by David Beers
Abel stared at him for a second, his hands tingling as blood rushed back into them. He reached up and wiped at the tears in his eyes. “I’ll do my best to not let you down then,” he said.
He walked by the dead man in the baggy suit and started toward the demon.
Abel was nearly out of earshot when the dead man spoke again.
He said, “Go then, boy.”
Abel and Emi
Early 2000’s
He was 16 years old when her mother died.
He was surrounded by death, more than anyone else he knew, and yet he hadn’t known any who’d actually died.
Emi’s mother was the first.
Abel wasn’t able to see Emi for two days after it happened; her father wouldn’t let her see anyone and Abel really, really worried during those 48 hours. He didn’t know her parents that well, basically only what Emi had told him, but he didn’t trust her father at all.
He didn’t know what the man might do.
At the end of two days, though, she was at his window. School had ended an hour ago and he was lying on his bed, staring at the wall and thinking of going to her house. He needed to hear something from her, if only to tell him that her dad was beating the shit out of her. That way he’d know what he had to do.
For the man that Abel would turn into, he certainly hadn’t started out that way.
Emi showed up, though.
He rolled over and stared at her for a second. She was beautiful, and though he would never ever tell her, he was in love. He wouldn’t kiss her or try to hold her hand. He wouldn’t ask her to a dance or take her to the movies. Abel Ease wouldn’t do anything other than what he’d already been doing, because he wouldn’t chance ruining their friendship. The only chance he’d ever taken, he already had, and that was when he told her about the curse.
She stayed and that was all he could ask of her. To put anything else on Emi Laurens, including his affection, would be absurd.
He moved across the bed and went to the window, lifting it up.
“Hey,” he said.
She didn’t even wait for him to move back, she simply placed her hands on the bottom and hoisted herself up, practically knocking him out of the way as she climbed in.
“Make yourself at home,” Abel said, though the normal sarcastic sting was missing.
She said nothing, but walked over and climbed into his bed. She laid on her side and pulled the blanket up to her shoulders, then stared at the window the same as he had been when she arrived.
Abel, suddenly, didn’t know what to do or how to act. He felt intensely awkward, something he hadn’t felt for years in front of Emi. He moved over to his bed and sat down on it.
He was quiet.
Emi was too, minutes passing with just the two of them sitting in silence. Normally, Abel wouldn’t have noticed the silence with her. That was them, a lot of the time. Him reading and she playing a video game, or sometimes reversing that. Now, though, the room felt heavy, like gravity had increased just for this room. Just for them.
“He’s drinking,” she said.
“Worse than usual?” Abel asked without barely a second in between, just glad to have words passing.
“I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s going to drink himself to death.”
“When’s the funeral?” Abel said.
“Tomorrow. I’ve had to do it all. I probably could have snuck out before now, but I just didn’t trust leaving him alone. I had to hide the gun, but I don’t think he noticed yet. When he does, there’ll be fucking hell to pay for it.”
Abel nodded, not knowing if she was looking at him or not. He sat with his back to her, staring between his legs to the floor.
Another minute or so passed in silence.
“Will you come to the funeral?” Emi asked.
Abel nodded again. “Sure. I’ll go. What do I wear?”
“I don’t care. I don’t think a lot of people are going to be there. My parents don’t have tons of friends, and her parents are dead. My dad’s parents are shit, so I doubt they’re going to trek down here from Maine.”
“What time is it?”
“Noon. We’ll pick you up. I told my dad you’re coming.”
“What if I had told you no? Then you would be a liar,” Abel said, unable to hold back the smirk on his face.
“No,” she said. “If you told me that, I would have just killed you then threw you in the hole with her, so you’d still be there.”
Abel chuckled.
“Do you mind if I sleep some?” she asked.
“No, not at all. Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Emi said.
Abel didn’t look to see if her eyes were closed, he only sat and stared at the floor beneath him for a while. Their talk had been brief, but Abel was happy for it. He felt better, her just being here, knowing that she was safe.
After a while he got up and walked to the kitchen. His parents still weren’t home yet, even though the sun was starting to set. Both were working odd shifts at their jobs, and Abel couldn’t keep up with them. His sister was in her room, and at 14, wanting absolutely nothing to do with her big brother. Abel, for the most part, was alone except when Emi decided to come over.
He made her a sandwich and brought it back to the room, not knowing when she’d wake up, but wanting her to have it if she did. He left it on his nightstand and then went back to the living room. It was the only television in the house.
He watched for a bit, falling asleep at it for a few hours. When he woke, he went back to his room and saw that the sandwich was gone and Emi asleep again.
He set his alarm for 8:00 in the morning and climbed in bed next to her. It took him a while to fall asleep, but that was fine. Abel was just happy she was okay.
The alarm woke him the next morning and Emi was already up. She was sitting on his bed in much the same position he had been yesterday.
