Temporar

y Anne
 With each day of my life, I sunk down closer to hell.

With each day of my afterlife, I continue to dig that pit a little deeper.

I know I'm going to hell, because I saw where I was headed when I first
died. I know I'm going to hell and staying there because I saw it and
because of what I've been doing since then. But I have no idea of
going to Hell yet.

You see, I found that I can stay out of Hell, at least temporarily.

My name is Anne. Let me tell you how I do it.

I was drowning. Strange to think that someone could drown, could be

swallowed up by and filled up with water, cool, crisp, water, smothered
in water, and spend the rest of eternity burning. Maybe that's a
particularly Hellish torture for drowning victims like me, people who
have everything to fear from dying. Maybe it makes it all the more
terrible that the last part of your life was cool and wet and the rest of
your afterlife is dry and filled with sulfur and your eyeballs burn.

I have no intention of finding out whether that's true, that your

eyeballs burn. But why wouldn't they? While I gave no thought to it in
my first life, the thought of it scares me now when I’m already dead. It
will scare me more, I expect, if the Devil ever gets his hands on me.

Drowning seemed an odd way for me to die, since I'd never been to
the ocean before. Not many people took vacations then, and this was
not so much a vacation that I decided to take as it was a business trip
for my husband. My third husband. And you're expecting me to say
don't ask what happened to the first two but you can ask. I didn't do
anything to them. Not directly. My sins were not as simple, before
death, as killing a husband for the money, which is a stupid and
shortsighted thing to do anyway. They'll always catch you and it's
harder to remarry if the stench of murder clings to your soul.

Murder was not what I did. I did not kill people's bodies, and I still
don't. I suppose I killed their spirits then, and I still do.

But I'm not going to talk about that. You won't lure me into that.
Talking about that too much might draw the Devil's attention to me.
I've kept It away, kept It from noticing that I'm not there yet. I don't
know how long I can hold out, and I don't know if there are others like
me. I haven't thought that far ahead. I suppose I'll hold out until It
notices me or Jesus comes back and sends me on my way, but if Jesus
tries that I'll fight Him, too.

As I said, I was drowning and going to die when I first saw Hell. We
were going to get on a boat soon, at a time in the early 20th century
when big ocean liners were the way to travel for the wealthy, which my
third husband was. So I was going with him, I and my lovers who I
managed to bring along because even though my husband suspected
they were my lovers, he could do nothing about it. I had ensnared
him, too. I told you. I did not kill the body. But you can keep a body, a
mind, trapped, if you have the right tools. And what I knew about my
husband meant that he could not afford to lose me and could not
afford to leave me.

He did not kill me, either. My death was a stupid accident. Or at least
what you humans (I say you humans because I'm no longer one of you
but a creation of my own, since if It created me It would have me Down
There and God couldn't have possibly had a hand in making me what I
am) what you humans think of as an accident.

It probably was fate, and if fate exists then maybe I do have a role in
world after all, but that role is to be what I have become and that, and
fate, are no consolation to me.

We were one day away from leaving on the ocean liner. We were in a
luxury hotel on the seashore, cooling our heels, killing time. I got out
of bed, the bed I shared with whomever I chose and rarely with my
husband, and left Lola laying there drugged and in a coma. Lola was
not a willing partner and had to be seduced through more chemical
means, something I did on a regular basis. Lola could not afford to
leave my employ since she needed the money to care for her sick
mother, and I took wanton advantage of that. Yet in the list of my sins
Lola would not have made it into the first volume.

I put on a robe. It was dark out, the moon shining over the ocean. If I
had not had contempt for all poets and writers, I would describe it
more aptly, more colorfully... the moon hovered over the still glass
pane of the ocean, a cool white portal into the night sky that beckoned
to the weary traveler to leave this world and go to a better one. I could
say that, and it would be an ironic foreshadowing, since you already
know that I'm dead and already know that I was not and will not be
going to a better world. This world is a terrible, horrible, sinful,
wretched scab of a place and I helped and help make it that way, but
the Next, for me at least, makes this world look like Eden.

Lola would not be stirring for some time. Opium does that. I looked at
her naked breasts as she sprawled on the bed and had contempt for
her. So weak. So foolish. I wondered if the drugs would kill her, and
then walked outside of the hotel, onto the deck that let out of my first-
story room and directly onto the beach.

