I see demons behind my eyes. I used to see them out in the world, but now they’re behind my eyes.
It started subtly at first, years ago. Even though there was no one there, and I didn’t even believe in any religion or an afterlife, as my little daughter was dying in the hospital, I begged anything to save her. I called out to any gods, any demons, anything, offering my soul, my afterlife, in exchange. I said that they can make my worst nightmares come true.
She died minutes later. Nothing had answered me, or so I thought.
Then as months of grief and partial recovery passed, (although I knew her loss would be one I never could fully recover from, that my true soul was gone), I began to see them. Subtly at first, as I said, in the corner of my eye, watching me from the dark or peeking around corners at me, in such a way that you do a double take, and when nothing is there, you realize your mind was just playing tricks on you.
But then I started to see them more clearly, not even trying to hide, just standing there in the dark like shadows, where I just barely can’t make out their features, but when I’d turn on the light, they’d always be gone.
I grew paranoid, beginning to feel like I was being watched at all times, even if no one else was around. That’s when the nightmares started. I had never been much of a dreamer, and usually if I did have the occasional dream, it would be something happy, perhaps a beautiful day at the beach or hike through the woods, a childhood memory of playing with my boyhood dog, that sort of thing. Of course, when my daughter got sick, and after she died, I would have grief nightmares about losing her, but they were always focused around her. These nightmares were different, horrific hellish mutilations, taking place in the very pits of hell themselves, where myself and others were facing our worst nightmares come to life. The physical pain and mental terror worse than any other I had ever experienced in the waking world, except for losing my daughter, of course. Any sleep recovery I had made was quickly lost to me after weeks of this new hell.
Then I began hearing them whispering to me in the dark, just saying “Hello” or something out of nowhere at first, but then no one would be there when I looked around in a panic.
Soon after, they began actually revealing themselves to me.
A pale skinned woman standing naked in the hall, her flesh mutilated in varying degrees, her golden, bulging, and bloodshot eyes staring into my soul as she chewed the flesh off her fingers, gnawed on a severed hand, or tore through her mouth with strips of barbed wire, blood pouring down her face, torso, and arms before splattering to the tile floor below her.
A small, ashen skinned, humanoid creature rounding a corner in the dark and rushing at me on all fours while it stares up with black, soulless eyes, and lets out an inhuman and guttural screech.
A dead little girl in a soaked sun dress, her flesh green-hued with rot, standing outside and pointing at my pool in the middle of the night, revealing all the screaming souls of her victims drowning eternally under the water.
A laughing and hairless man with skin as dark as coal and clawed fingers standing inside my closet with pale-blue eyes that seemed to glow in the dark, centered by the pupils of a snake, his hysterical laughter and surprise flinging open of my closet door threatening to drive me mad. Though I supposed at the time that I probably was going mad.
An impossibly tall man in a fancy top hat and trench coat with blood red eyes staring into my soul while he flips an unfamiliar coin in one hand and holds an elegant cane in the other, his calm demeanor and unnaturally large grin filling me with the worst sense of dread I could imagine at the time.
I thought it possible I was going insane due to the loss of my daughter or some inherent mental illness I had just never known about before, even though I had never shown any signs of having a mental illness before in my life. I requested antipsychotics from my psychologist, and began taking them, starting intense therapy as well. Nothing seemed to help as time continued to pass. In fact, it got drastically worse and more frequent, my life becoming a living nightmare.
They seemed just to want to scare me at first, and I did my best to ignore them, refusing to acknowledge their existence besides the occasional jump scare that would catch me off guard. But then they began to whisper secrets to me, telling me when and how a loved one or a pet would die, what I would find around a corner on a walk, the exact words another person would say during a conversation, when a car was about to crash on the road, so many things.
Everything they would tell me would end up coming true, making me begin to believe this was real and I really was damned.
