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Written by James H Longmore
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"KILL THE CUNT."
The voice in my head was as loud and crystal clear as if its obnoxious, otherworldly creator was standing right next to me and yelling at the top of his lungs into my damned ear.
Ignoring the shouting voice that had somehow managed to set my ears ringing, I smiled sweetly at the bedraggled stranger who sat looking up hopefully at me from the trash-strewn gutter by my feet, dropped a fistful of loose change into his tattered McDonald's soda cup and wished him well.
"You're a scholar and a gentleman," the guy grinned up at me, proudly flashing the only three teeth that remained in his festering maw of a beard-covered mouth. "Thank you kindly, good sir, and have yourself a blessed day."
I nodded self-consciously, and cracked an inward smile at the vagrant's unintentional juxtaposition, although I was obviously the only one between the two of us who knew that I'd only dropped him a few quarters and dimes out of guilt at the thoughts that were echoing inside of my head like bat squeaks in a dark, dank cave.
Had I really been contemplating killing this wretch of a man, human detritus that he was? Had I just actually found myself considering ending his presumably miserable life just because I'd heard some nefarious voice telling me to?
Demanding.
Oblivious to my internal dilemma, the hobo wrested his grubby placard - written on the back of a stolen real estate sign in handwriting so neat as to be almost feminine - from beneath his sleeping mongrel dog and drew hard on the glowing nub of his cigarette.
In another time, another place, my compassion would have registered a big fat zero on the Compassion-ometer and I would have commented quite loudly to anyone who cared to listen that perhaps this guy - and thousands like him - would be in less dire straights financially if he ditched the pooch and quit fucking smoking himself to death.
But things were different now.
I gave the poor, grinning vagrant my sweetest grin and went on my way.
"Pussy!"
I really wish Dave would quit yelling at me like that.
***
THERE'S A WELL-WORN and much over-used saying that springs to mind: we all have our own inner demons. It's a rather clichéd and somewhat trite way of indicating one's internal struggles with anything from alcoholism to serial killing to obsessive masturbation, one which I feel people would be far less prone to using if they knew what those of us who actually do possess said demons, individuals for whom it is more a truism than a proverb.
He's been a part of me for almost as long as I can remember. I call it a he, although there seems to be no gender with these things as far as I can tell. I have no idea how - or if - they reproduce, and consider it rude to enquire directly. But, from what little information I have managed to gather from mine thus far, the things just are, and have always been.
Of course, this leads to all manner of difficulties in naming them. Sure, you can have Abaddon, Melchon, Succorbenoth, Incubus, and a whole legion - if you'll pardon the pun - of handles by which to call them, but those are simply names given to the denizens of hell by people, and they tend to be more about what the demons do, rather than who they actually are. And in all honesty, the demons don't care much for the monikers that we people stick them with all that much.
So, I call mine Dave.
I've spent many, many a sleepless night trying desperately to pinpoint precisely how this all came about. Nights rendered sleepless, I must point out, by the incessant chattering that bounced around in my head, the constant questioning, analyzing and philosophizing that buzzed around the inside of my skull - it was like being pestered by an ever-present, insomniac five-year-old!
It is easy to hazard a guess that, were I not become quite used to Dave's jabbering from a very early age, I could quite easily have been driven insane by now.
There's a scene in one of the Back To The Future movies - the second one I think - where the crazy Professor guy with the unmanageable hair explains to the forever youthful, pre-Parkinson's Michael J Fox how timelines can be split at a particular point by a single incident. In the movie's case, it was Marty McFly's nemesis getting his fat hands on the Almanac of the future and thus altering the history of the timeline from that point onwards.
I tend to think of such incidents as Defining Moments; points in time which we all experience throughout our lifetimes that determine the course of our own history. Moments like should I tell the wife I'm working late and then give the cute blonde in Accounts a call?, or what if I quit my job and spent the rest of my days whittling mesquite sticks on the back porch?
No, I'm not digressing. Here's my point.
There's one incident that sticks in my mind, nothing more than a silly childhood prank, but it was, perhaps, my very first - and in hindsight, most critical - Defining Moment.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that it was that one, single moment that really was to define the remainder of my life.
We had a sad friend, as most thirteen-year-olds do, whose divorced parents vied for his affection with cash rather than love and affection. Subsequently, his behavior patterns had been duly programmed to buy our friendship.
Fair-weather friends that we were, we never complained, or refused the poor boy's grand gestures of fist-fulls of candy and all the latest trading cards, or his over-generous topping up of our relatively meagre allowances with his own. Yep, we were great friends to Bud, the very best he could have ever have paid for.
I think it was Joe who came up with the idea, but since Frank and I agreed with no hesitation, there's no blame to apportion other than three ways. It was a simple idea really, we were to perform an improvised séance to invoke some imaginary dark spirit or other - Bud was notoriously fascinated by ghosts, ghouls and all things netherworldly - and our main prop for attracting said entity would be that good old root of all evil - cold, hard cash.
