I was outside, playing tag with my friends in my backyard. It was a nice warm Spring night, with us just having fun like usual. I was being chased by Mike. It may have seemed odd to play tag after the sun had set, but we were just going with the vibe of the moment.
Eventually, Mike caught up to me and tagged me. As I ran after him, I noticed Jake was standing by the tree by the back fence. He was still, talking to himself, but I was too far away to hear him. He was never like that when Mike and I were around, so it was a bit off.
I stopped running and told Mike the game was paused.
I walked up to Jake. Once I got close enough to make out what he was telling himself, I listened in.
“No, what do you mean?” “I don’t want war” “Please” “Not that, either”
He sniffled. That’s when I got increasingly concerned.
“Jake?” I asked. “What’s happening?”
“Yeah, dude, are you okay?” Mike asked.
Jake hunched forward and began to scream.
“I… can’t…” Jake grunted before falling face first onto the grass.
This was so sudden to me. I looked at Mike, who had a look of concern on his face.
Jake picked himself up. Very curious, I asked him once again if he was okay. He looked at us, then he walked to the house. Mike and I called for him, but he kept walking, then stepped inside.
Jake sat at his desk, writing on a piece of paper. I walked over to him to get a look at what he was writing. Half the page was filled with weird symbols I didn’t understand.
“Jake?” I asked. “What is this? Why are you writing symbols?”
Jake continued to write.
I tapped his shoulder, which was probably a mistake, as I then began to feel an overbearing dark presence inside me. It was immediate, sinister, and I knew what it knew from the second it entered my mind. If souls were real, the difference between my body and my mind was clear enough for me to notice I had one.
All I could feel was dread. All these feelings made me want to step back. Once I tried to move at all, I realized I was frozen, which made my adrenaline rise.
During my struggle, I heard a voice in my head. It sounded like my voice, as if I was talking to myself in my own head, but it wasn’t my voice. I knew it wasn’t because this presence made it clear through telepathy.
“I need as many people as possible”
“Why? For what?” I asked, shaking.
The demon, I’ll call it, burnt images into my minds eye of a bird’s eye view of chilling looking beasts, grey coyote-shaped animals with holes where their facial features should be, fighting people, regular looking people wearing casual clothing, in a dense forest. It was so vivid and freaky that tried to imagine something else. Anything else. I got a headache just trying, and it was excruciatingly painful, so I accepted the vision I was being given. My heart sunk further as I realized the beasts were winning.
“The war,” the demon said. “This is where you’ll be headed off to.”
“I don’t want to go to that shithole,” I said. “Do you want me to die or something? W-why are you even coming to me about this?”
It didn’t respond, and instead showed the POV of somebody running towards one of the beasts. Those holes sent chills running down my spine, especially as my view of them got closer and closer. The person who’s eyes I was looking through dug a knife into the beast’s neck. The beast charged at the eyes I was looking through, and clawed at them.
I told the demon I wasn’t enjoying what it was showing me, but it still refused to respond. Dozens of symbols flashed before my eyes. Symbols resembling the ones Jake was writing. They were so significant, but I wasn’t being told or shown why. I broke out of my trance, and I could move my body again, and I felt calm as the demon left my mind, but I had an eager need to draw the symbols I saw.
I found some paper and just got busy drawing every single one of those symbols. They were all vivid. They were a bunch of different of shapes, lines, and what looked like fragments of numbers and letters. At least I didn’t have to write sentences. I wasn’t good at English and got my Dad to help me write when I needed and wanted to. That included this, my first post to the internet.
As I drew, Mike called my name, but I was too busy to respond. There was a thud. It came from the hallway. Within seconds somebody was banging on the door. Well, I thought it was another person, but I heard the door creak open, then Mike screamed.
I turned to look at the door. Mike was taking a couple steps back from a hideous sight. It was one of those beasts. I felt cold and froze at the sight of the beast just being there.
It ran at Mike, who ran and jumped onto the bed. All I could think of was getting the hell out of there. I jumped up off the chair and ran out the door and down the stairs to the livingroom. A fast paced clicking of claws followed me as I neared the bottom of the steps. My Dad walked into the livingroom from around the corner, asking himself what was going on when he looked above my head and visibly froze.
I ran around and hid behind him. The beast smacked into the wall, leaving a dent in the dry wall. The last thing I remember was it running at me. I woke up on a hospital bed with aches all over, as well as cuts. I asked the doctors what happened and they told me a wild animal broke into my home and scratched me up.
An hour after the doctors left me in the room, a police officer came in.
“Hey,” he said. “Are you getting better?”
“Sort of,” I said. Sort of lying.
“That wild animal in your home… what color was it?” he asked.
It seemed like an oddly specific question to ask at that moment, but I answered it anyway.
“It was grey,” I said, not ready to go into further detail.
His face went pale.
“You need to burn anything you wrote the symbols on,” he said. “It won’t stop it, but it will send a message.”
I was surprised. My friends and I weren’t alone in this? But I the demon did show me a group of around eight people, rather than just two or three.
The officer got a transmission on his radio and left without saying another word. All I knew was I had to get right home and burn the paper I wrote all of that random stupid stuff on.
As soon as I got out of the hospital and got back home, I went up to my room and found both papers sitting on my computer desk. There was some blood on the center of the page, which made me shiver. I took the papers into the bathroom. Feeling invaded due to what happened to me the night before, I ripped the papers to shreds then I dropped the shreds into the toilet and flushed them.
That afternoon, I went for a walk. As walked along the sidewalk in the middle of my quiet suburb, I swore I saw the officer who visited me in the hospital drive past me in a police car. The officer in the car even looked at me. Maybe it was him. Either way, I’m glad I’m not alone in this.
Despite everything, I wanted to know his side of the story. What was his experience with the symbols? Back home, I Googled around on my Dad’s laptop for any experiences similar to my own at least, with the same symbols involved. I found nothing, unfortunately. However, as I closed the Google Chrome window, I noticed one of the symbols I wrote was faintly visible, burnt into the home screen. A square with three verticle lines and some squiggly lines around it. It vanished before I could point it out to my Dad.
Over the past hour, I’ve been catching those symbols floating around in the corner of my eye. When I try to look at them, they disappear. Me seeing them at all makes go cold. I want this to stop, but it doesn’t seem like it will anytime soon.
I get chills thinking about the demon and what it showed me. I hope it doesn’t come back for me. I’m only 10.
I just saw a tall man with pale skin and long black hair walk by, right outside the livingroom window. He was wearing a white shirt with all those symbols on it.
Now there’s knocking on the front door.
Oh lord.