The Knife Promised Relief
A Story of Possession and Violence
Good morning. Happy Monday. I’m Lucas Mangum, and this is Fiction for the Cosmically Disturbed, a newsletter for family, friends, and readers of my work. Here, I share updates on upcoming releases, vignettes from a week in the life, and short slices of fiction. If you haven’t already, click that Subscribe button, and I’ll show up every week in your inbox.
Today’s story is the somewhat revised first chapter of a now out-of-print book (We Are the Accused, originally published by the defunct Sinister Grin Press). It’s really the only part of said book that I’m proud of, and I think it stands alone nicely. As with last week’s story, this one contains some gore. There is also some implied violence against children, which I know is a trigger for some, so I thought I’d mention it for anyone who may want to click away.
Copper-colored mist snaked along the edge of the wooded path. Tendrils of it enshrouded the trunks of nearby trees and crawled across the surface of large granite stones.
The man with the long coal-black hair and bone-white skin appeared, stepping out of the woods and onto the moon-bathed path. He stopped at the end of the path, put his hands on his hips, and moved his head side to side, surveying the street. The mist rose behind him, swirled between his legs, and curled over his shoulders like a living cloak.
When he stepped into the halo of the streetlight, it flickered, faded and flashed blood-red. The light switched back to its normal, pale hue as he stepped out of its range. He dressed in solid black from head-to-toe. Only his pale face and hands contrasted against his hair and clothing. He walked slowly and purposefully like a Puritan minister circling the gallows before hanging a witch. He stopped humming, stopped walking. The mist no longer engulfed him. His features froze in a severe expression as he looked inside the windows of each house. He stood nearly seven feet tall. Wiry arms swayed at his sides, the fingers open and relaxed. Angular joints jutted like jagged rocks.
He kept his gaze upturned toward the blackness for another moment, then exhaled a plume of crimson mist. It billowed up the side of the nearest house like smoke from a fire. Lingered just outside the window. Sensed the life forces on the other side. Nine forms, eight of them sleeping. One lay awake, thinking dark thoughts. The mist pressed against the glass, seeped through the seam. It took almost an entire minute, but time meant little to a being so ancient.
It swirled across the room. Hung above the bed like a blood-red storm cloud. The man snored, his chest rising and falling. The woman lay on her side, breathing sleepless breath. Her shoulders rose to pinch her neck, then fell, but the tension remained.
The presence in the mist could sense inflammation and tightness. It lowered itself toward her. It swept over her husband’s chest, curling through the tufts of hair, rolling over the pectorals. A plume extended from the cloud and a mouth formed at its end. The red mouth leaned toward the woman’s ear and whispered terrible things.
***
When Judith moved, she thought of nothing except moving. She knew not her purpose, only that she had one. She sat up, sliding her legs out from under the sheet, and put her sock-covered feet on the carpet.
Once, Becky Rogers told her about a dream of being surrounded by darkness, where a pulsating orb provided the only light and relayed the words of John 14:1. Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. The words repeated over and over in the dream, and Becky awoke driven to the Bible she hadn’t opened since she was a little girl. She found the verse immediately. She described to Judith the compulsion to go to the book and find the passage as unseen hands pushing her.
That was Becky’s conversion story, what led her to the local Baptist church. Judith wondered as she walked across the bedroom to the hallway if she was having a similar divine experience. If so, it was far from a pleasant endeavor, this coopting of her body. Unlike Becky, she journeyed without a goal, without a purpose she could see or understand.
Brief moments ago, she had been in bed with her eyes open, staring into the blackness of the closet, turned away from the second-floor bedroom window and her snoring husband. The shadows made by the tree leaves and branches danced across the slatted reflection of the blinds. An unusual quietude fell upon the woods outside. After several months’ worth of spending nights awake like this, she noticed the dramatic difference in tonight’s sound level compared to those of other nights.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t sleep. If she closed her eyes, the drone of Allan’s snores would lull her to sleep within minutes. Becky Rogers from church always complained about her husband’s snoring, but for Judith, the steady in and out of Allan’s snores reminded her of her father, made her feel safe and secure.