Of course, the only one of us who could get our hands on the amount of money we figured would be required to summon the dark spirits was - yep, you guessed it - good ol' unsuspecting Bud.
I remember as clear as if it were yesterday's memory and not one over three decades old, cycling to Frank's house on my merry way to fleece our new friend and whistling The Entertainer; I'd not long since seen The Sting on TV and I guess I thought I was being funny, or ironic or something like that.
Frank had set up his parlor for our fake séance really quite well. He'd painted some regular candles up with black poster paint, created a Ouija board out of an old chunk of plywood he'd purloined from his tumble-down shed and dug out his mom's old Gideon Bible which she had filched from a hotel room in Vegas a million years ago.
With the solemnity befitting our grim task, we lit the candles - the poster paints immediately gave off a God-awful stench which kind of helped set the mood a little - drew the drapes and took our pre-ordained places at the table.
Looking back, it was all pretty damned corny, we even had the whole 'is anybody there' thing going on; Joe knocking on the bottom of the table and Frank pulling on the myriad strings he'd set up to pull things over.
Bud was living it.
He'd borrowed - and for borrowed read stolen - fifty bucks from his mom's purse. Of course, he fully expected to be putting it back long before she noticed its absence - I mean, how was he to know that we would be stealing it from him?
After fifteen minutes or so of conversing with the dark spirits, it came time for the séance to go terribly wrong. Frank knocked the table over, Joe pretended to have been possessed by means of an undecipherable demonic message he'd pre-written in black Sharpie on his chest. I have to say, that Joe's ripping open of the shirt was way more dramatic than anything I'd seen in a movie before, or since.
Bud was wide-eyed with terror at all of this. Unbeknownst to us, he'd brought along his own prop - a tiny silver crucifix, also purloined from his Mother's purse. He clung onto that piece of jewelry as if his very soul depended on, which I guess he figured it did at that particular moment in time. We had him so damned scared that he barely flinched when the newspaper scraps we'd surreptitiously substituted for his Mom's grocery money went up in flames.
And that was pretty much that.
Joe bravely fought off his supposed demonic possession, Frank reassembled his parlor and Bud went home fifty bucks lighter and looking way paler than he had when he'd come over.
Joe, Frank and I spent the money on candy, soda and nudie magazines, which we hid in Joe's dad's garden shed. The rest we just squandered.
We often reminisced with pride about our expert confidence trick, although we did feel a twinge of remorse when Bud's mom grounded him for a month over the missing fifty bucks. To his credit, the boy never once cracked and told her what had actually happened to it.
And I never told the guys what I'd felt that afternoon.
Different.
Not just different, but somehow different than I had before the mock-séance - almost as if I'd been replaced by aliens and no one had told me about it, if that makes any sense.
I know now that one should never burn black candles at a séance because they invoke the darkest spirits - that is, if you believe in such things.
And I didn't.
I do now.
Something had been with us that afternoon in Frank's parlor. Something ephemeral, almost intangible, but there nonetheless. Even now, now that I have lived with the thing for all of these years, I struggle to find the precise words to describe what I felt following our mock-séance - and I'm supposed to be the fucking writer!
A presence, a ghost, a being from the Netherworld, call it what you will, but it was most definitely there with us that day.
And it chose me.
Dave and I have never actually discussed how he came to be, perhaps he takes it as read that I just know how - and when - he came into me. One day, I'll be sure to ask him.
In the days, weeks, months following our brilliant get-rich-quick scheme, and long after our ill-gotten gains had been spent, I became aware of the tinnitus ringing inside my head, it sounded to me like some high-pitched smoke alarm that was stuck perpetually onto on.
My Ear Nose and Throat specialist said that it was most probably down to the aggressive ear infections I'd suffered as a small child, and I had it figured as space aliens attempting to make contact - I'd not long seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind and I think it may have left a lasting impression on me.
And that was all. A slightly weird feeling of not being quite the same as I was before that day, and an annoying ringing in my ears that the best specialists in the county said I'd just have to learn to live with. I've since read up on the condition, and learned that suicide rates amongst tinnitus sufferers is far higher than in those who can enjoy silence. For me, perfect quiet is just a wishful concept.
What I know now, of course, is that the sounds in my head were not due to some inner ear damage but Dave's early, developing voice; like a small child, he had to learn his language, practice and grow with it. Like me, he simply had to mature and tune in.
As time marched by, I grew up as a pretty much regular teenager - I was never one of the cool kids, but had my fair share of low self-esteem girls and was popular amongst my own peer group of misfits and introverts.
I did the expected college thing, got my degree in Biology and pursued a sales career that had no parallel whatsoever to my chosen education path, much to the chagrin of my parents.
