Into The Abyss

I didn’t expect her to be home when I got there, but her gas-efficient, ugly-as-sin hybrid mom-car was parked out front. Guess they hadn’t left yet, or maybe she’d decided to stay. I swear I was gonna just leave, pretend like I’d never shown up. But I’d come there to work, and when I heard the shriek from the backyard my work-brain overrode my common sense and had me running for the side gate I could see from the driveway.

“Oh Sweetie, you scared me so badly.” Came that voice that tightened up my neither regions every time I heard it. The gate was locked but I could see between the fence pickets as my Sammy stepped off the back porch and bent over to pick up a fluffy cute little dog in cute little doggy pajamas. OMG!

My first thought was that maybe I wasn’t so into this chick anymore because dogs are dogs, not babies. But as I looked at the dog approaching her with a happily waving tail, I noticed something…off…about it. It was blurry. Like there were two dogs overlapping the same space and sometimes the bodies went out of alignment.

Rubbing my eyes, I looked harder and I swear to God, I could see something else behind the dog.

“Oh my fucking God!” Horror made my words come out in a whisper. I had to be seeing things. There was this tentacle behind the dog. Like, comin’ out of a hole in the ground next to the shed. I had to be losing my mind. My girl was much closer than I was. If there was something there, she would have seen it.

I knew right then that I needed to leave and maybe get to a hospital because clearly, I was having a stroke. Yet I felt compelled to stay. To watch and confirm that my mind was playing tricks on me the way I knew it was. Then the blurry dog made contact with my girl and as she straightened, the blurriness forced itself into the woman holding the dog.

Her body convulsed and I watched as her…her soul? God. Please no. Don’t let it be her soul that slumped like a dead body onto the ground displaced by the shadow-stuff that now corrupted the body I’d so admired.

“Come Sssweetie,” the thing inside my girl hissed. “Let’s go get Caleb from grandma’s houssse.” The thing turned toward the gate I was behind, the body’s movements jerky and uncoordinated as if it was fighting the commands the thing inside it gave.

Now, I wouldn’t consider myself religious per se. But like most men who have seen combat, I’m fairly superstitious. I wear my cross my mama gave me like a good Catholic boy, but you won’t see me in church, and the only time I’ve prayed since my Sunday school days ended is when I was stuck in a trench under enemy fire. And I wasn’t the only one praying then, believe you me.

I didn’t pray because I believed that someone might be listening. Faith like that is kid shit. I prayed because it made me feel like I was doing something to help my situation like it was good luck. It was a way to personally fight off the despair and exhaustion while I was fighting the evil of men. Mankind spreads a lot of evil; I’ve seen more than I care to remember.

Despite this, never in all my life had I ever actually considered that evil, the kind of evil I saw walking toward me across a lush suburban lawn, existed. I always consider the tales of hell and demons to be a kind of myth to…like, teach lessons about how evil people can be. Like, once someone commits a certain amount of evil they can be considered inhuman. You know, like…like an allegory. Yeah. That was the word. Fuck. Just fuck my life.