“Reconciliation party?”
“Yeah, we meet somewhere, talk for a few minutes and then beat the stuffing out of him.”
“Show him what we think of faggots in our school. You know what I’m saying?”
“I hear you. What say we make it happen?”
“Done deal. When?”
“No time like the present. Let’s set it up for tomorrow night.”
There was a pause and Matt could hear them high five each other from around the corner.
“This is going to be too fun,” Shane said, opening the door. “Should I bring my video camera?”
“That would be sweet,” Jeremy said, his voice disappearing behind the closing door.
A tear crept from the corner of Matt’s eye as he sat there in the darkened attic.
A burst of cold air blasted him from the gap around the vent above. He set the book face-down in his lap and closed his eyes, rehearsing the passage he had just read. The cold wind grew and intensified around him, swirling through the dank air. It took on a life of its own. One by one the flames atop the candles blew out, the wind racing faster and faster, whistling in the blackened confines of the attic. Still he pinched his eyelids closed tightly, the howling wind metamorphosing with each lap around the attic. The whistling changed from a high-pitched whir that made the wooden supports around him creak noisily, into something more resembling human voices, tortured and twisting as they finally came to rest in different corners of the room, the unseen figures hiding in the darkness.
He could feel them all around him, crouching in the pitch black, their eyes fixed intently on him. His fingers trembled with anticipation and his heart pounded so loudly in his chest that it was all that he could hear, until the sound of footsteps, creeping along the plywood floor aroused him from his trance.
Thrusting his eyelids back, he pawed at the floor, frantically trying to find his matches so that he could re- light the candles and get even the slightest glimpse of what he had been waiting for so long to see. He could feel them, there in the darkness with him; their aging brimstone-soaked breath heavy on the hackles on his neck. Fear welled in his heaving chest. There was the slightest moment of doubt, one fleeting instant where he wondered if what he was about to do was the right thing. It wasn’t like he was selling his soul. That archaic concept was almost amusing. If it had been as easy as signing his name in blood on the dotted line of some contract, he would have done that long ago and lived his life out like a rock star. But as no one had come to his door, offering his or her legal representation in contractual matters, he was going to have to do it the hard way.
The box of matches rattled as his fingertips glanced off of it, before he finally gripped the box tightly in his fist and raised it in front of him, sliding back the cover and producing one of the wooden sticks. Pressing the tip of his thumbnail onto the surface, he prepared to snap the white tip, when suddenly, a bright yellow flame burst to life before his very eyes.
The candle on the floor in front of him sat burning right next to the black leather-bound book, the flame crackling, bouncing higher and higher until it was as long as the candlestick itself. Voices from the corners of the attic filled his ears, whispering words that he couldn’t understand, their speech rhythmic. They repeated the same indecipherable phrase over and over. His eyes scanned the darkened sanctuaries of shadows around him, hoping for the slightest glimpse of the creatures that lurked within, but all he could see was the thick, ever darkening blackness that pulsated from the walls toward the center of the room.
He could feel the presence of many different entities, could hear their weight shifting on the plywood beneath the thick carpet pad.
The temperature in the room suddenly began to drop, and there was a loud crack that Matt felt as much as he heard. The bridge of his nose began to throb, his eyes watering mercilessly. A thin stream of warm, red fluid spilled from his right nostril, racing over his upper lip and dropping onto the cover of the book in front of him.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Like a dripping faucet, the blood splashed one drop at a time onto the black leather. The yellow light from the candle snapped from one side to the other before fading to a dark shade of crimson, washing the walls with the deep red. The shadows began to writhe in ecstasy.
The pooling blood atop the cover slowly began to expand, the running liquid swirling until it matched the shape of the pentagram, hiding the gold embossing beneath the blood. Unable to rip his eyes from it, Matt cocked his head and allowed his jaw to fall slack.
“Help me,” he whispered, shining tears welling in the corners of his eyes. “Please.”
“What is it that you want?” a thin, cracking voice said from somewhere in the bleeding darkness around him.
Matt’s heart stopped in his chest for a moment and he had to force his lungs to start to breathe once again. The hairs on the backs of his arms and neck stood tall, aching dully. Whetting his lips, his tongue smacked dryly. He peered into every shadow, hoping for a glimpse of whomever, or whatever, had spoken.
“I need your help,” he said quietly, staring down at his trembling hands as he attempted to steady them on his knees.
There was no answer, only the sound of the rustling of bodies across the carpeted floor and along the hollow paneled walls.
“I want them to feel what I feel,” Matt started, the quiver in his voice vanishing as elaborated. “I want them to feel the hell they have put me through. I want them to know what it’s like to wake up every morning wishing that you hadn’t. I want them to… I want them to…”
“To what?” the voice said, the heat from the creature’s breath right in his ear.
“I want them all to die.”
The darkness around him began to press in closer, smothering the light of the flame. There was the scratching of nails on the paneling and the wind kicked up in the crawlspace once again. Warm bodies brushed up against him, racing from one side of the enclosure to the other. Batting his eyes, he struggled to see anything in the darkness.
Fingernails tore at his clothing, scraping the flesh beneath. Unseen hands grabbed at his face, tugged at his hair. The room filled with swirling bodies, buffeting him from side to side as they raced the room in circles, over and over until…
Everything stopped at once. The flame from the candle sprung back out of the wick. The shadows retreated to the corners.
Matt wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. There was no streak of blood across his flesh. He stared down at the cover of the book, but there was no blood on it either.
Had he just dreamed up the whole thing? Was it all just some flight of fancy?
Shaking his head, Matt grabbed the book and tossed it against the wall. Hitting the base of the paneling, it slid beneath and into the pink insulation. He stared into his lap for a moment before finally snapping out of his trance with a long sigh and a chuckle.
Grabbing the lip of the drywall to his left, he blew out the candle and started to open the trap door to his bedroom below.
The shadows came at him with a fury and incomprehensible speed, peeling back his flesh as though it were paper mache. His back arched as he buckled in half, his head slamming onto the ground behind him. Frigid air forced its way down his opened mouth, silencing the screams that welled within. Bucking back and forth, his neck made of rubber, his eyes rolled backward into his head and his arms hung limply at his sides. Finally, his whole body collapsed to the floor with a thud, the air seeping from his lungs like a leaking balloon.
He lay there for what must have been hours, his mind functioning only in fragmented spurts. A wave of warmth washed through his body from the inside out, resonating at the tips of his fingers and toes. His body felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds. It took considerable effort to rise to a seated position.
He sat there, a line of saliva running from the corner of his mouth, falling with a small splat onto his jeans.
There were a thousand voices in his head now, some whispering, some screaming, all of them fighting to be heard. Placing his hands on his ears, Matt tried to settle them, to regain some semblance of order in his shattered mind. A warm sensation pulsed through his veins, electric, throbbing from deep within the core of his being. It rose through his veins, his muscles burning beneath the skin.
His shaking hands tugged at the cover to the crawlspace, sliding it back. Leaning over the hole, he fell through, landing in a heap on the mattress of the top bunk bed. Rolling onto his side, he could feel every muscle in