I blossomed - under Dave's discrete tutelage, as I have since discovered - from a socially awkward boy that used humor as a defence mechanism to the life-and-soul of every party. Class clown to fucking cliché in forty-eight years, that's me!
I married my high school sweetheart, created two beautiful children and built up my lucrative career doing something that I was exceptionally good at.
But all the while, there was this niggling feeling someplace deep in the darkest recesses of my mind that something was missing. A gaping chasm as black and empty as any sinkhole and along with it, the desperate craving for experience and knowledge.
And Dave was beginning to make his presence known.
Fast-forward to twenty-eight year old me. Successful sales executive for the globe's biggest vehicle manufacturer. Another dull Friday afternoon in a tedious sales meeting, fighting sleep and the thick headache of a hangover from the night before that was only just beginning to form. The night had been a wild one, too much booze, some barely remembered nightclub and a stranger's face on the pillow next to mine the next morning in my expensive hotel room.
If she'd told me her name, I'd forgotten it, and I really didn't care all that much anyway. Another ship passing in the night. Next month it would be a different face on a different pillow.
Dave's voice came through loud and clear, slicing through the sickly head pain like a lighthouse beam through thick, swirling fog.
What would it be like to...?
The impulse caught me unawares and before I knew it I was standing up at the table, trousers down, dick in hand.
I wiggled it playfully at the Sales VP, oblivious to the sniggers of my fellow salespeople. I seem to remember slapping my manhood hard on the board room table a couple of times for effect before the VP's dumpy secretary with the improbably pendulous breasts ushered me from the room, doing her damnedest to get me to tuck my penis back into my pants without touching it.
My actions that day have since become the thing of legend in that particular institution. Some put it down to Good Ol' Jim horsing around, some to a nervous breakdown or stress or something similar. Others figured that I was just still drunk from the night before and really didn't know what I was doing.
But I did.
I knew exactly what it was that I was doing. I was finding out just what it felt like to do what every person in every boring meeting has mused about at some time or another; just what would it be like to wiggle my genitals at the VP?
And now I knew.
In my defence, for me it was more like watching myself from a place above the table as I did it; I was fully aware of my actions, but knew that there was not a goddamned thing I could have done to prevent it.
It was to become the beginning of the end, or to be more precise, an end of that particular part of my life. Dave had finally found his voice within me and he was exerting his newfound power over his more than willing host.
Okay, so let me try to explain this thing.
Demonic possession is a thing that regular - unpossessed folk - see only in the movies. They see the snarling, rotting body, the vile profanities, the preternatural movement and the head-spinning, bile-puking evil that looks great on the big screen.
In reality, and away from what the Catholic church wants you to think, it is more akin to catching a parasite than any other analogy I can come up with.
There is a parasite that lives in cat shit - Toxocara gondii - whose primary host is mice. Once infected, it grows inside its unwitting host where it sets up base camp in the poor, unsuspecting rodent's brain. From there, it alters the mouse's behavior - making it braver and more reckless than its naturally timid and uninfected brethren. Some studies have shown that mice infected with gondii actually become sexually attracted to cats.
All the better to get eaten, my dear.
Naturally, a reckless mouse that has the hots for kitty-cats is far more likely to be gobbled up by Mr. Tiddles, which subsequently poops out yet more parasite eggs and thus perpetuates the cunning gondii's family line.
All by fundamentally altering its host's behavior.
I'm not saying for a minute that Dave made me inexplicably attracted to cats, but he did instil in me a certain recklessness, a confidence and a thirst for new experiences. And he wasn't all in my head either. Yes, that's where I 'heard' his voice, most likely because that's where the brain's auditory center sits; but I felt his presence everywhere; in every fibre of my body. In that way, Dave was probably more comparable to a fungal infection, its mycelia snaking into every capillary, every nerve ending, and every muscle fiber that made up my physical existence.
Parasites? Fungal infections? Once the biologist, always the biologist, I guess.
But, you get the general idea now?
Dave was like a small child. As he continued to grow, he - it - was experiencing everything for the very first time. And, like said child, his demand for new things to discover was becoming insatiable.
What is? What if? What would? How does? The barrage was unstoppable, the floodgates opened with the boardroom incident.
Dave - my inner demon - had found his voice all right, and I was damned well going to have to listen to it!
For anyone who still cares at this point in my story, I did return to work following a couple of week's forced rest. Just long enough for the hysteria and legend-building to have died down a little, and just long enough for my superiors to figure out the best way to persuade me that I really ought to be thinking about furthering my erstwhile lucrative career elsewhere.
And that suited me just fine. I was already making big changes in my life - under Dave's influence of course - and shedding the shackles of employment was just one on the laundry list that needed ticking off.
Dave wanted to write.
More to the point, Dave wanted me to write.
