That next day I called out sick from work. I googled “churches” on Google Maps and found one a mile from my home. Too sick to eat or even think about anything other than this entity that had taken over my life, I went to the corner store next door and bought the largest Redbull available for purchase. I left the convenience store on a mission; I was going to use my day to evoke a higher power, one that humans for thousands of years had turned to for the things that were more powerful than their understanding. Yet before I was able to set off on my journey, something gave me pause. It had been there for longer than I had been living in this apartment, and I had no doubt walked right past it countless times. But why didn’t it show up on my google search? I walked over to the large gothic looking building that had “St. Augustine est. 1892” written on it in crumbling stone. The for-sale sign outside of it was paired with an additional sign stating, “Private property: No Trespassing.” I marveled for a moment at the abandoned, beaten down church. I had never seen a church for sale before, it struck me as odd. There wasn’t even a name listed for the agency who owned the listing of the property, just a phone number. I stood on my tip toes to get a better look inside. The weeds and foliage had started to retake back what land was always and will forever be there’s. The stained-glass windows in the cathedral where masterpieces that bathed the pews in colorful light from the mid-morning sun. The place was haunting and beautiful just like the pictures depicted in each of the stained glass.
The walk to the church from my internet search was a blur. I could not control all the wicked and wild thoughts in my head. So many questions with no bastion for me to cast off from in a sea of confusion. I stared up at the church on the aptly named Church Street with hope in my heart that my first visit to a church since I was just a boy was fruitful in casting away what demonic presence had plagued my last few months. Inside it was what most churches looked like during off hours, empty, haunting, beautiful, powerful.
“There isn’t a mass scheduled for today. Can I help you son?” A priest emerged from behind a wooden carving of the virgin Mary to the right of the altar.
“Oh, Father I’m not here for mass. I actually… have something very strange to ask you.”
“Excuse my terminology, but you look like Hell. What is wrong?” He gestured for me to take a seat.
It did not occur to me until that very moment that I had prepared nothing for this encounter. What was I to say to this man of the cloth? How could I describe my situation to someone who was not immersed in the surrealistic nature of it all?
“I… have something to ask you about that not about God.”
“Okay, well why don’t you just go ahead and ask it.”
The priest was old enough to be my grandfather. He had a mystique about him only acquired through years of having other people speak their troubles at him. Every time I looked up, he was starring right into my eyes. I could not keep his gentle gaze. My discomfort with the subject at hand must have been evident because he prompted me again before I could speak.
“This is not the first time someone has come to me with something they themselves thought to be ridiculous. There is nothing as such on this Earth. God can help with any mortal matter.”
Hesitantly I asked, “What about those matters which are something… other than mortal.”
The old man was unflinching. He calmly replied, “Ah, I see, so it is a matter of something otherworldly? Would this be an inquiry into the ungodly that is always present in our world?”
“Always present?”
“Yes, of course. In my experience, there is always balance required in all things. One does not experience light without also experiencing dark.”
“I think there’s something dark that has… latched onto me. I know it sounds crazy, but for over a month now something has been… I don’t know, haunting me.”
The old priest’s facial expression did not budge. “Describe to me the entity. Withhold no details. Wait! First.”
The old man got up and locked the doors to the church. After his return I told him all about what I had been seeing.
“Did this entity,” he asked, “say anything to you? Has it given you any indication of what it wants?”
“My pain,” I explained, “ever since it has started talking to me all it keeps saying over and over again is that it wants my pain. It told me if I don’t give it my pain, then it will cause me to experience more pain then any human can bear- “
“Which would only make you all the more appealing to it.”
“Yes! It said that too.”
The old man’s brow furrowed, and he let out a deep sign, it felt like it was anger that drew the sigh instead of pity or anything else. Then he got up, disappearing behind the wood carved Virgin Mary. I couldn’t help but look up at her. She looked down at me with those engaged yet impartial eyes. It was as if she were saying, “not even I can help you in this fight, go with God.”
The old priest returned, slamming a book down before me.
“I know this entity of woe and despair. Tell me, have you experienced a great loss in your life? A tragedy that would leave your soul scarred. It won’t help you beat it, but it would confirm what we are dealing with.”
I told the priest about the drunk driving accident that took my parents from me when I was barely old enough to recognize what had happened. How they found me with my dead mother’s head in my lap. My grandparents bringing me to court in my tiny suit, watching the man who killed my parents after too man pina colada get sentenced to life in prison. My kindergarten all chipped in to try and help me morn a loss I could not accept had even occurred. How the foster care system in this country quickly taught me how to forget the past in favor to accepting the eternal Now because no one could survive such an experience without this sacrifice. I told him about a part of my life I spent 99% of the time since forgetting ever happened.
