SCS 53

Story 53

I Knew He’d Lost His Mind

I knew my friend from my first job had lost his mind.

We met at the company where we both started fresh out of university. I quit after four years; he stayed for nine. It was a brutal workplace — there were times we only slept two hours a night, or stayed at the office working straight through till morning. Going through all that together had forged a kind of bond between us. Even after we’d gone our separate ways career-wise, we kept in touch often and still hung out.

After he changed jobs, he joined a well-known local food company, doing corporate sales. Every time we met up, he complained about the power harassment he faced there, so I knew it was bad. I told him, “You’re single, you went to a good university — just quit and find something better.” But he refused, saying things like he truly wanted to be useful to the company, from the bottom of his heart.

Then he started talking about how wonderful his company was, and it honestly creeped me out a little. That’s when I first started to notice something wasn’t right with him.

I suggested he see a psychiatrist, or even go to the labor bureau. After all, he was showing up with bruises on his face and cuts on his eyelids. He said his boss hit him for making mistakes at work.

Then something else made his mental state spiral even further — a certain religious group.
Apparently, he’d joined because his boss recommended it. He invited me too, but I had no interest and kept refusing. Still, we stayed on good terms.

About three years passed after he joined that religion.
By then, I had a family of my own and was always busy, but he remained single, still working at that abusive company while devoutly following his faith.

His religious stories grew increasingly bizarre. He’d talk about God, sure, but also UFOs. He said electricity was a gift from the universe, sent to Earth by UFOs — things that made absolutely no sense.
He also had these creepy stuffed dolls — human-shaped ones. He claimed that by chanting with other believers at a temple, they could transfer souls into those dolls. Supposedly, one of them was his own spiritual double.

Whenever he talked about his religion, his words became incoherent, scattered — I could barely follow him. I really thought, this religion has completely broken him.

It was hard to believe that a graduate from a national university’s science department was saying these things.
And the irony — we’d both originally worked at an electric power company.
Sometimes, I even found his nonsense absurdly funny.

Anyway, that’s how it went: he’d joined a crazy cult, and he’d gone completely mad. Probably driven insane by stress and exhaustion.

His parents were so worried they even asked me to help convince him to leave the religion.
I felt sorry for them — and for him — so I tried, but he wouldn’t listen.

More time passed.

He told me proudly one day that he’d become a candidate for leadership in the group.

He said his next goal was to develop a technique that would allow him to communicate directly with the universe and then spread the teachings across the country.

He said all this with a beaming smile — but his face was gaunt and hollow, like a zombie’s.

Then one day, while I was at work, my phone rang.
It was his father.

My friend had committed suicide.

Apparently, he sat cross-legged on the train tracks, holding that human-shaped doll from his religion on his lap. That’s how the train hit him.

I can’t help thinking it must have been part of some ritual.
Normal people don’t sit cross-legged on tracks. And they don’t die holding a doll.

But there’s something else strange, too.
A witness who saw the moment of his death said there was another man sitting cross-legged right behind him — someone of a similar build.

Yet only one body was ever found.