“Maybe he’s still sleeping,” Damien said.
“It’s afternoon,” Aubrey said.
“He’s old.”
“You can hear him yelling stuff to himself at three in the morning. I think he gets more coffee than sleep.”
Damien knocked again.
“Maybe he died,” Sophia said.
They looked at her. A moment passed and heavy breathing came down the street towards the house, followed by a loud beeping sound. An old man in khakis and a heavy bag on his back came through the gate of the picket fence. “Wat doen julle hier?” he asked as he stomped up the steps to the door.
“We need to talk to you about something uncle Jakob,” Aubrey said. Jakob looked through the many keys on a giant key ring. The beeping sound coming from his bag turned into a constant ringing. “Not today,” he said, “Something big happened in the demon lands.” He shook the ring around and picked out the key. “But of course you children think I’m crazy so let me make a believable lie. I am terribly old and need to go to the toilet. I’ll be there for a while so don’t bother waiting.”
He opened the door and slammed it shut behind him.
“We believe you!” Aubrey said, “Something happened last night and you’re the only one who will believe us. We need your help.”
Jakob opened the door with shocked eyes, pointing the ringing device at them like a firearm. He looked directly at Damien with furrowed brows, noticing the bruise on his cheek and the swelling on his lip. He waved the device around to see where the ring was strongest. It turned to rapid beeps when he aimed it around him and it rang like a siren when aimed directly at Damien. He pressed a button and it turned off. Jakob looked at Damien with heart breaking surprise in his old and wrinkled eyes.
“This morning we had some first-hand experience with a demon... or two,” Aubrey said. Jakob looked at her. He was speechless and thoughtless, not knowing what to say or do.
“Kom in,” Jakob finally said and stepped aside for them. There was a hint of cautious humbleness in his voice. The three walked in. His house wasn’t the mess any of them were expecting. There were no pillars of books. The walls had no pages stuck up to hide the aged peach paint. There weren’t any maps with pins on them or blurry photos of demons. Jakob had an average home, however where the average home would have a vase of flowers or small statues or framed pictures, he had strange artefacts.
Jakob threw his bag down in his small lounge. “Have a seat. I’ll be back,” he said and walked down the passage from the lounge to his bedroom. They all squeezed onto the one couch and silently waited for him. It felt like waiting for a doctor to call one of their names.
He came back with a leather notebook, another device and a camping chair. He placed the device on the table and pressed a button on it. A red light came on. He unfolded the camping chair and sat down. He cleared his throat. “Do you mind?” he asked, gesturing to the recorder on the table between them. Damien looked at it and shook his head, but it was unexpected. The situation was a bigger deal for Jakob than any of them knew. He was face-to-face with the work of the better part of his life; the work that remained theoretical and without effective proof until now.
Jakob opened the book and scribbled the date at the top of a blank page. He looked at Damien and said, “Start wherever you’d like. Preferably at the start. What happened?” His white eyebrows bent up. He looked sad. This could have been children taking him for a fool again. This could have been another dream he was going to wake up from. Oh, the joy he felt when his old ears heard that ringing - a sound he’d only heard in dreams.
Damien took a deep breath.
“I woke up this morning after a nightmare. It was still dark. I felt weird. I think dissociative is a good way to describe it. Things just popped into my head and I went with it. I walked outside without a flashlig—”
“Where were you at that time?” Jakob asked.
Damien looked to the rest first. “We were sleeping in an abandoned house in the forest.” Jakob’s expression didn’t change. He just made notes. “May I ask where exactly this house was?”
“At the foot of Table Mountain. Newlands forest pretty much.”
Jakobus nodded and made more notes.
“I walked outside and went to go sit and look at the moon. Somehow I could sense what was going on around me. I was connected to the space. A man in a mask was hiding behind a tree and I felt anxiety. It was like anxiety, but without the uncertainty of what might happen. I knew what was going to happen.”
Jakobus didn’t stop him to question any of it and didn’t react to any of it. None of it fazed him. He simply made notes every few seconds without needing to look at the page.
“Aubrey found me and we started talking. The man stepped out from behind the tree, I sensed it and I blacked out, but- but my body didn’t.” He said it like it was a question. “When I woke up, I felt weak, but not in a way that my muscles were tired. I just had no control over my body. I fell to the ground, threw up and blacked out again... and what’s weird is that when I woke up after the first black out, I remembered everything I did while I was unconscious.”
“You did something while you were unconscious?”
