The rate of the flickering slowly increased as the days went by. Soon he noticed that whenever it would come, he would feel ... odd. His heart started beating faster and his breath would begin coming in gasps, as if he had just run. He would also feel nauseous to the very pit of his gut. This oddness would pass as soon as the darkness flickered away.

About a week later, it began staying for longer and longer periods of time. The moments of darkness became minutes. His symptoms also increased in intensity and he began getting the feeling that he was being watched.

He did everything he could to get rid of it. He visited many different doctors. He quit his job and moved. Nothing worked. It steadily grew worse, lasting longer and longer. He always felt like he was being watched and continuously found himself checking over his shoulder, not knowing what he was looking for.

The other symptoms changed from being physical to being psychological as well. His thoughts turned to other things, darker things, things he had done. Things he didn’t want to think about. Things he wished had never happened. Things like ‘the incident.’

In fact, as it came to be about a month after the incident, he found himself thinking about it all the time. It dominated his thoughts. No matter what he did, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

That feeling of being watched grew worse. He got paranoid, treating everyone he met with the highest level of mistrust. Every breath he took felt like his last. Was this how she had felt? He quickly admonished the thought. The incident was over and done with and he was past it now. It didn’t matter to him.

Months went by and he was still victim to it, what with the continuous flickering, nausea, complete lack of control of his thoughts; but he told himself he had over come it, and it was time to continue with his life.

One dark and gloomy night, he felt it worse than usual. He was walking back home when he happened upon a fight. It was a burly group of five against a scrawny kid in rags. He figured the kid owed money but couldn’t pay. He was getting pommeled. They pounded him over and over and over. He felt he should help, but he didn’t. He couldn’t! It wasn’t his place. He ran ...

All the way back home.

He had nightmares that night, more like memories, of the incident. He could have saved them then, just as he could have saved the kid today. He dreamed about the screams. The pain. It remained through the night.

When he woke the next morning, the It’s flickering was gone, only to be replaced by an opaque dark haze. Within hours, the haze had spread to obstruct half his field of vision. As he became more and more blind, it became worse than usual and he began losing more and more control over himself. Memories resurfaced, completely uncalled for.

The day wore on and night found him huddled in a corner, pathetically whimpering to himself. She didn’t mean it! She was desperate! He relived the incident with it replaying it in his mind like a broken record. He watched the questioning, watched how they forced the truth out of that old homeless woman, a shiftless vagabond. He felt his heart plummet when the woman screamed out that she was the one, she was the one who had given them up to the police. She had needed the money! She had been starving to death! There hadn’t been any other way!

He relived the moment he thought he should help the woman but had decided that his own safety was more important. That his life, for some unknown reason, had been worth more than her’s. The darkness of his memories surrounded him, suffocating him worse than usual. It was worse than ever. It darkened his vision and filled every empty recess of his entire being. He felt something nipping at his toes, then his fingers and arms. The nips grew harder and harder till they tore at his skin. It was eating him up! He knew he shouldn’t have thought back about the incident. It had finally decided that It had had enough with this heartless shell of a man. He had left that woman to her fate and now it was his turn.

He had been running from it ever since the incident, becoming more and more paranoid as time went by that it would catch him. And it finally had. As it consumed him, he finally realized what it really was.

Guilt.

I should have helped that woman, she needed it! She deserved it! Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I?

The question repeated in his head over and over again as guilt consumed him.