My name, well my name doesn’t matter much now, but for now you can call me Sam, it’s not my real name, nor a nickname, so don’t try to figure out my real identity. In a few hours I will be committing the most heinous crime known to man, I will kill my family, myself in the process. I want to leave this behind as a form of a testimony, I want to let it be known that I’m not insane, but that the reason is committing these crimes, is because the devil (or rather the fear of the devil) made me do it.
It all started a 3 months ago, my neighbor Jim asked me to watch his dog while he went away on a business trip to Arizona. His dog is German shepherd named buddy, I always hated the dog, not only for his name but the son of a bitch was a loud rambunctious asshole who would bark at his own shadow, but Jim offered me some extra money to watch him so I accepted the task. Buddy spend the first night at my house and he was his loud usual self, but I could rest easy knowing it was only gonna be a week before Jim came back and took him off my hands.
Buddy kept up his usual behavior, barking at everything, running around the house tirelessly, the kids loved buddy but one day his behavior changed. It wasn’t anything drastic but when I came down the stairs and he saw me he, couldn’t bark. He opened his mouth and made an attempt but nothing more than a muffled whimper came out. He barked at everything else just fine but when he went to bark at me, the same thing kept happening. The next day buddy refused to go up the stairs and now he wasn’t attempting to bark at me all, he was just staring at me, it creeped me out but he seemed normal enough.
The day before Jim came back to town Buddy just looked up the staircase leading into my bedroom. He didn’t budge, he wasn’t aggressive, he just sat there and stared, endlessly. He didn’t eat, he didn’t drink, he didn’t shit, he didn’t piss , it was as if he was frozen in time. When I woke up the next morning I was startled to find buddy sitting calmly outside my bedroom door, looking right at where I’d be as if he was expecting me.
“Something is seriously up with that dog”. Said my wife as she was preparing her morning cup of coffee, her hair a disarrayed mess.
“He’s creeping me out, he didn’t move all day yesterday and now all of a sudden he’s back to normal,and also, something looks off about him”.
I couldn’t help but to roll my eyes. Since buddy started acting oddly my wife hadn’t stopped complaining about him. It was nonstop, frequent complaints, to the point I almost started to side with buddy.
I looked over at him and that’s when I understood what she said. I had never bothered to really pay much attention to his facial details but something did look off about him. Buddys eyes were, human for lack of a better word. They weren’t normal eyes befitting a dog, his iris was smaller than normal for a dog. His pupils were also unnaturally dilated. I had never bothered to look closely at his eyes so maybe that’s how they always were, so for the sake of my wife’s mental stability, I downplayed it.
“Buddy is just a bit odd, besides Jim is gonna be coming around later to get this damn dog off our hands”.
Almost instantly after I finished my sentence my phone started to ring. As it vibrated on my kitchen table I couldn’t help but to feel a sudden annoyance, it was Jim.
“Hey, Sam how you doing, listen my flight got cancelled and I won’t be back until tomorrow, do you think you could take care of buddy for an extra day while I get this situated, I’ll throw in an extra hundred bucks.”
Jim was wealthy, wealthier than almost everyone else in the neighborhood. He worked as a “marketing sales supervisor” or something sophisticated like that, all I know is that he sold goods to supermarkets across the country and made a shit ton of money from it so a few hundred bucks wasn’t anything for him, but for me, it was the separating factor between dinner, or sleeping on an empty stomach, so I accepted his offer.
My wife wasn’t very happy with this decision, but she understood that we needed the extra money. Money was tight for us and we were barely able to afford the mortgage on our home, so we had to make do with what we had and we weren’t gonna turn down a few extra hundred bucks. Nowadays I wish we would have turned the offer down.
That night, buddy made that awful noise all night, it sounded like he had destroyed his larynx, I could hear him frantically running downstairs. I got up and I was furious to put it lightly. This damn dog was making too much noise in the middle of the night and I’ll be dammed if it kept going without me doing something about it. I ran downstairs and what I saw made me want to run back. In the middle of the living room, there sat buddy, in front of him was a woman I didn’t recognize, she wore a white, blood stained gown with strange markings on it I couldn’t decipher. She reached forward and grabbed buddy, I wanted to jump to action but I couldn’t move, I tried and I tried but I was frozen in place, then I watched her lift buddy by his collar, and plunge a knife deep into his neck.