He hit the alarm and then turned over, looking at her back—their positions now reversed.
“She’s dead,” Emi said. “I can’t really get that through my head. She’s dead, and she’s not coming back.”
Abel remained still, knowing that to say anything now would be wrong.
“I’ve hated her for so long. Her and my dad. I mean, I really hate them. Only, she’s not coming back, so I’ll never be able to hate her again, and ….”
Her voice trailed away, leaving silence in the room.
“I miss her,” she said, choking up. “I never thought I’d say that about my mom, but I miss her. Fuck, Abel.”
The tears came then, and Abel watched Emi’s back hitch up and down. He moved slowly, coming out of the covers and crossing the bed toward her. She didn’t stop crying and Abel spread his legs, pushing his chest against her back and wrapping his arms around her stomach, leaning his head just beneath her neck.
She took her own hands and placed them on his arms.
“I miss her. I fucking miss her,” she sobbed out.
Abel said nothing, only held the woman he loved. The first woman he had ever loved. And though he didn’t know it then, the only woman he would ever love.
A Friend of the Devil
Present Day
The entity was sitting with his group of three when the final Vessel entered the warehouse. The woman and man were both still fresh, their personalities having not yet been beaten into submission, and the entity was using them while it could. They still had the ability to make plans, and the entity knew that once it destroyed them, their ability would die too.
The entity was coming to understand that its decisions might not have been the wisest. At the very least, it hadn’t understood the complexities behind these Vessels. The FBI agents were special citizens, different from Demsworth. They would be missed more quickly, and there would be more people looking for them.
Yet, there was opportunity too …
Because they had more control, more power, more—
And that’s when another squeak ripped through
the building. It wasn’t the slow, almost agonizing kind that Lichen had made when he entered. This was quick and without care—someone simply pulling the door open, only wanting to enter and not worrying about what might be inside.
The noise, albeit loud, was quickly dwarfed by another realization.
Thought stopped inside the entity.
There had been a small connection with Demsworth, something that allowed the entity to flow forward over the course of months. The woman? The connection had been larger by many multiples. The last man? The third? Lichen? The entity thought it’d barely been able to reach him, and its control was weakest over him because of that.
Whoever had just entered the building towered over all three of these Vessels, even combined. The connection, the potential for whoever whipped that door open was exponentially greater.
All three Vessels opened their mouths at once, as if in some great ecstasy.
They remained in the same corner, the entity having been trying to plan the best it could, but all of that was discarded. There were no plans. There were no ideas other than one.
Get this Vessel.
The entity rifled through all three minds, trying to understand what it might use to bring the Vessel to it. It needed some sort of knowledge to trick this person, to just bring them within a step or two of it. The entity might not even need to put its lips on theirs, the potential was so powerful. It might simply breathe from a few feet away, and that would be enough.
“Where are you?”
The voice rang out inside the building, at least as loud as the door’s shriek.
The entity didn’t know who to use, only recognizing the voice as a male. It automatically took the woman, the Vessel with the greatest connection.
“Who’s there?” it asked, trying to portray fear.
Demsworth moved to the left and Lichen to the right, both circling around the building’s walls, trying to lay eyes on this new Vessel. They walked in the shadows, their faces lax, peering out and looking for the intruder.
“Do you feel it?” the man asked.
Demsworth and Lichen kept moving, but the entity’s frantic search for knowledge inside their minds ceased.
“You do, don’t you? You have to. You can feel me and I can feel you. There’s more, though, isn’t there?”
Laurens’s body had been sitting on the floor, her broken leg causing more problems than the entity first imagined. Now, though, the entity stood, using its arms to push against the walls and ignoring the pain burning afresh in its leg.
The voice was moving into the center of the warehouse, not hiding. Not trying to run. There wasn’t any reason to trick this Vessel. Nothing to hide from him. And the entity now thought it couldn’t hide anything from him. The connection was too great, the potential too powerful.
“I’m trying to find the right words for it, but I’m having trouble,” the man said, his voice still wandering further into the center of the floor. “It’s like … It’s like we’re twins.”
TWINS.
Demsworth and Lichen stopped walking, their eyes falling on the man in question.
TWINS.
The entity understood the term quickly.
“Identical twins,” all three Vessels said at once, their voices carrying across the entire building.
Abel looked at the bodies by his feet. He stared at them with an odd detachment. He understood what they were, though he shouldn’t. He should not know why one body would be nailed inside another, yet he did, and he thought …
It can’t help any of this.
“Identical twins.”
Abel didn’t glance up from the bodies on the floor, not needing to look around to understand what was happening. He felt the being in here, felt the three people it inhabited. Abel could, because of his connection to it, actually feel Emi and Lichen too. The third one—his name was Demsworth—he was lost. If anything at all existed of him, Abel couldn’t feel it.
