I’ve always considered myself religious and to believe in the supernatural, at least in theory. Like if you came up to me on the street and asked if I believed in miracles or demons I’d say yes, but if confronted with one I would probably look for a mundane explanation first. But lately some stuff has been happening that I truly can’t explain, and I just need to tell someone.
So it started a couple months ago, near the end of the spring semester. I was sitting in the hallway of the chemistry building at my college, studying, by which I mostly mean staring vaguely into space with a book open on the table in front of me. Don’t judge. I happened to stare in the general direction of a bulletin board on the opposite wall, and an unusual flyer caught my eye. It had a black background with white text on it that said something like “We believe that all creatures should be treated with compassion, according to the dictates of reason.” I don’t remember the exact wording, but that was basically it. Lower down was some more text in red that I couldn’t read at that distance, and below that, a QR code. My interest was piqued, and I would have jumped at any excuse not to get my work done, so I strolled over to get a better look. The red text said “Do you agree? Come learn about our other tenets!” There was no mention of what the organization was, just the QR code to scan.
“Well, that’s not shady at all,” I thought to myself. I had heard of extremist groups luring in impressionable young people by starting with innocuous principles, and then getting to the weird stuff once they already had their hooks in you. Like how Scientologists don’t learn just how much of a nuthouse they’re in until they’ve leveled up too far to turn back. Generally, anytime someone takes a grandiose, principled stand on some issue that there’s really no one on the other side of, they’re probably being disingenuous. Or they’re a CW show trying to get brownie points for tackling hot-button issues without actually putting the work in to understand a complex topic, but that probably wasn’t the case here. Add to that the fact that whatever organization the flyer was for didn’t even dare to put their name on it, and I was 90% sure something fishy was afoot. So I scanned the QR code with my phone.
Of all the things that could have popped up on my screen, I was not expecting the official website for the Satanic Temple. I quickly closed the tab, even though no one was around, and went back to my studying. But the more I thought about it, the funnier it seemed to me. Now, I don’t know a heck of a lot about Satanism, but from what I’ve read on the internet they seem pretty insistent that they’re not evil. So I can’t help but wonder why they would put up such an obviously sinister flyer to advertise themselves. It seemed almost too cartoon-villain-ish to believe, and yet there it was, right between advertisements for an astronomy lecture series and a swing-dance workshop.
Eventually, I ran out of reasons to procrastinate, and the flyer went out of my mind. But soon after, I started feeling uncomfortable. Now, I have really bad social anxiety, so I pretty much always feel uncomfortable in public, but this was different. I felt like I was being watched. Sometimes I even thought I could see something out of the corner of my eye, just barely in my field of vision, but whenever I looked, it was gone. I chalked it up to stress over my upcoming finals, but it didn’t stop, and last night I saw something I don’t think I could have made up.
Now I’ve always had an overactive imagination, and I was a real chicken as a kid. When I was about ten, I made the mistake of reading the last book of The Spiderwick Chronicles before bed. It took me a long time to work up the courage to walk past the dark, open doorway of my parents’ room to brush my teeth. Sometimes I even scare myself with monsters I come up with for the stories I write. So it’s possible that I could just be imagining everything, but it just feels too real.
Last night, my kitten, Artemis, woke me up by jumping on me. She does this most nights, but this time she seemed terrified rather than playful. She kept hissing at something beyond the foot of my bed, and when I looked, I could see a dark shape there. I assumed it was one of my dogs, but just as I was about to get out of bed and make it sleep downstairs where it belonged, alarm bells went off in my head. It was shaped differently than a dog, and if I listened closely, I could hear it breathing much much more deeply than even my St. Bernard. Whatever that thing was, it was not a dog, and as I watched, it raised its head, and I caught a glimpse of eyes and teeth.
And then, I swear to you, I saw it smile.