“Play with me~”, the demon whines

This story was originally posted to Twitter on April 26, 2022.

“Little witch, little witch~”

She sits huddled inside her circle, her last little bastion against the world. A fortress wrought of old amber chips and gallium drips, a tiny pathetic thing standing firm in the face of what waits just outside.

“Why won’t you come out to play~?”

If she let herself look at it, if she let her eyes rest on that broken parody of a person for a just a moment—

She doesn’t lift her eyes.

It prowls through her peripheral vision, stumbles around her circle, tries to catch her out. Maybe it doesn’t even know where her eyes are.

“Aww, you’re no fun! Maybe I’ll have to find SOMEONE ELSE to play with~”

That sudden shout, that roll of static-filled thunder shaking her bones and setting her all a-tremble! Somehow it’s worse than the putrid rot that fills its normal voice, that sound of ruined flesh dripping from distended bone to splatter on a floor already soaked with all the gore and refuse that half-consumed bodies can offer up—

“Y-you can’t leave,” she says, and curses herself for those words. She knows that it can’t, knows that her bindings haven’t broken that far, but she shouldn’t talk to it. Shouldn’t even acknowledge it. That’s the rule, with things like this: don’t let them in. Don’t let them know that they’re getting to you.

Stupid little witch, breaking all the rules …

It laughs and crouches just in front of her, muscles flexing and changing, a stop-motion parody of all the little ways a natural body shifts with motion. It smears itself up against the wall, up against the fragile edge of the cylinder, stretches its arms out into great enveloping sheets to fill up everything in front of her with blood and rot and broken bone and the warping fungal growths that stretch far deeper through its body than anything should be able to.

“Not yet, little witch, but you’re going to let me~” Its spine cracks as it tilts its neck. “You’re going to help me, little witch~”

“I will NEVER help you.”

Her words are full of ice, and sudden frost cracks and steams on its face as it pulls itself away from her pathetic little fortress.

“You will, little witch~”

She doesn’t answer it, and it returns to slowly pacing around her—

That’s not quite right.

It returns to exploring the confines of its prison, those walls she knows so well; it runs its appendages along her bed, along her dresser, along her desk—all pushed as far back as she was able to, little things tucked away to clear the floor for her true work. The window lined with sticky tape and salt, the door sealed shut with dripping wax and silver thread, the carefully drawn curves and sigils which throng the canvases hung on her walls. All the tools of witchcraft; all the weapons binding it in here with her.

Even as curled up as she is, even through all the trembling spasms that wrack her body, she does her best to keep track of what it is. Tilting her head, craning her neck, doing her best to hold it in her periphery—

“No,” she shouts without thinking, without realizing the regret her words invite, “get away from that!”

It doesn’t move. Its entire body is hunched up over her little desk, over where she unthinkingly left her purse just hours before—

She can’t see what it’s doing, but she can almost feel its rotting tendrils reaching down to rifle through her purse, the way they linger on pillbottles and how its stench clings to all the cleaning clothes and beautifying tubes and little makeup compacts that comprise her weapons against the public world.

She feels it splay her wallet open as if it were her own flesh, feels the putrid slime its every touch leaves behind on those thin leather folds. A wrongness soaking in, permeating far beyond its fumbling touches; a corruption clinging to all the plastic cards and folded bills which bind her life into the fabric of the world. Her stomach roils and clenches, half-molten food and bright yellow bile begging for escape—

And then it finds what it was looking for.

“Emily Garcia …”

Her name is twisted in its mouth, a tumor bursting between crumbling teeth. It runs with blood, with slime, with the sudden horrible sensation of a thorny slug bursting beneath bare feet.

It speaks her name again, and each word, each syllable, tears at her; a rosebush growing up around her, a vast shark’s maw opening around her mind.

There is nothing she can do to stop it as it speaks her name a third and final time, as she feels its touch all about her, as her fortress melts into nothingness—silvery gallium running beneath the sun’s spreading heat, amber sparking and shattering to release the buzzing monsters caught within, the last remnants of her circle clinging to something that is suddenly more like a grinning mouth than the solid wood floor it was supposed to always remain—

It doesn’t need words to speak to her now.

It’s inside her.

It’s got her.

And it’s going to have ever so much fun in the precious hours before she breaks for good.