I walked down to the surf and felt the water brush over my feet. It was
not cold, but cool, and felt refreshing after the sweaty exercise I'd been
engaged in before Lola had passed out (and a little after) and I walked
along the beach with the water rushing up to my ankles and retreating.
The ocean has a small amount of phosphorescence at night, but I did
not care about the beauty of that. I saw it merely as another fact that I
noted in case it was useful to me or harmful to others (those being flip
sides of the only coin I traded in) someday.

After I'd walked a short ways, I saw a man up the beach who appeared
to be fishing in the surf. I could not make him out clearly but the time
with Lola had whetted my appetite to tease and I dropped my robe and
walked a little further along the beach until I was sure that the lights of
the hotel were turning me into a silhouette for his eyes. I saw him look
at me, the hotel lights reflecting in his narrow pupils and as he did I
turned to my left and strode into the surf.

I walked out until the water was just above my waist. I knew that
between the moonlight and the hotel lights he could see me, and the
waves which were not breakers at that point swelled up and lifted my
breasts before covering them and then receding. I pretended not to
notice him. I wondered if he would try to talk to me if I came out of the
water, and what I could do if he did. Pretend he'd raped me? Not
subtle enough. Have sex with him and blackmail him? Even back then,
a century ago, that was already a cliché. I thought about it as I began
to swim, a slow languid backstroke that would cut across in front of
him.

I swam until I'd passed directly before him and was going to turn
around and head back to the hotel, slantingly so that I'd come out of
the water near where I'd gone in, when I felt a sting. I sat up in the
water, or tried to, and tried to stand. The current, though, had drifted
me further out and my feet did not touch the bottom immediately. I
felt the sting more sharply and reached for it, wondering if it was a
jellyfish of some sort. It was the man's fishhook! It had jabbed me,
pierced my skin and jabbed me. I pushed at it and it let go of my side
and as it did a wave pushed up against my back, ducking me under
unexpectedly.

I went under and did a somersault, getting water in my eyes and nose
and mouth and inhaling it and feeling a push against me from the
other direction, a push of colder water, feeling more solid, and I
reached out my hand but the sand pulled away from it and when I
came up coughing and sputtering water and spitting I was both further
away from the shore and facing out to sea, where another wave was
coming towards me. My side stung from the salt water in the wound.
The wave lifted me up and over and I fell into the trough and reached
with my toes for the sand but could not feel it, could not feel anything
below me. Still spitting out water and trying to catch my breath I spun
my body around to try to see the shore and the cold, hard push of the
current, the undertow, hit my waist and legs and pulled me further.

I watched the shore recede and saw the fisherman and tried to yell as I
slipped down into the trough again and sucked more ocean water,
salty and warm like blood, into my mouth and went under again.

I was drowning and I didn't know if he'd heard me.

It's not as easy as you might think. It is always after me, and I don't
think I ought to let God see me, either. Talking about evil brings It's
minions closer, too, and then I might have to take drastic action.

Look at her, there. So sweet, so innocent, so young, so hopeful.

That's what I need, you know. Innocent, but purposely so. It would be
nice if I could just use babies because they would be so easy to get.
But I can't. Babies don't distract Them when they find me because
there's not enough essence to fool them. While it's quite impossible at
this point to find someone who's both innocent and close to my age,
that's not necessary. I only need to fool them for a short time, to get
out of their range for a bit.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Not that it matters, since I have all the
time in the world. Checked into this hospital, I have plenty of time.
And the fortune I've amassed over the years helps me stay here. Not
that I can stay anywhere for long. They track me down, always. Down
in Hell, it doesn't keep close track of what I'm doing, but It does have
minions that will seek me out or will sometimes I think just stumble
across me.

