I woke up in a cold sweat. Weak, exhausted, and nauseous, everything hurt. The clock showed that I slept for almost eleven hours, but somehow I felt even more tired than when I went to bed. My night was nothing but a fitful sleep filled with vivid dreams.
From the second I got up, it seemed like everywhere I looked I could see him. Peeking out from the foot of the bed, from behind furniture and even through the windows. Sometimes it was his face if I closed my eyes, or even a fleeting glimpse of black wings or a tail going around a corner. The constant barrage of sightings had me questioning my sanity.
Even if I couldn’t see him, I could feel him every time I entered a room. Usually it was just the feeling that someone else was there, but if I tried to occupy my mind with something else like the TV I would start to hear him breath or ever worse, feel his breath on my neck or in my ear. If I actively tried to ignore him, he would tug at my clothes or hair. A few times I told him outright to leave me alone and that seemed to help a little and he wouldn’t bother me until I was no longer thinking about him. Apparently, he needed my full attention.
The longer the day wore on the more a heavy darkness ensconced me despite having every light on in the house and it was getting worse by the second. I sat in the recliner and fought to think of something else, anything other than him but I couldn’t. In mid-morning I started to doze off and just as sleep was upon me I felt something on my shoulder. I looked down and screamed. A gray scaly arm with a clawed hand was reaching around for my throat. When the tip of the claw brushed my skin, I leapt from the chair with a scream but turned to find nothing but the empty, rocking recliner.
That was the last straw for me, it had to go. I’m not sure why it hadn’t dawned on me before, but it now seemed to clear and simple. Get it out of the house. In the trash, in the street, it didn’t matter. That thing just needed to be anywhere but here. I tore through the house looking for the statue but it was nowhere to be found. After a half hour of searching, both bedrooms were essentially ransacked. Every cabinet in the kitchen was rifled through as was the coat closet. In desperation I went so far as to check the refrigerator and freezer.
I was about to give up when I heard some scratching coming from the back of the house. Bolting to the hallway I waited for it to make another sound. I thought it sounded like it was coming from the bathroom, but it just as easily could have been Tyler’s room too. After two minutes of silence I crept down the hall to the bathroom and began to slowly turn the knob.
I truly expected to get the door half open and find myself staring into the face of a seven-foot-tall, sword-wielding monster. The further the door opened, the more I trembled and the harder my heart thumped in my chest. When I had the door a quarter of the way open, I couldn’t take the uncertainty anymore and with a scream threw open the door.
Empty. The statue was nowhere to be found. Not behind the door, in the shower or under the sink. I wanted nothing more than to get the statue out of the house, and I was at my wits end. It was nowhere to be found but I could still hear the sound of it scooting around the house. Crouching down I put my ear on the floor to try and get a direction to search next when it hit me. The scratching sound wasn’t from movement across the floor at all, it was from underneath.
The one place I hadn’t checked was the basement, but the thought of going down there was excruciating. Our house was old, like everything in this neighborhood. Built just before the turn of last century, the basement wasn’t original but dug out sometime later. The stairs were creaky, the walls were brick and even stone in some places and the lighting was poor. Other than doing laundry, I never spent any time down there, it was just too spooky. I always told myself that it was just my mind messing with me after watching way too many horror movies, yet I still didn’t go down there unless it was necessary.
Going to the basement was frightening, but that thing loose in the house was exponentially worse. Fearing the worst, I retrieved my large flashlight from the closet and the pistol from my nightstand. With the flashlight tucked under my arm, I grasped the door handle and brought the pistol up to my chest so I was ready to fire if he was behind the door like in my dream.
I kicked open the door and pointed the pistol into the darkness. There was nothing behind the door save for darkness and the musty smell of the basement. I listened for a moment but didn’t hear any sounds coming from down there. Though I didn’t want to go down there, I knew I had to if I wanted to get that thing out of the house, so hit the light switch and crept down the rickety wooden stairs with the light and pistol out in front of me.
With every step I scanned for any sign of movement. Terrified beyond measure, I almost turned back one step from the bottom but I took a deep breath and pushed forward. The laundry area at the bottom of the steps was finished off and separated from the rest of the basement by a wall that spanned the width of the room with a single door in the middle.
I checked the laundry area for the statue but it wasn’t there either. As I closed the dryer door, noises started coming from the back part of the basement. “Oh hell!” I groaned. I wasn’t happy at all that he was in the storage area, but also was not surprised in the least that he would pick the creepiest room in the house to hide.
Standing next to the door I couldn’t decide how to proceed; barge in with weapon drawn or try to sneak in and see what lay inside before I entered. I considered turning the laundry room light off to make it easier to sneak in, but just then the knob turned itself and the door opened halfway. With the element of surprise clearly gone I kicked the door open the rest of the way and entered with my light and pistol at the ready.
Usually the storage room was half filled with boxes, but now it was empty except for two people in the middle of the room. One lying and the other crouched over them. I couldn’t see anyone’s face but the crouched figure facing away from me was wearing my clothes, with my hair, my watch, and holding my large kitchen knife in the air. All I could see of the person on the ground was their feet, long fanned out blonde hair, and an outstretched arm with the bracelet I got Kris for Christmas.
The crouched figured started to lower the knife and I screamed “NO!” and charged towards him.
“It’s too late,” he said in my voice right before I brought the large metal flashlight down on the side of his head. Sending him sprawling to the floor and the knife clattering into the corner.
