The Devil's Lullaby

by Chris Scalise

  “Father God, you know I haven’t always been the most faithful person. I don’t pray as much as I should. I haven’t always been serious about going to church. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of my life wondering if you even existed. Well, I don’t wonder anymore. I thank you for setting me free tonight, and for using Dominic to help me through that awful experience. I just pray, though, that you’ll keep protecting me. Whatever that thing was, I’m scared that it’s trying to get back in. Please don’t let it. I’m going to keep going to church more and praying more, and not because of fear or guilt. Just because I know now that it’s the right thing to do. Thank you again for protecting me. Please keep me safe. Watch over me. Amen.”

  She sat up in the bed, leaned toward the nightstand, and picked up her leather-bound diary. She had never been much of a diary person growing up, but in recent months she found it therapeutic to just sit and write down her feelings. Perhaps on a more somber level, she felt that this diary might be her way of saying goodbye if anything should happen to her. If the demon should completely take over her faculties or put an end to her entirely, she needed to have her own thoughts on paper. Maybe her mother would finally understand.

  She began tonight’s entry the same way she began every entry, with the words, Dear Mom.

  Dear mom,

  I’m thinking about you again. Today I was at the grocery store and I saw one of those rickety rides out front, the kind that looks like a rocketship and just bobs back and forth. It made me think of when I was a kid and you used to save all your quarters because you knew how much I loved those silly rides. I really miss when life was that simple. Just running errands with you was my favorite thing in the world, because it was just me and you.

  Anyway, I’ve been going to church a lot lately. Saturday nights, Wednesday nights, Sunday mornings. Sometimes I’ll even finish one service and just stay for the next. I think it’s really helping me with the issues I was talking about, but I admit, I’m still always looking over my shoulder. Every time I hear the tree rustling outside, it startles me. A lot. After Dominic helped me, I thought things would get quiet again, but I guess that’s never really how it works. All I can do is keep fighting and keep praying. Hopefully this will all work out in the end. I love you and I miss you.

  After jotting a few more notes in the diary and setting it aside, she tossed the massive bedspread over her head and focused on sleep. The last thing she heard before drifting off was the sound of a narrator’s soft voice in a Chevy commercial. She could care less about new cars at the moment. There were much bigger things in the universe to worry about.

  She wasn’t sure what had awoken her in the middle of the night. Could it be the crying baby next door? No, the room was silent. Could it be a sudden urge to use the bathroom? No, that wasn’t it either. No, she was awakened by a general feeling of unease, like she wasn’t alone. Something didn’t feel right. She was still fully cocooned within the bedspread, but she nevertheless noticed something that horrified her to her core. The light in the room had been turned off. She was lying in absolute darkness. Then she remembered that she had purposely fallen asleep with the television on. But the room was now silent. Power outage? Unlikely.

  Trembling, she slowly pulled the bedspread down to chin level. Darkness. She lifted her head slightly and gazed into the hall. The hall light had been turned off as well. There wasn't even a glimmer of light from one of the other nearby bedrooms. Everything was black. Perhaps it was a power outage.

  No, it was not. When she cocked her head toward the clock radio on the nightstand, the glowing green numbers informed her that it was 3:23 a.m. If there had been even a short outage, the numbers on the digital clock should have been flashing. So what the hell was going on?

  She slowly sat up, the springs of the mattress creaking ominously beneath her. She twisted to her left and reached for the TV remote on top of the clock radio. After a bit of fumbling, she pointed it toward the TV and pressed the large, circular Power button. The TV turned on, and Cassidy was greeted by a loud infomercial for real estate investments. Like she honestly cared.

  She lowered the volume on the TV and then placed her feet on the floor. She was trembling, unsure if she could even summon the courage to run to the light switch. Her entire body was numb. She could hardly feel her bare feet on the carpet as she pulled herself off the bed.