The man did hear me. You've guessed that because I'm telling you this
story and I’m not drowned, not dead. I know what I said at the
beginning, when I first died but I misspoke. Or maybe I didn't. I go
back and forth. Maybe I did die and came back. People who have
near-death experiences always report going towards the light. I did
not do that, I assure you. But I began to go somewhere and I did not
like it and I fought. So maybe I had a near death experience or maybe
I am dead, except that my soul remains anchored to this body.
The man heard me, heard my gurgling cries for help and saw my
splashing in the moonlight. He'd probably not taken his eyes off of me,
I flatter myself to think. Self-flattery is probably a sin, but would have
been and is the least of my sins by far. He heard me and as I struggled
and as I was swept further out to see I saw him stride into the ocean
and begin swimming towards me with the powerful strokes of a man
who has muscles because he has to work for a living. The only time I'd
seen my current husband naked he did not have muscles like that and
that was why I never saw him that way again.

I was no weak swimmer, either and not faint of heart. I struggled

against the undertow and fought it and tried to get back into the shore.
But you cannot fight an undertow; it is stronger (I know!) than the pull
of Hell itself. And I knew that but could not think because I was
suffocating in a lungful of water and spitting it up. But my struggles
helped hold me in place or slow me down because the fisherman
reached me. I felt his strong hands on my arms, pulling at me and
realized that I'd gone underwater and that's why I couldn't breathe. It
was not that the water was sucked into me so much as I was sucked
into it.

The man pulled me up and up and I felt my head break the surface and
tried to gulp air but got hit in the face by a wave or ducked under and
pulled more water into my body. I was wracked and twisting with
coughs and spasms from the water now and was scarcely aware of the
man saying something (probably telling me not to struggle) and my
back arched with the pain and the need to breathe, to get air. My
vision went black and then went red.

Then I opened my eyes because I did not need to breath anymore. I

did not feel the water anymore. I felt heat. I felt currents of hot air
blowing, hotter than the hottest water, hotter than sunburn, hotter
than I could bear. I opened my eyes and saw that my world was
overlapping something else. Around me was the water of the ocean,
around me were the waves and the fish and seaweed and in back of
me the shore. I could see all of that both clearly and not. It was
transparent, as dimly visible as a reflection in a storefront window. It
was reflected, if that is the word, in what I saw more clearly.

What I saw more clearly than the sea was a flowing, pulsing, corpuscle
of heat and fire. Hell is not fire and coals and brimstone. It is hot, to
be sure, or at least my entryway was because I would get no closer
than that. Hot enough that it felt like my eyeballs were blistering. Hot
enough that my skin felt tight and dry and pulled off and shredding
already, even though I knew I was still in the ocean because there it
was around me. But it was not flames and hot rocks and burning trees.
It was like flesh made into fire. If you have ever seen someone cut
open in an operation, and seen the quivering, gelatinous, slobbering
mass of cells and slime that make up the layers between our skin, you
have seen what Hell is built of: a flowing, slimy, quivering, pulsating
mass of burning material. Hell is the inside of a blister that stretches
across infinity.

In that mass, I could feel the heat pressing into me and sucking me
down like quicksand and burning beyond my flesh, reducing my bones
to ashes already and forcing itself between the very cells that made
me, me. Maybe that mass of Hell is made up of the separated cells of
the souls (not poor souls because I know and they know where they
were headed and could have avoided it, don't pity me or them!) the
individual cells of all the souls that have gone there, all separated and
intermingled now but somehow retaining the idea of what it was like to
once have been united in a single organism. Maybe that portion of Hell
was made up that way, because Hell was disintegrating me and I had
not even gone there yet, was only heading there now. The mass
clutched at me, wrapped itself around me in a grasp that made me gag
in the back of my throat.

And the fisherman still had me. I can't know, have no way of knowing
what he saw or felt. I never will. Hell was pulling me into it and he was
pulling me towards the surface of the water and he was losing.

That was when I saw the minions, the demons, Its workers. They were
crawling towards me and scuttling towards me and slithering towards
me and pulsating in my general direction. None of them moved with
something so normal as a stalk or stomp or walk. None of them had
any reasonable number of legs or arms or eyes and all of their
appendages ended in talons or claws or stingers or eyeballs or teeth.
Most of them seemed to barely hold onto their shapes, wavering
around the edges as though they were not quite comfortable in this
form and could not keep it for long. Stuck to them were other souls
and pieces of corpses and they bumped into each other as they came
towards me and when they did they casually attacked each other,
sometimes tearing off a limb or gouging an eye but moving towards
me. They approached at a pace that was dreamlike and all of their
hundred thousand eyes were fixed on me except for the ones that
were wretchedly bloodshot or dangling by threads or roaming in the
socket like a deranged spider.

