Joseph had what you would call an interesting childhood. Since he could remember, falling asleep was always a disturbing proposition: while for most people that stage between consciousness and sleep, when the mind slowly drifts between the two states, is a quite pleasant experience, that was not much so for Joseph. For him, drifting into sleep was plagued by an inability to move or speak while still somewhat conscious of his surroundings, and a vague perception of shadows, whispers and very light touches on his face that would send shivers down his spine, until he would finally fall asleep for a night of dreams where those shadows became faceless silhouettes inviting him to follow them to a place where he would spend eternity playing with children who he knew had already passed away. Joseph was always grateful that he could not see any faces in his dreams, as he knew they would surely be frightening.
Those dreams developed in very strange places; sometimes in what seemed to be an abandoned hospital, with stained white tiles falling off the walls on a dirty floor covered with rusty medical instruments, with the hole set bathed in a sick light coming from a dusty window from where he could barely see what was left of daylight quickly disappearing. There were people hiding in corners and under old furniture scattered all over the place; scary people, with extremely pale skin, and dark, thin hair. Joseph knew that as soon as the last of the daylight was gone, a sick, green darkness would engulf the room, and the people would leave their hiding places, and Joseph was terrified of what their eyes would look like. As darkness and Joseph’s despair increased, the invitation from the silhouettes would feel like the lesser of two evils, and Joseph almost gave into temptation to accept their proposition right before waking up. Joseph had the same dream over and over again, with very little variation, and every time he was closer to accepting the invitation from the silhouettes.
As Joseph grew older, he started to add other recurring dreams to his repertoire, different versions of the same theme of something rather scary that could be avoided by accepting an invitation. One of the new dreams took place in what Joseph knew was an abandoned mental institution, with the walls covered in drawings and words like “kill”, “help”, “despair”, “death”. The whole place was bathed in a yellowish, dark and nauseating light, and entities not quite human were hiding in the shadows. Other was in a forest, cold and sad, with macabre trees extending their fragile and twisted limbs to the dark and gray sky, trying to reach out to whatever was left of sunlight; the ruins of a house could be seen in the distance, and Joseph was desperately trying to get to it before dusk to avoid the horrors of the forest, although even worse horrors were waiting for him at that house. One that was particularly disturbing was simply a long hallway filled with dust and decrepit furniture; a thin, pale figure in a wedding dress slowly approached Joseph, who expected a sudden transformation into something terrifying that would certainly drive all sanity out of his mind. In all those dreams, however, Joseph had the option to follow the invitation of the silhouettes instead of facing the terror, but he knew that even worse things would happen to him if he accepted the invitation. Thank God he always woke up before having to face the fate of his dreams.
Needless to say, Joseph had trouble adjusting to normal company. He was always a quiet, scrawny child, always a bit sleep deprived, and always waiting for something to happen while he was awake. Unfortunately when he reached his teenage years, things did start to happen while he was awake: he started to catch fleeting glimpses out of the corner of his eyes of something he couldn’t quite explain, and every time he turned to look it was gone. Noises and whispers also started to happen while he was wide awake. While trying to sleep he would hear objects fall from the shelves in his bedroom, just to find out the next day that everything was in place. One night he woke up with the distinct sensation that someone was in his room, approached his bed and started to slowly pull the covers from him; he turned to see who it was just to see the emptiness of his room staring at him. Another night he woke up and saw a pale figure walk across the foot of his bed towards the window, look outside, and go back. Joseph was relieved that the figure turned around not facing him, because he was really frightened with what her face would look like.
Joseph tried to go to college, but there was some sort of a curse following him. All his roommates invariably asked to be reassigned, as they murmured something about the room being cursed, nightmares, constant headaches, strange noises at night coming out of nowhere, but above all how Joseph’s presence made everything worse. After some time, people simply stopped assigning roommates to Joseph, who was then all alone. By then, he could barely get a decent night of sleep at night, which translated to him dozing off during classes. That wouldn’t have been so bad if the process had not been accompanied to his classmates morphing into creepy figures that would cause him to jump in his seat, thus attracting undesired attention from professors and the students. His horrified face following those events, however, eliminated all desire of people to laugh at him; eventually he became the creep to be avoided at all costs and after a troublesome semester, he left college.
