The Cabin

[evilsoup]

"But what if - what if you're wrong?"

He paused for a moment, and in that moment she allowed herself a spark of hope that he would change his mind. Then he turned his head to look back at her, and she could see the determined look in his eye, and that spark was snuffed out.

"If I'm wrong," he said, slowly, trying to keep his voice from trembling; "Then I will die."

The words were like a slap to the face: Sharon took a step backwards, gasped.

"How can you just say that? How can you walk to your death like that?"

"Because, if I'm right, then that child needs to be saved. If I'm wrong... then I won't have the death of a child on my soul."

He looked down at the floor, the turned his whole body and looked right into Sharon's eyes; there were tears in his.

"If I... you have your gun. You'll have to... I'm sorry."

He slowly turned to face the cabin and began to trudge through the snow to the door. His hand was on the door-handle by the time Sharon regained her voice and shouted:

"You bastard! You fucking coward! Don't you dare open that door-"

He pushed the door inwards; Sharon desperately fished in her bag, felt the chill metal of the gun, pulled it out and took aim.

The cabin was unlit, but Sharon could see a little girl - nine years old at the most. Kenton pulled down his hood; Sharon could see that he and the girl were talking, but the wind was too strong for the sound to ravel.

Kenton dropped to his knees, opened his arms, ready to scoop the child up and take her away from this awful place. Hesitantly, she walked forwards and embraced him; he picked her up, turned around, and started back towards Sharon. She lowered the gun, tremblingly put her hand to her mouth. She was about to say thank God, but-

-the child had a hand either side of Kenton's head, palms flat, fingers splayed; his face was red, he screamed out in pain, tried to drop the girl, tried to hit her with his fists. But she kept pushing inwards; blood was spurting through the gaps between her fingers. Sharon raised the gun again.

"Fucking stop it you bitch, I will shoot you!"

The girl ignored her - or maybe she couldn't hear her - and continued pushing. With a cracking wet sound Kenton's skull collapsed, his eyes popping out and falling to the snow.

Sharon screamed at the top of her lungs and shot at the girl until the gun ran out of bullets and started clicking when she pulled the trigger. She fell to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably; the girl was writhing around on the ground.

"H-he-elp... mum, I-"

The girl's voice was carried by the wind straight into Sharon's ear. Sharon looked up; the girl was twisting around on the ground, staring into Sharon's eyes with a look of fear.

"Puh-please, where is... mum, where-"

Sharon cautiously walked towards the broken little figure. She tried to feel hatred - she looked at Kenton's body, with his crushed pulp of a head, and felt disgust and rage - but then she looked at the bleeding, dying, scared little girl on the snow-covered floor.

"You killed him, you-"

"Puh-please, where- where is..."

There was a look of confusion painted over the girl's face; she looked around, then winced as the movement of her clothes brushed against the open bullet-wounds. She whimpered, looked up at Sharon, tears rolling down her blood-spattered face - Kenton's blood, thought Sharon; but that fear, that confusion...

"He was right..."

The snow was no longer crunchy, sodden as it was with blood; it squelched as Sharon knelt down next to the child and (hesitantly) put her hand on the girls face, stroking her cheek.

"What's your name?"

"Ju- Julia, I- where am I, I..."

"Shh. Shh, Julia, it's okay. This is just a bad dream. Go to sleep, just... go to sleep, okay?"

Julia coughed and blood spat out. She muttered something that Sharon couldn't quite hear, apart from the word "...hurts..."

"Shh. Close your eyes and... and count backwards from one hundred, can you do that?"

Julia nodded slightly, painfully closed her eyes.

"One-hundred ... ninety-nine ... ninety-eight ... ninety-seven ... n- nine- ninety-s- six ..."

The girl coughed again, turned her head slightyly; her lips were moving, Sharon could read them counting down the numbers, but no sound came out. Julia got down to eighty-four, and then stopped moving entirely.

Sharon sat there for five minutes, between her dead husband and his murderer. She removed her hand from Julia's face and stood up; she considered giving Kenton one final kiss, but couldn't stand to look at his crushed grape of a head.

Jesus, fuck, what a mess, she thought. Then: If he was right about that girl, then maybe...

She didn't allow herself to complete that thought. She looked at the cabin, it's door swinging open in the wind; from where she was standing it looked empty, but Sharon couldn't see very far in to the unlit little building.

In spite of the inclement weather, the first shiver of the day ran though her body. If Kenton was right, she should leave now. But he was dead - and the child...