“No I mean when I blacked out, something else took over. And when I was conscious again, I remembered what I- what my body did while I was unconscious. I remember the feelings and everything. It’s like having a memory of something you never experienced.”
“What did you do while you were unconscious?”
Damien paused.
“I blew fire...” He paused again to wait for Jakob’s reaction, but again, there was none. He simply made his notes to study and investigate later. His eyes lost that sadness. He wasn’t dreaming and he knew it. He now had the curious, serious eyes of the scientist that he was.
“I was stronger. I started to fight with the man until he left. Once he left, the second blackout happened. When I woke up, we left and went to Aubrey’s grandma.”
Jakob said nothing. He finally looked down at his page and jotted down his thoughts in fluent cursive scribbles.
“His eyes also turned black,” Aubrey said, “It looked like his eyes were leaking black silk.” Jakob looked up from his notes. “Did you feel possessed?” he asked.
“I ... suppose. As I said, I blacked out when it happened.”
“And the nightmare?”
“What about it?”
“There must be something special about it, considering it happened just before this. What happened in it?”
Damien thought about it.
“The dream felt like a memory too. I don’t know who I was, but I definitely wasn’t me. It was first person. Whoever I was, was trying to commit suicide. I was standing at the edge of a cliff over the ocean, but when I jumped off, something stopped me. I grew wings and I flew.”
Sophia and Aubrey hadn’t heard this part yet. They both stared in anticipation and listened attentively. Damien looked down at nothing. Talking about the dream filled him with a hollow fear. It felt too real.
“I was- I was possessed. By something. I blacked out, just like this morning, only I was able to maintain consciousness. The man was angry at the thing possessing him. He tried to fight back, but eventually he just gave up.”
“Do you feel like the man at all? At any point after the dream, did you feel any sort of… presence.”
Damien looked up. It seemed Jakob knew something. “I feel like... I am an adult, but I feel it uncertainly. I feel like I’m both a child and an adult at the same time. It’s like the possession came with the original host. I think there’s a third part of me that is that man.”
Jakob shook his head. “I’m not a genius in possession, but I don’t think you should feel ‘uncertainly’,” he air quoted, “like a different host. Do you feel the same for the possession?”
Damien shook his head.
“There are three entities we’re working with here,” he spoke with a lecturer’s voice. “There’s you, the possession, and the man aka ‘the host’,” he air quoted again. “Why does one forcefully take control of you yet the other feels familiar despite them both being foreign to your body and mind?”
Damien felt himself start to shake. He hoped it wasn’t noticeable. He knew the answer and so did Sophia and Aubrey, but he didn’t want to say it. He hoped Jakob had a different answer.
“Damien, you are the host. If you feel like that man, even slightly, then you must be that man.”
“But I’m not that man.” He wanted to argue, hoping to make some point that changed the conclusion that he wasn’t his own person. He was a placeholder for somebody else.
“Not anymore, but it’s like nostalgia felt by your being. You’re feeling like who you used to be…”
Damien said nothing. Jakob said nothing. Aubrey and Sophia said nothing. The fact settled in with them on the couch. Damien was reincarnated. The three were in an awkward state of both believing it and not believing it. Their logic told them that it was just fiction and Jakob really was crazy, but following the logic of what happened, it made sense.
“Damien why did you come to me? What exactly are you hoping to get from me?”
“I just want to understand what happened. I want to know what to do about it. You’re the only person we know who knows about demons.”
Jakob tried to piece together some advice. He could see that Damien needed some sort of guidance. Everything he studied about angels and demons were just theories and logical ideas he believed to be facts. Now he was facing a real specimen, and it was asking for help. “Do you trust me?” Jakob asked all of them, but he only needed Damien’s answer. Damien nodded.
“You became possessed because of that man in a mask. This thing controlling you is a reaction to a threat. I suggest you stay away from threats so that it doesn’t come out again. Demons don’t want us to know they exist. They make themselves scarce. I don’t exactly know why. I also think that they have places of hiding. I was able to follow energy sources into forests and bushes. I think the energy comes from some kind of portal separating our worlds. Stay away from unpopulated areas. That’s where most of them are. It might be easy for you. I need tools, but with what happened to you, you might have gained a sense for where they are.”
“Do you know what exactly is on the other side?” Damien said, “Of those portals, I mean.”
“I was able to find general locations of them. I was never able to see or pass through one. The only reason I know any of them are there is because of the tools I use and because there’s a spike in their radiation shortly before and after demon incidents. It could be a hell. It could be a heaven. It could just be a copy of our world.”