Joseph settled for a low paying, repetitive job that didn’t require much attention. Joseph was not dumb; quite the contrary, he was very smart. However, the monotony associated with repetitive tasks somehow alleviated his problems, and that was more than he could ask. His job and his small apartment were in a decadent part of town, old, musty, with high rises that, except at high noon, involved the streets in a constant penumbra. Joseph’s apartment was very small, a room with an attached kitchen and a small bathroom; he kept it nice, clean and ordered so he wouldn’t wake up from his strange dreams to a messy place. Being orderly helped him remain as calm as possible.
His apartment was on a lower floor, with an external hallway that faced a small courtyard full of weeds and dwarf trees struggling to survive the absence of sun. The hallway had only a handful of lights that were burned most of the time, since nobody bothered to replace them. Most people kept it to themselves, there was very little interaction amongst the neighbors except for the occasional short salutation when people crossed each other in the hallway, and Joseph liked it this way. His window faced the street below, with a purple neon sign creating long, strange shadows on the wall. Joseph worked the second shift, and he always walked back home hoping to get there tired enough to fall asleep faster, but that seldom happened.
Unfortunately the hallway was becoming a difficult walk for Joseph lately - for whatever reason, as he approached his apartment, he started to get the feeling that something incredibly malevolent was waiting for him at the end of the hallway. In the beginning, he was able to control these feelings and get into his apartment; however, this feeling was becoming increasingly worse. Images would flash into his mind for a fraction of a second - children holding hands, but with holes instead of eyes; a dog with a human face; an incredibly thin woman, with her bones almost cutting through her skin crawling towards him; a baby with legs in the shape of animal’s legs crying, trying to stand up; a man holding his bloody eyes in the palm of his hand. Those images would come and go with every step of the way, and an increasing sense of malevolence started to emanate from the walls, oppressing him.
One day these images were particularly bad, and only with an incredible effort Joseph managed to reach his apartment door. Having gotten there, however, he couldn’t open it. There was an unbearable sense of evil coming from his apartment, and every time he touched the doorknob, some bizarre image would appear in his mind. Joseph spent quite some time trying to rationalize his feelings and unlock the door, but he couldn’t. He started to sweat and tremble; tears of rage flowed down his cheeks as he couldn’t summon the will to get into his apartment and finally rest after a long and tiresome day. And then suddenly that sense of evil completely overpowered him; he could barely breathe or move, his hair standing up and chivers going down his spine, and only by exercising an enormous amount of willpower he finally managed to step back, walking backwards to the elevator. There was a bar downstairs that never closed, so Joseph spent the night there cuddling his drink waiting for daylight to come.
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It was a crisp, cold autumn morning, and Joseph decided to take a walk before going back to his apartment. A narrow alley, to which he had never paid attention before, drew his attention; he saw an old bookstore sign and decided to check it out.
The place was rather peculiar - mostly old books collecting dust, with an even older shopkeeper behind the counter, glasses on the tip of his nose, completely absorbed in reading a book. Without taking his eyes off the book, he muttered a muffled “good morning, make yourself at home”, pointing to a chair nearby. Joseph grabbed a random book from a pile, a rather large book with leather cover, so worn out that the elegant golden lettering of the title had all but completely disappeared. He took a seat and opened a random page, starting to read.
The book was as peculiar as the bookstore - it talked about ancient gods, Ammon in ancient Egypt, the Damkina priestesses in Babylon, Hermes and Mercury in ancient Greece and Rome, Turms in Etruria, the templars and Benedictine monks during the middle ages. It explained how the Universe was once one for a long time, with gods laboring to keep it uniform. There was no concept of good or evil, everything was mingled together, and it had been like that since eons. However, at some point, perturbations started to appear in the primordial fabric of cosmos, and the gods, as well as the matter and energy, started to coalesce under two major forces that we call good and evil. In the beginning, the process was barely noticeable, with good and evil being almost identical, but over time, the difference increased.
“Over time” is a relative concept, as in this primordial fabric time flowed in a completely different manner. What was an eternity during those early times today would be measured as a tiny fraction of a second, but for the gods living in that uniform ocean, that flowed like a very long period of time.
