Demon Mine

by Marina Simcoe

  I knew I couldn’t expect him to drive on the road with the mask on. It could have been okay on Halloween, maybe, but it was March, apparently, and we couldn’t afford to attract any extra attention from other motorists on the road. Not to mention that it would be extremely difficult to explain this mask to the police if we ever got pulled over. Still, after all this time wondering about the man behind the mask, I didn’t ask him to remove it when we were in his cave.

  Everything had changed, and I had to deal with all these changes at once, even if they were obviously for the better. All of this was still overwhelming after months of inactivity. The familiarity of his mask put me at ease somehow.

  I still hated the mask as I hated everything associated with my time in that demon jail, but as long as Sytrius wore it, he represented the one and only bright thing I had to myself during my incarceration. Without the mask, I would have to face the fact that my “imaginary friend” was an actual person, not only with a name and a voice of his own, but also with his own face that would be a face of a stranger to me.

  He must have sensed it, as I heard the back door of the truck open and close and then he opened my door, already wearing the mask.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, taking the blanket off me and tossing it into the back seat.

  “Better,” I said, realizing that the headache was gone. It was a huge relief! My head still felt a little fuzzy, but all the pain had vanished. “Much better, actually.”

  “Good.” He nodded and reached to lift me out of the seat.

  “I can try to walk again,” I protested and reminded, “You said you wouldn’t touch me without my permission.”

  He ignored my protests and lifted me out of the truck.

  “This isn’t sexual,” he said matter-of-factly and kicked the door of the truck shut.

  Okay then. I let him have it this time. Pick your battles and all that… Besides, the lingering weakness in my body would have most likely still make my legs shake if I tried to walk.

  “Where are we?”

  I looked around. My eyes were getting used to the darkness again as he carried me through what looked like a large garage with an old car parked next to Sytrius’s truck. A workbench was along one wall, with a collection of tools hanging on pegs above it.

  “A house of somebody I know.” He opened the door and we walked into a large country kitchen. “He has been in Deep Sleep for the last couple of years now. I come by now and then to check on him and his place. There are no neighbours here for miles, which is a good thing.” He put me down on a chair next to a large dining table. “We won’t stay long. You will eat here, and we will take his car.”

  “What time is it now?” All windows in the house that I could see looked like they had been boarded with pieces of plywood from outside, making it hard to tell whether it was day or night.

  “Shortly after midnight. We were on the road for over thirteen hours.”

  “Any chance I could take a shower here?”

  It would have been heaven!

  “No, sorry. The water has been off for sometime. The pipes would most likely burst if we turn it back on. There is no electricity either. The house is thought to be abandoned right now, but I’ll get some candles.” He walked back to the garage and returned promptly, carrying a lit candle in a red plastic cup and a black cooler bag.

  “What’s this?” I tipped my chin towards the cooler.

  “Your dinner,” he said and placed it on the table in front of me along with the candle. “Eat, please. You need your strength back.” He turned back to leave again. “I’ll need to get the car ready.”

  “Wait!” I stopped him. “Your friend, the one in Deep Sleep… Where is he?”

  “It the bedroom,” he said casually and gestured in the direction of the hallway off the living room adjacent to the kitchen.

  “Um… Can I come with you and eat in the garage while you’re getting the car ready?” I asked carefully. Somehow the idea of staying in the dark house, in the middle of the night, with a stranger in a state of a vampire-like coma being somewhere nearby, creeped me out.

  He looked closely at me for a second as he often did and then shook his head.

  “No, I’ll wait here while you eat. We can go to the garage together after.” He pulled another chair out from the table and sat across from me.

  “Thank you.” I opened the cooler and took out a sandwich wrapped in wax paper and a container with chopped vegetables. There were also an apple, a banana, a bag of mixed nuts, a couple of granola bars and two bottles of water inside the bag. “I’m starving!”

  I realized that I was really hungry again as soon as I saw the sandwich.

  “Eat,” he said with force. “There is no need for you to starve. Ever. Human food is readily available everywhere.”

  I remembered what he said about the hunger among incubi. Is that why he felt so strongly about me having regular meals, because he knew only too well what it was like to go without?

  “Would you like some?” I offered him the second half of my sandwich tentatively. “You said you eat human food sometimes…”

  “Just as an experience.” He shook his head. “Or to fool the hunger for a while with a feeling of fullness inside. It’s not nourishing to us otherwise.”

  “Are you hungry right now?”

  “I always am, always have been to a various degree, for as long as I can remember,” he said calmly, way too calmly, considering what he just said. “You don’t have to worry, though,” he added. “I can function without regular feedings for a long time without losing control.”

  As if that was what I was worried about right now! All of a sudden, the sandwich was too difficult for me to swallow.

  “You said you worked for them in exchange for the access to my emotions outside of the arena? Sorry, that big white room you took me to every night, I called it ‘arena’ in my mind because it made me feel like an animal in a circus performance, with the audience and stuff…” I explained gloomily.

  He simply nodded without saying a word.

  “Did you …eat regularly then?”

  He nodded again. “Yes, I had the right to skim any positive emotions you had.”