He was frowning, “I’m so sorry. I will do whatever I can to help you. First, I need you to understand a few things about the mortal and immortal world as I know it.”
With this his body language changed from that or pity to a more direct posture. “We all like to believe,” gesturing the church and every human outside of it, “that there is a good and evil in this world. A god and the devil. The angels and the demons. I spent my life in service to our lord, so I am including myself in this as well. But I cannot deny what I know to be empirically true based on my experience dealing with the immortal, or the world beyond our own physical world. Speaking from that standpoint, and not a priest of the church, there is no hierarchy that I can see among the things beyond our understanding. There are just simply those entities that are good, bad, malicious, mischievous, malevolent, and all the like. The evil entities do not punish the evil humans, the evil beings do not punish the good ones, the good ones don’t always help the good people, the good one do not always punish the evil. There is no moral compass that I can see when it comes to entities of the other realms of existence.
“Here’s what I do know. Those entities that would act maliciously towards you have some qualities that are common amongst them. First, all evil entities are more powerful, one might even be able to say more ‘real’ in our world when it is colder. Those tropes in movies about ghosts being a cold presence are true. Something about our world being colder allows them to exist here more freely.”
This all washed over me in a wave of prophetic awe. The entity had gotten more bold, more real as the temperature dropped. The nights were colder than the days; November was colder than October, and December was colder than both of them. That night when I saw those glowing eyes from the roof of my neighbor’s house was the first time it dropped below freezing. The night I let the monster into my apartment was the coldest night of the year so far.
“Where do you live?” The priest asked.
“I live over on High –“
“-land street” the priest finished, “That’s what I would expect. The second thing I know is that places of worship, those places in our world where humans gather to express combined faith are like imprints of the other world beyond. As I said before, you cannot have the light without the dark, the good without the evil. Churches and places of worship do attract the attention of virtuous deities like angels. But for the same reason they are attract malevolent demons. St. Augustine’s has been abandoned for over 40 years now and it has continued to be a beacon for entities, almost entirely of the evil kind. Virtuous deities are more drawn to those places where faith is actively being practice with the goal to attract them. But St. Augustine has no active worshippers. It still is imprinted on their world, and always will be, but the spirits that are willing to go there are more malevolent in lieu of their being more commonplace for worshipers in this world of the malevolent kind. You are not the first person who lives close to St. Augustine’s to come in here since it closed. I remember that day it closed.”
“What happened?”
“It’s a story for another time.”
“How many people have come here?”
“Being the closest church to St. Augustine, I can imagine we get most of the people like you who are affected, but there’s no way to know for sure.”
“How many?”
“In the forty years since it’s closed? I don’t know, I don’t keep a tally, but somewhere in the figure of 200.”
200 people. 5 unlucky people a year. And those are only the one’s who arrive here, at this church, courageous enough to fight. Stupid enough to look for answers.
“This entity that has attached itself to your soul, I have only known two other people who have had it. The entity want’s the pain you experienced in loosing your parents, it finds the grief you felt since to be the most enticing form of sustenance. Your heartbreak only gets better as you age, this entity will not stop until it can consume it.”
A worm squirmed in my stomach, twisting and turning, desperate to get out. I could barely ask.
“What happened to them? The two before me.”
“They gave it what it wanted.” The priest sighed. He steadied himself. “I am sorry. This entity takes your pain away, but in loosing that pain, you lose everything. Many of those who have these entities attach to their souls arrive as you did. This is their first time in a church for as long as they can remember. I am no one to them. For many of them, I have no idea what happened. I have no idea if they survived, became possessed, died horribly, or anything in between.” He paused, seemingly losing his train of thought, starring off into the distance, “I volunteer at the local hospital, Mount Ossipee. Many people in hospitals need priests. I started my time volunteering there to help those who needed strength or a path to the world beyond. But since St. Augustine closed, I kept going for another reason. I only see a fraction of the people who arrive here talking about dark entities eventually end up there, but it is the only way I can try to find out what happened to them. That and the obituaries, which a larger percentage show up in. The two that have been here before with this same entity both arrived at Mount Ossipee. Neither of them I could say ‘fully’ arrived there. You see, pain is normally seen as a bad thing in our society. Turn on your television for more than 10 minutes and you will be inundated with adds for treatments to essentially get rid of pain. It doesn’t matter if its physical pain, mental anguish, spiritual decay; all these can be relieved if you are willing to pay for it. But without pain, there is no reference point for every other experience on the spectrum. Like light and dark, bliss can only exist with pain, anguish, suffering, anguish, torment etc. Life does not exist without pain.