Although I'd hankered after a career in the literary arts since the beginning of Ever, I'd never done much more than tap out a few disjointed pages of pedestrian stories inspired by some movie or other. But now, now my head was filling with stories and images and dialogue and characters so fast that I could barely keep up with them all.
And, it transpired that the only way to clear them from my cluttered brain was to write them down. Although, that seemed to have the effect of simply clearing room for fresh material; it was much like having a garage sale when you know damned well there's more crap to bring down from the attic.
And so I began to write.
And when my first story was out, laying there bloody, raw, bleeding and glistening wet like a newborn, I felt for the first time since that fateful day of the fake séance that the bottomless, gaping hole in my psyche was a hairs breadth closer to being sated.
As a writer, people always - and I mean always - ask you that same old, conversation-killing question; 'where do you get all your ideas from?' They most likely think it makes them sound all intelligent and engaging.
It doesn't.
I always wanted to answer that dumbass question with 'and where do you get all your farts from?' And thanks to Dave I actually have done just that now.
The reply is a short and simple one. A creative's ideas are generated inside our brains. Little more than a product of the complex bioelectrical and biochemical processes that any functioning brain performs simply to stay alive and maintain its god-like control of the human body.
Only some of us are different.
Some of us get our material from an otherworldly source, our very own, personal demon - in a sense, it's actually far more literal than the non-possessed will ever understand.
Lovecraft, Barker, Stoker, Poe, quite possibly King - all authors who have had the ability to dip into the seething currents of the unseen worlds that bubble and gurgle a hairs-breadth beyond human comprehension. Worlds filled with torment and nightmares that would drive most people insane in a split second.
Why else do you think they - we - write about the vile, creeping things that inhabit our darkest, deepest nightmares?
Because we have been shown them. We know what's out there, watching us with beady eyes, grinning at our frailty with snaggletoothed maws and reaching out for us in the night with spindly, oozing, pustulant claws.
My marriage broke up. A necessary casualty according to Dave, although I put it down more to his 'I wonder what picking up hookers is like' musings than anything else. Go figure.
As Dave grew stronger, I discovered a deepening feeling of being pushed out. You know how you felt as a kid when the group you were friends with one day suddenly and inexplicably decided not to include you in their games the next?
Much like that. More and more I found myself a passive observer in things that I was doing. A little like an aware sleepwalker or someone having an alleged out of body experience. I say alleged because there really is a simple explanation for that - back to our friend the brain again. A release of chemicals to dull the pain and gut-twisting panic of impending death is what creates the illusion of tunnels and white lights and your favorite grandmother's long-deceased dog.
End of.
Well, believe it or not, there is an actual etiquette to picking up hookers off the street. Dave and I know that now - a lesson learned together.
The skill is to drive slowly around the designated red light areas until you find the girl of your dreams - without getting pulled by the cops for curb crawling. A couple of drive-bys to catch her eye and then wait for The Dip.
Your chosen lady of the night will bend her knees to peek at you as you go by. A slowing down of your vehicle tells her that you are interested in a business transaction and she will approach.
And before you can say sexually transmitted disease, you're in an abandoned parking lot somewhere dark having God-awful sex with a girl who reeks of cigarette smoke and nonoxyl-9 and has arms decorated with scabbed-over track marks.
And they say romance is dead.
So, Dave and I discovered what it did feel like to pick up hookers for soulless sex, and shortly thereafter, what it felt like to get caught out by your wife and thrown out of the home you'd spent ten years of your life paying for.
There's a well-worn saying: the devil made me do it.
In most cases it's just bullshit spouted by convicted felons trying to cop an insanity plea. But in a few cases - mine included - it really is the God's-honest truth. Not that it holds water with angry wives and pissed-off employers but as excuses go, it's a good one if it's genuine. Perfect too, for assuaging the conscience.
Dave's inquisitive nature began as innocent as a small child's. What do butterflies feel like? How do you eat spaghetti? What do farts look like?
And then, as my demon matured inside of me, I noted the less-than subtle change in his curiosity. What does a girl's tit feel like? What do you do with a rock hard dick at two in the morning? What does a threesome feel like? What happens if you do drive too fast?
It was fun. Discovering all of these new things made me feel like a kid again, seeing the world as one of wonder and excitement instead of one of hard work and soul-destroying drudge.
And I was writing. And Jesus H. - was I writing? Pages and pages and pages of neatly crafted prose created from ideas and story lines that pretty much jumped fully formed into my head, all thanks to my nefarious lodger. And it was all original and unique material that, as it turned out, was highly saleable.
Dave had completely turned my life on its head; I had success and money doing the one thing I'd always wanted to do, and the glorious trappings that went along with it. An obscenely big loft apartment, a disgustingly expensive Aston Martin DBS (fully paid for) and a hot blonde girlfriend ten years my junior.