  “Why only positive?”

  “Negative emotions are toxic. They would make me sick. Some are outright poisonous and incapacitating in large quantities.”

  A memory came to me.

  “Just like when you took my grief and sadness that one time when I had a bad dream and cried?”

  He nodded once again.

  I thought a little further back.

  “You did it more than once, didn’t you? You did it when I had a meltdown earlier too?”

  He pulled in a lungful of air and exhaled slowly.

  “Yes, it was the first time I met you. You were on the edge of insanity, and I had the order to take you to the Council. If they saw you in that state, they would have terminated you that night. I had seen it happen before; I thought I was saving your life…”

  “You made yourself sick by doing it.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, I spent the night in the infirmary to let the pain work through me. Janitors brought you food.”

  “The other guards?”

  He nodded.

  “You didn’t need the whole night to recover the second time, though?” I remembered the acute suffering that I saw swirling inside his inhuman eyes then.

  “No. The positive emotions you felt about me cured it much faster.”

  “What positive emotions?” I asked confused. “I don’t remember feeling anything cheerful at that moment.”

  “Positive doesn’t necessarily mean cheerful. The biggest emotion you felt for me at that time was compassion. It was good, nurturing and delicious, and it took the pain away. I didn’t take it directly from you, but I skimmed it from a distance as soon as it left your body. It was no longer inside of you when I skimmed it. You could not have felt any different this way, and you didn’t.”


  An answer came to me on its own: “Is that why your eyes twinkle?”

  “Twinkle?” A smile was in his voice. “Yes, the light of human emotions reflects in my eyes when they enter my body.”

  “It’s pretty,” I offered. I had finished my sandwich, almost emptied the bottle of water and was nibbling on carrot sticks now. “I haven’t noticed them do it for a while.”

  “The idea of me feeding on your emotions upset you, so I stopped.”

  Just like that, really? He stopped feeding off me because I told him I didn’t like it? I kept silent for a moment, not sure how I felt about his answer.

  I knew I absolutely hated the idea of him manipulating my feelings in order to “feed” sexual energy to a group of strangers. On the other hand, had he himself continued to “skim” whatever positive emotions I had, I would not have minded it.

  Now, however, he put me in the situation where I had to actively give him a permission to skim them again, which felt to me like going against the principle. If I backed down on this one thing now, would he still respect any other limits?

  I kept quiet and busied myself by collecting the leftovers from my dinner back into the cooler bag.

  “Thank you for that,” I said finally and added, “and thank you for the dinner.”

  I felt like a real jerk now, but it was better to be safe then sorry, I reminded myself. If he truly was a demon – the notion I was beginning to accept – then I was the weaker one here, and I should care for myself first and foremost. He said he could last for a while without sustenance, didn’t he? It wasn’t like he would die without it anyway - he was immortal. Anyway, he was not my responsibility. He’d figure something out without me; he’d been around for a while…

  Of course, he’d lost his employment now and with it his only chance to be fed regularly…

  “I will have to check on Ivarr quickly and then take you to the garage.” Sytrius interrupted my thoughts when he got up and walked around the table towards the living room.

  “Can I come with you?” I surprised myself with the question.

  Did I really want to see what was in that bedroom? Well, I most certainly didn’t want to stay anywhere in the house on my own, and I hated to admit it, but the curiosity got the best of me: I wanted to see another demon. Sytrius looked and acted more like a human than any demon anyway. Now that his eyes stopped “reflecting the light of my emotions” as he put it, the only supernatural thing remaining about him was his strength, with which he carried me around like if I was a one-year-old. If it weren’t for all his crazy talk about Council, draining and Sources, he would easily pass for a human. Well, come to think of it, even with all the crazy talk, he could still pass for a human, just a delusional one.

  I was curious to see the demon that had been in “Deep Sleep” for years. It also sounded safe enough, with him “sleeping” and all…

  Sytrius paused for a minute then nodded: “Alright, you can come. Just stay behind me at all times, don’t come close to the bed and don’t touch him. He is starving. If he senses your touch, he won’t let go until the end…” He trailed off and I didn’t feel like clarifying the end of what he was talking about. A sleeping demon, apparently, still wasn’t as harmless as I thought.

  Chapter Sixteen. Ivarr.

  “Should I carry you or do you want to walk now?” Sytrius asked, giving me a choice this time. I got up from the chair gingerly to test my balance and the strength of my legs. My head didn’t spin, and my legs shook but held.

  “I’ll walk.” I nodded with more confidence than I felt.

  “Alright.” He moved closer to my side and wrapped his arm around my waist for support. With his free hand he picked up the candle from the table. “Let’s go.”

  We walked along the corridor to the farthest door at the back. Sytrius let go of my waist, opened the door, and walked into the dark room. Clutching the back of his hoodie in my fingers, I followed closely behind him.

  I didn’t know what exactly I had expected to see, but there were no coffins, no burned out candles, no chains or bats hanging from the ceiling of the room. Incubi might be considered energy vampires, similar to blood-sucking vampires, save for the gore of blood; however, there didn’t seem to be much in common between the incubi and what the popular culture had taught me about vampires and their lifestyle.