And the fisherman still had me and still pulled. He tried to save me in
the face of all the demons of Hell and I turned towards him out of no
other impulse than to turn away from those things and I saw them over
his shoulder and pulled back and he was staring into my eyes, shouting
something. His face was flecked with water and I knew he was not
where I was but somehow he still held me.

As the demons closed in, as Hell collapsed around me, and as his arms
grew weaker and weaker on me, I met his eye and when he yelled
something I pressed my mouth against his, feeling the heat of Hell fill
my mouth and pour into his. I forced my tongue into his mouth and
kissed him with my last breath, surely a breath that for him was filled
with the inferno and sea water, and I used my tongue to pull his into
my mouth. He clenched my shoulders as I did that and the demons
were almost there, I hadn't closed my eyes, and I had an inspiration.

I bit his tongue off and felt the blood spurt right into my mouth and I
swallowed it and drank it and sucked it and sucked it and felt his blood,
hot as his body, cool me down because the warmest human body
cannot stand up to the fires of Hell. I kept drinking his blood as the
demons reached for me and I pushed him from me.

They paused. They paused! Around me the shimmering shapes of half-

crushed insects, of dogs mauled by wolves, of two-legged almost
humans twisted by disease, all covered with eyes and teeth and burns
and scars and thorns, paused!

And I saw the man's soul, the fisherman's soul! It glimmered, it

hovered and spun and began to course upward, appropriately enough
like a fish in the sea swimming for the surface, and as it did a demon
shot out its claw, or claws, and grabbed the soul.

I had never thought, before that, that a soul could make a sound. They
can. I've heard several sounds from souls since then, but that was the
first, and frankly, the best. The soul whimpered when it was grabbed,
it cried and then disappeared in the claw that seized it.

And I was in the water, out of the undertow, sputtering and tasting
blood in my mouth, which was full and I was chewing on something. I
spit out the fisherman's tongue and swallowed the blood. I swam to
the shore, and pulled myself out. After I threw up the seawater, I
pulled myself together and looked back out at the ocean, which was
calm and about where I was the large reflection of the moon was
barely disturbed by the waves passing below it.

I made my way back to my hotel room where I relieved the emotions I

felt by savagely beating the still unconscious Lola.
That was long long ago when I saw the demons and narrowly escaped
them. You have figured out what I did, too, although I didn't know it
then and I still in all these decades cannot tell you why I did what I did
except that I cannot deny my nature anymore than a spider can deny
its.

Over time, I refined it. Over time, I realized how it worked and why it
worked. It only works for a short period of time against Its henchmen.

Hell, I think, is an anarchic land where the Being that runs it knows far
far less than It thinks, and relies on the workings of its animals, if that
is what the demons are, and the working of the universe itself,
including God, who is supposed to see that the evil souls end up in Hell
and the good ones do not.

I have found a way around that.

I don't know if the demons are actively looking for me, or if all of them
are, or if they just mostly happen across me. I know that I run into
them too frequently for me to think it is mere chance, but not
frequently enough that they seem to have an organized campaign out
to get me. And why would It? There are plenty of souls making their
way to Hell each day anyway, and I suppose I might be helping It out
so It suffers me to go on living.

What I cannot figure out is why God allows my countenance to grace

his earth. I can see myself in mirrors and I try to avoid it except for
those times, those short times, when I have again avoided the demons
of Hell. I would do that more often but it is difficult, and time
consuming, and I do not want to waste the power I have in case it is,
like the confusion my actions cause each time, temporary. But those
times that I see my reflection, in a mirror or window or puddle or in the
eyes of a young woman (for those are my favorite, the young women),
a young woman who has just realized what I am doing, I shudder and
want to look away. The years have been less kind to me than I have
been to them and the people I met during them.