“When these men arrive at Mount Ossipee I had never seen anyone more dead while still having a pulse. It was as if someone had scooped out all the essence from their body and soul, leaving a decaying husk that could only be seen as waste. All the light from their eyes had gone. I have no idea how long after they gave the entity their pain they turned into these husks, but I can assure that they did give it exactly what they wanted.”
“So, what do I do if I can’t give it what it wants? How do I get rid of this thing!?” I started to feel my panic rising.
The priest shook his head in sorrow. “I don’t know. I haven’t had enough experience with an entity like this, so I have no reference for anyone who has had success against it. The only thing I can tell you with 100% certainty is that you cannot give it your pain. Whatever you do, you must hold onto your pain with everything you have, or the same thing will happen to you.”
There was not much left for me to speak with the priest about. He could not give me the answers that I needed to face this thing. He did send me on my way with a jewel encrusted cross, 2 vials of holy water, and a bible. He told me that he was sorry he couldn’t help me but hoped that these items may aid in some way. I was no better off at that time than when I had arrived at the church, besides possessing the assurance that there were others suffering the same fate and the solace that I was not crazy.
That night the forecast called for temperatures to drop into the teens for the first time that winter. I was almost certain that this malicious entity would not let the opportunity slip through its grasp. I knew it was coming, but I still had no idea what I would do when it arrived. I knew only one thing for certain, I could not under any circumstances surrender my pain to it. The priest had made it clear that my pain was a fundamental part of who I was, and that losing it was paramount to losing myself. That misconception that these men of the past had mistakenly seen as a blessing was the entity’s true genius. A small comfort was that I was the only person to have faced this entity yet armed with such knowledge. But even then, there still stood the fundamental question; if I could not give the entity what it wanted, what was there that I could offer it in return? How could I refuse the offer? I felt helpless in the wake of these questions. Sleep did not come easily despite my best laid plans. I thought about sleeping with a weapon by my bedside but decided against it. There was no flesh for me to strike with a blade or bludgeon. In my last meeting I had fallen physically paralyzed by the sight of the beast. There was no reason for me to believe that wouldn’t happen again. Instead, I knew the only weapon I could use was my mind. I would need to think my way out of this, hope for a miracle, or more likely utilize a combination of both. It was right in the middle of that thought that sleep finally took me.
There was no THUD on my door that night. I was simply asleep, and then I was awake, feeling consciousness pulled from me like a snake from its burrow. This feeling of being pulled backward into the light. The forces that bound me raised me into a seated position in the bed. At the foot of my bed was the old man with his back facing me. I can’t explain it, maybe it was my having unwrapped the mystery a little since out last encounter, but the presence coming off of the entity felt weaker somehow. A thought occurred to me; what if the entity was starving? What if, just like us mere mortals, hunger could weaken it? ‘ARE YOU READY TO GIVE ME WHAT I WANT?” the voice howled. The voice was summoned from a vocal range beyond that available to human vocal cords. It sounded like the horrid wailing screams from all our meetings prior, but more panicked. There was a frantic nature to its tone. Its hold over me was still too strong for me move, run, attack. I screamed back because it was the only thing I could do, “NO!” “GIVE ME WHAT I WANT!” This time the screams were louder than they had been before. The man turned around, eye’s glowing so bright and wild.
He hopped onto the bed. “YOUR PARENTS ARE DEAD! THEY ARE HERE IN THE WORLD BELOW! THEY DON’T MISS YOU THEY NEVER LOVED YOU! THEY BEGGED FOR THEIR DEATH!” The old man was now mere feet from me getting closer with each second. The old man was now mere feet away from me and getting closer with each blood drenched step. I could see his crooked mouth full of daggers, the dried blood clinging to scraggy facial hair. His eyes grew brighter, “GIVE IT TO ME!” “NO!” I screamed back. We were face to face now. I could smell its rotting breath, it took all my power to keep my stomach. “GIVE ME YOUR PAIN NOW OR I WILL SHOW YOU SUFFER YOU COULD NEVER IMAGINE!” “NEVER!” “NOW!” “NO!” Then the voice from somewhere inside this evil spirit said, “then take mine.” It was not the voice of a demon but a man. The old man in that instant grabbed my head on both sides. I could feel the crusted blood from his fingers against my face. And then I was gone. I had left my bed and was now somewhere else entirely. It was a profound darkness no one could describe in any language we mortals speak.
