I was a normal person. I really used to be. A man of come-uppance and banality. A warrior of nothing. Now I’m a demon hunter.
It started with the voices. Voices coming from nowhere and finding their way into my head. A job lost. An insanity takes hold. It overtakes the senses and beguiles. Am I telepathic? Am I psychic? So many questions asked. The voices grow stronger. They take over my mind and my senses. A breaking point. I move back in with my family. Support. They seem distant, like they’re treating me with caution. A shell of a man that needs to be nursed back to health. Medication doesn’t help. Images in my head. A control of mentality. A thought directed at the heart of the assault of my brain. I develop a mental fortitude and start my search. A search for answers. I was never like this. I was successful. Happy. Care-free.
A forest in my mind. An array of color. A woman crying out. A glimpse of children conceived. A future.
A move to the city. A new job. Faces in the windows. An attempt to rebuild a life. Anonymity within the tall skyscrapers and buildings. I lift my head from a great going under. I reach out for air.
A cigarette smoked outside. A man approaches in the distance, staring at me. I look away. He turns, a triangle symbol on the back of his uniform. I flick my cigarette and follow gently. Down an alleyway he turns. I slowly walk toward. A woman is there suddenly, halfway down the alley, cloaked in shadow. They both turn, toothy grins on their faces. I stare.
Sleep. A close.
I wake the next morning from a terrible nightmare. A beast dangles from the ceiling, devouring my skull. I shake from the memory of it. A smell. Holy candles burning. A scent of the heavens above.
A thought,
“I am a quiet sea.”
A voice answers,
“A sea knows naught of the strife of man. A sea knows not of the writhing of bodies and mass and energy of the humanity. The sea churns and bays and it goes above and within and deep below.”
I am silent.
A workday. I look out the window, tapping a pen against the desk. An array of triangle-shaped post-it notes on the window of a neighboring building catch my eye. They begin to writhe, forming a disgusting mass of flesh and blood. They wriggle and consume. I blink. I blink again. They go back to normal.
“Witness,” A voice calls out.
“Beguile.”
“Go below.”
“Dangle from the heavens and fall within.”
A blink. A needless and hurried blink.
I put the pen to my head.
A workday completed.
A coffee on the streets.
A man and woman kissing on each other on a park bench.
The voices call out.
I ignore them.
My apartment is reached.
There is a heating pipe that extends from the floor to the ceiling in my bedroom. Paint cracking. A rim seal dangling from a bevel that is meant to sit flush with the ceiling. I flip on music and open up my mind, exploring the happenings of my sentience. A conversation is heard.
“A Lair Weill. A pipeline to the beyond. Does he know?”
A voice answers, “It would be a poor shame if he did. Can he see?”
A voice calls back, almost soothingly, “He can. He is about to.”
Two faces appear in another dimension in two corners of my room. My heart skips a beat. I am silent. They stare at me. They look at each other. They recede back into the corners of the room.
Reality starts to fade. I put my hands over my eyes. I fall into a deep despair. I look at the pipe in the corner of my room. I lie back in bed and an energy within the pipe begins to reveal itself. “A Lair Weill,” I thought. “What does that mean?” I said.
The voices answer:
“Cleanse it.”
“Go beyond.”
I begin to manipulate the pipe with my mind, pushing the seething energy back into the ceiling. A language comes to me. A language of dance and fingers. I dance the dance and my fingers gyrate. A web of purple and pink and blue cover the darkness dripping into the pipe. I don’t know if this is heaven or hell. A new feeling of taught likeness. A dark sea of disturb and dank, ripe evil. A portal to the heart of man. A deep experience of electricity and suffering. A voice speaks to me, coming from the sounds around me:
“When the world knows the cleansing of all pipelines of the Lair, it shall know peace that has been sought after.”
I shudder. A sickening feeling comes over me. What have I stumbled into?
I answer in my mind, “I don’t know what you want from me. Why me?”
A voice chuckles, “He thinks there’s a why. How serplunt. You were chosen.”
I answer again, “What did I just do?”
There is no answer.
A great need to write comes over me. I put pen to paper and begin the exaltation of creation.
“When the sky opens up and the heavens above fall to the Earth below and the dark below rises above and mixes within on the Earth below and the darkness within stirs upon the hearts of man, and the stars above and the sun even higher still meet the stirring of the darkness and the seas below churn and go under and rise above and waves crash down upon the interred exist of the man therein; when the hearts of man know peace of their mind and their minds join in of the great meeting of the heavens and hells that descend and ascend and fight their great war - when man joins this great battle and saves themselves: then the Earth shall know peace.”
I shake slightly at the writing, and go down upon the street. “A drink will make this alright,” I thought.
A woman leans against a building. I admire her form and give her a glance. In another dimension I see her head swivel and turn upside-down. A sickly, rotting tongue hangs out and mocks me. I wince and look away. Her physical form turns and looks at me with a smile as I pass. She takes a drag from a cigarette. I look past her and see the bar I’m heading toward. “Jones bar” It was called. I walked straight in and ordered a Maker’s Mark on the rocks. Normally I start out with a beer, but tonight was a hard night.
I step outside for a cigarette, lighting it up and taking a drag. It is cold and winter outside. I can’t recall the last time I went to the supermarket. Something about the ambivalent excess and desire to purchase beyond my means. I look up at a pipe on a building and I see the same creeping darkness coming from within it. I manipulate the evil with my fingers and mind and cleanse the Lair Weill. The street grew brighter before my eyes. My mind felt a little off. I’m lost in the woods. A deepening of the senses. Objects grow closer and further. Nobody is outside. The door opens, and a young couple walks out, smiling. They hold hands. They glow with blue energy before my eyes. The man stops and asks me for a cigarette. I hesitate, then nod and hand him a Newport. He thanks me and they continue walking. I go back inside, slam down another drink, and pay the tab.
I take a detour through the central part of the city. It is almost 10 PM. I notice an array of lights high up in a building. Energy came out of them, and the parts of them became pixelated and static. A satellite dish on top of the building turns to a grey, pixelated static. I search the reflections of the windows and find a distant land, where birds harried away and crowed at the presence of the gathering darkness.
The voices grow loud in my mind.
“You are alone.”
“You must defeat this evil.”
“You alone.”
I light up another cigarette and cleanse my lungs with it. My eyes burn from the smoke. I speak in tongues and combat the evil in the square, swinging my arms and moving my fingers. A dance, done in public. A few eyes watch. In front of my eyes magic swirls around. An insanity takes me. The lights take normal form, flickering in the windows as part of ceiling fixtures. The windows return to their normal shade, and a satellite dish casts a watchful eye over the skies. I searched the buildings around me for any sign of the presence. The invasion.
“What is this?” I mutter. A man continues to look at me.
Instinctually, I put my left hand down and put my pinky, ring, and middle finger in a descending pattern, with my pointer finger up. My form dematerializes as I go invisible, free to do my dance of demonic cleansing.
“Hell invasion defeated,” I see over my eyes.
It is over, for now.