I have lived these many years without food and without water, living
on malice and blood and flesh, body parts and fluids I steal when
necessary and at the last minute from those who I seek out to protect
me when Hell gets too close, like my nurse now who was chosen for
just that purpose. That living, though, has wrung out my body like a
rag. My skin has passed from pale and ivory and smooth as it was
then, through browning and spotted and wrinkled, to sagging and limp
and loose, to drawn and porous, to what it is now: threadbare and
stretched tight and tearing open in spots where my body can no longer
muster the energy to build a new skin cell. Somehow, my hair has
lasted, or most of it, although it is thin and straight and brittle and has
been devoid of color for so long that it is clear. My nails have gone
past yellow into brackish gray and are uncuttable, so thankfully they
do not grow anymore but remain about an inch long and curled
towards my fingertips so they do not poke or tear easily at people I
clutch to me. My teeth remain in my jaw by sheer luck, and are riddled
with holes and plaque and my gums have receded past the roots of all
but a few of them. When I poke at them with my tongue, I can wiggle
them and poke the tongue into the cavities where the nerves died long
ago.

I suppose that I am sustained by my own rotten core the way a dead

tree might appear to live on because it stands for years before
crumbling from inside. When my body eventually cannot replenish
itself anymore, I wonder what I shall be.

As I said, I do not know if I am living or dead, truly. And I will explain it

the best I can in here, you unknown reader, who will find this after I
have left this place I am staying currently. How can I stay anyplace,
you might wonder? It is because the living do not see, and they do not
see because most of the living cannot stomach the revulsion of pure
evil. People want to be good. They do not believe in God, I imagine,
so much as they want to believe in him because they want to think
highly of themselves, and what better way to think highly of yourself
than to think that you were put here specially by an omnipotent Being
who set you upon the earth to achieve a purpose?

I do not know why God created people. I know He exists because His
counterpart exists and I have seen Its domain. I have had no way and
no desire to communicate with God.

But I know why people want to believe in God because I prey on those
who have that desire, and I know that people such as that have trouble
seeing evil and will not allow their mind to process it. Evil is a blind
spot in humanity and the more evil someone is the harder time
humans have seeing it. Not me-- I recognized my nature in myself and
others early on. Others cannot do so as easily, it seems. And so when
they see me, they see an old woman but not how old, not how ancient,
not how drawn. They do not see how my eyes have become scarred
with cataracts and my eyebrows long fallen out, the hollows in my
shoulder blades that come from not having eaten anything in three
years, and my last meal was a hairdresser's eyeballs, gulped whole
because a demon had grabbed my arm and was tugging.

So I can use my money -- the root of all evil -- to check into a private
facility such as this. This is an easy way for me to pass the time
because health care is full of people who want to do good and who
view healing as the Lord's work. Their very goodness makes me think
that the demons are less likely to prowl here, and their very goodness
makes it easier for me to slip the hangman's noose off my neck one
more time and get away one more time.

My present nurse is the ideal candidate.

She is my third-shift nurse, overnights, and I know from listening to her

talk and from occasionally talking to her that she has a young boy who
stays with her mother and father overnight while she works here, the
best paying job she could find. She took this job to put her boy into a
Catholic school so he would grow up in his religion. Can you imagine?
She is sweet and young and nubile and innocent, and she thinks that I
am someone who deserves her sympathy. So she spends much time
in my room when she is not otherwise occupied, and I keep her close
not just because I can still remember the pleasures of the flesh (and
enjoy them sometimes just after a reprieve) and see them in her, but
because the demons are getting closer and I will need her soon.

I felt them this morning, not in my room, not yet. Not even in this
clinic, not yet. But near. I know when they get near because the world
pulses with their infinite malice. The walls seem to breathe in and out,
and everything appears fuzzy and blurred around the edges. There is
a rise in the temperature -- rare here in the northeast even this time of
year -- that is maybe perceptible only to me. And I have been near
enough to them to begin to feel their presence in my mind when they
approach. It is probably that feeling that eventually draws them to me;
we are connected by more than the fact that I am supposed to be in
their thrall in their realm. We are connected by the ever-deepening
well of treachery and hatred and viciousness in me and by the many
near-misses over the years.

I may even have dealt before with the one who is near now. After so
many years, after so many close calls, I feel I begin to know some of
the demons that come after me. I never talk to them, oh no, but I
know them nonetheless. While they are blurry around the edges and
horrid to look at -- so terrible that they make my eyes burn when I look
directly at them -- I can nonetheless recognize them. They are
amorphous only within the outline of their shells.