  “Hello?” she stammered, not sure what type of response to expect. But the only sound was the voice of the enthusiastic businessman on the television as he spoke about the life-changing benefits of real estate investing.

  Cassidy peered at the light switch across the room and then slowly made her way toward it, half afraid that her decomposing stalker would emerge in the doorway as soon as she reached it. She couldn't think about that. Summoning all the adrenaline she could muster, she barreled toward the switch and flicked it on. Precious light filled the room once again.

  At that moment, she heard a strange noise coming from across the hall. It sounded like someone was knocking softly on the door of the hall closet near the bathroom. Unfortunately, the hallway light switch was located on the opposite end of the hall. The only way to reach it would be to venture across several yards of total darkness.

  She cautiously leaned her head into the hallway and peered outward. Just a dark hallway, and one that should have been well-illuminated. The noise ceased for a moment, but then it picked up again, soft and slow, like a small child politely knocking at someone's front door. This was not a figment of her imagination. She could hear it as clearly as she heard the testimonials on the television. It’s just the plumbing, she reasoned to herself, but the knocks were uniform and rhythmic like a metronome. And then they stopped entirely once again.

  She backed away from the dark hall until she was once again bathed in the bright light of the master bedroom. She rushed over to the nightstand, opened the top drawer, and retrieved her designer handbag. Inside was a small, pink can of mace that fit in the palm of her hand. Just in case a human intruder was walking the halls, she wanted to be ready.

  “Hello?” she cried out a second time, once again inching her way toward the hallway. She leaned her head out the door; once again, a faint knock echoed from across the hall. An intruder wouldn't stand inside the closet knocking quietly. What the hell was going on?

  She took a deep breath, gripped her pepper spray tightly in one hand, and barreled across the hall like an Olympic sprinter on a mission. When she reached the end of the hall, she furiously flicked on the light switch. Comforting light filled her immediate surroundings, and the closet door—which now stood directly in front of her—went silent.

  She knew that opening the closet door was a dumb idea. She had seen enough B-grade slasher movies to recognize that you never investigate the source of the creepy noise when you're alone in the creepy house. But what if she wasn't alone?

  She knocked loudly on the closet door and then raced across the hall, pepper spray in hand. There was no sound coming from inside the closet, no indication of panic or movement.

  As much as she wanted to call the cops, she knew that wasn't an option. She had already called the police from this house on two other nights, and both incidents turned out to be false alarms, at least as far as Las Vegas Metro was concerned. The first time, she had heard a crash coming from the kitchen, just after 3 a.m. The police found no indication of a break-in, an intruder, or a crash of any kind.

  The second time she called the police, she was certain she had seen the decomposing spirit in her doorway. It was shortly before her full-fledged possession. Once again, the police found nothing. If she called them a third time, she worried they might have her committed, or perhaps arrested for abusing 911.

  As much as she hated to admit it, she knew she was on her own this time. So she slowly made her way back toward the closet and reached for the knob with a trembling hand. She used her other hand to point the can of mace at the door, and then she slowly turned the knob, her heart pounding.

&n
bsp; She pulled the door open and scurried backward toward the staircase. To her relief, no one came running out, but she knew she wasn't out of the woods yet. With her mace still pointed forward, she made her way toward the closet like a soldier stepping into an unfamiliar and potentially hostile environment. Thankfully, there was no one inside.

  There was, however, an odd artifact that caught her eye. It was sitting on top of her black Samsonite suitcase, but she had not put it there. In fact, she had never seen it before in her life. It was a black, leather-bound book. Scrawled on the front was a single word written in an almost illegible gold script: Lemegeton.

  Beneath the script was a golden outline of what looked like a demon. It had a slender frame like a small monkey, but it also had horns and a pointed tail.

  She stood frozen. Who had put it there? Not one other soul had been inside the house since the day she had rented it. Or so she thought. Nothing made sense anymore. She stared down at the book. It rested right on the center of her suitcase as though someone was positively determined for her to find it. But she dared not pick it up.