She steeled herself. Whatever was in there - whatever you are, I'm coming for you.

Sharon started towards to the cabin.

[Mayabird]

Holy shit, man.

...is this just a one-off? I almost hope so. *shivers*

[evilsoup]

I'm honestly not sure. I have a half-planned second part to this, but it might take away from the horror of this little scene by explaining it, so... maybe a one-off. I don't know.

[evilsoup]

Oh wow. I have written a second part of this, but oh G-d it makes the first part look like a children's tea-party. Seriously.

This next part is bloody horrible, do not read if you are of a sensitive disposition!

Right. Consider yourself warned.

[evilsoup]

Sharon stood at the threshold. She took a breath in, trying to sooth her jangled nerves. It didn't work. She plunged her hand into her bag, rooted around until she found her torch; it was slippery, and she remembered that she still had blood on her hands. A sob of disgust escaped her lips. She wiped her hand clear on her jacket, then tuned the torch on.

The beam of light cut into the darkness of the cabin, revealing plain walls - not a single picture hanging up, though she could see a few nails half-driven into the varnished wood. Sharon was looking down a hallway, with one door each on the left and right, and one at the far end of the corridor.

Plain walls? No- - there was something there, large patches of tar-black mould. Sharon took her first step into the cabin, then another; she stepped closer to the nearest patch of the mould for a closer look, and glass crunched underfoot. She looked down to see a thoroughly-destroyed faux-silver picture frame, the metal twisted far out of shape and the glass scattered across the floor.

Sharon knealt down and carefully picked a photograph out of the wreck. She uncrumpled it and pressed together the two sides of a tear; she recognised the girl Julia immediately, and there were three other figures - mother, father, and a scowling boy of about fifteen; older brother, probably.

She put the photo in her bag, fished out a pen, and stood up. Her face was less than a foot from the mould; she could smell something strange - a hint of raw sewage, though whether it was from the mould she wasn't sure. She poked the pen into the black patch, and it moved as if through treacle. When she pulled it out she could see, below the dark film that stuck to it, that the plastic was corroded.

The click of a door opening - Sharon dropped the pen, span around, shined the torch down the hallway. At the far end, leaning nonchalantly on the door-frame, was that boy. He was looking straight at Sharon, a slight smile on his face, dressed only in jeans in defiance of the cold.

"Well, hello there," he took a step forwards, spread his arms wide; "Welcome to my humble little home."

Julia had seemed innocent, but this boy radiated malevolence. Sharon knew enough to stop herself from taking the instinctive step backwards, tried to mask the fear in her voice as she answered:

"You ... you're Julia's brother?"

He laughed quietly, took another step forwards; the light caught his eyes for a second and Sharon could see a red glint in them.

"Not quite," - he came to a stop by one of the doors; "Guess again."

"You're a-" - the word was on the tip of her tongue, but it felt too ridiculous; "You're using his body-"

"It's my body now. Tom - that's his name, if you were wondering; he's nothing but a voice-" - he tapped his temple - "-up here. I kept him around so he could see what I was doing with his body. Oh, and his screams and protests made the torture all the sweeter!"

"You were... you were controlling Julia, too?"

"Oh, no. She killed your man, but that was all her. And then you killed her - maybe you'll see each other in Hell?"

Sharon's throat was dry, her hand trembling, her eyes blurry.

"You're lying! She was too strong - you were controlling her!"

He brushed away the objection with a flick of his hand.

"Everyone has that strength, but most of you in these days don't know how to call on it. She assuredly acted alone, just as - well," - he opened the door to his right, then took a few steps backwards until he was back where he had been when Sharon had first seen him; "Why don't you take a look at little Julia's handiwork?"

The stench was much stronger now: shit and rotting meat. Every instinct in her body was telling her to run away as fast as she could, every cell was screaming out in protest as she walked forwards. The closer to the room, the stronger the smell got. Sharon looked at the thing wearing a boy's body; he did not look like he was going to move, so she turned the torch into the room and instantly regretted doing so.

There was dried blood everywhere. On the bed there was what used to be a woman, trussed up like a roast chicken, facing towards the door: one arm was stripped to the bone, both ears and the lower jaw was missing, but the eyes - they were dried and shrivelled, but they were staring right at Sharon. The last thing Sharon saw before she turned again to look at the boy (struggling to keep vomit from working it's way up her throat) was that the woman's eyelids had been cut off.

"Impressive, isn't it? Little Julia was born in the wrong time: she'd have made a fine torturer."

"You ... fucking bastard! W-why!?"