“If this demon is here as a reaction to threat, why is it only showing itself now? It’s not like a man in the forest was the first thing to be potentially dangerous.”
“Something must have changed recently. Maybe something came into your life that triggered this. Maybe encountering another demon for the first time caused this.”
It wasn’t the answer Damien was hoping for. It was just a bunch of maybes, but he understood that Jakob didn’t understand it either. He didn’t have many sources to work from. All he had was his own will to discover. Jakob sighed, pulled his bag to his leg and scratched through it. He took out a large paper rolled up and held closed by an elastic.
“Damien, I know this isn’t as helpful as you expected. I work with books, stories and things I can’t see. Sometimes I think I’m Crazy Jakob too.”
Damien and Aubrey looked at each other, slightly embarrassed.
“In the case that you figure something out or feel confident in your abilities in dealing with this,” he said and held out the paper. “I wouldn’t recommend it, but seeking another demon might be what you need. If you do decide to use this, just remember that they aren’t friendly creatures, from what I understand.”
Damien took the paper and unrolled it. It was a map marking the different locations of the portals that Jakob found, from the Western Cape all the way up to Limpopo.
______
“Am I the only one who feels guilty?” Aubrey asked as she drove, “All my life I thought he was crazy and now he’s the only one putting some logic into this thing we don’t understand… To be fair, he still yells to himself in the morning. That is pretty crazy, regardless of what he says.”
Aubrey looked in her rear-view mirror at Damien and Sophia. All she could see were their foreheads peeking at her from behind the giant page. They were looking at the map that Jakob gave them. “It’s crazy how many of these portals there really are,” Sophia said.
“He probably didn’t even find them all,” Damien said. “And this map is just our country.
“If you had to search for demon incidents on the internet, we aren’t even close to headlining,” Aubrey said, “These things are global. Multiply however many portals are on that map by the number of countries in the world.”
“And imagine if everything from the other side decided to come over. We’d be in trouble,” Sophia said.
“You don’t seem bothered by any of this,” Aubrey said. Damien looked up from the map at her in the mirror. “It feels natural... and Jakob said that as long as I stay away from these places I’ll be fine.”
“So you aren’t planning to find demons?”
“Do you want me to?”
“If you don’t want to, I won’t make you, but I am curious. Don’t you want to know what’s on the other side of those portals? If you’re a demon, it’s like you have a membership that gets you into the other side.”
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“I do, but I don’t think I’m ready for it.”
“If you ever do decide to go to one, tell me. I’ll bring a fire extinguisher and a bad attitude. And Sophia will bring emotional support.”
Damien smiled. “We are a group of clowns,” he said, “A group of clowns looking to fight demons.
“Urah!” Aubrey yelled.
The weekend passed as usual, only with the extra burden of a secret. Damien was tempted to tell them, but his parents wouldn’t believe them if he tried to explain what happened. Damien told his parents that the bruise on the side of his face was from an aggressive pillow fight. The rest of his Saturday was spent thinking about his blackout and thinking about who he was. He laid in bed for most of it. Sometimes he would watch TV and not pay attention. He felt that he was going to be replaced by who he was in some other life. He also gained a newfound respect for Jakob. He was able to theorise a science of something that he could never observe. He needed imagination to come up with it, a genius to prove it, and a craziness to enable it all - a creativity like a drug and a logic defiant of science.
By Sunday he lived like it never happened, albeit with his identity issues. News reports warned of a new demon seen in the mountains - a pale woman in a black dress. It was more of a ghost sighting. The witnesses only had claims and no proof and nobody believed them, as usual. Damien didn’t know what to think of it anymore.
At the end of the day it felt like life was back to normal. Damien laid in bed staring at the roof. That was his weekend. He wanted to go through a school week before he let himself settle down again, but his brain had no say over how his body felt. He felt fine. Life was fine. What happened was a brief, meaningless thrill… It wasn’t. Why did it feel like it was? Life goes on. Why did it go on? He was possessed. He found out that he was a nobody waiting to be replaced.
And yet, he felt like everything was fine. Everything was wrong, and that was normal. That was okay.
______
“You’re kidding.”
“Swear to God.”
“How?”
“I think I got it from my dad. That side of the family is composed of rugby players, martial artists and some soldiers.”
“I wish I could run that far.”
“Usually I’d say it takes hard work, but in my case, I really did just win the genetic lottery. I mean obviously I train, but I had some genetic luck. I popped out of my mom and started doing laps around the hospital.”