  She slowly backed away. It probably just fell from that shelf, she assured herself, observing the single shelf that lined the top of the closet. There were no books on it, but there were a few pairs of rolled-up socks and a mostly eaten apple core that was God-knows-how-old. It seemed almost Biblical.

  Trembling once again, Cassidy slammed the door shut. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes as she staggered back across the hall. God,” she prayed quietly, “why aren't you protecting me? What did I do to deserve all of this?”

  She gripped the doorknob to enter the master bedroom and then stopped cold. As terrified as she was, her horror was slowly being replaced with anger. “I did nothing to deserve this,” she shouted aloud. “Nothing!”

  She wanted answers. But what was the name of that book again? She wanted to look it up online and figure out exactly what was going on. If nothing else, maybe Dominic would know what it meant. Rather than entering the bedroom to retrieve her car keys as she had originally intended, she turned around and marched defiantly back to the closet.

  She opened the door and looked down; then she nearly fell to her knees. The suitcase was still there, but the book was gone. She frantically pulled the suitcase out into the hall and searched the entire floor of the closet, but there was nothing but aging brown carpeting beneath her feet.

  She slammed the door once again and raced into the bedroom. She wanted to drive far, far away, but she feared it wouldn't make a difference. Whatever was tormenting her was not subject to geographic limitations. It was like a parasite, and it just wouldn't die.

  Though it was nearly 4 a.m., she wanted desperately to call Dominic. She stumbled over to the nightstand in the master bedroom and retrieved her iPhone from beside the clock radio. Then she furiously tapped the phone icon and proceeded to her menu of recent calls. Incidentally, the vast majority of her recent calls were to Dominic. All she had to do was tap his phone number.

  Much to her frustration and anguish, the call went straight to voicemail without so much as a ring. She left a quick, mumbling voicemail begging Dominic to call her back immediately, and then she threw the device down onto the nightstand, unfazed by how loudly and violently the delicate phone connected with the hard wooden surface.

  She knew there was no hope of sleep at this point, so she sat up in the bed, watching the godawful infomercial and waiting patiently for the sun to rise. Hopefully it wouldn't be too long. She sat for nearly five minutes, then closed her eyes and prayed.

  Dominic said that she had been tormented by a demon of abuse. There was no way he could have known about the violence in her past. She had never told another living soul. She didn't even want to confront the issue herself. She wondered, though, if that was perhaps why the demon continued to chase after her. She was still running from the torment. She knew she wasn't dealing with it.

  She laid back, closed her eyes, and meditated on that first horrific encounter. Age 10. Her mother had just walked out, and she and her brother were alone with their narcissistic, alcoholic father. Dad had always been a heavy drinker, but it had gotten much worse since Mom left.

  The afternoon started off like any other, as little Cassidy exited the school bus in front of her father’s opulent hillside mansion. She waved goodbye to her friends, skipped across the cobblestones, and opened the massive front door. When she entered the home, she found her father on the kitchen floor wearing only briefs and a tank top, his back resting against the stove. In his left hand was a bottle of Absolut vodka, 750 milliliters. It was almost empty.

  Usually, she knew to stay out of his way when he had a bottle in his hand, but sometimes his intoxicated presence was unavoidable.

  In an obvious drunken stupor, the man turned to his terrified ten-year-old daughter. She stood frozen on the kitchen floor, tightly gripping the straps on her Bear in the Big Blue House backpack, trembling.

  “You know it's your fault she left,” her father mumbled. “You never fucking listen. Think the whole fucking world revolves around you. Don't you?”

  Unsure of how to respond, she turned her eyes toward the staircase and slowly made her way toward it. She just needed to make it safely to her room.

  “Hey!” her father screamed, struggling to get to his feet. “I'm talking to you, you little shit. Come here.”

  She stopped cold, but she didn't turn to him.