Nobody knew exactly why those perturbations started; the reasons are completely lost at this point. What we know is that once they appeared, the separation between good and evil started to increase very rapidly. A war between the two forces then took place; a long and painful war, where immortal gods battled each other and yet none could ever hope to achieve dominance or victory. Again, this battle lasted for what seemed like a long time but, in reality, we would call an ephemeral moment.
When it seemed that this battle would never end, something unusual happened with the universe for the first time - a great explosion like it may never happen again took place, and good and evil separated. This created two separate universes, one mostly good, the other mostly evil. The Chinese, for example, call them yin and yang, and just like in the symbol, there is a little black on white and little white on black, so there is a little good in the evil universe, and a little evil in the good universe. Besides that, there are still connections between the two, within which good and evil may flow - sometimes small tears appear in the fabric of the universe, opening a pathway for something small to come to our side. This journey, however, was a strange one - the physical body disappeared from the “source” universe, but it never quite fully appeared on the other side. People conjecture that the body went to a place between the two universes, and projections of the body was all that appeared in the two universes. For lack of a better name, those projections were called spirits.
In the past, we also knew how to make our way to the evil side; however, the few who risked the journey either never came back, or if they did, they had such a terrifying expression of extreme fear, their faces completely twisted in an expression of sheer horror terrorizing all who had seen them, just to die after a painful agony, endlessly screaming a scream of pure fright. Those few attempts were made in the remote past before the instructions on how to make the journey were carefully hidden, lest a more adventurous and light hearted soul tried the fatal jump again.
Most people are insensitive to these tears and the visitors, but anyone at least at some point in their lives experimented some irrational fear, heard things, felt something - those are visitors from the evil side taking advantage of small tears. Having said that, some people are more sensitive to the projections or spirits (whatever you want to call them), and that explains why certain people could see things, and were plagued by visions right before falling asleep - tiny, temporary tears connecting the two universes are a common phenomenon, and sensitive people, particularly when it’s dark and quiet around them, can get glimpses of the other side, sometimes confusing them with dreams.
Sometimes larger tears form, and evil spirits appear on our side. There are places that, for whatever reason, are more subject to opening to the other universe. One example is what the Jews called Gehenna - this place of evil was, in fact, one of those places more subject to connections, and that’s why it was, well, a place of evil. Bad things happened there. Also, for reasons nobody can quite explain, after sometime the connections ceased completely.
At times the tears in the fabric of the universe happen inside a person or an animal. When that happens, evil flows freely inside that body, completely pushing away the original soul and taking its place. These are, in fact, what demonic possessions are.
Joseph stopped reading at this point, it was already dark again and he hadn’t noticed it; he was shivering, his face covered in cold sweat. What kind of sick imagination could produce such an account of spirits and demons, one that at the same time seemed to make no sense, while still presenting an explanation that almost sounded scientific and sometimes way ahead of time one would expect from those old, yellow and stained pages? He hastily closed the book, put it back on the pile where it came from and ran to his apartment, decided to set aside all his overworked imagination, conquer his irrational fear and have a good few hours of peaceful sleep. And so he did, fighting against the panic that overtook him as he approached his apartment and touched the doorknob. He summoned all his courage and determination, and managed to open the door, get in, and close the door behind him.
Joseph was never seen alive again. His boss, a rude and uneducated man, never bothered to call the police when Joseph didn’t show up for work, simply assuming that he had quit his job without notice. Several days later, the neighbors called the police to report a bad smell coming from Joseph’s apartment. When the police arrived and entered, they found Joseph’s body on the floor, the stink of death filling the small room. But that was not the worst of it.
The police, the detectives and the coroner all agreed what they would write in their reports, and they all agreed that somehow they would “lose” the pictures they pretended to take; some things are better off left alone. Unfortunately for them, what they saw remained permanently imprinted in their memories, and they all requested to be transferred to other places so they wouldn’t have to see each other every day and be reminded of what they had witnessed.
Joseph’s body was placed in a bodybag and sealed; he had no family left, so they quickly buried him - and they paid the gravediggers to dig an extra deep hole. Because nobody could stand what they saw in Joseph’s face - if a pure expression of fright ever existed, that would have been it, his eyes and mouth wide open, crooked, a silent scream shattered before it could materialize. But it was his eyes that were the most horrifying - wide open, gazing at something that could not be described, but if you paid close attention, you could still see a repulsive, maddening image imprinted in the dead irises...