  The room was almost disappointingly plain. It was much smaller than I expected too. There was a double-size bed in the middle with the headboard pushed to the wall opposite from the door. It was the only piece of furniture in the room.

  I didn’t hear any sounds of breathing. Then Sytrius walked to the side of the bed, and the light of the candle in his hand illuminated the man lying there.

  He looked surprisingly young, too young even for an incubus. His skin was extremely pale with a greyish tint to it, thin and fragile; it looked almost transparent. His long blond hair fanned out around his face in soft silky curls. He was dressed in a plain white t-shirt and was covered up to his chest with a quilt, with his arms stretched over the quilt along his sides.

  He didn’t look starved or even malnourished; pale and lifeless, but not famished. He looked more like a beautiful apparition than a corpse. His shoulders still expanded wide and strong under the t-shirt, and his exposed arms above the quilt still had a muscle mass and definition.

  When I looked more closely, though, I noticed the sharp angles of his face. It remained frozen in a peaceful expression, but the deep shadows around his eyes and mouth as well as the hollows of his cheeks betrayed the fact that it was not just a sleep, that some illness or suffering strong enough to leave physical marks plagued this beautiful body. He didn’t stir a muscle. I still didn’t hear any sounds of breathing, and I couldn’t determine if his chest was moving at all.

  “Is he okay?” I asked and let go off Sytrius’s hoodie. Whatever the man on the bed was, he did not look scary or dangerous to me.

  Sytrius handed the cup with the candle to me; with no furniture in the room, there was nowhere to put it. He took the glove off one of his hands and placed it onto the man’s forehead, and then carefully lifted one of Ivarr’s eyelids up with his thumb.

  The eye behind the eyelid was dark grey. All of it. The iris and what was supposed to be the white of his eye were the solid dark colour of wet concrete. It reminded me of the sightless eyes of stone statues.

  I shuddered and took a step back.

  “He is in pain,” Sytrius stated simply and released the eyelid, covering the expressionless eye. “It’s what happens during Deep Sleep. There is nothing we can do,” he added as a matter of fact, but I sensed a trace of sadness in his voice. He moved aside a lock of blond hair from the man’s forehead and pulled up the quilt a little higher over his chest.

  Only now, I noticed the stiffness in the man’s body in front of me. The hands on top of the quilt were clenched into fists so hard that the knuckles appeared to be completely white, even against his pale skin.

  “How long will he be like this?”

  “Until somebody wakes him up. Most likely until the Council needs him.” Sytrius walked over to the window in the room and checked the locks and the frame. “Could be years… or more.”

  “Can we… can I do something to help?” I asked before I could stop myself, before the thought even fully formed in my mind. “I could wake him up, couldn’t I? If I gave him some of my emotions? Energy?”

  His eyes shot to mine.

  “Would you do that for Ivarr?” he asked in disbelief.

  I didn’t know if I could really go through with it, but seeing Ivarr’s lifeless body frozen in silent torture compelled me to do something.

  “Would it help? Would I get hurt?” I asked instead.

  “Yes, you could get hurt. Once awaken, he could drain you before he comes to his senses. I cannot allow it,” Sytrius said firmly. “Besides, Alyssa, waking him now would possibly be even more cruel than letting him be. You cannot stay here. We will be leaving soon, and without
a source of energy, he would have to go through the painful process of falling asleep again.”

  “What will happen to him now when you leave? Will somebody else check on him?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” He sighed. “Eventually the Council will find out that he is in Deep Sleep and will order to move him after all. Not all incubi have a place of their own. The ones that are awake have jobs with the Council and stay at the base. It is much easier in many ways. Ivarr prefers to have his own place and to live separately. I do too. It is more difficult to keep and maintain it, but I like to be on my own outside of the base.”

  “Do you have more friends, other than Ivarr?” I gestured towards the bed.

  “Ivarr is not my friend. He is a demon, like me. I come here to make sure the house is still standing while he is asleep. I had other incubi stay at my place while they were in Deep Sleep over the years. The close physical proximity made it easier for me to look after them while they were sleeping. That’s all, though… Unlike humans, incubi are too individualistic to maintain close friendships. We keep mostly to ourselves. Well, we live too long, long enough to outlive any meaningful relationships…” He stopped in front of me, and I moved to the door, anxious to leave the room now.

  “How old are you, Sytrius?” I asked the only question I had been avoiding to ask. I wasn’t sure exactly why I didn’t want to know his age. Maybe it was easier for me to pretend that he was more like me if I didn’t know how old he really was; maybe I felt a little closer to him without knowing the number of years between us. It was time to stop pretending, though. It was time for me to get a grip on reality, even as my reality kept getting more and more unbelievable.

  “At least 600 years…”

  “At least?”

  “I’m not sure. There is a familiarity to this number, and I have at least some memories that go back that far… I think… But I could have been around for longer than that, I just don’t remember...”

  “Six hundred years! It’s a lot as it is,” I said, entering back into the kitchen. “It is a long time to be around, Sytrius. It is hard for me to even begin to comprehend the life experience of anyone that age!”