Last night, I saw a demon.
It came to me in a garden touched by autumn. The leaves were browned with rot, a murky stream of fog flowing in-between dense hedge. Not much else could be seen, except that the sky was nearing twilight, all blackish orange. My vision faded in and out, in and out – synchronized with jagged breathing. Walking forward, I gradually realized with faint concern that I was not going anywhere at all; it was the garden moving past me.
The scenery remained the same, never-changing, those autumn leaves tinged in their rusty orange dimmed further by the fog and the choking sun. I was nervous, trembling nervous. Yet the garden kept walking, on and on into nothingness. I wished so desperately for it to stop, not because I saw anything frightening, not because I expected any terror from the faceless leaves, but because I could not control if I would eventually come upon something frightening or terrible.
It was a fear realized when I came upon the demon.
I cannot say how I knew it was a demon. Until this dream, I had never been in the presence of one. It appeared first as no more than part of the pitch nothingness at the end of the garden. But, as I drew nearer, its shape was defined by what was not there, and I became aware of a malicious consciousness lurking in a spiritual form. As my heart raced, my vision cleared, and I saw that the pitch was formed with purpose: the shape of a human, cut out like a paper man in the fabric of space, a black hole sucking the garden into itself. Sprouting from its head were two long appendages, an appearance like ears. There was nothing overt about it that would make one consider it a demon. Yet it was, simply because I knew it to be true as soon as I saw it. I classified it immediately by the feeling alone, before I even had the chance to mark its appearance.
The demon stood suspended, waiting for me to come. The clearer that empty form became, the faster my heart raced from fear. Those two ears twitched, as if hearing my pulse, and its own evil owner crackled like static, not from glee, but from the anticipation of satiated hunger. I do not know what exactly it was hungry for, but I knew that whatever it was was stored deep inside me. At first I knew this was but a dream – I was convinced this was a vision that could not affect me. But, the longer I stared into the infinite darkness of the demon, the less certain I was that this was certain. As my courage wavered, I was aware that the demon had some sort of physical body; bits and pieces of a describable appearance phased in and out of the darkness. I strained my vision to see those pieces clearly.
It was then I began to fear for my life.
I can’t tell you why. I’ve basically given up all possible explanations, and there’s no way of finding explanations when you’re trapped inside a nightmare. All I know is that the longer I stared into the demon, the more aware I became that I was going to die in that garden, at the feet of that demon. My whole body was wracked with hopelessness, the primal fear of promised doom.
I stared and the demon stared back. It had no eyes, , not all of the time, yet somehow it held my stare without break. My neck strained under that Hellish glare – my head jolted up and down – these were the throes of death, more violent the clearer my spectre became. I had to look away, or I would die there.
I could not look away. So I woke up.
I woke not on my own, but by the uncontrollable thrashings of my own body. They startled me out of my mind, and, even pulled back into the communal plane, I continued jerking about like one possessed for another minute. When the shakes subsided, and my head stopped its possessed bobbing, I was left exhausted, traumatized, sleepless at four in the morning. It was an epileptic seizure that saved me, but I was sure, if I were to see the demon again, it would be an epileptic seizure that kills me. Oh-so close to death in those waking moments, I wandered my apartment without a thought in my head for a while. Thoughts were replaced with terror, terror that every shadow behind every door concealed a devil determined to draw me back into the dream – to force me to stare into the demon until I finally succumbed to hopelessness. I sweated, fearful that a devious grin or a black form was waiting to propel me into fear again, behind the door, at the foot of the bed, at the end of the hall. This was neurosis speaking. But that neurosis revealed something to me: I understood the only way to avoid such an end was to force myself not to expect, and consequently peer into the demon. It was the demon’s unveiling, not its presence, that would prove to be fatal. Knowing this didn’t do a thing to quell my fears.
After wiping the drool off my pillow and cleaning the sweat off with a shower, I fixed some coffee and watched The Autopsy of Jane Doe. It was a frightful film, but I had chosen it in particular because I wanted to check something: to see if the nightmare affected my experience with the movie. It helped feed the dark atmosphere, certainly, but my thoughts were untinged by the evil in that movie. It was posing as evil, a watered-down replication of the darkest malignance, which I had borne witness to. The film even proved to be a welcome distraction, entertaining me and drawing my thoughts away from thoughts that would otherwise make the morning drudge along in fear of every dark corner.