"She was of no use to me. I'd touched her womb, and it was barren."

He crossed his arms. There was silence as Sharon worked out the implications of what had just been said.

"No..." she stumbled backwards a few paces. She remembered what it was she was facing, tried to steel herself. She could hear the winter wind calling her to safety, but she stood her ground: she had to know-

"Why are you here? Why do you need..." - she couldn't complete the sentence.

The boy started walking towards her, slowly.

"I'm not here by choice. That fucking enchanter, I underestimated him - not a mistake I'll repeat - but he underestimated me, too. He thought that by tricking me into this frozen shit-pit, he'd kill me off. It would have worked if I hadn't spotted this little beacon of life: I crawled here on my hands and knees, and when frostbite took my fingers and toes I slithered here on my belly. But if I'm to get home, I'll need a new body of my own."

He was getting too close now. Sharon backed out the door, into the snow, kept walking backwards - keeping him in her sight.

"I need a new body, but none of the whores in this little shack could give it to me. You, on the other hand-"

Sharon finally gave in to her instinct; she dropped the torch and started running. Almost straight away, she tripped over Kenton's half-snow-covered body. She could feel a presence walking behind her, could hear him crunching barefoot through the snow. She could see the gun, where she had dropped it - it was empty, she knew, but how would he tell?

She scrambled for the gun, span around, pointed it right at the boy. He raised his arms in mock surrender.

"You misunderstand me, woman. If I wanted to have you, you'd aready be trussed up next to the fat bitch in there. You already have a life growing in you."

"W- what are you-"

"You didn't know? I could smell it from a mile off! Well, congratulations. Let's make a deal."

Let's make a deal. The words flipped a switch in Sharon's head.

"W- what?"

"I need a new body. An empty body. The one growing inside you is not yet quick, I could take it and shape it into something worthy of me."

"A- a deal?"

He rolled his eyes, crossed his arms.

"What are you, retarded? I want your unborn child. I could just take it, but that's such a lot of effort... come on. What do you want? Your husband back to life? A metric tonne of rubies? What?"

This is wrong, this is fucked- - but Sharon wanted to make the deal: she somehow knew, deep down in the bone, that it was the right thing to do. She glanced to her right, to the frozen corpse of a little girl.

"Her too. Bring them both back, you know; fully healed."

"No. This is a strict one-for-one deal. I can pluck your husband out of Heaven or drag the little bitch out of the Pit. Your choice."

My husband, or a child. I'm sorry, Kenton...

"I want her whole. And not to ... remember ... what you did to her."

He shook his head, let out a disbelieving chuckle.

"Oh, after all these years, you lot still manage to surprise me. I offer you your husband or his murderer, and you choose little Julia! Oh, I will heal her flesh; but even if I could take the pain of her memories, I wouldn't. She comes back whole. Do we have a deal?"

I shouldn't, I can't-

"Okay," she dropped the gun; "Do it, then."

He smiled, took a step forwards, dropped to his knees, put his hands on her stomach. Sharon's belly went numb, her breathing slowed. The boy was staring right into her eyes; she looked back. The whites of his eyes slowly turned pink, then blood-red. He smiled maliciously. She felt like a small furry thing caught in the headlights of a car: she could not bring herself to look away, even as blood started sweating out of his eyeballs and pouring down his cheeks, dripping onto the snow.

Sharon felt a stabbing pain in her gut. She opened her mouth to scream, but could only manage a low croak. The pain increased. She tried to raise her arms to push him away, but there was no strength in her muscles. The pain increased. She felt like she would double over, but her body was not responding to the nerve endings screaming out in agony. The pain increased. The vomit that she had been keeping down finally worked it's way up her gullet and spilled over the lower lip of her mouth. The pain increased. She felt warmth spreading from between her legs, and watery shit leaking from her bowels. The pain increased.

Oh God, oh God I'm sorry-

There was an inferno burning in her belly: a Hell-in-miniature, with little devils pitching burning embers against the fleshy sides of her womb; and at the centre of this conflagration was a blinded, blistered, calloused and deformed embryo. A puff of hot smoke drifted up her windpipe and steamed out of her nose. The thing in the boy's rapidly-decaying body laughed and bent down, placed his face against Sharon's belly, which was swelling rapidly with the heat.

He reached forward with both hands and tore away her overcoat, tore away her jumper, and her shirt, and the thermal vest she was wearing underneath it all, exposing her flesh to the chill winter wind.

"Nearly ready now..."