  “What? So you're scared of your old man now? I pay for all of this, you ungrateful little cunt. You're just like your mother. Come here. I said, get over here.” He was now fully on his feet, holding on to the granite countertop with both hands to maintain his balance.

  He began dizzily shifting toward her, still using the countertop for balance. “Come here,” he repeated in a voice that was soft but ominous.

  The frightened girl took one step back.

  “I said come here,” he repeated, more sternly this time. He spoke softly and forced a smile, though he was clearly seething beneath the surface.

  When he finally reached the edge of the counter, he slowly let go and then hobbled toward her.

  When he finally reached her, he gently stroked her cheek. Trembling, she kept her gaze to the floor.

  “Look at me,” he said in a near-whisper.

  She remained frozen.

  “I said look at me!” he roared at the top of his lungs.

  She raised her head, but only enough to gaze at the lower part of his tank top.

  “You're gonna learn some fucking respect!” he barked as he snapped his arm forward and grabbed a chunk of her brown hair.

  The little girl screamed, and the adult Cassidy awoke from her horrifying meditation.

  She was back in the rented house in Henderson, Nevada, lying in the cozy bed. But there was nothing cozy about this. Once again, all the lights were off. So was the TV.

  She turned to the clock radio. 4:19 a.m. Could she have actually dozed off? She lay there frozen for nearly five minutes, quietly praying, wondering, almost begging for death.

  Then, suddenly, an unexpected sound caused her to jump. It was the sound of harsh white noise. It was coming from the clock radio. At this point, she was beyond trying to comfort herself by writing it off as an alarm clock malfunction. Something malevolent was at work. And it was about to get worse.

  After nearly a minute of static, a haunting melody broke through the noise. There was something eerily familiar about it. It was a simple repetitive melody that sounded as though it were being played on a child’s xylophone.

  She had heard this song once before while lying in this very bed. It had happened about a week ago. But she had convinced herself it was only a dream. She knew what was coming next.

  After four repetitions of the melody, a little girl started to sing along.

  The devil creeps into my room

  To sing a lullaby

  He softly whispers

  Pleasant dreams

  For soon it's
time to die

  5

  What the fuck did I sign up for? Allison asked herself the next morning as she stared into her bathroom mirror with bloodshot eyes. It was 9:15. It would take her approximately twenty-five minutes to drive from her seventh-story apartment at Flamingo and Maryland Parkway to her New Age shop at Valley View and Tropicana. In other words, she had about twenty minutes to shower, get dressed, find some kind of sustenance, and get out the door.

  She loved being an independent business owner, but there was a part of her—okay, a significant part—that loathed the path she had chosen. After all, she was a lifelong atheist. When she and her sister Laura were forced to attend Mass every Sunday as children, Allison would often bombard her Sunday school teachers, priests, and catechists with questions like, “If God is in control of the whole universe, why would he need to have his son killed for everyone’s sins?” and “If Jesus and God are the same, how come Jesus prays to God? Is he talking to himself?”

  When she was only six years old, she once asked Father Michael, “If Adam and Eve came first, where did Australopithecus come from?” Father Michael was unable to respond, not so much out of ignorance but because he was so amazed that a six-year-old could even pronounce a word like Australopithecus. Her fascination with National Geographic had stripped her of her childhood faith before she even hit puberty.

  And now, at age twenty-eight, she made her living as a pretend psychic. It was a vocation that she had pursued out of convenience. Las Vegas was a town full of suckers, and she wanted to start a business that would allow her to justify ridiculous markups on virtually worthless products and services. When she saw her aunt pay twenty-five dollars for a cheap plastic “energy bracelet” at a second-rate shopping mall in Henderson, she knew she had stumbled on a potential goldmine. The rest was history.

  Just as she was about to leave her apartment, her phone started buzzing from inside the pocket of her jeans. She retrieved the phone and gazed at the display. Scrawled across the screen was the word “Mom.” Allison sighed but accepted the call.