by Wilson, Jay
I looked at the aftermath, and couldn’t believe what happened. Two people were dead, one of which gave birth to a creature that was now on the loose.
My stomach didn’t react favorably, but I was thankful that I was near my apartment. I needed to call the police, though I wasn’t sure they could do anything. Maybe I needed to contact a priest, instead.
As I stepped over the bodies, the woman started to move. I stopped and watched as her hand tightened into a fist and then relaxed. Finally, she opened her eyes, but they were no longer a beautiful blue. They were now completely silver, as if her eyes were replaced with ball bearings.
A deep growl erupted from her throat, a sound so sinister that I didn’t want to stick around. She tried to grab for my leg, but I quickly dodged and rushed down the corridor to my apartment. I fumbled for my keys, and as I looked back, the woman climbed to her feet and headed my direction.
I was relieved when I found the right key. I unlocked the door, rushed in, and then engaged the deadbolt. For good measure, I wrestled my old filthy couch to the door and blocked it.
I climbed onto the cushions and looked through the peephole. I watched the woman attack a man who ran up to help the dead man in the elevator. He died quickly and violently. The woman ran to the emergency stairs and disappeared through the door.
When I looked back to the carnage, I saw the man from earlier start to move. I didn’t want to see anymore so I stepped away from the door. My stomach twisted and I lost the contents of it into the kitchen sink.
For several weeks, I didn’t lay a single step outside my apartment. I observed the city from my window as it tore itself apartment person by person, each rising with silver eyes. The news told of horror stories spreading from my city to the rest of the world. By the end of the month, all broadcasting ceased.
The Boogeymen
They're all around us. Boogeymen. They pursue us, their only purpose to kill humans. Like shadows upon the wall, they’re dark visages of men without faces, eyes, or mouths. Silent stalkers, and when they come for you, you know it. They make themselves known, and they don’t stop until you’re dead.
When I first saw one, it was the first day of my freshman year in high school. I walked along the clean tile floor, staring down at the mirror-like finish. The fluorescent lights seemed to take their time passing me, though they moved much faster when I looked at the ceiling. I felt the familiar tickle of my bladder begging me to release its storage, and so I ducked into a nearby bathroom.
As usual, the multi-urinal abode smelled horrid, like ancient piss and moldy water. After I finished bleeding my internal bag dry, I washed my hands at the sink. Had I not done this—had I not learned that hygiene was important—I might not have seen it. As I lathered my hands with a soap that stank with the rich aroma of hospital-grade antibacterial, I looked up to check my fifteen-year-old face for blemishes that might ruin my entire high-school experience forever. What I found instead ruined me just the same.
Standing behind me, unnervingly motionless and staring at me with its blank black face, was a boogeyman. Its arms remained slack at its sides, its body wrapped in a glistening obsidian flesh. The hairs on the nape of my neck twisted into corkscrews and I whipped around to face the freak behind me. Nothing was there.
I moved along the bathroom to check the stalls, but I found no one. The bathroom was entirely empty, except for a frightfully white and fully terrified version of me.
I returned to the hushed vomiting of the water at the sink and refused to look into the mirror. I didn’t know what I’d seen, but I didn’t want to see it again. However, my curiosity laid siege to my willpower, and as I exited the bathroom, I looked into the mirror once more. The boogeyman was there again, and it turned toward me, hands still at its side, staring at me.
I tore ass from the bathroom as fast as I could, even earned a few stern looks from teachers who thought I shouldn’t be running in the halls. I didn’t care, though. I wanted rid myself of the creature; however, as I would later learn, you can’t run away from your fate.
When I arrived at my Science class, I slipped through the door as the bell rang. I threw my book bag at the foot of my seat and slumped into the cold chair.
Lilly, the gorgeous and smart as hell Lilly with blonde hair and who had emerald eyes I swear to God glowed with a magical phosphoresce, sat in front of me. She turned around in her seat and said, “That was close.”
