Lonely Friends

When I was a little girl, my mother purchased a house in the country. After moving from place to place my entire life she scraped together her dimes and nickels to give me a forever home. The house was a fixer-upper but a real steal in her opinion and with a little elbow grease she’d make that house our home. I didn’t know what she meant by that, but I did know it was far from the nearest neighbor, and with no other children to play with I was lonely. I wandered the vacant halls while my mother worked to restore decaying rooms. The sound of a hammerhead on a nail echoed against the walls like she was a worker in an underground mine. She wouldn’t resurface until dinner when she wiped the sweat dripping from her forehead with the back of her filth-covered hand and ask me how my day was.

“Fine,” I said holding back my thoughts. I’d lost friends every time that we moved, so I could endure the loneliness, but what I was holding back was the fact that I was afraid of the house.

The wicked bones of the house that she tirelessly tried to restore were haunted by evil. The stairs creaked as my feet padded up to the platform above, each step forcing me to go faster as the rotted wood threatened to break and send me falling through the cracks into the pits of hell. When I played in the yard, I stayed as far away from the algae-ridden pond; the image of bloated bodies lurking in the murky depths repelled me from its shore. And in the evening as my mother kissed my forehead, I pleaded with her to leave the bedside lamp on, the only thing that kept the demons that hid in shadows away. The doorknob jiggled when she closed the door, leaving me alone with my imagination. The dull light from the lamp cast a net over the room, protecting me from blinking red eyes that might not have been there.

I had a toy car that I claimed out of a box in the attic when we moved in. The tinplate frame painted canary yellow had a metal key above the bumper. I’d wind up the key and chase the car from room to room counting how many steps it took me to catch up. I followed the car around the labyrinth that was the first floor – 1 step, 2 steps, 3 steps, changing the direction of the car each time I hit a dead end. 7 steps, 8 steps, 9 steps – I caught up to the car just as the clockwork organs died in front of the pantry door. The car hadn’t quite reached a dead end, the door was unlatched and waited to be pushed open by the propelled toy but the light in the pantry was broken and I was scared of the dark.

I bent to grab my car and take it to a safer location when the key turned 6 times and jet forward out of my reach into the cavern of preserved food. The door swung open with a heavy thud as I peered inside. The car had been stopped by the wall underneath the shelf, the wheels still turned, trying to continue its race. I considered abandoning the car and going up to my bedroom on the second floor, but climbing the creaky staircase scared me more than the pantry. My feet carried me to the car, and I kneeled to reach my arm under the shelf. It was only an inch out of reach, my fingertips grazed the bumper. I tried to stretch even further; I was sure my arm might pop out of its socket.

A thick exhale tickled the back of my neck, I craned my head from my perch on the ground towards two red eyes unflinching when I made contact with them. I had never been told what a demon was, I’d only ever heard about them from the soundtrack of the television carrying to my room at night, but I knew that was what I was looking at. A guttural growl from the demon suppressed any scream I had inside of me, a warning, telling me to run. I scrambled to my knees, my stockings tore on a sliver in the hardwood. A run in the nylon exposed my leg down to the sole of my foot when I pushed myself out of the pantry into the hallway. The demon’s dense footsteps pounded behind me as I tripped over the threshold and fell onto the ground under the light. My exposed foot still bordered the line drawn between me and the shadows. The demon skidded to a halt before it hit the bright space outside of the pantry.

Its face was more defined at the edge of darkness as well as its muscular black body made out of an unexplainable void of anything. Silhouettes shifted under its skin and played tricks with its shape like when I watched the static on the TV for too long and started to see ghosts. From its twisted mouth, two crooked cuspids protruded like a warthog's tusks. The demon reached out with a humanoid hand and wrapped its clawed fingertips around my ankle jerking me a little bit further back into the darkness. It held my leg close to its face and sucked in a rattling breath through two slits that could have been mistaken for a nose. I imagined the beast putting my leg inside its mouth, hot drool dripping down my thighs as it sucked the flesh off the bone leaving nothing but the gristle like chicken wings at dinner. Instead, it dropped my leg onto the ground and let out what could only be described as broken-up white noise. The demon’s lips turned upwards, and it clutched at its chest as the noise escaped its throat – I realized it was laughing.

I yanked my foot back to my side of the light and examined my toes. The sweaty smell from having been confined to the nylon assaulted my nostrils and the ball od my foot was dirty from the floor of the pantry. The attempted laughter faltered, and the demon became silent observing me. I stuck my foot out closer to the shadows and it pounced as close as it could without coming into the light as I retracted it back next to my other leg. The laughter started up again, and I began to laugh too. The demon retreated to the back of the pantry inviting me into its space. It peaked around the corner of the shelving when I did not follow. After a moment of hesitancy, my yellow tin car puttered back into the light, and I realized that the demon wanted to play with me.

Carefully I walked back into the pantry, the demon did not rush me. It waited patiently behind the shelf until I was as close as I felt comfortable then it would growl, and I would run as fast as I could toward the light. The demon would laugh, so would I, and then we would repeat the game. We continued to do it until we were laughing so hard, my lungs started to ache. Whatever pace I made; the demon matched it. The last run, I ran so fast I slammed into the wall outside of the pantry, putting a dent in the plaster from one of my elbows. I turned around just as the demon failed to slow at the threshold and skidded under the beam of the lamp hanging above us. It began to writhe in pain, its limbs and joints contorted in unnatural poses as the shadows escaped from its boiling skin like wisps of smoke. The beast was dying; my friend was dying. Panicking, I picked up my tin car and tossed it at the lamp that hung from the ceiling. The bulb fractured on impact, glass shards fell on us and cut my skin like frozen rain.