Well worth the pay-off of being another's puppet, I thought.
All was going swimmingly with Dave and me, until, one day a thought popped into my head: 'I wonder what fresh human innards taste like?'
And sadly, as much as I tried to ignore Dave's constant, nagging voice chirruping around inside my head like some errant cricket about this, he was, unfortunately, all-too persistent.
Well, for the record - and I'm sure you're just itching to know - warm, raw human innards taste pretty damned awful. And I'd swear to this day that the hooker was still alive when Dave and I chowed down on her bloated, steaming transverse colon - I'm positive that I saw her chest rising and falling. Ever so slightly, the faintest of movement, as was the flickering of her baby blue painted eyelids.
How best to explain Dave from that point on in our strange, symbiosis? Well, you know how you have that little voice inside your head that would really like to know what it would be like to mow down that sad-faced, little old lady tottering by on the crosswalk, or how it would feel to feed your hand into the garbage disposal and switch it on?
Now imagine that little voice actually having control over your actions.
And that's how come I had to deliberately torch a one-hundred-fifty grand car and tell the cops it was stolen and learn how to type one-handed. Hell, I have to do everything one handed nowadays. Although, I guess I should count my lucky stars that Dave had the good sense to try out his masochistic experiment with my left hand.
And so commenced what I guess I could call now - looking back with the 20/20 that hindsight offers - the beginning of Dave and mine's downward spiral. His desires, and along with them, his demands, became ever more sadistic in nature, initially involving just our body, but quickly expanding to pull in others.
Our body?
Yep, that's what I said.
I had come to view the corporeal vessel that I had inhabited quite singularly - or so I'd thought - for the best part of thirty years or so as a shared thing by then. Dave was as much a part of 'my' body as I was, and in some cases, more so - even if I insisted on pushing its physical limits to the extreme and then some.
Somewhere between us killing the doddery old woman, leaving her shattered body twitching and oozing blood and brains in the gutter, and butchering the hooker in order consume her slippery viscera, I happened upon a club for people who had developed a taste for life's more extravagant and experimental pleasures.
I say club, I was soon to discover that it was more of a society; something more akin to the Freemasons or some such than a mere club. Highly secretive, one hundred percent underground and yet managing to pervade every level and aspect of the regular social order that regular folk take so much for granted.
And it had a large population of people just like me.
The possessed.
I guess that's how come I found out about The Society in the first place - through the bizarre network that the demons have going on. I suppose it's only natural that they communicate with one another in some form or another. God only knows how they do it, but it quickly became obvious to me that they do.
I'd been hanging out in some of the BDSM clubs with Rachel - the aforementioned blonde girlfriend du jour - first as a spectator and then as an active participant. It was good to be amongst like-minded people in an environment where Dave and I could indulge Dave's curiosity and very quickly we hooked up with people who were more than happy to be strapped to increasingly uncomfortable chunks of exquisitely carpentered equipment to be whipped and clamped and tortured in the most imaginative ways possible.
I remember one brunette girl who insisted that I - we - bound her impressively sized breasts so tightly with harsh hemp rope that they turned a most unnatural shade of purple, and for her to have us thrash them soundly with leather riding crops until her nipples actually bled.
As Dave, Rachel and I progressed, I began to sense that Rachel was becoming increasingly less enthusiastic and more detached as we advanced to the more extreme clubs. After a while, she preferred to remain a spectator - tourists, the BDSM diehards call them - and on the few occasions I managed to persuade her to join in, whether as a perpetrator or a recipient, she made it obvious that she was only taking part to please me and then would refuse to talk to me for days afterwards.
She looked damned hot in the black leather dresses I'd bought her, though.
It was on one such night, in a club new to us - rather unsubtly christened The Tortured Vagina - that I think I, well, Dave and I - pushed my beautiful blonde a little too far.
Stripped of her leather, bondage-buckled dress and deliciously naked, Rachel adorned the St. Andrew's Cross like she and it were a work of the finest art. Strapped to the upright wooden cross by her dainty wrists and ankles, her full, pert breasts signaled their invitations with hardened nipples and her freshly denuded pussy pouted and glistened in the flickering light of the countless candles that illuminated the dungeon room.
With the multi-coloured ball-gag wedged firmly in her mouth, Rachel's pleasures began.
Thinking back with more clarity than possessed me at the time, the ball-gag was possibly where we went wrong. We had agreed our safe word - hammock - but of course the poor gal had no way of actually expressing it when she had reached her limit.
And I'd I totally misread her eyes.
I don't know whether the last straw was the hot candle wax that was dripped down her breasts, or the cold, metallic intrusion of the huge, stainless steel dildo that some fat guy in a translucent, latex body suit forced into her ass that did it. Or the bull dyke with the shocking pink Mohawk and ripped combats who fisted my poor Rachel until her eyes streamed and her pussy bled, or the nice young couple dressed as if for church who decided to practice their erotic asphyxiation techniques on my girlfriend until her baby blues bulged and her frantic wriggling against the biting leather restraints ceased.
