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Mother
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Shape-Shifting:
Finally, its real face
Book One: Creator's Hope
Second Tale:
A Demon Feeds on Your Terror
Chapter 4: It Comes
Quinn speaks:
As to that next night:
The demon came again to my room.
At first, peeking out from under my bedcovers, I saw only the shadow it cast across the bedroom floor in the dim moonlight penetrating from the hallway.
I felt mortal terror, but forced myself to look up into the doorway. It advanced, a big, shadowy figure I could see only in silhouette.
“I am FleshCrave the Soulsucker,” it snarled in a voice sounding both like that of a man and a woman, yet also wild and inhuman. “I am spawn of Lucifer and Grendles mōdor.* It was I who stoked the Witchfires of the Inquisition and Salem. I feed on childflesh. I feed slowly to savor every bloody bite. I will chew the flesh from your bones and ingest your screaming soul as it flees your body in agony. I am terror beyond terror. You are paralyzed by your fear of me. You cannot run; you cannot scream for help!”
*(The mother of the monster Grendel, fought by Beowulf. FleshCrave injects a bit of Old Anglia-Saxon into its speeches every now and then, on the belief that it spikes the impending victim’s terror, which gives off an aroma it savors. – Plug)
I had no idea why the thing was reciting its lineage and personal history; it meant nothing to me back then. Even then, as a kid, even as I was gripped by terror, I felt for just an instant that its manner of announcing itself was comically self-absorbed. Yet, too, I was only ten at the time and inexperienced with demons, so the look of the thing, its awful voice, the choking, noisome odor of rotting flesh in its hot breath, and the fact that I was tonight’s entrée did indeed incite a terror beyond any I could have imagined up until then.
As Fleshcrave advanced toward me, it shifted shape rapidly, its face changing rapidly in a frightening montage of what looked like monstrous caricatures of my father’s face and burlesques of my mother’s, one after the other, all with the red-painted fingernails and lips, seeming to drip blood.
It drew close, within inches of where I’d held a crack of the bedcovers open. It was noisome of body, breath, and septic drool, and now brightly aglow with desire.
It bent very close and sniffed. Its face, inches away, stared at me with one big, bloodshot eye.
But I had something new on my side, and I don’t mean only the baseball bat. I now knew that I harbored this astonishing Wrath, an unfathomed depth of it, deposited in my soul one smackdown after another over years of parental abuse.
So yes, I was terrified. But not paralyzed.
Now came my moment: rather than curl up under the protective magic of the bedcovers as I always had before, I slid out of the far side of my bed, stepped out into the open, and faced the beast.
For just a moment, as I looked up and saw all of it for the first time, this seemed like a monumental mistake.
It was huge, a good seven feet tall and broad as a doorway, with brawny arms like my father’s, but exaggerated. Its fat lips were indeed painted in my mother’s fuck-me-red lipstick, thick and overdone. It now had huge orange fangs and fingernails longer than hers, claw-like and colored a brindle of orange and black.
And in its huge, wild eyes, with orange tendrils in the sclera, I saw its insatiable hunger for the flesh of a human child.
But now, facing it rather than cowering, I recognized it. To my astonishment, its face was exactly the face of the demon in the fragment of pottery my father had brought home from Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat! It was the same monster! I wondered: Is this a revelation? Am I being gifted with a bit of knowledge about how the hidden, spiritual world works?
Its excitement rose as the scent of childflesh filled its flaring nostrils. Its skin began to lump and writhe all over its body, as if a thousand tiny things were struggling to burst out. And in the dark, I thought I could see them: tiny eyes, noses, and mouths, their faces contorted in a shared agony beyond mortal experience. What was I seeing? Were these the souls of its victims?
FleshCrave advanced, leaving me no time to ponder further what horrors its skin contained.
Deliberately, I had left the Orphan’s Toothpick across the room. I summoned it now with an extended arm and an open palm of a raised hand.
Again, the bat flew to me – magically, loyally, I did not know how – but as I felt it hit the palm of my hand and I wrapped my fingers around it, my vision was suddenly floodlit with red, giving the entire room a red glow. And the voice within me, the voice of the Wrath, rose much louder than it had with the three child bullies.