The dead man was wrong, he thought, though not by much. Emi is slipping away and so is Lichen. Both of them will fall down as far as Demsworth, and then their bodies will truly be Vessels.
That was the entity’s word, not Abel’s, but he knew it, because the entity did.
The things at his feet, the being thought of them as Altars, and Abel supposed that’s what they were. Grotesque creations of death and pain. A woman impaled and then broken open, while another man was shoved inside her to suffocate. They were Altars to …
Master.
Another of the entity’s words. The dead man outside with that baggy suit would call it the Devil, Abel believed. Others would have more names, but in the end it came to the same.
Master.
This had been done for the Master, whatever that was, and while Abel stared at the horror, he knew it was an act of love. Perhaps he knew it better than the entity actually did. It was compelled to do this, maybe even created for it. Pleasing its Master was all it knew.
Love, though, was behind these two dead people. A sick, perverted love, but love all the same.
“Yes,” Abel whispered. “We are twins. We’re the same, you and I.”
He knew the being heard it without him having to raise his voice. Demsworth was to his right and Lichen to his left, both against the wall and staring at him. Emi was unseen, but Abel knew she stood in the corner in front of him, hiding behind some large piece of machinery.
The entity was in all of them, though it held the most power over Emi, because that’s who Abel had rubbed off on.
“The same,” he said again, unable to pull away from the freakish surgery beneath him.
Because his father had killed in love, and then Abel had done the same. His father had put a noose around his sister’s neck and then pushed her from the stool, watching as she strangled. He did it out of love. He did it to make the suffering stop.
And Abel, when he bashed his father’s head open with the stool? Yes. It’d been out of love, too. Love for his mother, for himself, for Emi. Because everyone in that house would have died otherwise, and so he’d committed murder.
The two men on either side of him started walking forward and Abel understood what they wanted.
Him.
The entity saw Abel as another Vessel, something that it could use to continue creating its Altars.
Demsworth’s and Lichen’s footfalls met his ears as he moved closer. They stopped about 10 feet from him.
The dead man was wrong, Abel thought, but he was also right. There isn’t any way out of this.
He saw what would happen next—what the entity had planned for him. Abel knew Emi would come hobbling out from behind the machine, her leg broken. He saw these two standing next to him, ready to hold him if necessary, and Emi coming forward. He saw her leaning in, her lips coming to his, and then the icy frost flowing from her mouth. The frost that would turn Abel into another Vessel.
What happened after that, Abel couldn’t see, but he didn’t need to. He understood the creature well enough. Death and Altars. Death and Altars. It would keep going until all its Vessels were destroyed and it was forced back to whatever world it came from.
“Twins,” Emi’s voice said.
Abel looked up, seeing her in front of him. Fifty feet off, her voice still carrying across the space.
“We’re twins,” it said again. “You and I.”
Emi came forward and Abel saw her more clearly. Hunger raged inside her eyes, and he understood that it wasn’t her, but the entity. Hunger for Abel. Perhaps the entity understood what he’d meant by saying they were twins, but Abel doubted it. The entity was referring to the shared connection, both of them having touched realms other than Earth.
“We are,” Abel said, feeling sorry for the creature, understanding that their similarity rested inside them—not from anything external. Their ability to do awful, awful acts based out of love.
“Yes, yes,” the entity said through Emi’s mouth, moving closer.
Ten feet.
Five.
And then it was on Abel.
Emi’s lips touched his own, and Abel breathed in the cold air.
The entity flowed deep into the new Vessel. It filled the man’s lungs, and yet still didn’t stop forcing in air. It had never imagined something so grand … so complete.
Finally, when the Vessel could take absolutely no more, the entity released it, opening the eyes of this new body.
The entity was now four.
It felt this new person—Abel Ease—still alive inside, but he wasn’t struggling like the other two. Demsworth had finally gone gently, and it appeared this one would too.
The entity moved the majority of itself into Ease, knowing that the other three would only be appendages to this Vessel.
All four turned to the front of the building.
There was a car outside.
The four walked toward the door, Lichen helping hold Laurens up so that she could walk with the broken leg. The entity paid the pain no mind.
It could think clearest when using Abel’s mind, plans flowing easier to it.
For the first time, it hoped one of the Vessels might stick around. It could use this type of planning, one where the underlying person did not make a FUSS, but simply remained there to help. To help build Altars, to keep the entity from being caught, from breaking unnecessary RULES.
It used Abel’s hands to open the door, holding it for the other three to walk through. Laurens and Lichen came last, hobbling, but both of their faces completely still and staring forward. Neither so much as glancing down to the broken leg.
It will need to be SET, the entity thought, Abel’s mind readily feeding it the term. If it is SET, then the Vessel will be of more use.
The entity saw the vehicle in the distance. The back door was open and there appeared to be something metal laying on the road.