Either way, once we had unstrapped Rachel and she'd revived enough to call me a fucking sick asshole, it was way beyond 'sorry' and lame excuses. She'd stormed out of the club's Torture Zone with as much dignity as a naked chick with her ass crusty with cooled candle wax could muster.
And by the time I returned home, just a few hours later, Rachel - and all of her stuff - was gone.
But it was there at the Tortured Vagina that I learned of The Society. One minute I'd been standing there, dumfounded, watching as my girl's perfect peach of a bare bottom left the room, and the next I'm hearing a soft voice purring in my ear.
Whoever she was, I never saw her face.
She whispered that I was not to turn around, but that I had impressed her with my dark desires. She pressed a crisp, white business card into my hand, asked me to say hi to the friend inside my head for her and then she vanished into the flickering ink of the shadows that danced amongst the dark, wooden torture equipment.
The card was damn near featureless, adorned with just a phone number. No name, no address, certainly no business title. Yet I - and Dave - knew precisely what it would lead us to; oh, what doors had just been opened for us!
The Society's gatherings were spectacular, opulent affairs. They were held in the grandest of mansions that belonged to the incredibly elite membership - gone were our days of the squalid underground clubs hastily thrown together in the city's decrepit, abandoned places, which were invariably populated by the sick, the addicted and the broken.
Although, deep down, I suspected that Dave actually missed those sleazy, depraved times, we were both entirely captivated by the sheer luxury and whole new level of depravity that The Society had to offer. That and the fact that each and every one of the members was people like me.
The Possessed.
Every invited member of The Society was there as a player, and each one of those had their very own Dave. Of course, they gave different names to their demons, some even preferring not to be quite so familiar with the being that dwelled in the darkest depths of their soul as to give them a name. And those that weren't The Possessed? Well, they seemed to be there solely for our entertainment.
Dave was finally amongst his own kind.
And so was heralded the beginning of what I guess was the end for me.
The Society held their debauched soirees pretty much each and every weekend, and of course, a great deal of the pomp and ceremony revolved around perverse sexual practices - in most cases a simple, loosely disguised ruse to get the young, impressionable and decidedly unpossessed Entertainment naked and vulnerable as quickly as was humanly possible. I have to say that they did seem to be enjoying themselves for the most of it - the uninhibited hedonism of group sex, sado-sexual torture and on occasion, bestiality - as they cavorted with each other and The Society membership with joyful faces and orgasmic cries. It was almost as if they relished the closeness of we Possessed, perhaps even harboring the vain hope that by giving their bodies so freely to the demons that lusted after them would bring them one of their own.
Only it doesn't quite work like that.
And some of the Entertainment even giggled and squealed with sheer and absolute delight whilst we ate them.
Unlike the hooker that Dave and I had tasted a million lifetimes ago, these young men and women gave themselves freely for consumption by the Membership. Again, perhaps they thought that in doing so they would gain their own demons or fast track to the unearthly pleasures they assumed lie beyond death. And I must confess that the added fear, pain and adrenaline gave the flesh a soupcon of a tangy palette that fair caressed the taste buds.
And again, it doesn't work like that; the poor, deluded saps were in for one very big, if somewhat final, disappointment.
We would sit around the long, long tables in the cavernous dining rooms and pick out the choicest parts of our meal, some of us even preferring to carve those tender pieces of flesh for ourselves. The inner thighs were a much sought-after delicacy, as were the calf muscle, cheeks and the breasts and vagina walls of the young women - the latter being a much sought-after delicacy, when prepared by the right chef. It was usually saved for the most senior Society members, or for those who had been asked to procure the next banquet.
The meats, once carved, were presented to the tableside chef who would then cook them to our preference and serve them back on a bed of rare and exotic leaf salad. To a casual observer, ignoring the living, breathing source of the meat, it looked for all the world like any other teppanyaki restaurant.
Although, there were those - Dave and I included - who preferred our meat raw, bleeding and still warm from the body from which it was sliced.
Through all of this obscene degeneracy, Dave was growing ever stronger within me, my will more and more playing second fiddle to his, and my demon eagerly allowed The Society to absorb us into its world almost to the exclusion of our own.
"And you, Sir!" a ruddy-faced, rotund gentleman called to me from the opposite end of the ridiculously elongated table. All eyes - even those of our dinner - turned to inspect my reddening face.
"Me?" my voice squeaked out like a strangled fart.
"Yes! You!" he guffawed, taking great relish at my obvious discomfort. He shuffled in his seat and a young man, naked and shaved completely hairless, wriggled out from under the table between Fat Man's legs. "At our next gathering, it is your turn to procure something special for our table!"
