs are the same. They yap at your feet, cocking their leg to urinate over your feeble attempts to forget.

But I tried. In my room, I would close the curtains and my eyes. I would sit on the floor, my duvet beneath me. Legs crossed and arms in my lap. I would breathe slowly. Eventually, for short periods at least, it would work. I'd drift on a flying carpet of nothing through a sky full of night. The voices would fade. The images would disperse.

Life cares nothing for the impact of the obstacles it throws in your way. It smothers them with lashings of full dairy time, making them become less painful. Less urgent. Less likely to keep you awake when you're unlikely to sleep anyway. So, after a few months, I forgot. Well, not forgot, but didn't remember. I continued. The voices returned without me noticing. I used my 'calm space' less and less as the memories went off and lost themselves in the halls of my mind. After a while, I was back to being me.

That was what they were waiting for.