What had I done? I looked down the hallway. The kitchen was only steps away, but the light was off. I’d never make it to safety before the demon pounced on me. I’d trapped myself alone with it. I’d been so distracted by having a friend, that I’d forgotten I was playing with a monster.

“Honey,” My mother's voice carried from further in the house and the light in the kitchen flicked on. “What’s going on? I heard something break.”

I looked back at the demon; its back now turned to me. It walked into the pantry, closing the door firmly behind it.

“The light broke,” I said, not wanting to share my new friend with her. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want her to tell me I couldn’t play with it anymore. She looked up at the ceiling and down at me, flecks of blood where the glass had grazed my cheeks. She muttered something about these old houses and took me to the kitchen to get cleaned up.

I returned to the pantry only after the light was fixed. Although I had seen that my friend wouldn’t hurt me, I didn’t know the rules of demons and I needed to be sure that we were real friends. I’d been friends with a girl at my old school who had said we were friends too, but the next day when I tried to talk to her in class, she revealed we had only been fake friends and everyone had laughed at me. I waited outside the pantry for hours, and the demon never came back to play. When I went to bed that night, I asked my mother to please turn out the bedside lamp.

“Are you sure?” She asked, and I nodded. I needed the demon to know that I trusted him, that I wasn’t a fake friend. She closed the door, the only light in the room was the moon casting an iridescent glow onto my furniture. I closed my eyes and waited until I felt a presence push down on my mattress by my feet. The demon sat like my mother did when she told me a bedtime story, almost mimicking her with its taloned hands clasped in its lap.

“I knew you’d come back!” I bounced out of the quilt draped across my chest and my friend seemed to smile, or so it looked in the shadows. “Do you want to play?”

The demon never spoke, only communicating through rudimentary noises and gestures. It would be too loud to play our chasing game without the risk of my mother coming in and turning on the light. I’d thought of this, and I pulled out an easy game to teach it; snakes and ladders. It took several tries for it to understand the rules but with very little cheating it was able to play. We played all night until the sun started to rise, and I wondered if it was time for my friend to go. It stood as the light started to stream in, stepping around the rays of the sun and walking out of my room into the hall. I followed as he walked down the stairs to the living room and through the wall.

“What are you looking at?” My mother was already awake. She turned on the light and stood next to me by the wall. She ran her fingers over a crease in the plaster, her brow furrowed. “I think there used to be a door here.”

“In the wall?” I asked unsure how a door could just disappear.

“Sometimes when old houses are renovated rooms get sealed up,” She explained. “Maybe today I’ll take a break from the basement and tear down this drywall. What do you think honey?”

I wanted to know where my friend had gone, so I sat on a sheet covering the couch with a dust mask loosely tied to my face. I watched my mother bring her tools into the room and carefully choose a sledgehammer as her weapon. She threw her body weight into the swing as she tore down the wall. Dust particles danced in the sunlight light like glittering fairies from my storybooks. When the hole was big enough and the dust finally settled, she popped her head inside and let out a surprised gasp. She waved me over and we stepped into the room together.

“This isn’t on any of the floor plans,” she told me as we stepped into a small windowless library. Shelves of books competed to reach the roof leaving few patches of torn wallpaper behind them. She analyzed the titles, most of spines presented as boring old textbooks. Each title less interesting than the last, the only one that caught my attention was one that had fallen from its place on the shelf. It lay open on the floor. The book was handwritten and had a crude drawing of my friend staring up from the presented page. I snatched it from the ground before my mother could see it and hid it under my nightgown. I wanted to read it with my friend, not her.

That night, I waited until my mom had shut the door and I felt the familiar presence of my friend at the end of my bed before retrieving the book from under my pillow. My friend’s eyes flickered like flames when I opened the pages to the picture of the demon.

“Is this you?” I asked, tapping my fingers on the yellowed paper. An exhausted exhale escaped its nostrils as I tried to read what the handwriting said. The words appeared to be gibberish. “Lumine libera ambulate in terra…Lumine ambulate in terra…Lumine ambulate in terra.”

I turned the page and another drawing of my friend stood below a simple sun with rays above it. Deep inside I knew that was I was reading was an incantation, one that would let my friend walk between its world and mine. There was only one way to be sure though, I reached over to the lamp. The demon growled a warning, it lunged toward me as I pulled the chain. The light brought the bedroom back to life, and the demon cowered, but its skin stayed smooth and smoky.

It looked at its own form, understanding swept over it as it realized that it was free from the manacles of darkness. Its distorted laughter from that night in the pantry chortled out of its throat. I was so happy that I was happy too, now my friend could be with me always and I’d never be lonely again.

The demon’s laughter faded to a low whistle that slowly became louder and louder until I worried that it would wake up my mother. I tried to quiet it, but the whistle called out into the night. From the stairs, I heard the splintering of wood and the heat of fire radiate from the hall. Outside my window I could see the water of the pond break, a bloated flesh-like snake slithered out from the depths of the pond and writhed up the side of the house toward my bedroom. I stepped back from my friend, confused about why it had called these things, until the fiery hell creature that lived in the stairs and corpse beast from the pond towered over me next to it.

They closed in on me, trapping me against the wall. I screamed as they reached out to touch me, they grabbed at my hair and face. Fingers slipped inside my open orifices until I gagged. They filled my lungs and stomach with rotting flesh, boiled my blood with fire, and finally darkness settled in my mind. Mother burst through my bedroom door and found me alone sitting in a pool of bile…

Mother said I wasn’t the same after that.

We weren’t the same after that.