Page 116 of The Harbinger

I took the last step into the foyer and squinted as another flash of lightning cast a silhouette of a towering man against the wall. I spun around and glanced at the second floor, where he gripped the banister.

“That’s not…”

The man was gone, the space where he stood devoid of his presence.

Buzz.

Drip…

Drip.

“There you are.”

I stood at attention, my muscles taut and ready. Chaos brewed in my mind, my head pulsing with a thousand marching men, and my ears hummed with the shrill noise of their drumming hearts.

“Who said that?”

Stone grinding against stone broke the cacophony assaulting my senses. The white rock shaped as a demon moved his leg, his bare foot shattering the marble floor like tempered glass beneath him as he rose from his hovering chair.

Blood pooled in my toes, draining away from my head as he stood to his full height, the two horns on his head glinting at the tips.

“This isn’t real,” I chanted, my hands frozen at my sides, my feet encased in cobble. “This isn’t real.”

“I’m more real than the breath in your lungs and the darkness in your mind.” The demon stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

Drip. Drip.

Crimson lines scorched his alabaster skin, spreading wide across his wrists like gnarled caverns.

They hadn’t been there before, the tiny figurines or the blood now gathering at his feet. The viscous pool of darkness squirmed and convulsed as if they were clawing toward the light of salvation. Their silent cries echoed from their agape mouths, frozen in an eternal scream.

Every fiber of my being strained against the unseen binds, my muscles screaming with the effort as I fought to break free. My feet were rooted to the ground, the weight of the world bearing down on me like a living stone.

“There’s no escaping me.”

“I…”

The words stuck on my tongue as my lips melted in thick sinew. My liquefied lips muffled my screams as he wrapped his bloodied hand around my throat and squeezed.

Drip.

Drip.

Tears pooled on my lower lids until they overflowed and dribbled down my cheeks.

Lightning flashed, disrupting the image of the beast before me like a glitch on a game screen, his taut body and flaccid penis rippling with a new figure beneath his stone skin, this one oddly familiar.

Hair pooled in front of her face, her jeans torn at the knees as though it were made that way. Her stained shirt lay in tatters around her shoulders. A long, jagged knife in her bloody hand glinted, and just as I’d laid eyes on her face, the flash of light morphed anew. Her hand around my throat disseminated and splashed onto the ground, melding with the puddle the demon left behind.

The ground shuddered beneath me, my cries muffled, as the bloody beings inside the pool climbed on top of one another, their claws digging into the figurine below them in a race to the top until it formed a blood-red being, pulling itself up from the ground.

My heart stammered, its missed beat punching against my ribcage as the humanistic man stood over me, his gloved hand outstretched.

Crunch.

“You’re going to make this right.”

That voice… My chin trembled, and my eyes burned as a warm trickle tumbled down my legs.

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