Blood ran down his fur and stained my white carpet, then as buddy began to whimper, pleading for his life, the lady began to mutter. slowly but surely that mutter became clear until i could finally distinguish what she was saying.
“The devil is coming, the devil is coming”
she shouted this over and over until it became deafening.Slowly my vision became dark and I passed out.
I woke up in my bed, drenched in sweat, it was roughly around 8 am and while I was relieved that it was all a nightmare I had to go downstairs to check on buddy. As I headed downstairs I couldn’t get the strange dream out of my head, while I do have vivid dreams, they’re mostly related to my past military service, none are ever related to anything demonic. I got downstairs and seen buddy, laying down in the same spot where the lady had murdered him in my dream. For once I felt relieved to see that damn dog. I bent down to pet him when I noticed something strange, he had a small scar, right where he had been stabbed in my dream.
Surely it had been there this whole time, surely I was imagining it, but I had no time to think about it as Jim came and rung my doorbell. As soon as buddy sensed his presence his ears perked up and he looked alive, he ran around, jumped on Jim, and just looked like himself, something he hadn’t been for the last few days. As Jim proceeded to pay me roughly 700 bucks for watching buddy I looked down at him to say goodbye.
I still can’t explain it but as I pet him, he opened his mouth and, he spoke to me.
“See you soon Sam”
The words just…left his mouth. As in he opened his mouth and the sound just filled the air, leaving behind it a chill that ran down my spine, making every nerve in my body feel a sudden and paralyzing shock.
My jaw dropped to the floor, but Jim seen un phased. I struggled to put together anything but a miserable mutter until I was able to compose myself.
“D-did you hear that” I asked
“Hear what?” Asked Jim , looking concerned, I can only imagine what my face looked like at this moment.
I remained quiet and said goodbye to Jim, but buddy refused to move. Jim had to pick up buddy to get him to leave.as he walked away with him . buddy looked over Jim’s shoulder, locked eyes with me, those some disgusting human eyes. And he spoke once again.
“This won’t be our last time speaking”.
Over the next few weeks, whenever I would go outside, buddy would be there, talking to me. Most of the time he spoke in tongues but whenever he spoke in English, he was direct.
While I was shoveling my driveway, after a morning of heavy snowfall, buddy spoke to me.
“Tell me Sam, those who you call your family, how well do you really know them? How do you know they’re not plotting against you? How do you know that when you least expect it, they won’t go behind your back and take everything from you.”
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” I asked him, aware of how insane I must’ve looked, talking to a dog.
“I was given this ability to talk to warn you Sam, there is an inherent evil that resides in your home. It lives in your walls, it crawls inside the skin of your wife and offspring, it has completely corrupted those around you, and if you don’t stop it, you will be next.”
His words startled me, I didn’t know if I should take them with a grain of salt, or if I should be concerned, but I decided to ignore him. After all, it’s a stupid dog, what does it really know.
About a week later it struck me that it had been a while since I last saw Jim, his home reeked of trash as it hadn’t been taken out in several weeks and his mail was stacking up in knee high piles. I called the police and they found Jim, sitting on his dining room chair, head slumped backwards, eyes rolled back, with now dry blood having run down the sides of his mouth.
The authorities chalked it up to natural causes but I simply don’t buy it. While Jim was definitely on the heavier side he was far from unhealthy. If you spent more than a few minutes talking to Jim he would be quick to try to sell you on his diet and how he “reached his athletic peak a month after turning 47”. Jim was someone who would constantly go for runs and was a frequent sight at the local gym. despite his heavyset appearance, Jim was about as healthy as a man can be.
Jim was divorced, had no kids, or any family his parents had died years ago when he was much younger so he had nobody in his will, as a result most of his l belongings were auctioned off to charity. One of his most prized possessions was an authentic, autographed, game worn Dick Butkus jersey, like I said, the man was well off. Buddy was gonna be put down due to lack of space at the shelter but after a lot of pleading from my wife and my kids I opted to adopt him.
Buddy was, different. We assumed that it was because he was traumatized because of Jim having passed but deep down, I thought about our conversations, and the filth that lives in my home. Over the next few weeks we continued to talk, until last week. While I was sitting on the porch smoking a cigarette one evening, buddy approached me. “ Are you ready to confront the truth.” I rolled my eyes and sighed, here he came again with his creepy voice, ready to give me the usual doomsday speech. “Sure buddy, enlighten me”. “Please, refrain from calling me buddy, call me by my real name” “Oh yeah, and what’s that?” “God” I chuckled but before I could even get a word out buddy spoke again “I’m aware that it sounds ridiculous, but I just want to warn you, I’m pleading you, allow me to show you the truth”.