This was news to me. No one had mentioned that Members had to procure anything at all. I was of the understanding that these dinner guests - and the Entertainment - just magically appeared.
Perhaps they wanted me to find a rare bottle of wine, or a two hundred year old scotch for after dinner drinks?
In my head, Dave laughed at my naiveté.
Then Fat Man clapped his hands in that theatrical way that only the morbidly obese can carry off.
A squat guy with an odd, reddish tinge to his skin and an immaculate white suit appeared in an instant from one of the servant's doors on at the side of the dining room. The door closed gently behind him, blending in perfectly with the heavy-pattern of the wallpaper and the white wainscoting. With him, the squat guy had a young girl.
She was no more than ten or eleven and was dressed demurely in a full-length cotton and lace gown; the girl looked like she'd just strayed from the Little House On The Prairie. She stared over at the living dinner tableau on the table before her as if she'd seen it all before.
"The other members and I have decided that we would like to satiate our taste for something a little more -" Fat Guy paused, more for effect was my guess, "- delicate." He laughed again, loudly.
"Hey, come on -" I ventured, feeling all eyes burning into me.
Come on nothing, it would be so sweet. Dave chastised me.
"You are aware of the rules of The Society, sir?" Fat Guy raised his voice to me and it boomed across the now silent room to make my ears ring.
"I am, Sir, but-" the words struggled to leave my mouth.
"But nothing!" Fat Guy countered. "If you are to remain in The Society, and enjoy all of the -" here, he swept an arm wide to indicate the all too willing flesh on and around the table, "-benefits, then you will adhere to the rules." His voice had now adopted a hard, aggressive tone; any further protest from me was only going to fall on deaf ears.
And Dave wasn't helping either.
We like this place, these people. They're our kind. He chirruped inside me like some sick twist on Jiminy fucking Cricket. So what if they want to eat children, the people you're eating right now were kids once, ya know.
What scared me was that my demon's twisted logic was actually beginning to make sense.
"Just the one will do," Fat Guy boomed. "We don't want to spoil the treat for ourselves now, do we?!" He clapped his hands again and smiled at Squat guy.
A flash of a blade and the little girl's throat was slit. To my dying day - and may that come very soon - I'll never be able to erase the image burned into my brain of her impassive doe-eyes and the scarlet cascade that soaked the front of her crisp white gown into a dark, wet scarlet.
And, of all the things I had experienced with Dave to that point, all the things that we had seen and done together, it was that defining moment that divided us.
For the first time in our symbiosis, as we watched the girl slump lifelessly to the polished hardwood floor of the mansion's dining room, I came to see Dave for what he really was; a sick, soul-sucking parasite that I could never be rid of.
I avoided The Society the following week. And the week after that. A month or two crept slowly by, Dave's incessant chatter about complying with their demand and returning a deafening cacophony inside my head.
To placate him some, we frequented some of our old haunts, but found the shabby pretences of turpitude a bore and no longer able to meet our elevated desires. We procured a hooker or two - a sad cliché, picking on those in society whose job it was to get into cars with strangers, it was almost too easy - spiriting them away to the deserted parts of the industrial part of town where we would play with them for hours on end, revelling in their pain and terror, and ultimately their death. Yet all the while, that gaping chasm of Not Enough ate through our enjoyment like rust on an old car.
And all the while, Dave would whisper to my conscious; one little girl, that's all they want, just the one. What harm could it do? Just one and we have all of that delicious debauchery back again.
I truly want to believe that Dave's heart - or whatever imagined lump of offal he had that passed for a heart - was not one hundred percent behind the constant goading. I know that he missed his own kind, as did I in many, many ways, but I like to think that perhaps just a little of my humanity had rubbed off on my live-in demon over the years.
Just a little.
On the day I got word of my cancelled book deal, I found out that Rachel had somehow managed to clean out my bank accounts, even the - as it turned out, not-so-secret - Cayman Islands offshore account. And then my bank foreclosed on my apartment without so much as a by your leave. There was something in the fine print of the mortgage contract - who the hell reads all of that?! - said they could do that. Apparently.
The Aston Martin went next, a pair of the World's burliest repo' men in dark suits towered over me at five thirty, one humid Saturday morning and demanded the keys. Arguing was not even a consideration, let alone an option.
It would appear that The Society's insidious influence stretches far and wide, like the infectious mycelia of some all-pervading fungal disease.
I had pissed them off and they were punishing me, it really was as simple as that. I tried making contact with them, to apologize and beg their forgiveness in order to save my sorry hide, but when you don't know exactly whom you are supposed to be attempting to contact, it very quickly becomes an exercise in futility. I visited the mansions and panoramic-view penthouse apartments where they'd held their fabulous gatherings, only to be turned away by puzzled faces.