No, insomnia didn’t keep Judith awake. She made herself stay awake because these hours of the night, when Allan and their seven children—three biological, four fostered—had gone off to bed, were the only times her house felt peaceful, the only time she had to herself. She didn’t even like watching TV or playing Farmville or knitting. Even those small, meaningless activities tired her out. Instead, she liked to lie awake and explore her own thoughts, an activity she had never had the opportunity to do. All her childhood she had been immersed in church activities like Sunday School lessons and Children’s Church, where they kept her sustained on Jolly Ranchers, orange sodas and a healthy dose scripture. She chose to trust Christ as her savior when she was seven years old after she made the connection that doing so meant she would never die. At the time, she suffered from night terrors where she obsessed over her fear of death so intensely that she could hardly move or speak. Christ’s promise of eternal life quelled this fear and the night terrors stopped after that fateful Sunday morning when she accepted Him into her heart. From there she threw herself into the church, participated in all Sunday activities and even Wednesday night Master Classes. As a teenager she assisted leading groups during Vacation Bible School, wore a purity ring, and never had a boyfriend, not until she met Allan.
Allan and his family switched churches after his parents had a dispute with Saint Thomas over their diminished tithing. According to Allan’s parents, while the church staff expressed sympathy and understanding over their economic woes, a general coldness toward their family tainted their Sunday experience. While his parents were initially uncomfortable with the fundamentalist teachings of the Baptist church, Allan took to them. He would later confess that he had been trying to impress Judith, but regardless of his motive, he proved to be a great asset and active member.
Judith fell for him one summer during Vacation Bible School when he cleaned up a child’s vomit from a picnic bench without so much as crinkling his face in disgust. He showed the boy, a small redhead, the utmost sympathy. He asked if the boy was okay, patted him on the shoulder, and took him to the bathroom to clean his hands and face. The whole time Judith watched, something warm pulsed within her. She had thoughts she never had before. About holding hands and kissing and having children. Impure thoughts, maybe, but they didn’t feel impure when directed toward him. From then on, she went out of her way to spend time with him, to compliment him, to smile at him. He asked her for a date and her parents let her go because they knew Allan from church, and they liked him well enough. They went to see a movie, She’s All That, and he held her hand, opened doors for her, and paid for their tickets. He acted like a perfect gentleman, the way she had been told all her life that gentlemen were supposed to behave.
They dated for two years, and while he occasionally kissed her, he knew how serious she took her purity ring and only asked for sex once. That was at his senior prom, after both of them drank vodka for the first—and only—time. She denied him and he apologized, once that night, and again the next morning, over the phone. They got married the week after graduation. The next spring, Caleb, their oldest, was born. Rachel came the following year and Elijah the year after that.
They planned to have more, but a workplace injury—a wayward brick that smacked Allan in the testicles—rendered all future attempts fruitless. After a year of trying and praying and crying (a year in which she had her only extramarital affair, with their pastor of all people), they decided to foster, an idea Allan was enthused over, but took Judith some time to warm to. Two months into it, she found she enjoyed it so much she wondered why she had been so apprehensive in the first place. Fostering presented the opportunity to give temporary homes to children who had no one and, best of all, it gave her more young people with whom she could share the gospel.
For the better part of her thirty-seven years, all of these things in her life brought her much joy. Now, though, she found little pleasure in any aspect of her life. Instead, everything—her family, God and church, her friends, her part-time job—were distractions. From what she wasn’t sure, but something was eluding her, something beyond her life and understanding. It frustrated her, because she always believed that a life devoted to the Lord and family would give her all the fulfillment she needed. She tried everything she could think of: prayer, talking to Allan, talking to Pastor Rickman; she even went to see a therapist without telling anyone. Sometimes she thought her discontent had to do with her affair, though she had long since repented. But nothing worked. Cold, detached, and irritable, only lying here, in the dark, listening to Allan snore and watching the shadows of the tree dance on the wall in the moonlight made her okay, brought her peace.
