/* Trigger warning: this story contains elements of suicidal thoughts, physical abuse and non-consensual sex. If those topics are a turn-off regardless of what the rest of the story includes, then you should probably look elsewhere.
Everyone engaged in sexual activity in this story is over eighteen.
Your comments and ratings are seriously appreciated! */
Sir:
Michael Hutchence was not wrong. Everyone does have the devil inside. Only in my case, you can take that literally. Okay, maybe not *the* Devil. But *a* devil. Or demon. Or imp. Or something.
Just a couple of years ago, I was an ordinary guy leading an ordinary life. I was reasonably successful and fairly happy with my job as a software sales rep. Sure, I spent a lot of time on the road, but I was good at it so the money was great and I figured that at 32, I had a couple more years to make my mark and then start worrying about family and the future.
Then Salt Lake City happened.
I was at a bar in a non-descript mid-priced hotel near the airport on the north side of the city, getting ready to call it a night and turn in. I had a flight back home scheduled for 2pm, which gave me time to write up my notes from the meetings I'd had that day.
I had just signaled the bartender for the check when a wild-eyed older man stepped up to the bar next to me and grabbed my wrist. I felt a shock travel up my arm, like I had plunged it into a tub of ice water. I yelped and shook him off, but not all that hard.
Nevertheless, he fell to the concrete floor and it was pretty obvious that he was dead before anyone even thought about checking for a pulse. EMS was there pretty quickly but of course all they could do is declare him to be in the condition we had already surmised and take the body away.
I suddenly felt exhausted and after charging my drinks to my room, I stumbled for the elevator and made my way back to my room on the third floor.
My next conscious thought was that the bed was a lot more comfortable than I remembered. Then I realized that I wasn't in my room at all -- and that the huge bed I was lying in was covered in sticky pools of congealing blood.
I let out an unmanly yip and slid out of the bed, looking around enough to realize that I was in a much nicer room than my own, that I was completely naked and that the blood was most likely not from me, as I seemed to be uninjured. And there was a *lot* of blood.
Checking the obligatory sign on the back of the hotel room door, I confirmed that I wasn't in my hotel. I wasn't even in Utah. In fact, I was in one of Vegas' better-known hotels, likely in a high rollers suite. There was no sign of where the body that had produced the copious amounts of blood was and in my shocked state of mind, all I could think to do was get dressed and drive back to Salt Lake City, if in fact my rental was here.
I got dressed and made it to the parking deck without anyone stopping me and used the remote clicker to find the rental Nissan Maxima. It was about 5:30am and I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to be arrested at any second.
Instead, I drove up I-15 like a bat out of hell, quickly changed clothes and checked out of my hotel and headed for SLC. I was terrified that I would get pulled from the TSA line, but I boarded without incident and made it home to Raleigh with no issues.
"Normal" only lasted a couple of weeks. I tried to forget about what I internally referred to as "The Incident". After a few days with no authorities come around to ask questions, I started to think that I was home-free, despite the number of cameras that are everywhere in Vegas.
Then the voices started. Or maybe just one voice, mostly speaking in a low, guttural, unintelligible language but sometimes using a much higher feminine but no less hideous voice. I couldn't understand any words, but there was an urgency building, like something was coming that I needed to react to.
I knew better than to tell anyone about it, so I suffered in silence, getting shorter and less patient with my co-workers and even my boss as the urgency grew. Then I blacked out again.
This time I had images of an older woman, a brunette with touches of grey - being ripped limb from limb. The screams were heart-rending. I even had images of dumping what little was left of the body into the nearby river. And again, there was so much blood -- in her apartment, running down the stairs, and all over the strange car (hers?) that I parked at the edge of the shopping center a half mile from my apartment.
The voices stopped again for a while. And again, no one came to arrest me for a grisly murder. Furthermore, I realized that I was now hearing not just the voice, but the thoughts of others. That took my mind off of the bloody business for a little while as I spent a few days trying to understand this ability, which quickly also became the ability to somewhat control others' thoughts and actions as well.