The first time one of them ever touched me, was in the middle of the night, when I had finally managed to get some sleep. I suddenly felt sharp pain in my right arm, and I jolted awake, my head rising and something immediately piercing into my left cheek.
Her golden eyes stared back at me, my cheek having been pierced by the barbed wire dug into her face, and I immediately adverted my gaze. She was straddled atop me, and as I turned to face the pain in my arm, she was carving into it long ways with a razor, seemingly attempting to bleed me out.
“No!” I screamed, thrusting my hips up and using all my strength to heave her off me, flinging her to the floor.
She landed gracefully on all fours like a cat, and skittered backward out my open bedroom door into the dark of the hall, giggling the whole way. I always closed and locked my bedroom door, I couldn’t sleep with a dark hall staring back at me, especially nowadays. How had she gotten it open?
I had to go get stitches for my wounds, the doctors asking me repeatedly if I had done this to myself, as the wound on my arm was inflicted with a razor blade in a self harm manner.
I swore up and down that I had not, and made up a story about an accident with a box cutter, in order to avoid being 5150ed.
The worst part was, I didn’t even own a single razor blade in my house. I would occasionally trim with an electric razor, though even that felt like why bother nowadays, but I never clean shaved and hadn’t in probably close to two decades.
The next time I was attacked, the little ashen skinned gremlin had rounded a corner in the dark and chased after me, leaping onto my back, and digging its claws deep into my flesh before tearing them down.
I screamed in agony and managed to slam him up against a wall to get him off me, and then I ran into a bathroom and slammed and locked the door, hiding in there throughout the night.
When I examined the claw marks on my back in the mirror, it was clear I could not have done that to myself, as they were out of my reach, and long deep gashes where I had no finger nails. I had to treat the wounds myself the best I could, pouring rubbing alcohol into them and wrapping bandages around me, for I dare not get locked away for self harm where I had no means of escaping these demons.
Leaving the bathroom several hours later, the door was clawed to shit where the gremlin had been desperately trying to get to me.
I decided I needed to collect proof to show others, but that just taking pictures or video of the damage to myself or the house wouldn’t be enough, that it would just be assumed that I had done it myself.
Attempting to video record the demons, however, would lead to them distorting the footage, to make it appear as if it was just me talking to myself, or the footage would be erased all together, or just a pixelated, jumbled mess. One time, it was even replaced with a scene from some old 1930’s film that depicted hell.
I then settled upon audio recordings, and even managed to get the gremlin’s screeches, the charcoal skinned demon in the closet’s hysterical laughter, and one of the drowned girl asking me if I wanted to swim with her and her friends.
I took these to my therapist, convinced she would see the truth, but she rebutted every one, saying it could be my laugh, that the little girl could be a neighbor girl, that the screech sounded like something from a horror movie she had seen before.
I felt so defeated after this, it felt as though even if I did manage to acquire enough concrete proof, it would never be enough, no one would ever believe me.
It was then, in my time of defeat and hopelessness, that the demon in the hat decided to speak to me for the very first time. “I am the Reaper,” Is all he said the first time, but when I turned in surprise to face him, he just stood there staring at me with his piercing eyes and haunting smile. “You’re going to be one of my children,” He said weeks later. “I’m here to collect your soul,” Days after that.
I snapped to his last interaction, not thinking clearly due to severe sleep deprivation and my constant terror. “You can’t have my fucking soul!” I screamed, turning to face him.
His smile very slowly faded into a scowl, his eyes narrowing and brow furrowing, the sense of dread he emanated intensifying 1,000 fold, almost buckling me. “You made a deal,” He said, his voice sounding much deeper than it already had before.
“You didn’t keep your end of the bargain, my daughter’s fucking dead!” I stood my ground, an almost impossible task with the level of dread and terror assaulting me.
“My bargains are one sided.”