This internal voice began to chant a song of rage, at once sacred and homicidal. Yes, it felt righteous, as if I were a crazy person in a mental breakdown, finding some twisted illogic for mayhem:
“Yes, murder!” it screamed within me. “Murder! Oh, murder most joyful!”
Banjo hitter that I was, I cocked the bat as if to slap the monster’s head for a line-drive single between short and third.
It bent to bite. I stared into its nearly baseball-sized eyes.
Here is a fact I learned in that instant about Bloodymouth demons: while they feed on your terror, they fear a brave heart (if the rage within me could indeed be called that).
I saw that fear in its eyes as I started to swing.
And the swing itself: it was as if the bat, not me, the skinny little singles hitter, took control and pulled my arms with it in a home-run swing as powerful as any Sultan Prince had ever swung.
Then, in an instant, in mid-swing, just as I felt the bat make hard contact with its face, FleshCrave disappeared. It dematerialized right before my eyes. The Orphan’s Toothpick hit something that was solid for an instant but then was gone, and the bat fanned the air as it passed through where the monster’s head had been, like the Orphan barely nicking a foul ball.
The power of the swing carried me around in a 360-degree gyration and into a heap on the floor. I looked up and around. It was indeed gone.
So I had whiffed, or at best, foul-tipped it.
“Strike one,” I whispered to myself.
But one was enough. FleshCrave would never return to my bedroom.
I collapsed on the floor, exhausted, with the bat in my hands like an avenging sword in the hands of a spent warrior.
I jolted awake in the morning, still on the floor. I sat up and looked around. Everything in my room was normal.
But I knew that normal I was not. I wondered, “Who or what am I?” There were no answers. I would have to wait a long, long time for answers.
I never again wet my bed.
I couldn’t tell this tale to anyone at the time, of course.
So began a new phase of my survival. With FleshCrave gone and the three playground bullies scared, I did what becomes an automatic reflex as a child grows older. Fearing ostracism and its consequences, I shut my mind to the very existence of magical beasts, to my ability to summon objects, and to the entire body of mystical and magical knowledge I’d glimpsed. And even to the fact of this Wrath that lay dormant in my soul.
It was exactly thus that, over time, I lost the path to that other world, in which magic, wizards, warriors, demons, angels, and beings of two natures exist.
Was this my father’s motive, too, for smacking me around the dining room? Was it to cure me of my childish fantasies and force me to live with his, as if they would empower me to face what he thought of – what you, reader, think of – as the real world?
Or was there more to him? Was it possible that my father, too, had come face to face with this demon at the very moment the war had seemed over for him and therefore when he must have been at his most vulnerable, thinking that no more courage would be needed?
Was it possible that he had failed to defeat it or scare it off, and that then, when chance or fate juxtaposed Hitler’s Berghof and Dachau for him days apart, so vividly illustrating that men possessed by demons walk among us, wearing fine suits and charismatic personalities, willfully leading toward destruction those whose own inchoate impulses to conquer and possess draw them to adore and follow such evil men, his courage had failed him at length?
Or am I mistakenly trying to see his war experience through a boy’s eyes, as myth and metaphor? Is that juxtaposition of the Berghof and Dachau, stripped of the protective fantasies of childhood, the true memory? Are there no actual demons as beings, only demons within the soul, ever craving expression, ever at war with the potential for the angelic within us?
I’ve come to believe it’s not either-or, but both. What other theory can explain both FleshCrave and the likes of, to choose modern examples, our former President, Baccarat Magot – or, more vividly, the likes of that self-castrated and perpetually enraged Skoptsyian Empire dictator, Volvka Sputim, who’d murdered civilians by the tens of thousands when he sent his army, his tanks, and his air power to crush civilized, democratic Russia and publicly torture to death its wise and gentle leader, Vladimir Putin, beloved by his people and respected worldwide as a maker of peace, and then to invade Sarmatia-Trypillia?
I never got to pose this question to my father. Perhaps it is cruel of me to speak of him this way. But you, dear reader, did not endure the back of his hand, the occasional beatings with no rational motivation, the surly drunkenness exploding into sudden rage.
Years later, when he passed of a heart attack, with all issues unresolved between us, I would tell myself at times that the heartless bastard died of a malfunction of the blood-pumping machinery.
At other times, thinking about him, I would remind myself of a conversation with one Dain Dumass about fathers and sons – but that races ahead to the Fourth Tale.