I will know for sure when I see him, and when I see him my nurse will
be near me.

I felt the demon’s closeness as I began writing this, and I feel it still.
Why am I writing this, you might wonder? I will tell you, as I have told
others before. You, reader of this missive, are not the first such reader
and will not be the last. I write this, and I have written these before, as
a warning of sorts. A warning to you, and to anyone you can tell. You
have read this far, so you know what it is that happened to me and
what it is that I do. And you know who I seek out. I seek out the
innocent, the good, the pure, because it is them I need and you will
see more clearly why as you read.

So to you I say, do not be innocent or pure or good. Go commit some

evil when you finish reading this. Go hurt a drunken homeless person.
Steal from your employer. Cheat on your husband. While it is harder
and harder for me to find a pure person, there are still those who are
pure and they should not be.

And you, reader, wonder what I get out of turning you evil? Out of
reducing by one or more the number of future victims I can use to
prevent, to forestall, my eventual descent into the cataclysm of the
Inferno? I will tell you: I hope to delay that entry by keeping It sated
with other souls, not just the ones I send directly but by sending
additional ones. And if, when I am finally caught, when a demon is too
quick or the Second Coming arrives and my time is put to end (but not
without a fight!), if then I can at least show It that I, too, have helped it
out and increased Its dominion, then maybe I will have found yet
another loophole.

So you see, it is yet another facet of the mirrored hall of evil that is my
soul: You can choose to commit evil, and damn yourself and help me at
the same time... or you can stay pure and worry that I will find you
and what befell others will end your life, as well.

I had to take a break from writing this because I was correct. I will tell
you what happened.

A demon was close. And it was one I had seen before. It was one
covered in thorns, or barbs, perhaps, fleshy bulbs or pustules that
bulged like saggy skin but appeared to be made of the same material
as an insect's shell or metal (but not a metal that you would find in this
life) and with tiny gouges and sharp hooks. If this one grabbed you it
would pierce your hide a thousand times with a thousand of those
stingers and they would not let go. This was a dangerous one.

I knew he was coming when the walls grew watery and ran with colors.
Demons do that. They affect reality that way. They alter the laws
around them so that solids are liquids and liquids are solids, and they
all end up in an in-between state. The air becomes thicker and the
ground becomes thinner so it is harder to breathe and harder to move.
Demons are hot, as you would expect. They are hotter than stars, I
think, and that may be why they change the world around them. You
can feel them coming. And they stink. They each have their own
stench. This one, the one with the thorny carapace, smelled like rotten
milk and roses, and before you think that odd, think of how sweet a
rose smells and how your nose turns towards it, and then think how
awful that smell becomes when combined with rotten milk, and how
ever after that you would look at a rose and shudder with the memory
of that milk smell, a smell so foul it could make your tongue swell in
your mouth. This demon perhaps chose his stench not just to repulse
when he was near, but to remind of Hell each time thereafter that a
rose was near. Hell has many levels of horrors and the destruction and
corruption of beauty is one of them.

As I well know. I was a great beauty. Now I would sooner gouge my

own eyes out than look at my reflection.

The thorn-demon was approaching and it was getting late and I was
growing tired. I must sleep sometimes although I try not to. The lack
of sleep leads to my brain creating visions and terrors, though, and
when they start I must sleep because I cannot tell them from the real
minions that are after me or that might stumble across me. But I
dared not sleep that night.

When my nurse came in, I knew that I must not let her go. She was
wearing her scrubs, as they call them, and she fussed around a little
before determining that I was awake.

"Miss Anne, you shouldn't be up so late. Do you feel well?" she asked.
Her voice was sultry although -- because -- she did not mean it to be.

"I feel tired," I allowed "But not tired enough. Come here, will you?"
She came over and I patted the bed beside me. "Are you terribly busy
tonight?" She started to talk, to say yes, because even someone as
nice as her would not always want to spend time around me and
although she would not let herself see me (not yet) she could feel my
essence and that drove her away just as her nature drew her to try to
help me. But I preyed on her and did not let her move. "Because I
need the company. I'm lonely."