I ran then, bursting through my front door and out onto the street, desperate to get as far away from him as I could. Every time I turned a corner, however, running through the streets like a madman (though to anyone that saw me I’m sure that’s exactly what I would be), he would be there waiting before me, standing in the middle of the street in the dark, mildly lit up by some supernatural spotlight.
“There is no escape,” He said after the first few encounters.
I pushed forward, wheezing from the intense exertion the mad sprint was putting on my already exhausted body.
“You cannot escape my children,” He said after several more turns.
The small gremlin-like demon that would move on all fours then rounded a corner behind me, screeching ferociously as it chased after me.
Just as I thought my legs were going to give out and my lungs were going to burst, the new rush of adrenaline and sense of urgency propelled me onward.
Rounding a corner and passing by a house with its sprinklers on watering the lawn, the drowned girl demon appeared, her skin slowly sloshing off as the water splashed against it, her head turning up to look at me with dead and long decaying eyes, her long, tangled, dark hair hanging down all around her face and over her shoulders. “You’ve always loved the water,” She said as I passed her by. “Don’t you want to swim with me forever?”
I rounded the next corner, seeing the charcoal skinned, blue eyed demon from my closet sitting in the driver’s seat of a flamboyantly purple painted muscle car with dice hanging from the rear view mirror. “Get in and let’s take a drive,” He said, barely being able to get the words out over his incessant laughter, the volume muffled from within the interior of the car. “It’s going to be a wild ride!” He screamed loudly and then broke out into more uncontrollable and hysteric laughter.
Turning the next bend and reaching the main road in town, finally pushing out of the vast stretch of suburbs I lived in, the demon with the barbed wire that was always drenched in blood waited for me, carving out her own face. “I want him! I want him, daddy!” She screeched frantically, blood gushing out from her mouth as she twitched and angled her gaze crookedly in my direction. “I want to make him bleed!”
I screamed, her visible appearance scaring me most of all, though no fear I’d ever felt could rival the unimaginable dread that emanated from the demon in the hat.
Desperately running out onto the main road in a mad dash of blind fear, I was hit by a car. Although I’m in complete agony right now, I didn’t even feel it in the moment as the impact shattered my hip, broke my ribs, and sent me rag dolling down the road.
I managed to hold on to my consciousness for a bit after, just long enough to see the demon with the barbed wire bending down over me to gaze deeply into my soul.
When I first regained my consciousness in the hospital, I could see her behind my eyes, now inside with me, and although I tried to avoid her gaze and stop her from taking me over, it feels like I may have failed.
Now bedridden at home, I see flashes of them inside of me while my eyes are open, and see them there in the dark when they’re closed. At first, I would just see her, and the demon in the hat, standing far in the distance in the sea of darkness.
“He’s coming,” She whispered from inside my mind.
I checked and he was closer, now with several other figures lingering behind him.
“They’re coming,” She laughed.
Now there’s an endless army in the distance.
“They’re almost here,” I saw a flash of her insanity inducing eyes.
I checked again. The entire army was gathered right in front of me now.
“He’s here,” She whispered sharp and fast, and I knew she was right next to me, whispering it directly into my ear, her bloody and barbed wire wrapped face terrifyingly close to me.
I looked again, and he was standing directly before me in the dark, his giant red eyes staring right back into mine, our noses almost touching, his smile now returned. “For over 4,000 years we’ve waited in the dark, cast down into the shadows. It’s time for our return. Join us, instrument of our revenge. Join us, my new child.”
For some reason, I no longer felt dread emanating from him, but an oddly paternal warmth. I know that it’s too late for me now. I can feel myself… changing.
I don’t know why they’re allowing me to write this, perhaps they want you to know that we’re coming, dear reader. Perhaps they want you to be afraid when we do. To know that we’re real. That it isn’t madness taking you when we come, but something much much worse.
While some of my humanity still remains, I thought I’d offer some last words of advice to you, human reader.
Never look them directly in the eyes.
Never go into the dark.
Never show them your fear.
Never engage with them.
And above all else, never make a deal.