I hung there in the infinite darkness. It was only a moment, yet it felt like an eternity. Then I was lying on the floor of a dirty bathroom. I couldn’t look around, nor could I even feel the physical body I was in. A bottle of Drain O lay on its side in front of me pour its toxic contents slowly onto the floor in an ever widening, wait, shrinking pool. It was then that I noticed the liquid was going from the floor back into the bottle. The liquid became entirely removed from the floor and the bottle jumped into my hand. The bottle hit my hand at the same time when the body I was in started to rise. I was standing with the Drain O to my lips, the blood from inside of me was retreating back into my body. The body lowered the bottle and I saw in the mirror who I was inhabiting. It was the old man. He placed the bottle back down on the counter and looked closer into the mirror at himself. I wondered if he was really looking at me. He looked like he was in such agony.
Then I watched the whole life of the old man in reverse. I watched him backwards through his 50s drinking every night as the old man who no one in public would ever acknowledge. He spent each night alone, angry, drunk, in pain. He tore out patches of hair from his head in frustration while staring into mirrors screaming. He got beat up more than a few times, often picking a fight with those who were too happy for him to let go on their merry way. The man cashed unemployment checks and spent many nights on the streets sleeping on bus stops, beneath underpasses, and in makeshift tents. When he was housed, it was never for long. Evictions followed him under each new roof. He punched cement walls with bloodying knuckles. He would cut himself to make sure he could still feel.
I watched him loose job he hated in his late 40s. Then I watched him go to work everyday and pretend he didn’t hate it. He didn’t celebrate any birthdays in his 50s, but as the forty wound backwards he started to make himself a cake each year. 44 was spent with a store-bought cake in an apartment too large for just him. 43 was the same. 42, the same again, except he spends the whole day in fits of tears. I was in a court house watching a man get sentenced to jail for the murder of two people, the result of a drunk driving accident. Then I was at a funeral. Two pictures sat at the top of two very different size caskets. The picture of a beautiful woman with blonde hair was propped up on the larger of the two, that of a girl who couldn’t be older than 5 on the smaller one. I was in the remains of a car crash. The pavement on all sides of me was covered in bits of shattered glass and mangled metal parts. The whole scene was in red and blue light. I jumped up and the flaming car in front of me quickly reversed the explosion that had occurred. I was in front of the back passenger seat slamming the car window with my bloody fists. I crawled back into the wreck of the car and sat back down behind the wheel of the crumpled car. The woman’s whose picture was on the casket sat in the passenger seat with blood gushing from he head and a chunk of jagged metal through her torso. I was driving home before the car was hit. We were all out to dinner at a restaurant called The Great Wall of China. The little girl was slurping lo mein and I was holding the hand of the blonde woman.
I watched the old man fall in love with the woman’s whose name was Beth. I saw love blossom with maturity and respect. I felt a type of love that I had yet to experience in my own youthful stint at this game. The two fought but always made up. They loved each other before anything else in the whole world. The last memory I was shown was of Beth walking into a class at UConn and sitting next to the old man.
When I came back into my bedroom there were two presences there. It all started to click into place for me. This dark entity was not of our world, whether it was cold outside or a balmy summer day. It could only live here if it found a vessel attached to our mortal world of inexplicable sadness and pain. Suicide was probably the only way that a vessel as such would become available. And of that, a life of excruciating pain born from inexplicable chance would only sweeten the feast for such a despicable entity. It all came to me in an instant and I was sure I was right. There was another theory I couldn’t shake. The tragedy of a drunk driving accident didn’t seem like a coincident. I think the entity could taste different flavors of pain and suffering. And I think he liked the taste of this old man’s, so he sought for more of the same. I was furious. The anger of two wronged souls coursed through me.
The old man looked as he did in the last memory I saw of him at UConn. He looked at peace, and then he was gone. The other presence in my room was no more than the shadow of a being. It was dark with orange eyes. The shape of it looked like a human of incredible height, hunched over so its head hung around eye level to my own. The crest of its back touched the ceiling. I walked over to my front door and ripped it open. Then I looked the shadow, a mere wisp of the horror it was before. I starred straight into its glowing orange eyes that no longer terrified me. I stood with the door ajar, delivering the words I wanted to say with a fury I could not previously access,
“Get the fuck out of my apartment!”