“You have no idea.” I said, keeping my eye on the door.
“You okay?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you okay? You seem a bit, I dunno, off.”
“I guess.” I said, and I wanted to tell her but I couldn’t. I knew she would never believe me.
“Alright, class, time to get started.” Mrs. Winters said, and walked to the whiteboard. “Today we’re going to learn about the human reproductive system.”
I listened to a few of the boys clumped in the back of the room snigger at what the teacher said. I, however, nearly lost my lunch. Not because of the subject, but because of what I saw in the reflection of the picture frame holding the teacher’s credentials. The boogeyman followed me. It was in the room with me. With us.
I shot up from my seat and everyone turned toward me. My hands and arms shook violently, and the teacher said, “Is there a problem?”
“N—no, Mrs. Winters.”
“Good, then sit back down, please.”
As I started to sit down, I watched the boogeyman move within the refection. It crossed the back of the room unlike anything I’d ever seen. It seemed to skip and jump, but not as though it was teleporting, it was as if it moved so fast you could just barely detect its movement. When it stopped, I could finally see it in person, standing next to Mrs. Winters.
“Now class, the human reproductive system is a complex,” she began to say, but before she could finish, the boogeyman jumped into her.
“No!” I screamed, and stood upright from my half-sitting position.
A few of my classmate giggled at me, but if they could’ve seen what I saw, they wouldn’t have laughed just then.
The teacher turned away from the whiteboard and picked up the long wooden pointer she often used during her lectures. Mrs. Winters walked toward me with a slack jaw and lifeless eyes, navigating between the desks until she stood right in front of me. She raised the long pointer like a dagger as Lilly jumped up from her seat. The woman, without hesitation, brought it down at me, but I ducked. The point of it stabbed the kid who sat behind me, piecing his neck.
As the boy choked to death on his own blood, I grabbed Lilly’s hand and rushed out of the room.
“Oh my God! Why did she do that?” She screamed at me, but I didn’t answer her. We needed to get away first, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t have given her a good answer anyway.
As we reached the front of the school, I watched two male teachers move in front of the doors. Their legs spread shoulder-wide, ready for anyone that might try to escape, perhaps ready to keep me from escaping. I immediately turned and ushered her into a nearby empty room.
I locked the door and dragged a desk in front of it. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until too late that the door opened out toward the hallway instead of toward the room.
“Tell me. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Something… I guess some kind of monster possessed Mrs. Winters.”
“What?” Lilly said. “Quit being a creep. What really happened?”
“Lilly! You saw what happened back there.” I said, pointing at the wall. “She just killed Rolf. Put her cue or pointer or whatever through his fucking neck!”
Lilly seemed to turn inward as if it was only now finally hitting her. I took her hand into mine, and she was trembling just as bad.
“What are we going to do?”
“Fight. It’s the only thing we can do.”
“But I…” She said, and though the moment wasn’t even remotely romantic, I interrupted her with a kiss. It w
as mostly for my own sake, to calm my nerves, give me reassurance that there was something worth fighting for, and it was Lilly. The intense emotion swelled from that single small kiss, and gave me the rush that I needed to fight hard to keep her alive.
As my luck would have it, my fervor to protect her didn’t last long. Just after I locked us in that room, a creature appeared in the reflection of the window. Not a second later, Lilly tried to kill me.
I fought her off as best I could without hurting her, and I got out of the room as fast as possible. Back in the hallway, teachers, students, and anyone else I once knew were now possessed by the boogeymen. They were everywhere, determined to kill me.
I left school that day, and never returned. Out in the world, reflective surfaces carried with them boogeymen that could hunt me down through anyone and anything. Eventually, I holed myself up in a condemned house that had absolutely no reflective surfaces. Anything I saw that reflected even the dullest bit of light I covered with black matte paint.