She softened around the edges. I saw her lips purse and her eyes
blinked rapidly. I wondered if when the time came I would get to kiss
those lips or if I would be in too much of a hurry.
"I can stay a little bit," she said.

I looked at the walls, which had just bowed inwards as though pressed
in from outside. They flashed and shimmered, quickly.

"A little bit is all I need," I said.

That nurse sat there, talking with me. She told me how her son had
taken his first spelling test just that day, and had come home with a
"100" written on it and a gold star (and I can't believe there are still
schools giving gold stars, but this was a Catholic school, after all) and
he'd been so proud. She'd made him a cupcake with a candle and
sang congratulations to him in the tune of Happy Birthday.

While she talked and told me of that boy, whose name I deliberately
did not listen to, I watched the walls. I watched the floor. And I
watched the ceiling, and that was where the demon came from.

Demons are not of our world, as you well know. They do not interact
with our world the same way physical things do, but they are not
immaterial, either. Hell exists not as a place that is up, or down, or
over there, but extant here and now, just not in this here or this now.
It is all around us in a sense, but we are not able to feel it or sense it
because we are corporeal. So in one sense, it is farther away than you
can imagine. In another sense, it is right here.

And it was in that latter sense that the demon was right here. The
demons, like angels, I expect, are part of both worlds and can move in
both. Although I never see angels, not me. Not me. I only see the
demons, which pass between our world and Hell freely and can move
somewhat inconspicuously when they need to, which is most of the
time.

And demons are rarely seen, I have surmised, by the truly living, those
who are not like me and who are not evil, especially. If a person's
mind cannot bear to look on my face (and few can) how could they
stand to look at a demon? They cannot and so they know they are
there but they simply do not see them. And it is hardest for the good
to see the demons, which is fine I suppose because the demons can
hardly affect the good.

They move slowly. I have never seen a demon move quickly. Maybe
that is something to do with how they have to interact with our life.
Maybe that is because few sense them and so do not try to get away. I
do not doubt they can move quickly if they have to because they are
evil and evil can be slow and insidious or it can strike like a scorpion
tail.

This demon seeped into the room. They do not move like us, or like
anything. If you have ever watched a snake wind sideways across dirt,
or seen an insect picking its way with backward legs, or a crab
scuttling, you have felt a small degree of the revulsion that the
movement of demons creates in us. There are manners of moving that
we, with our forward-looking eyes and forward-walking gaits, cannot
stomach and demons move only in those ways.

This one moved slowly like a tarantula does. It picked its way forward,
seemingly feeling or tasting each step with a protuberance that could
be an arm or a claw or a leg. It had too many limbs and too many
joints in those limbs. We are raised to like symmetry and find
asymmetrical things ugly. Demons are asymmetric because of that; or
we find those things awful because demons are like that. It doesn't
matter. They always have exactly the wrong number of eyes and
limbs and mouths and teeth.

This one, I saw, had 9 arms. Not evenly spaced out. It had a thorax,
and abdomen, or sorts, and its arms radiated out from that. Several
were protruding from the top of the abdomen. A few came from its
waist, or equator. The others, sickenly, moved around it or
disappeared and reappeared elsewhere. It had, as I have said, thorns
or spikes on all surfaces and those sometimes caught its own arms and
tore them and let loose a bilious green pus. The thorax was covered in
mottled shell-pieces that roamed about like continents on its body and
between the cracks of shell I could see flesh that reminded me of the
space beneath a person's tongue.

The nurse had a tear in her eye as she said how her son blew out the
candle and said he wished that he would get another "A" so she would
be proud. Oh, how heartbreaking that would have been had I cared.

The demon did not have a mouth, and that was another thing wrong
with it. Everything we have come to expect of a thing, and animal, a
person, demons pervert somehow. It had eyes, but you had to look to
see them. They were the dull eyes of a spider, peering between the
cracks of its carapace, in all directions, and with no glow or light or
spark. Dark marbles staring at me. It stepped forward on its arm/leg.
It pressed towards me, haltingly, its arms waving and spasming,
tasting the air around it. One arm waved right over the nurse's head
and she paused, feeling her hair pull with the wind of it.