Sophia laughed. “You must be the fastest athlete in the school.”
“Not even.”
“There’s somebody better?”
“Somebody who does sprinting. I’m second to her in pretty much everything other than long distance.”
“If you had to train really hard for one week, do you think you could beat her?”
“Nope. She’s on special diets and protein shakes and she has a trainer. I’m on a healthy diet of whatever the hell my parents give me and I just make up workouts.”
The bell rang over the intercom and the two picked up their bags. “I suppose it’s a career path for her. Where are you heading?” Aubrey asked.
“Physics,” Sophia answered, “What about y—”
“Aubreyanna,” a deep voice called. Aubrey looked at Victor standing at his desk. “Yes sir?” she said and walked to him. Sophia slowly left with the rest of the class, unsure if she should stand with her. Victor waited for everybody to leave the class before walking to the door, closing it and coming back to his desk. He stayed silent for a moment.
“What’s wrong with your friend?” he asked, “Damien.”
“What do you mean?” She was good at playing it cool, but hearing that question felt like swallowing a brick.
Victor shifted uncomfortably, trying to think of how to answer. Aubrey squinted at him… the width of his shoulders caught her attention, and her mind started piecing together similarities. Being an aspiring fashion designer, she had an eye for things like these. Mister Halliday’s build always intrigued her. He was simultaneously the burliest, the slimmest, and the most averaged height man she had ever seen. He was built like an ox that was made to race cheetahs.
Her eyes grew wide and she stepped back.
“You’re the demon who tried to kill us!” she yelled.
“Shhh not so loud! I didn’t try to kill you. He tried to kill me.”
“Then why were you out there in the forest where we were?”
“I was... searching for you. For Damien.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Is it some demon magic stuff I wouldn’t understand?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“So you’re a demon?!”
“Yes, Aubrey, but not the demon you’re thinking of.”
“The fuck kind of demon then?”
“Aubreyanna, stop. I need you to tell me what’s happening to Damien.”
“Why?”
Victor took an annoyed breath. “Because there are legitimately bad people out there who are much stronger than I am. If I’m able to find Damien, they can too. Only they won’t be searching for him. They’ll be hunting for him.”
Aubrey looked at Victor with worry. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”
Victor raised a brow at her. He felt slightly offended by that. “If I wanted to kill him, he wouldn’t be at school today. If I wanted to kill him I wouldn’t be asking you what’s wrong with him out of concern.”
Aubrey nodded at the obvious. She took a deep breath. “We don’t know exactly what’s going on. Damien said he woke up and he felt like... an obedient slave I guess. He walked outside to that spot where you found him. When you came, he said he was possessed. We went to talk to somebody who was supposed to be an expert on this stuff afterwards.”
“Who was it?”
“His name’s Jakobus. Until Saturday, we called him Crazy Jakob... We talked to him about it and we think that the possession has something to do with reincarnation or something. He had this dream where he was somebody else and he got possessed in the dreams too so he’s starting to think that the dreams are memories.”
Lightbulb. Reincarnation answered the million-dollar-question: Where does he get the power from?
“What else did Jakobus tell you?”
“He gave Damien a map of locations of portals. He said that Damien needs to stay away from those locations because meeting another demon will make him possessed again as a defence mechanism. He also said that if Damien ever felt ready, meeting another demon to teach him might be what he needs.”
Victor nodded and rubbed his chin. It sounded like Jakobus, whoever he was, knew what he was dealing with. The noise of students lined up at the door came in through the corridor windows.
I want you to promise me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Try to keep Damien away from going through any of the portals. Don’t even let him get near them. If something ever happens to him, related to this, tell me first. And don’t tell him we had this conversation.”
“Why not?”
“He sees me as a threat. If his possession is a defence mechanism then he might try to kill me.”
“But he doesn’t see you as a threat.”
“He doesn’t, but whatever is possessing him does.”
“But you can beat him, can’t you? You can help him?”
That caught Victor by surprise. She looked at him as if he were the solution to their problem. What was happening to Damien was stressing her too.
“Aubreyanna, you were there. I can’t even get near him. And I don’t want to scare you, but Damien might be a threat to everybody, which is why you need to keep him away from the gates and out of that forest you were in on Friday night. We can’t trigger him.”
“Gates?”
“We call it gates, not portals.”
“Oh...”
“So do you promise?”
“... Do I have to keep him out of the forest we were in?”