“Here I sit, writing this because I know that I will not last long. The boogeymen have finally found me, the one human that managed to escape them. I hear them clawing at the door, nails breaking against the splintered wood. Soon the door will fall and I’ll be dead. For anyone who finds this, please find a way to stop the boogeymen. There is no hope for me, but perhaps you will be able to stop them from killing anyone else. You are humanity’s only hope.” Hank read aloud.
Hank held the bloody letter pinched between his index and thumb. The police had arrested three men for breaking into the house, killing the young vagrant squatting there, and rummaging through his belongings. They claimed they had no memory of what happened, but Hank had been part of the Newport Police Department cleaning crew for so long that he believe people to be nothing but evil.
He stuffed the letter into the trash bag, and looked at the bloody mess where the man’s skull had been crushed into a fine pulp. He grumbled, knowing he had a busy day ahead of him.
Sometimes They Escape
I lumber through the door of my house, barely able to stand on either leg for any length of time. I look down at my legs, and my jeans are shredded and bloody. My shoulder still burns, but the gash stopped bleeding at some point. I lick my tender and cracked lips and wince as the wound on my forehead gives me a sudden and random sting of pain. I’m a mess, but at least I escaped that wretched place.
I hear the faint sound of two men talking bitterly at each other coming from the living room. One of them sounds familiar, the voice strong and commanding, and the other is a bit more unknown to me, yet somehow it’s also familiar. However, neither of them sound like him, and I am almost positive he is in my house somewhere. I didn’t expect there to be two other men, but after what I'd been through, nothing will stop me.
I shuffle through the foyer, the smell of stale cigarettes and old beer is strong and disgusting, but not worse than the sulfuric stench of the depraved prison in which I once took involuntary residence. That dark place reminds me of the loose tooth in my mouth, and so I tongue it, suck some of the blood from the root, and spit it onto the floor. Long before I had been where no man should ever go, I would've thought that splotch on the ground as nothing more than simply blood and saliva, but now it looks like a winged demon dripping with the lost ignorance of innocence and empowered by humanities most wicked nightmares.
In the kitchen, the smell is much worse, a mixture of the vices of man and the bite of rotten vegetables and meat. Plates with half-eaten bloody pieces of meat are stacked everywhere, and the bowl of fresh fruits and vegetables I once kept on the pale wooden dinner table is now full with a black and fuzzy pile of death.
As I pass the fridge, I stop. I continue to stare at the floor, but from the corner of my eye, I see the white paper hanging from the refrigerator door. In my tattered memories, I envision the crayon drawing of three figures holding hands: my wife, my son, and of course me. The sun has a brilliant smile as it hangs dutifully in the corner of the page above a purple house with HOME written on the door. My young son is the brilliant artist of the family. Was the artist of the family.
I leave the kitchen as a renewed rage builds inside me, and enter the adjacent room. The television flickers in the corner with bad reception, and the man’s voice I previously recognized is actually The Duke talking at people in the original True Grit. In front of the television, sitting on my couch and wearing my clothes, is him.
I approach the imposter, the dark and wicked clone with the same name as me. He must have heard me, because he stands and turns around. He appears as I do, except without a broken body.
He says, "How did you get out of there?"
I don’t want to answer him. I feel that if I don’t, however, then I am certainly acknowledging some kind of superiority he has over me. My dysfunctional rationality bears evidence to my flawed humanity, and I reply in a cold, course voice ruined by cinder and ash.
"You should've known you couldn't keep me there."
"I banished you to Purgatory. You took my place there." He says as he backs away from me.
"You took everything from me." I growl and then cough blood onto the floor.
"You think you can just come back here?" He tells me with a trembling voice. "You can't come back. You're breaking the rules."
I cough a dark laugh. "You broke them when you sent me to Hell! When you took my place among humans!"
He backs against the wall next to the television, leans down, and picks up a food-encrusted knife from a pile of filthy dishes. I lunge at him, wrap my hands around his neck, and squeeze.
"Stop." He pleads thinly from his wicked lips, but I do not relent.