Unable to move, Sharon could feel herself choking on the vomit. Her head was paralyzed, but her eyes - she looked down; the boy was at the very lower edge of her vision. His hair was falling out. His skin was melting as though it was plastic and falling to the ground in strips, revealing raw red muscle and off-white bone. He opened his mouth (with blackened slugs for lips, and the tendons clinging to the jaw visible) wider than would normally be possible, deliberately glanced up at Sharon with his lidless eyes, and then bit into her flesh.

His teeth were sharp, and her skin was tender. Muscle tore and fat popped, and the devil ate it all; pushing his head further and further inside her until he came to a stop abruptly, his mouth around the twisted embryonic half-living wreck.

He stopped moving, and she was finally able to scream out: a wordless, nerve-rending, low roar of anguish. She fell forwards onto what was now little more than a skeleton.

Sharon could feel the life draining out of her, leaking into the puddle of water and gore surrounding her. She screamed again, and vomited a little, and the vomit was mostly blood.

Julia...

She had to see. Slowly - painstakingly - she turned her head to look at the girl.

No!

The body was still there.

Kenton ... my ... child...

The body was still there, and it was not moving.

...all ... for...

She couldn't breath: vomit was blocking her airways, and besides her lungs were charred and blackened beyond usefulness. Her vision was blurred and fading, but Sharon focused on the body, hoping that it would move: but it did not move.

...nothing...

[Mayabird]

You never make deals with the devil, no matter what. It'll only end badly.

I wrote a PSA on that a few years ago.

[evilsoup]

Oh thank god. I was worried that I went too far in writing this last bit, thanks for putting me at ease Mayabird.

[fgalkin]

Why did she choose the little girl over her husband?

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Rabid]

I believe it is because in the modern Judeo-Christian, Occidental culture, children are generally judged to be more deserving to live than grown-up adults - the exacts reasons why, I can't tell (even if I have some hypothesis), but that's how it is.

I don't have any constructive criticism to formulate, but interesting blend of psychological & body horror nonetheless.

Also, just so I understand : did the 'daemon' failed to respect his engagement of bringing the girl back to life, or is there something I missed ?

[evilsoup]

You haven't missed anything, the girl didn't come back to life (well maybe she did after Sharon bled out/suffocated, but then she'd probably freeze to death anyway). As for why she chose the child over her husband ... well.. You could make a good utilitarian argument for saving the child, but that would be based off of the devil's line:

I can pluck your husband out of Heaven or drag the little bitch out of the Pit. Your choice.

Of course the devil could have been lying, and neither or both of them are actually in Hell. But Sharon didn't make her decision based off of that kind of cool evaluation of circumstances. It's something between natural protect-the-child instinct(/cultural blahblah, I don't really want to get into a debate about nature/nurture) and guilt: after all, she killed the child, she is responsible for that, felt little Julia die under her hand. Her husband willingly sacrificed himself and died quickly and heroically; Sharon shot the girl, and Julia died slowly, and terrified.

p.s. there are some little things that don't make sense in this part; but I have planned a (short) third part that will explain some of it.

[evilsoup]

They had been a happy family. Tom could remember.

He could remember a day out at the beach. The weather had been on the edge of cold, but they had ice cream anyway. Tom had skimmed stones on the surface of the sea.

He could remember one Christmas - it seemed so long ago now. He had been sulking that he didn't believe in Father Christmas, that presents were for babies - but his parents had known better.

He could remember his first-and-only fight at school. Tom hadn't started it, but he did finish it; he'd been punished, and he had shouted that it was unfair - but in the end he understood that violence solves nothing.

The devil had entered him just as he was going to go to bed, forcing its way in through his mouth, his jaw pried open until it nearly broke: forcing Tom into a dark, cold little corner of his mind. He could still see, and hear, and smell, and feel what he was doing; but he had no control whatsoever. As the devil abused and raped and killed his family by inches, it taunted him with his own memories.

Remember that day at the beach? is sneered; Remember leaning against the metal barrier at the car park, looking down at your little sister with ice cream on her face? She looked cute then - doesn't she look cute now, down on her knees like a whore - but that's not ice cream on her face! It had laughed violently; Tom tried to sob and beg - but he could not find his voice.

That Christmas, thought the devil, knife in hand; Your father told you a joke, and you told your mother, and she smiled knowingly. Well- - he scraped the knife against flesh, not quite drawing blood, looked straight into her eyes; She knows now, doesn't she? Tom could see the fear and pain painted across his mother's face: he wanted to scream and vomit, but the devil's control was absolute.