You had expected, perhaps, a battle? A fight? Or fleeing, at least, with

screaming? Holding the nurse hostage? Or trying to stab the demon?
You have watched too many moving pictures, read too many novellas.
You cannot fight a demon. Trying will get you pulled down to the
depths. And likely torn into pieces, one for each arm. I was not going
to fight. I knew this demon. I knew its sight, I knew its stench, I knew
the way its arms or legs or what-have-you clattered and clicked as it
moved forward.

It was nearly at the bed. I put my hand on the nurse's leg. I felt one
arm of the demon shove the mattress and it swiveled slightly to turn
two or three of its eyes towards the bed. I am fairly certain that they
know who they are looking for because of times like that. One eye
appeared to stare right at me. One seemed to be looking at the nurse.

"Are you all right, Anne?" she asked me. "You look pale."

"Come closer," I said. She hesitated. But she was good. She cared for
me. And, despite her unconscious and quite correct desire to not be
nearer to me, standing behind her and inching closer was a minion of It
and she wanted (though she did not know why) to get further from
that. She leaned in.

"Yes?"

I saw, over her shoulder, an arm disappear from the far side of the
demon and begin to push out between two pieces of shell on this side.
It had three fingers. No, it had a finger and two thumbs. These
creatures disgust me.

"Closer, dear, I am not as strong as I once was. And I am tired," I said

but I thought I will not be in a moment and she leaned in.

The arm was reaching towards me, coming over the nurses' shoulder.
She leaned into me. I saw two of the demon's eyes move slightly as it
focused on me. It pulsed, as though sighing. The arm swayed forward,
testing the air between it and me. The nurse leaned closer. I saw, as
she did, her pale and sweet-smelling skin, and nesting just above her
breasts a locket that I knew from experience held a picture of her boy,
the boy who wanted to get an A so his Mama would make him another
cupcake, would hug him and put his test on her refrigerator, holding it
there with a magnet shaped like a puppet.

Just ahead of the arm that was aiming for my forehead, I pulled the
nurse to me, and I gouged my fingers into her eye sockets, quickly
before she could pull back. Blood gushed onto my lap and I pulled her
eyeballs out. I've learned that eyeballs are the best. I took them and I
ate them in one gulp, barely time to enjoy the taste. Barely time to
enjoy the look on what was left of her face, her lovely little mouth an
'o' of surprise and shock. I did have the time to reach in and grab her
tongue with my bloody hand, for good measure, and pull that out of
her head.

The arm of the demon paused. At least three or four eyes blinked,
wondered, blinked again. I have seen that before and know that it is
working.

There was a mirror on the back of the door. In the mirror I could see
the reflection of the light shimmering, and I knew without seeing more
what was happening. I was changing, shifting, metamorphosing. All I
need, ever, is a little bit to fool them. When I do this, when I take a
vital part of a person, I can fool the demons because I fuzz the
boundaries, and for a moment, they cannot tell who is who and what is
what.

I felt my skin pull and bulge, momentarily, a few seconds, at best. My

face contorted and for a moment I no longer had holes in my skin. I
had hair and breasts and a face that would not scare small children.

And the nurse did not. Her face sagged and her hair dropped in
clumps and her body fell over. She was already dead and maybe she
knew it because her spirit began to flee her body, her limbs grew
rubbery and thick.

And the arm that had been reaching for me, the branchy, thorn-
covered quivering pulsating venomous thing pulled away and grabbed
at the nurse, grabbed her soul and I heard, as I have heard so many
other times, the scream of someone being dragged down, the scream
of someone who had never planned on going to Hell doing just that.

I swallowed the rest of the tongue, chewing it carefully, as the demon

retreated, convinced that it had gotten its quarry. It took no shorter
going out than it had coming in, but eventually it was gone, and
eventually the stink left, and the walls stopped pulsing, and quiet
reigned over all again.

I sat up, invigorated with the spirit of the nurse and ready to move
again. I pushed her body on the ground, and heard the locket tinkle
against its chain. I pulled it off of her neck and looked at it. The boy
was smiling from the tiny photo.

I finished this missive and left, leaving my things there. I will keep the
boy in mind. If his life is not destroyed by the loss of his mother,
perhaps he is someone I should keep company with.