She had come to think of the dark as her companion, something with which she shared a kinship. Sometimes she entertained the idea that maybe that elusive something, the source of her fulfilment, her destiny, lay with the dark. She didn’t know how right she was.
Now, she crossed the hallway to the stairs and descended to the foyer. She moved in a lazy shuffle, as if drunk. On one level, she recognized the house around her but another part of her, the force in command of her body, viewed all these things with a stranger’s eyes.
This dissociation with all her material things made her belly clench and her heart rate accelerate. She hoped whatever controlled her had benign intentions. While she believed herself covered with the blood of Christ and took all the necessary precautions not to invite demonic spirits into her house or body, she didn’t doubt the capability of these malevolent forces. Maybe one of the children, not hers of course, but one of the foster kids played the wrong games or listened to the wrong music without her knowledge and thus gave something sinister free reign in her house. She prayed it wasn’t so but kept moving.
Judith entered the kitchen, opened drawers and cabinets, scoured the countertops until she found what she needed. The nine-inch stainless steel electric knife from Black & Decker lay in a drawer next to the oven. She seldom used it. The last time had been Easter Sunday on a bloody roast beef. Her lips twitched as she glanced over the kitchen tool.
Did I just smile? Of course she smiled. The memory of Easter Sunday served as a perfect snapshot to the cause of all her frustration. She ran every which way that afternoon to please everyone but herself. At the end of the night, she collapsed, and slept for thirteen hours. She grinned with satisfaction that Sunday, as she took out her frustrations on the piece of meat. The knife promised relief.
Her left hand closed around the contour grip and she lifted the knife out of the cabinet. She turned and headed back to the stairs, the cord slapping against her thigh. All the while, a voice in her head screamed.
What am I doing?
Judith, get a grip. Put the knife down.
Stop, stop, stop. Oh, God, please make me stop.
But did she really want to stop? A strange, dark and terrible freedom awaited her at the end of this path. She ascended the stairs, crossed the hallway, and reentered her room, experiencing herself doing all of this, but powerless to stop it, not sure if she wanted to stop it. Of course she wanted to stop it. She unplugged her bedside lamp and plugged the knife in its place and unraveled the cord.
What am I doing?
Oh, God…Allan!
She opened her mouth to warn him, to tell him to run, but no sound would emerge. A solitary tear squeezed out of her eye and tickled as it rolled down her cheek. She crawled onto Allan’s lap. His warm erection pulsed beneath his underwear. She sat snug against it.
“Allan,” she said, her voice soft, seductive.
Her mouth closed before she could utter another word. He blinked. A smile formed when he noticed her. Even in the dimness, his smile made her gushy inside, like the teenage girl who fell in love with him so many summers ago at Vacation Bible Study.
Please don’t make me do this.
She switched on the knife and drove it into the soft tissue under his chin. He barely had the chance to scream. Only a wet, sickening gurgle filled his mouth as he choked on blood. His teeth clattered together. Terror pulled his eyes wide, large and white. His arms flailed as he slapped at her and tried in vain to pull her off him. The knife split his tongue down the middle and penetrated the roof of his mouth. Tears flecked with blood glistened on his cheeks. The warm spray of his piss soiled her thighs and the sheets.
He croaked his last breath and his hands fell to his sides, twitching. Judith stared down at her handiwork.
No, not mine.
Someone else’s.
Someone else made me do this.
She wondered, with disgust and grief, if that were true.
Sour urine lingered in the air. Blood ran wet and sticky down her hands and forearms. At some point, she switched off the knife. She tugged it. It stuck on something, and Allan’s head plopped back to the pillow. She placed the heel of one hand under his chin and pulled the knife’s grip with the other. This time the blade came loose with a wet grinding sound. Judith unplugged it, rolled off the bed, and walked down the hallway to start on the children.
If you enjoyed that story, you’ll like some of my books. I’ve got some available at my store.