The Society, it would seem, had not just vanished from the face of our planet as far as I was concerned, it was as if they'd never fucking existed at all.
Only, I knew damned well they did exist; my rapidly ruined life stood testament to that.
Of course, Dave was all I told you so and if you'd listened to me and procured what they wanted, you wouldn't be in this mess. But at the time, I liked to think that, deep down, he was feeling sorry for me.
Are demons capable of compassion?
I sincerely doubt it now.
And here I am, everything lost, even my sobriety and sanity.
Dave stays pretty much quiet these days, I think the alcohol puts him to sleep, or at the very least it subdues him to the level of a faint mumbling in the darkest recesses of my tortured brain. Every now and then he will raise his metaphysical head to chastise me like a bored pre-schooler over what we have lost. But there's nothing I can do, not now.
There's a dark shadow blocking the one sliver of sunlight that ventures in through the gap in the freeway pillars. I look up, and see the guy standing over me. He's one of the kinds I have become, a homeless bum, and he's coveting the crap I lug around in two dirty, plastic Circle K bags.
He is also Possessed, I can see it in his eyes.
Kill the cunt.
The voice is so loud in the bum's head that I can almost hear it, his very own Dave. I wonder what name he has given to his demon? Perhaps I should ask, strike up a conversation to distract the bum's attention from the folding knife he's clicked open and is absently fiddling with?
But, I'm guessing he's not come over for a chat, or to ask for loose change.
We're going to die now. Dave stirred in my head. It's been fun.
Fun?!
Not exactly the adjective I'd apply to the absolute wreck of my life - a life over before I'd even hit fifty.
One last experience to share. My demon informed me. Embrace it, it's going to be interesting, to say the least.
Probably for you, Dave, my internal voice raged at my demon. This was the definite end for me, I knew - don't ask me how, as I'd never asked him - that Dave would go on. Either he'd return to where he came from and a lightless eternity of whatever it is they do there, or it would be onto some other poor schmuck who he can parasitize and destroy.
The chill steel of the blade slides easily between my malnourished, prominent ribs. It slices its cold, unrelenting way into my heart and I can smell the stink of the bum's breath in my nostrils and feel the coarse prickle of his unkempt beard on my face.
You've done so much for me. Dave sounds quite sad. What was it Shakespeare said? Something about parting being sweet, sweet sorrow? Bullshit it is. It's anger and disappointment and desperation, that's what it is. A parting of the ways with my demon, Dave, who had been a part of me for almost as long as I can remember meant death, and the dark finality that brought with it.
What can I do for you?
Well, Dave, you could get this piss-soaked hulk off of me for starters. Then you could get his knife blade out of my chest and stop me from bleeding to death in the gutter like some diseased animal.
That would be fucking nice for starters.
Then perhaps you could use your otherworldly powers to save my goddamned life - that's what you can do for me, Sir!
But, of course, I know in my heart of hearts (a poor choice of phrase here, I know) that Dave can do none of those things. He is as rendered impotent by my physical limitations as I used to be by his overbearing presence in my mind.
You can show me Hell, Dave. My mind reaches out to my own very personal demon, inquisitive to the bitter end.
I slump sideways into the spreading, warm, viscous pool of my own blood, my consciousness fading in and out like a dimming light bulb and Dave's voice is hauntingly silent.
I know that there is nothing more for Dave to say to me. He has no reason to show me Hell, no reason at all.
I've been living it all along.
End
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BIO
James hails originally from Yorkshire, England having relocated with his family to Houston, Texas in 2010. He has an honors degree in Zoology and a background in sales, marketing and business. Relatively new to the writing arena, his writing style and story telling have already been compared to James Herbert, Richard Laymon, Stephen King, Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum.
An Affiliate Member of the Horror Writer’s Association, James has to date five novels published – ‘Pede, Tenebrion, Flanagan, And Then You Die and The Erotic Odyssey of Colton Forshay – plus Blood and Kisses, his definitive short story collection, all in addition to three novellas and a whole bunch of short stories dotted about in myriad anthologies.
James also writes screenplays and currently has three under option (a spine-chilling horror, a Tarantino-esque crime caper and an animated family movie). In 2014 he was commissioned by Spectra Records to write a biopic feature on the early life of Bob Marley, and in 2015 was writer for hire on the Kenyan sitcom ‘The Samaritans’.
As if that weren’t enough, James has written and directed a bunch of short movies, winning Best Director in the 2013 Splatterfest film competition and Remi awards at Houston’s Worldfest Film Festival in 2012, 2014 and 2015.
James’ writing style has been described as uncompromising, unique and entertaining; he combines highly original ideas with brilliant vocabulary and highly effective yarn spinning in which the story always comes first! Be warned, his work does have a tendency towards the dark side – usually with a rich vein of humor – and there is always that delicious twist at the end!