Death and Candy

by David Maloney

  It’s a terrible curse to have—watching people die in your dreams, and I’ve tried everything from hypnosis to antipsychotics to get rid of it. But I’m not writing this to tell you about my bizarre medical condition. I’m writing it because of the last dream that I had.

  After two days straight of being awake I finally resigned myself to my nightmares and succumbed to sleep. That night’s dream was… well, I don’t know how to describe it. So I’ll just tell you what I saw.

  The dream was in a darkened room, lit by a circle of flickering candles that lined the walls. In the center was a chair, and on the chair sat a woman, naked, bound and gagged, her body convulsing with violent sobs.

  A robed figure approached from the shadows. As he drew closer, the woman began to struggle violently against her bonds, so that the screeching sounds of the metal chair rocking back and forth on cement echoed in the silence of the room.

  The man let down his hood, and I was surprised to see that he looked perfectly ordinary. If he felt any emotion his face did not betray it as he drew a long and slender blade from beneath his robes. He plunged it into the woman’s chest, and she began to shriek and moan, pulling so hard against her restraints that her wrists sprayed blood all over her surroundings.

  She didn’t die, though. At least not right away.

  The man twisted the knife and then pulled it out. The woman’s breath came in ragged gasps around her gag. And then I saw something that made me physically sick. Two shadowy black hands reached out from the wound in her chest and sunk their claws into her flesh, causing little rivulets of blood to bubble out where they had pierced the skin.

  Then they began to push, spreading the wound wider and wider.

  The woman shrieked and moaned, and her body shook with frantic spasms, but the hands continued to pull.

  Soon the hole was large enough for a shadowy black head to emerge, dripping some sort of black goo that sizzled and smoked as it dripped on the woman’s flesh. The creature pushed its shoulders out next, and I could hear the sound of the woman’s ribs snapping like twigs as her body folded and collapsed in on itself, peeled off of the shadow body like a rubber glove.

  The shadowy black form fully emerged, and the robed man came forth and draped a crimson robe just like his own around it.

  The creature’s face began to change texture and color, until it resembled a human with no face. The robed man touched the creature’s forehead, and the skin began to bubble and melt like hot wax, until the creature had taken on the appearance of an ordinary human.

  I realized with sudden urgency that I’d been holding my breath the whole time this was happening, and I began to gasp as my heart beat loudly in my ears. The man turned in my direction, and for a moment I thought he’d noticed me.

  But he turned back to the creature and whispered something in its ear before fading back to the shadows.

  The newly robed creature, now with the appearance of a man, walked over to the crumpled and eviscerated body of the woman and dipped its hand inside her chest.

  He began drawing something on the floor. My view was obstructed by its back, so I could not see what it was writing.

  When it was finished it rose to his feet and followed the robed man into the shadows.

  I squinted at what was written in the blood on the floor, and through the flickering candlelight I could only just make out the words, “We know you’re watching.”

  22

  Demon Possession for Beginners

  When most people think of demon possession they picture the classic projectile vomiting, head spinning around variety. While that does happen, it’s mostly novice demons who cause that, the vomiting and abnormal behavior being a result of the host’s mind rejecting the possession. In reality, most demon possessions are a lot subtler. They’re the little voice that tells you that you’re fine to drive when you know you’ve had too much, or that you can cheat on your wife just this once and no one will ever find out. Or, if you’ve ever known someone with dementia who got really mean towards the end, you’re like as not looking at the work of a demon.

  Dementia demons are mostly novices though. They do it because old broken minds don’t fight back, so it’s pretty much impossible to screw up. And if you’re in hell you want good stats on your first possession, otherwise you’ll get kicked right to the back of the line and you won’t see another chance for thousands of years. Oh, I almost forgot about the line. Everybody in hell gets a number in the line, and the more evil you do with each possession, the better your place in line next time around. So if you’re lucky enough to get a possession, you’d better wreak havoc, and try not to get exorcised or killed. It used to be Hell trying to keep track of the paperwork of who went where, but things are running a lot more smoothly with the new computer system. We’re still way behind earth technology of course—we don’t get a lot of computer engineers down here for some reason. Though for some reason we’ve got an overabundance of salespeople though.

  But back to the line. Before you can even hop in the line, you’ve got to go through what basically amounts to demon college. They call it a college but it’s really more like those corporate training seminars they have in America. Satan wanted it to be soul crushing, after all. Most of the introductory stuff is boring, like how to take control of the mind of your victim. That really is the foundation for everything though, because if you can’t do that your victim’s mind will kick you right out and you’ll be back in Hell, at the back of the line with a failure of possession charge on your record. And you definitely don’t want that. The advanced stuff is where it gets more interesting, and you get to choose a specialty.