“Yes. That’s… what I just said.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s near one of the gates. Now do you promise?!”
Aubrey hesitated. If it were a more human situation, she wouldn’t have, but it wasn’t human. She was promising that she could keep her friend, who is now a demon, away from more demons. She thought about the demon sighting that happened the day before. The witnesses claimed to see her in the forest they were in. It could have been looking for Damien.
“This is for Damien, Aubreyanna,” Victor added, “It’s dangerous and until I think of a way to help him, if I do, it’s going to stay dangerous.”
Damien was her friend - her best friend - since the third grade. Because of his shyness and how he couldn’t stand up for himself, she took on the role of a big sister. This situation was nothing new, but it was more dangerous and with the additional demons.
“I promise,” she said, “But promise me you’ll think of a way to help him. This is just the start of it. We don’t know it’ll get better and his parents don’t know anything at all. And you say that other demons are after him. According to news headlines around the world, staying away from gates isn’t a prevention.”
Now Victor was in the spotlight. She was right. Some demons aren’t scared to show themselves.
“You don’t have to try and get rid of the demon thing. I think that’s permanent, but at least help him use it and understand it.”
“I promise,” he said.
“Thank you.” Aubrey waited for a moment, but that was all Victor had to talk about. She walked out of the classroom and let Sophia know right away. It would be easier for her if two of them had the same goal. They had no questions about the goal, but every time they passed Victor - known to them as mister Halliday - they felt an awkwardness from knowing that they were keeping a secret with a teacher.
Damien would have had a normal day, but it was littered with dissociative episodes. He would stare down at his book and everything his teachers said would go unheard. It seemed to be the state that his body went into when he took a step back from his own mind and this demon was ready to pounce into control. It happened every time he overheard other students discussing the demon sighting. The pale woman in the black dress was a celebrity now. It was a group of students who’d seen her. They were all cross-country runners, training for the winter season. Damien heard that the demon was seen in the forest where they stayed. He feared that it was coming after him… No, he knew that it was coming after him. He even remembered to bring his pocket knife.
He felt a similar disassociation as he walked through the corridors of the school. Each time he did, Aubrey or Sophia were with him and they would guide him in a different direction. They were conveniently always with him. It was as if they knew he wasn’t feeling right, but Damien assumed they were just worried. That and he was too busy focussing on not blacking out to really notice.
When the school day had ended, he walked home. Sophia’s parents had come to fetch her from school so he walked alone. He felt anxious. He felt like a target. He didn’t encounter the demon in the forest coincidentally. He was being hunted and there was nothing to show him that the hunt had ended. The fear made his state worse. He stared at the ground to make sure he was placing his feet properly. He was losing balance. He only looked up every time he had to cross a road.
Something slammed hard on his shoulder. Damien looked straight up and twisted his head in surprise.
Not these two.
“Howzit, Dummy?” one of his unnamed bullies asked with a ‘friendly’ arm around Damien’s shoulders.
“I’m fine,” Damien said.
“Do you like the nickname?”
“It’s original.”
Damien crossed legs on one of his steps and fell a bit to the side, shaking off the bully’s hand.
“Jerre. Can’t even walk,” the other bully said.
“Are you feeling sick or something?” the first bully said and poked Damien’s shoulder. Damien crossed legs again, but this time he fell onto the grass in front of one of the houses.
“What’s wrong with you?” the second bully asked.
Damien said nothing, stood up, wiped the dirt off his knees and continued with a sigh. “He must’ve had a knee injury from playing rugby,” the first answered and they laughed.
“Is that it? Did you try out for rugby and hurt yourself?”
Damien felt his breath start to stutter and the pavement started to swirl in his vision. One of his legs lost feeling and he fell before his other leg caught him.
“Now he’s just being stupid,” the second said. He swept Damien’s foot out from under him as he stepped and Damien fell to one knee.
______
There you are!”
______
The stuttering breaths moved to his lip as a quiver. He was angry. It wasn’t sadness disguised as anger. It was anger disguised as sadness. He was so angry he wanted to cry. He wasn’t sad because he was bullied. A little voice in his head whispered into his internal ear something different. He was angry because he was above them and he knew it. He was angry because he could do terrible things to them, but he let himself get pushed to the ground.
The ground stopped swirling like vision coming into focus. Damien regained full consciousness. He slowly got to his feet.
If he were to push me right now, I would...