Some of these things required huge amounts of energy and I collapsed for a day or so afterwards. Some I found that I could do easily, with very little energy expended at all. Making physical changes or making people do something physical was hard. Making someone *want* to do something was relatively easy. So making someone physically drive to the store for ice cream was hard but it took nothing to make them want to do it so badly that there was no talking them out of it. And reading minds required almost no energy at all.
I was somewhat prepared the next time the voice started getting louder. I had a sense of how much time I had and I made my way into an area of downtown that was known for homeless people. It was horribly cruel and callous of me -- homeless people are people, after all -- but I was selfishly trying to protect myself.
This time I was fully aware of what was going on. I could see through the mind of the two victims -- while they could see a dim outline of me, what they mostly saw was an 8-foot-tall demon with brown-green scaly hide, massively-clawed hands and feet and a grotesque face with a short snout and a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.
As their terrified screams went unheeded into the night, I could feel the energy from their terror suffusing every part of us (I could only think of the demon and me as "us" now) with an incredible dark energy. I looked down to see an evil-looking, enormous erection, easily eighteen inches long, as thick as a man's wrist and covered in thick veins.
I was not a bad person and I knew I couldn't go on like this. I considered suicide but, when I tried, the demon stopped me. He/she/it didn't have complete control but it was enough to avert the gunshot to my head and, in another attempt, to whip the wheel of my car at the last moment to avoid the bridge abutment.
So I decided instead to find a way to control it. I researched on the Internet and in libraries up and down the East Coast, particularly in religious universities, neglecting work until I finally just called up my boss and quit one day. I had enough money saved that I could spend a few months researching.
And then it hit me that I could also make use of the damn powers that I seemed to be gaining. I spent some time with a couple of accountants and a couple of bankers and soon had untraceable bank accounts in the Caymans and other safe havens that they would never remember. And like any red-blooded American male with a limited imagination, I was soon sporting a twelve-inch cock and a much better physique than before.
That expenditure of energy brought the need to feed back more quickly but I'd had an idea. There are somewhere around forty-five thousand suicides a year in the US. Why not use my mind-reading abilities to try to find someone about to do themselves in and target them? They were going to die anyway, right?
I really didn't work the math out on this plan very well -- statistically it was a very stupid idea and was never going to work. Winning the lottery was almost as likely. Except that by some quirk of fate, it did work. Quite well, at least once.
I'd been travelling around, trying to make sure that when it came time to feed again, I wouldn't be in the same neighborhood as any previous time. So I was in a small town south of Nashville on a Friday evening in late May when I felt the voice, which had steadily been growing louder, suddenly get more strident.
I pulled into a Walgreens at about 5pm and scanned the people in the store. There were a couple of older people in line for prescriptions that were contemplating death, but only in the abstract as something they realized was relatively near. There was at least one person considering killing someone else, but not themselves.
And then I heard her as she stood in line to check out, large bottle of sleeping pills in hand. Janelle, her name was, and she was at the end of her rope. Her husband had died in Iraq a few years before and her life had been pretty much hell ever since. Her students at the high school had no respect for her, the administration kept passing her over for better assignments -- she was convinced that was because she wouldn't put out for the principal. So now she was ready to make it all go away.
I followed her out of the store and pulled my rental car behind her aging Toyota Yaris. One of the first things I'd figured out how to do was cloud minds so that I was invisible. She pulled up to the small house whithout her seeing me and I heard her thinking about how her husband would be ashamed of her but she was at the end of her rope. I entered the house unseen behind her.
She poured herself a big glass of white wine in the kitchen before heading back to the bedroom with her purchase from the drug store. I could see that she had been quite the head-turner ten years before but grief and time and neglect had worked their dark magic on her. I felt so bad for her, but I didn't see anything I could do for her. And the demon needed to feed.