  Most people go into Addiction, because it’s one of the easiest majors and you get a reasonable amount of time before your host OD’s or just gets used up. Some people go into Mental Illness, but that can get you institutionalized, and you don’t really get to have fun with your new body if you’re stuck in a padded room all day. There’s also a dictator class-Professor Hitler teaches that one. But not many people take it. Not only is it impractical, Hitler always ends up going on some tangential rant about Jews for like forty minutes every class. We get it Hitler, you don’t like Jews. The professional serial killer class is pretty popular though. There are a lot of wannabe serial killers in hell, and it gives amazing stats if you can pull it off on earth. Ten or more victims and you’re allowed to jump the line and possess another body without even going back to Hell first.

  The last thing you should know about demon possession is how it happens. After all, you want to avoid it if you can. The most common is Ouija board use. People will accidentally summon up a demon , and by letting it control their hands they allow their consciousness to overlap with that of the demon. The demon sneaks in through that window. If it’s a particularly talented demon it can fragment its consciousness and possess everyone with their hands on the board. The same thing can happen with séances. Most demons will choose the weakest link, but some will be able to possess everyone in the room.

  Anyway, I’m afraid this is where my story ends. My host body is dying and typing is getting pretty exhausting. But before I leave you there’s one more thing I want to tell you. The most ancient and skilled demons need only the tiniest overlap in consciousness to possess you. They may only need to converse with you for a moment, or even just trick you into reading something that they’ve written. Maybe a story that distracts you just long enough for them to slip in unnoticed. You may feel uneasy or paranoid when it happens, or you may feel nothing at all.

  How do you feel now?

  23

  The First Thing to Die

  The goldfish was the first thing to die. Goldfish die sometimes, right? That’s no reason to suspect foul play, certainly no reason to suspect the children had anything to do with it.

  Only then all the class potato plants died. The class project, shriveled up, blackened and dead. The kids said the plants looked just like dead snakes. You know kids; they’ve got such vivid i
maginations.

  Ms. Robbins died next. She had a heart attack right there in class, and the kids just sat there and watched. They found her dead with the phone in her hand, the line cut clean in two. Must have been some kid playing with scissors, right?

  The substitute broke her leg on the way to work; slipped on a patch of ice—would you believe it? Had to have surgery to get it fixed. There was a complication and she died on the table. Too much anesthesia.

  The class pen pals stopped writing back. When the administration tried to contact the other school, nobody answered the phone. Maybe the secretary was let go.

  It was old John Anderson who found the abandoned church in the woods. He said he found it by the smell. The place was littered with torn up animal carcasses. We always thought there were coyotes in those woods. Can’t let kids go playing out there anymore.

  The town pets started to disappear; we figured the coyotes must be coming into town. People started carrying their guns with them; never know when you might see a coyote.

  John Anderson had his throat cut, and his children disappeared. Could have been those child traffickers. Sometimes they come up from the border and take kids back down to Mexico.

  Paula Torrini vanished too, but they found her intestines smeared on the ceiling. The kids were gone, and there was a trail of blood leading out to the forest. The town police started shooting coyotes on sight.

  The kids started to sing nursery rhymes about Ms. Robbins, John Anderson and Paula Torrini. They sang about the devil’s hands, dragging us down to Hell. The school banned nursery rhymes. It didn’t help.

  People barricaded themselves in their homes; the phone lines all went dead. Some people tried to leave, but their cars went off the road. People fell asleep at the wheel or blew a tire. It happens.

  On the night of June the seventh, the kids all disappeared. Bloody trails led out to the woods, but the church was burnt to ash. They couldn’t figure out the cause. The fire marshal said lightning must have hit the roof. Set the dry wood off.

  After the kids left the adults all drifted out of town. No sense sticking around. It’s the strangest thing: I can’t remember the place’s name. People forget things, I guess.

  The plants in my garden died last night. Went all black and shriveled up.

  Look like dead snakes.

  Sometimes at night, I can hear the voices of children, singing nursery rhymes.

  They sing about Ms. Robbins, Darren Anderson and Paula Torrini, being dragged down to Hell by the devil’s hands.

  Last night, after the plants in my garden died, they added my name to the list.

  24

  I'm a Demon. Help Me Out?

  I’m a monster.

  I don’t mean that in the sense that I’m a terrible person or anything like that; I mean it in the sense that I’m a monstrous Hell-creature that feeds off human fear and misery. You may be wondering why I’m writing this to you, and I’d be glad to tell you the reason. It’s because I need your help. I’ll get to the specifics in a moment, but first I’d like to explain why it is that I need your help.

  About sixteen hundred years ago, some practitioners of black magic discovered an ancient Latin text and summoned me to this plane of existence to do their bidding. Only, one of the warlocks, Adriel I think his name was, messed the ritual up so badly that I was no longer bound to do their will. Apparently, they wanted me to enact an apocalypse that would destroy the current world order and set them up as leaders. I decided that sounded like quite a bit of work, and wound up eviscerating them instead.

  I might have enacted the apocalypse anyway, after a good long nap, but Adriel’s screw-up also caused me to be summoned with only a tiny fraction of my power.

  Even so, I left Adriel alive, mostly because he seemed like a good lad. He went on to become a baker later on if I recall correctly.