He was right, it was too late. The blank expression and dozens of bloody punctures in her shirt confirmed that. I turned the pistol towards him and found myself staring into my own face, sneering and bloody.
“You’re not real!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“I could be. Really I should be if you want this to end.”
“Screw you!”
With a chuckle he stood up and looked down as he brushed himself off. When he looked back up my face was gone and had been replaced by the monster on the statue.
“I need a life, Josh but it doesn’t matter to me,” he said in the dark, growling, evil voice I’d heard before. The demonic Josh looked briefly to the reanimated corpse of Kristi which stood up next to him, then back to me. “You can give me someone else. One life for anther and I’ll go away forever.”
“Go to hell, I’d never hurt her.”
“I’ve been doing this for centuries and you would not be the first to make a trade. In fact, I really don’t want you. You don’t interest me, so I’d much rather have someone else. But if you don’t want to go that route … you’ll suffice.”
When they started coming towards me, I spun on my heel and ran as fast as I could. Mere feet from the door I tried to reach for the knob, but just as my fingers touched the metal, a cold and bloody hand closed around my wrist. The bloodied corpse of Kristi had appeared between me and the door and we stood face to face. Her baby blue eyes that always seemed to sparkle were now dull and sunken in the sockets with an expression that was half pleading and half accusatory. I tried to look away from the eyes but her face was pale, bruised, and spattered in blood. No matter where I looked I always came back to the eyes and seemed to get stuck there.
I knew it wasn’t actually her, but on some level it felt real, and I felt guilty. Was he just messing with my head to break me or was the lifeless visage of Kris a fatal vision that portended horrific things to come? “I’d never do this to you,” I said just above a whisper.
The demon moved right behind me and chuckled. “That’s what they all say, but self-preservation is a powerful instinct. Even more powerful than love.”
I yelled as I turned and pointed the pistol at the demon. I fired five times in quick succession hitting him in the chest. Without even so much as a noise he crumbled to the floor. I whipped the pistol around and pointed it at the corpse’s head. She looked at me again with the dead pleading eyes and started to open her mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said and started to put pressure on the trigger.
“Three days,” she hissed.
The gun went off and I found myself sitting in the recliner drenched in sweat and panting for air. When I stood up something heavy fell from lap onto the rug and landed with a heavy thud. With trembling hands, I picked up the pistol and felt the receiver. Warm, like it had recently been fired. I checked the magazine but it was full with another round still in the chamber.
I flopped back into the chair and tried to wrap my head around what was going on. I couldn’t tell if I was cursed, possessed, or just going mad. When I lifted my eyes to the coffee table, there sat the statue staring at me with its dead eyes and frozen sneer. I swore at the statue as I slammed the magazine into the pistol and aimed it at the piece of rock sitting in the middle of my table. My finger slid off the receiver and onto the trigger. Growling in disgust at the stupidity of shooting a rock in my living room then having to explain to the cops that I had to do it because of ghosts or some such insanity, I laid the gun on the table and picked up the statue.
With it tucked under my right arm I stormed to the door, determined to throw it in the trashcan. I gripped the door handle and screamed. The searing pain in my stomach was back and almost bad enough to bring me to my knees. “Nice try,” I groaned as I opened the door.
I was stopped dead in my tracks with one foot over the threshold. The statue under my arm wouldn’t budge. No matter how hard I pulled, I could not force it outside. I came around and tried pushing it with both hands and all of my strength but it refused to go. When I let go it fell to the floor, rolled a few inches and righted itself.
In a rage I went to the bathroom and grabbed a large towel then stomped back to the door where the statue still sat. I wrapped the towel around the statue, flung it over my shoulder and tried to drag it outside with all of my strength. Though I made it over the threshold onto the porch, it stayed inside, suspended in mid-air. The towel started to rip and I stopped pulling and turned in time to see the statue burst through the fabric. It rocketed through the air to the living room and came to a dead stop in the center of the floor right in front of the coffee table at the exact same spot where I had previously found the knife sticking out of the hardwood.
I closed the door and returned to my chair defeated. Johnny Two Wings and I sat and stared at each other for the next hour as I contemplated my situation. I saw no way out at that point and occasionally glanced over at the pistol sitting on the couch. While I had no desire to die, it seemed like a better option than to be driven insane, possibly to the point of murder. I started to seriously mull over ending it all right there when the phone rang. It was Kristi. “Saved by the bell,” I muttered before answering.
Kristi and I spoke for a while, a few hours actually. She offered to come over but I told her no, I was still sick and it wasn’t worth the risk. I never mentioned the insanity going on in the house. If I did, I knew she would have been right over but she needed to stay far away from here. It was a fight, but I was able to convince her to stay at school.
At the end of the conversation she informed me that she was coming over tomorrow after her classes, regardless. Though she didn’t come out and say it, I knew she could tell something was wrong and I simply wouldn’t cop to it. That meant she was serious about coming and nothing was going to stop her. Unable to give her a good reason not to, as any bug I would have should have been past the contagious stage by then I told her that I would see her tomorrow and hung up.
It wasn’t very late but I stillturned in. I only have a few hours tomorrow to figure out a way to get rid ofthis thing before one, or both of us end up dead.
If you haven’t read the past installments the links are below.
I – II –III– IV– V–VI–VII–VIII– IX
© 2018 Robert Crouse All Rights Reserved
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