When the film finished, I looked online for explanations of that nightmare. Some people propose to be experts at reading visions, and most opinions online are free (some of the traumatized love to relieve their fears to connect with others of the same thought or experience). However, all I could find were mentions of “dark men” with “black hats,” furry beasts, or your Slenderman types; hardly any were recognized as the demon that I came upon. There were records of possessions that lead to epileptic seizures, but barely any provided descriptions of the demonic culprit. Moreover, none had mentioned that singular despair of looking into the figure – how that figure fashioned from void material clenched your gut with the feeling that life was on the line. As far as I could tell, I was the only one writing about it. It was my fear alone.
I noticed something over the next few weeks. I noticed that the people around me were not privy to fear. Anxiety, yes. Depression, yes. Wariness, most definitely. But true, unadulterated fear is not something present in most college students’ lives. True fear is founded on the precept that all things are about to end, and that there will be no chance for recovery because there will be nothing to build from. Just one ruined shell of what was once a being, laid low by forces outside their control. That is death. That is the fear I woke to in those dawning hours. Their numbness was not born from courage, but rather imperceptibility. They had not faced death – there is no way they could no what fear felt like.
Yet the fear only lasted through half the day. My mind became preoccupied with other things, and what I thought I saw in the demon was discounted as a nightmare, brought on by subconscious thoughts that I could not be bothered to untangle. My fear was irrational, heightened by the certainty that I knew what I had been looking at, when I really did not. But, as I considered the impact of fear on my peers, I became more relaxed with the idea that whatever would come, would come. Only One has the power to stop it, and I prayed, but I was unafraid because I knew the demon could only take my life, not me.
Within a month, I found myself returned to the twilight garden. It had been some time since I stopped philosophizing fear, content with the answers I found. I did not fight the hedges and the fog as they rolled onwards, but focused rather on confronting what would be at the end. It took longer than last time. Much longer. Perhaps it only seemed longer, since I was now aware, but the garden appeared to have grown while I was away. My nerves were steeled in preparation, but they loosened with impatience as there was no break in the orange-black foliage in sight.
Only then did the demon manifest. At the end of the garden, wherein it only seems to continue on towards nowhere, did the demon finally manifest through its spatial tear. My body was transported by spasms, and I gasped for the courage to stare my reaper straight in its faceless eyes. The longer I held my gaze, the clearer the demon seemed to me; likewise, the longer I held my gaze, the more violent my spasms became. The waiting, the journey through the garden, had sent me to slaughter, wearing down all my reassurances by forcing me to stand at attention until it arrived at the proper point. And now the demon had the upper hand.
But still I gazed, and still I picked apart the demon’s existence. As its body became clear to me, I realized it was not made of parts familiar to corporeal sight, but felt in the mind’s eye. The more I picked it apart, the less I saw, and consequently the more I feared because the demon was made of fear itself, and had tricked me by its stillness into believing I could stare directly into it and not be afraid. Its ears twitched. They were not ears at all, but antennae detecting the worry in my heart and manipulating it into possessive fear. I had fallen for the demon’s unassuming nature, and my body was now beyond my control.
Unable to look away, unable to run away, I had no choice but to look into the depths of that hole as I was drawn ever nearer. Closer, closer, death approached. The garden soon brought me to the demon’s feet, and I realized that we had reached the end. As I collapsed to the ground, trembling from seizures, I stared unflinchingly up at the demon. Its gaze seemed to look past me, as if I were already lost and thereby not worth further attention. My vision faded in and out of blackness, as the twilight was slowly fading into night. On the cusp of death, I realized that this figure, this demon, though made of fear, was not frightening at all. It was the fear I saw in it, and what I feared that meant for me, which brought me nearer to death. It was fear for loss of control, not the loss of control itself, that convinced me that hope was now just a dream, and this nightmare a reality.
In that dawning thought, I found strength. In that strength, I found peace.
Morning's Early Dark 