  So, with nothing else to do, I burned the summoning scroll and went back to my own plane of existence, where I had been tormenting lost souls with my kids. However, it seems like I should have killed Adriel after all, because unbeknownst to me, he had transcribed the summoning ritual and bequeathed it to his children after he died. The scroll was lost for centuries, until one of Adriel’s modern descendants discovered it in his great-grandfather’s attic while preparing for an after-death estate sale.

  He decided to get it translated out of curiosity, and afterwards he decided that the contents would make a great foundation for one of those dumb creepy stories that people post on the internet. He even included the original Latin incantation for flavor. This was a few years ago when the fad of internet horror stories was still booming. To my great surprise and distress, my summoning instructions became somewhat popular. At this point, I hadn’t been to Earth in over a thousand years, and at that time I had been summoned by the most powerful of dark wizards.

  Now, every few days I was being whisked out of Hell by some drunk teenagers shining flashlights up at their face in their bathroom trying to scare each other.

  You see, a long time ago, when literacy was exceptionally rare, my summoning ritual was extremely complicated. But in the days of booming literacy rates and Google translate, it’s become absurdly easy.

  Luckily for me, though, Adriel didn’t just fuck up when he summoned me, he fucked up when he transcribed the ritual as well, so that I’m not bound to anyone’s will when I get summoned. That’s a good thing, because drunk human teenagers usually ask me to do some pretty weird stuff. However, I still only get summoned with a tiny fraction of my full power, so I usually just terrify them to their very core before dashing off back to Hell so to play with my kids.

  That was until Lucy.

  Last month some six-year-old girl found my summoning ritual online, and decided to try it out. By chance, she got the ending right. I suppose it was bound to happen eventually; it was only a small mistake that Adriel had made in the transcription after all.

  The problem is that she’s not actually evil in any sense of the word. She’s managed to summon a demon capable of bringing about the Apocalypse, and she has me do things like materialize cotton candy and puppies out of thin air.

  Her parents are always flabbergasted when they arrive to pick her up from school and she’s surrounded by at least eight puppies.

  At this point, I don’t even care about destroying humans and feasting on their souls anymore, I’d really just like to go back home. So I’m asking for your help. I need someone here to complete my banishing ritual so I can go back to Hell and live in peace.

  It’s actually quite simple, you just draw a pentagram in a mirror, light seven candles and read the following words:

  Daemonum Magister ab antiquo,

  dono tibi mea corpus, gratia liberabo vos

  ego vivere invite vos intra corpus mea

  ego immolo anima mea

  nos vanae humanae creaturae,

  nos apetimus mortis et infernus

  producat in fine hominis

  Amen

  So if anyone could help me out it would be greatly appreciated.

  25

  Sleeping with the Corpses Next Door

  The doctors have always told my mom that I have something called ‘dissociative hallucinations.’ They think that just because I’m a kid I don’t know what that means, but I do. It means they think I’m crazy. Adults all think that just because they can’t see something that means it isn’t real, but the truth is that the things I see are just as real as what they see—maybe even more real.

  That’s because when I look at people, I see what they look like on the inside. I don’t mean that I see their organs and bones and stuff, I mean that I see who they really are. A kind-hearted old woman looks like a radiant angel to me, and a vacuous supermodel like someone suffering from an unfortunate birth defect.

  When I look at pictures in my school textbooks of notorious dictators or criminals throughout history, all I can see are bloated corpses with worms poking out of holes in their rotted flesh.

&nb
sp; So when our new neighbor moved in, his head caved in and maggots nesting in his brain, I knew that he was not to be trusted. He came by the same afternoon he moved in to introduce himself.

  “My name’s Jim,” he said, extending a hand to my mother and grinning. I gagged as black pus oozed out of the lines in his cheeks.

  “Oh, it’s nice to meet you!” my mom said. “I was wondering who had moved in across the street.”

  Jim crouched down so that his rotted face was at eye level with me.

  “And what’s your name, little girl?” he asked, grinning even wider and sticking his hand out at me.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh Annie, you’re being so rude,” my mom said with her customary exasperated sigh. “Sorry Jim, she’s a bit shy.”

  “Oh that’s okay,” Jim said, grinning with every part of his rotted face except for his eyes. “I’m sure she’ll grow out of that soon.”

  He placed his hands on his knees and pushed himself back to his feet.

  “I’ve got a daughter her age, too,” he said. “Annie ought to come visit for a sleepover, sometime. I’d love for little Lucy to have some friends in the neighborhood.”

  “Oh that sounds like a great idea,” my mom replied. “How about we set one up this weekend?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Jim said. “Well, I’ve got some errands to run, so I’ll see you later, neighbor.” He gave my mother a cheerful grin and looked at me one last time before he left.

  I looked up my mom as soon as she shut the door.

  “That man’s a bad man,” I said.

  My mom sighed.

  “Don’t be silly, Annie.” She paused, then added nervously, “You’re not…seeing things again are you?”

  “No, mom.”