I caved in and accepted.
Buddy, if I can even call him that, showed me visions, he showed me hell. I saw endless misery all around, I saw Jim, wondering around aimlessly, his skin covered in burns and boils as he attempted to scream, although he had lost his voice long ago. I saw my parents, both had been unfaithful to each other and they too were covered in blisters and burns, however, their reactions were only those of misery, the pain they felt was surely agonizing but they only looked, sad. I saw many more of my friends, friends who had died in war, friends who had taken their own lives, every where I went I saw familiar faces, but they didn’t see me, I couldn’t touch them, I couldn’t talk to them, I couldn’t save them, I could only sit and watch as they suffered endlessly.
I fell down to my knees and began to sob, the things I was seeing far to brutal for my mind to comprehend. I wept for what felt to me like hundreds of years, but in reality was nothing more than probably a few seconds.
“Do you now understand, do you understand what I’ve been trying to save you from?“
The sudden, booming thundering voice broke my crying almost instantly, I then noticed that the air around me was slowly cooling off. As I looked at my arms the burns I had accumulated slowly but surely begin to disappear. As I looked up, my tears went from those of dismay, to those of joy. I was standing in front of god.
I don’t know how to describe what I saw to the full extent but I’ll try my best. In front of me, about 50 feet off the ground, sat a giant white orb, around 100 yards in diameter. I couldn’t tell if it was in front of me or 100 feet away, the best way to describe it is as constantly moving between those distances but I’m 100% positive it was stationary. Looking into the orb I could see every event that ever occurred. I saw children being born, to newly wed couples, to a group of people being murdered, everything that’s ever happened was now being shown to me in fractions of a second. Unfortunately for myself, every one of those events has now been deeply engrained into my memory, down to the finest detail, a fate more unbearable than it sounds.
Before I could put the words together the voice broke the silence, feeling every single corner of this endless expanse of gray clouds.
“It’ s too little too late, the devil has already made an attempt on my life, and now it has taken control of your family, there’s only one thing left to do .”
I fell to my knees and begged for another way out of this. I vouched to get an exorcism done on the house, to go to church, to fully devote myself to god and to do everything possible to save my family from the impending task at hand.
“SILENCE” he shouted, the words echoing and disturbing the calm, nonchalant flow of the clouds.
“Your own stubborn ways and failure to make the right choices early on in your misfortunes has lead you here. I tried warning you for months and you ignored me, now you must pay the ultimate price for your negligence.
Just like that I was back on my porch, down on my knees, as I stumbled trying to grab a hold of something just to make sure I truly was back on my porch, I felt something fall and stumble out of my hands. I opened my eyes and on the ground lay a chrome dagger, wrapped in a pristine white and gold satin scarf. Before I could make sense of it all, God spoke to me again.
“Do you understand now?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The words left my mouth effortlessly. It was as if my brain could put no other sentences together regardless if I desperately wanted to. I knew what I had to do, and despite my best attempts, I knew my family had to die.
Buddy wagged his tail and then barked, for the first time in 3 months, the fucking dog barked again.
Buddy, or God I should say hasn’t spoke to me since, he’s went back to his normal behavior but the madness has consumed me. I hear the voices in the walls, they whisper “kill, cleanse, save them” over and over and over again. I can’t look at my wife in the face anymore, all I see when I look into her eyes are the gates of hell. Her skin has started to look more red lately, she thinks it’s allergies because of the dog but I know the reason why. I see insects crawling in my children’s skin, they are filthy, they must be cleaned. The final straw was when one night, while doing some late night laundry, I found a blood stained white robe with strange markings along with all of my wife’s clothes. The same robe from that fateful night. However the marking suddenly made sense
“Spawn of Satan” it said in Latin, my wife was with them all along, she knew, she caused this.
At night I still hear the screams of desperation from all those people, I hear them cry and plead for help, I hear them beg for mercy and tell me to save my family from the same fate.
My wife just came home an hour ago, she’s downstairs preparing dinner while the kids do homework, it’s time for me to do what I must do, and spare us. I just want to repeat, I am not insane, this could happen to any one of you, so please just take my word for it, the devil made me do it.