The first bully shoved Damien’s shoulder, but he didn’t fall. He caught himself with bent knees and pushed the bully on his chest. “Jy!” the bully yelled. He stumbled backwards off the edge of the pavement and was almost hit by a car. The car hooted loudly. The driver yelled at them and then drove off. Damien rolled his shoulders back. He felt like a man who had eaten a demon’s shit for so long he was ready to jump off a cliff. The bully was his demon; this fight was the jump. It was never just a suicide. It was an act of decisiveness. He’d had enough.
The bully gave an ugly frown, stepped onto the pavement and pushed Damien back. As the shove came, Damien twisted and hooked the bully in his jaw. Damien fell back and the bully fell sideways with a grunt. The second bully punched Damien in the side and Damien kicked him in the hip. The two bullies backed up and threw down their bags. Good idea, Damien thought. He dropped his bag and took off his tie. The first bully rubbed the side of his jaw and said, “You hit like a poes naaier!”
The two rushed him. Damien punched the first one again, but missed. The second one grabbed Damien’s arm, got behind him and tried to choke him. Damien slammed his elbows into him one after the other and pressed back. They both fell to the ground, the bully knocked breathless. Damien pressed his chin down and pried on the bully’s arms. The first bully stomped on Damien’s stomach. The corner of the heel cut into Damien’s ribs. Air rushed in and out of his nose. In his pants pocket, he felt something press against his leg. In that instant, he thought of all the possibilities, all the things he could do, the thousands of ways he could tear two people apart… and in that situation alone. His mind filled with vile inspiration.
Damien stopped pulling on the second bully’s arms and rather tried to catch the first one’s foot. The first two attempts failed, the shoe scraping skin off of his palms. On the third he caught it flawlessly on beat. He had both palms pressing the sole of the shoe. He used one hand to keep the foot while his other reached into his pocket.
The bully yelled in pain as Damien slashed a knife across his calf. Damien kicked his standing knee and let go of his foot. The bully fell back, hitting his bum on the curb and the back of his head on the road. Damien used his free hand to keep the second bully’s arms in place around his neck. The tip of his knife pierced the back of the bully’s forearm and Damien carved between the two bones up to the elbow. The bully screamed and let Damien go. Damien rolled to the side, stood up and kicked him before stepping away.
Damien was aiming for the Achilles. He was hoping the knife would go deeper into the arm.
The bully, with tears in his eyes, helped his friend to his feet. Damien got up and faced them. Both of them put on a hard face. Damien knew they were scared. He could sense it in them, but despite what they felt, they were stupid and kept up the act.
He stepped towards them. They stepped towards him.
But before the situation could move forward, it went sideways.
Damien’s senses blurred. His skin felt like television static and his vision turned to an acid trip. A low ringing hummed in his head. His sense of taste and smell were vague. A split second in real time was ten seconds in his experience. He reached a state that felt like hyper-mindfulness. He was mindful, yet thoughtless.
He felt life pulsing in every cell in his body and above all the overstimulation, a sixth sense formed.
This sense was the same sense that he felt when that man in the forest attacked him. Like eye sight, he could focus nearby or far away. Unlike eyesight, he could do it all at once. He could feel the insignificant presences of the people in their homes and those nearby who came to see what the yelling was about. None of these mattered. None of these were why this was happening.
The sense focussed far away. A bright light was facing him. It was coming for him, he knew.
Damien’s vision swirled. He felt as if his eyes were being unscrewed. His temples started to pain. His mind drifted away in the commotion of every sense screaming at him at once and his body, for a quick moment, was lifeless. Then, consumed by his inside turning out, the perception of time realigned with real time and he turned to the light. He dropped his knife on the pavement and he started to run. The bullies wouldn’t let him get away so they chased.
The bright light that he sensed was coming for him. He ran to it and it ran to him. He didn’t use his eyes, only the sixth sense and the queue of commands. He had no idea where he was or how long he’d been running.
He felt his legs slow down and his hearing let in the sound of crunching dead leaves. Damien looked up. He was in a forest. All of his senses returned in an instant and it was like he woke up from a dream. He turned in circles, not knowing why he was there or what he was supposed to be looking for. All he knew was that his demon was about to come out.
He heard the bullies coming up behind him, but they were the least of his concern. A low pitched and soft tinnitus grew into a high-pitched screeching that hurt his ears, his other senses distorting with it. The bullies yelling sounded like mumbling. His body filled with a nauseous and weak feeling. Turning in his constant circle like a mad man, Damien thought he was going deaf.
His last sight was the swirling vision of a pale woman in black lashing out at him and then...
Black...