I don't really know how to start this. I don't really think that I should be writing this down but I don't know where else to put it. It's been driving me up the wall for the past 24 hours and if I told anyone I know then I would probably end up in a psychiatric ward or something. But since it has been tearing me up inside so much this seems like the best thing to do. I doubt that many of you will believe me but that is your choice. It's been happening to me so I know its true and I don't really need your belief. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself now so I should probably start at the beginning.

My name is Philip Rigby. I live in a small town in England not too far from Manchester. I'm not saying exactly where because I don't want the wrong people to know exactly where I live. I'm a pretty average guy I think. About 5"10 in height. I weigh in at about 170 pounds, and unfortunately its not all muscle as I have been letting myself go lately. I wear glasses for pretty much everything, have shoulder length blackish-blue hair for the past few months since I dyed it as I had enough of the brown. As I said, completely average in all ways in outside appearances at least. Inside though I am extremely shy and reclusive. I have very few friends but the once I do have I'm extremely close to, although many have been drifting away recently. But enough about all that. The reason why I am having a problem is the fact that something extremely weird happened a few days ago. I don't actually know what happened the day before the incident though, it still hasn't come back yet. All everyone is telling me is that I just seemed to collapse and was out of it for a few hours. But the first thing that I do remember was excruciating pain. It happened from the moment I first awoke. It sounded like people were screaming down my ears. I know that sounds stupid but it did. It continued for the first few minutes without stopping and then everything went quiet. I couldn't imagine what was going on so I just decided to ignore it believing it was a remnant of the end of my dream, although I couldn't remember having one. The next thing I heard was my Nan shouting me down for breakfast. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that, I've been living with my Nan for awhile, my granddad past away a year ago and she has had cancer recently so I've been looking after her. Plus it is closer to my college as well. So I went downstairs grabbed my dinner and then ran back up.

I suppose I might as well explain my room as most of this story takes place in there. The room is the smallest one in the house. It's big enough for me though. It has just enough room for a set of drawers, my computer desk and a bed. Me and my step-dad decided to build one into the room though so that I would have room to place all my books and things for college. I also have my TV inside of there but I don't have time to use it very often. Now I finished the toast that I had stole from downstairs and got back to relaxing. My family had decided that I should have today off to make sure that its nothing serious, you see when I was younger I went through several months of dizzy spells and blackouts and don't remember any of them. So I decided that while I was having the day off I might as well relax. That's when the problem started again. All I heard was this screeching sound in my ears. Now that I was more awake though I figured it sounded more like when a radio is out of tune, or just off the right station. I remember wishing that it would just be quiet and it did. It was still there of course but it was barely negligible compared to the sounds I was hearing before and at least now I was able to think to myself about it.

Now that I could think I thought back to all the stories that I have read in my life. In case you couldn't tell from my earlier description I am sort of socially inept. It's not that I can't talk to girls or anything like that, in fact most of my closest friends are female and only a few are male. It's more like I have a problem with trusting people most of the time plus I'm no good at handling myself in huge crowds of people. I just clam up. So I spend a lot of my time reading, and have read loads of different types of books. So I came to the conclusion early on that I was doing a form of mind reading. Although I don't really remember any of them going on about the agonising pain this much, or the fact that I could just tell them to be quiet. In fact I remember all the talk about a mental shield, So I decided that I might as well try it, and while it didn't block out the noise totally it did quieten it down a load more which I figure helps some. but the problem isn't knowing what I have it is what to do with it and how I am supposed to use it. Now I know that I had been told to take it easy but I really didn't want to try using my mind reading powers on my Nan, plus I thought it would be better to go somewhere where there is few people so I took a walk down to the forest which is near my college.

Now very few people come down here but since it is near enough to some of the buildings on the edge of the college grounds and not in the middle of an estate I decided my mind would take the pressure better. And while I was slightly right about this I forgot about the route to it was along a busy road so I spent 30 minutes walking to the grounds in intense concentration trying to keep that shield up to block out the noise. It was starting to get easier by the time I arrived so I figured that with practice it would become second nature and eventually I wouldn't even have to think about it. But now that I was in the forest the sounds almost disappeared. I was slightly disappointed in this since it appeared that I couldn't read the minds of animals, but I did figure that if I could I wouldn't be safe anywhere to get used to this power. Maybe it will come along later once I get used to it, who knows.

I figured that now I had reached a quieter spot I should try concentrating on the sounds though and tried to bring the noise up slowly. Unfortunately it didn't work to well and I ended up with another headache as it came straight back up to full volume again. So after quieting it I decided to try and just bring up one noise at a time. Now that worked much better, in fact most of the other noise pretty much disappeared after that and just one voice could be heard. What was more interesting about it though was the fact that I actually ended up picking one of my friends called Aaron. He was stuck in a maths lesson so his mind was wandering as always. He seemed to keep on coming back to two different things though, first he was wondering how I was since he had been at the party the night before and had seen me take the fall and my not coming in the next day was making him believe it was something serious. His other thought really shocked me though. He was trying to figure out how to tell me that my girlfriend was cheating on me as well. He had found out the night before after I had been driven home as she had started coming on to him. She didn't get very far as he already had a girlfriend and was loyal to me. He knew that I had strong feelings for her though and really didn't want to try and hurt me.

Now I will admit that I wasn't that crushed. My girlfriends name was Charlotte (but she preferred to be called Charlie) and I had actually been suspecting the fact that she had been cheating on me for a while now but I could never get proof. That plus the fact that I have always been one to put my feelings before someone else's left me to keep going out with her. But now that I did have proof I could finally end it. The problem was how to get the truth out of either her or my friend. I doubt that telling one of them that I could read it out of their mind would be a smart idea. Then it came to me. I knew that my friend recently visited the spot I was at for thinking as well so I decided to wait there for him. At the same time I decided to scan for some other minds. Trying to find out whether I could actually choose who I wanted to listen to I thought about another girl in my class called Jen (short for Jennifer).