With the steak knife, he stabs me several times in my ribs, and I feel the blade sinking deep, which penetrated my lung. I cough hard as I feel the bone in his throat pop and cave. He drops the knife, and it clatters against the oak floor as he begins to choke for air. I tightened my grip. Eventually, his eyes flutter and he falls limp.
We both drop to the floor, and my breathing becomes shallow and quick. With one lung collapsed and the other barely working, I don’t have much time left. I feel my body tighten with gooseflesh as whorls of darkness burn in and out of my vision, but I am not afraid. I know that my revenge comes with a price, but that fee is not a penalty because I am not going back to that dark place where demons call from the darkness and where soldiers of horror rip flesh from the bones of evil souls. No, I am going to a much better place, hopefully one where I might find my wife and son. One where I might finally find peace.
Sometimes We Escape
Humans are a waste of existence, I thought as I waited inside the mirror. A filthy human named Brent stood opposite me on Earth. A soft afternoon light filtered through the frosted glass window of the bathroom, casting a fuzzy bar against the white wall behind him. The bathroom was unkempt, with clothes thrown all over the floor along with a couple bottles of liquor—one partially shattered.
Brent boldly used a large piece of the glass to cut his right palm. The blood quickly pooled in his cupped hand, and he dabbed his finger into the sweet liquid. I licked my lips as he drew upon the mirror, which, by consequence, drew a wide grin upon my face.
First, he created a circle, and the blood dripped down from the highest and lowest arcs. Inside the circle, he drew a crude version of the Aramaic sign for life. Sweat beaded upon the tacky skin of the pathetic mortal as he finished, and then he wrapped his hand in a rag, which quickly turned a magnificent crimson.
He laid the glass next to the sink near a small rectangle of wrinkled paper. The human pinched the corner of the page, and lifted it. The paper trembled along with the human's own quaking body, and then he began to read it aloud.
I was already familiar with Aramaic, and it annoyed me how poorly he spoke it. To disgrace the language that came before humanity’s weak slobbering English seemed wrong, but I was content to know the result would be my freedom.
"Orias," Brent uttered nervously, "I c
all you. I beg for a favor, and in return I offer you my soul."
I felt the energy empower me to reveal myself. These humans could summon us at their will. For whatever reason the creator of all found it necessary to make such a weak being powerful enough to control us, but thankfully, our guile was always their undoing.
When fear fell upon his face, I knew he could see me. I spoke in his native tongue to ensure the easiest transition. I had to play it smart, perhaps even a bit dubious. I knew what he wanted, but to get what I wanted, I had to be clever.
I said, "Who calls unto me, bringing me from my slumber."
"I... I did."
"What is it you want?" I boomed, and then a soft scream of a distant soul tortured by a fellow demon added to my dark presence.
"I request a favor; I need your help. I need my family back." He said as tears journeyed down his face.
"I am limited in power to humans while I am bound within Purgatory." I said, which was true.
"What can I do?"
"You must release me. Free me from this prison and I shall grant your request." I lied.
"Okay." Brent agreed without hesitation.
It comes rarely when a human is so desperate that a demon need not try very hard to manipulate them. Brent's case was even more amazing than that. About a year ago human time, his meat-bag of a son had been killed on his way to school when two gangs got into a heavy shootout. The police couldn't find the shooters, so they closed the case pending further action only if they get lucky and recover the guns in the future. This news devastated his wife, and because she was unable to handle the lack of judicial convictions she so desperately needed, she hung herself.
I never had the power to bring back either his son or his wife regardless of where they went, but neither of them made it to Purgatory, anyway. His son was too young to have committed any serious offenses, and his wife hadn't done anything wrong her entire life. However, Brent assumed his wife had been damned because she killed herself, which wasn't the case at all. Humans were good at making shit up, especially when it came to their religions, which worked out for me because now this idiot summoned me to bring them back. I barely had a foot in the door, and he pulled it wide open.