Even when he was telling you off, when they were in the middle of proclaiming your punishment - even then you remember seeing the pride in his eyes, hidden behind the stern disapproval of the fight, that you won. Look at him now... His father was looking at Tom with shame and hatred. At first he had thought the whole thing a sick joke; even with both arms broken and skin hanging off his face, Tom's father had tried to reason with him; but now he was a broken man, hanging on only to desire for revenge for the pain and humiliation heaped upon him. Tom wanted to flinch, to look away, to fight for his body.

But the devil's control was absolute.

He discovered that, as the devil could access his memories, Tom could see the devil's. This was no blessing: he saw a continent of fields covered in squirming bodies, pinned to the ground by taut barbed wire. He saw dozens of people squeezed into tiny bronze cages, suspended above open fires. He saw trees strewn with stretched-out intestines: amongst the tangle of internal organs and slashed skin and shredded nerves were mutilated heads. The heads were screaming, but their screams could not be heard above the unending head-splitting background noise.

He was in a Hell worse than any of that. Their suffering was greater, but they could at least scream out, to add their voice to the cacophony. Tom had no such release: the pain and the shame all built up with nowhere to go.

The devil knew what it was doing. It had created, over a month, a storage battery of suffering. It allowed the release of that power all in one go, adding the agony to its own nightmare-strength and focussing on the little embryo in Sharon's womb.

It pushed through, let Tom's body die (his mortal form could not withstand the energies being used, and the pain fed back into the process), eating flesh and fat and bone until it reached the little thing, twisted as it was by the demonic energies focussed upon it.

It felt a rush of excitement as it leaped from Tom's flesh-rent corpse, into the fresh new vessel. The embryo twitched and changed, little proto-arms stretching out and developing claws, head growing and warping-

-but something was wrong. The change stopped. The devil opened its half-formed eyes; there was nothing to see. It tried to move its limbs, but found it was paralysed.

A trap! it thought; But how? Who!?

An image appeared unbidden in the devil's mind.

That fucking enchanter!

The little pool of heat he was lying in disappeared, and the devil was lying on a cold stone altar. It could sense a presence nearby, but it was too weak to shift its essence - and besides, it suspected that the spell encompassing the body would stop its flight.

The devil had only just started to mould its vessel, so its senses were dulled: no smell, blurred vision, barely-functional hearing in one ear - but enough to hear footsteps approaching. Enough to see a familiar face loom over the altar and look down mercilessly. The enchanter. The one who had thrown it out of that body in Prague, who had chased it over the world; who had tricked it through a portal to that frozen waste.

Oh shit.

The enchanter smiled, satisfied of his victory.

"Oho," he said; "You thought you were so tricky! You thought you were hiding from me in that little cabin, didn't you? All of you lot fancy yourselves chess-masters, I know; but really, at most you are competent poker players. When you face someone on your level, someone who really knows what you are..."

His hand moved into the devil's vision; he was holding a long iron nail.

"It was I who set up those Crowleyite fools to fail in summoning you. You thought I was chasing you for revenge over what you did in Prague?"

Then why?

The enchanter moved the nail so that the point was resting in the devil's mouth. From its position, the devil could see that the nail was as long as itself; maybe longer.

"I spent so long just reacting. Just cleaning up messes. But wheels that I've been setting in motion - going back nearly two thousand years - are all coming into alignment. You think I dumped you nearby that house by accident? And you think those people just happened to wander to that isolated cabin, in the middle of winter?"

With one swift push, the nail went right through the devil. It was grounded now: there was no escape possible. The enchanter picked it up, brought the (the paralysing spell now broken) squirming little thing up for close examination. He turned and started walking.

"I don't want you dead, you see. Oh no, you're of use to me alive - but just barely."

Nearly two thousand years? Who- - the realisation hit him more painfully than the ache of the nail; NO! Not him!

The enchanter chuckled, raised the devil up; it could see a wooden staff, but could not make out the screw-thread encircling the top of the thing. The enchanter placed the devil-embryo on the top, the flesh of it's almost-legs touching the rough wood. The enchanter brought his face close to the devil, smiled widely, and pushed down until the nail was secure in the wood. A quiet, gurgled scream came out of its throat.

The enchanter walked away. The devil tried to move; desperately tried to leave the body: but it had been right, the spell had trapped it in its body. The enchanter returned with a hollowed out wooden bulb. He placed it over the devil, and screwed it in place on the top of the staff, shrouding the devil in darkness.