The Devil You Know
There was a lustrous brilliance to the Darkness. The Pit was illuminated within and without, not by light but by suffering. There was no succor. There was no salvation for the blessed. To bask in the glory of the Archfiend Abaddon was a reward that needed to be earned through pain and torment. It was the fate of all who entered its domain. And it was the task of the Priest to ensure this torment was thorough and all-consuming. The Priest was the right hand of Darkness.
In another time and another place, the Priest was as all supplicants who kneel before the dark throne of Prince Abaddon and beg for mercy. And Abaddon’s mercy was unlike anything the Priest could have imagined with a mortal mind. To become a gear of the great machine, to exercise the will of the Archfiend itself, was sublime.
Forward and back through time, the Priest fulfilled his duty. There was no time and no place he did not exist now, such was the gift of Abaddon. The Priest had always existed. The torment would always exist. There was no time and no space in which the Priest would not find the wicked and righteous alike to bring them punishments for their sins, both real and imagined. Such was the power of the Priest. Such was the power of Abaddon.
Abaddon fed on the souls of those who fell, and the Priest was his reaping tool, sent to harvest each one. He cut them out root and stem. Abaddon sent the Priest and the Priest would enact his will. And so it had always been. And so it would always be. Until, that is, it was not.
The man was called Van Collins. Not a remarkable man. Not a leader or a monster. Not a killer or a prince. Just a man, like so many others. The Priest could see sin on a soul like a painter could see inspiration on a canvas. There, but not there. Like the essence of the thing. And Van Collins had sinned. By his own mind, he had sins, and those were the greatest sins of all. To tell a man he had done wrong meant nothing if he did not believe it himself. But for a man to know, in his soul, that he had done wrong. Those were the sweet sins to be savored. Those were the sins Abaddon relished most of all.
The sins of Van Collins were not remarkable. He had not secretly hurt others. He had not even stolen or broken or ruined the world in which he lived. But he had regrets. He had told lies. He had hurt others with words and actions rather than violence and malice.
There was a time when the Priest may have disdained harvesting such a soul. But his was not to question the will of his master. And his master made no distinction regarding the quality of the sin. A penny or a pound was all the same to Abaddon. The minor sins of Van Collins would serve.
It was perhaps because Van Collins was so unremarkable that the Priest was caught off guard when he arrived to harvest the man’s soul. He could walk through shadows and drift from tomorrow to yesterday, as a mortal would travel through doorways. But he was not accustomed to surprise. The Deacon was already there.
The Priest arrived from the Darkness into the home of Van Collins, a simple domicile in a mortal city that was as still and quiet as mortal cities got under the cover of their darkness.
He drifted from the shadows into the fullness of being, taking his physical body into the reality of the earthly world and standing over the sleeping form of Van Collins. But across the room, mirroring the Priest and his actions, stood the Deacon.
The Deacon served as right hand to the Archfiend Astaroth, rival prince to Abaddon. Equal in their might but sworn enemies, Astaroth and Abaddon had warred with the many other princes of Hell since the beginning.
For many years, there would be not so much a truce as a disregard. Abaddon had no cause for quarrel if Astaroth had no cause. They traveled in separate shadows. They harvested different souls. They ignored one another to prevent further war and further wasted time. And yet here, now, was the Deacon.
The Priest and the Deacon were the same in function only. They ventured forth to harvest souls for their masters. But their methods were not the same. Their beliefs were not the same.
Abaddon, and by extension the Priest, was calculating. Abaddon had no need for emotion. Emotion was the power on which it fed. The fear and elation, the hate and the joy of the souls the Priest brought to it.
Astaroth was the flip side of the coin. It was impulse and emotion. It was anger and fear. The Deacon was much the same, but it had, in its time, crafted fear into a precise and skillfully wielded weapon. Every aspect of the Deacon was designed to cause dread.
“Deacon,” the Priest said quietly, his voice like the whispers of the dying.
“Priest,” it replied, the sound like the crisping of flesh in ovens.
“Why have you come?”
The Deacon spread hands that evoked the memory of human appendages. Long and tapered were the fingers, an extra joint in each one. The flesh was glossy and moist, caked with viscous pus and gelatinous blood.
“I have come for the soul,” it explained as though speaking to an inferior.
“The soul belongs to Abaddon,” the Priest explained.
A guttural hum rumbled deep in the Deacon’s skeletal and scarred chest. The eyeless, egg-shaped head regarded the Priest with a perverse curiosity. Its worm-like lips pulled back and back, bisecting its face to expose a massive maw of bestial teeth and red, bloody gums. The Priest felt nothing.
“I claim it for my master,” the Deacon corrected. “You will retreat now.”
The tone of the Deacon’s warning was clear. A threat unspoken in its voice. The Priest could feel the waves of compulsion flowing from the Deacon’s words. An infernal trick born of the power of all higher order demons, a power that caused influence and even control over mortal souls.
“I am not to be commanded by you or your master,” the Priest replied. Neither he nor the Deacon was so weak as to be subject to such simple tricks. And if they were to battle, to truly fight, they would likely destroy one another. The Priest had no time for such things. But the Deacon was not a being of rationality and thus was unpredictable.
“You will not have this soul,” the Deacon warned. The Priest looked at the man, asleep and oblivious to all that was transpiring. It did not matter what the Priest wanted or didn’t want. And truly he did not have wants in that sense, anyway. He had duties, and he performed them. It was his duty to harvest the soul of Van Collins.
“We shall see,” the Priest replied. The Deacon hissed, a serpentine tongue slithering out beyond its many teeth. Its spindly body bending low over the sleeping mortal. The Priest did not move as the Deacon traced the tip of one of its oozing fingers across the man’s forehead, leaving a trail of rancid effluence behind.
Shadow replaced the Deacon, his physical form gone from the room. The Priest looked at Van Collins. It would be difficult to finish his task now. The Deacon would need to be removed somehow.
Van Collins shifted on the bed. His body slept, but his mind was active. The Priest looked at him and felt the flow of malefic energy from within his mind. The Deacon was already at work in the mortal’s dreams. The Priest needed to be quick.
***
Van stood in the kitchen, breathing heavily. He was home again, the home he had grown up in. The sky outside was grey and dismal. The threat of rain was apparent, but for now only the wind blew.
“When…?” he began, looking around the room. It was familiar, of course. It was his home. But not anymore. He had grown up and moved out. His parents had sold the house. That had happened, he was sure of it.
Why was he in the kitchen? He stared at the large stainless steel refrigerator doors. To get a snack. That had to be what he was doing.
Van opened the fridge. The light clicked on and revealed a cavern, vast and long, that stretched into a cold, howling darkness. The walls were not plastic and metal but flesh. They pulsed and undulated and the red, raw surface was lined with thin blue veins.
At the mouth of the cavern was a creature that looked like a grossly malnourished man. It was skeletal but also malformed and ill-looking. Its flesh was diseased, suppurating and weeping from a great many sources. The fingers oozed with congealed blood and filth and an eyeless face split virtually in half to reveal a massive mouth.
Van screamed, scrambling back from the fridge and falling onto the floor as he tried to flee. The monster crept from the fleshy cavern, licking its plump lips with a whiplike, prehensile tongue as it came towards him.
He rolled over and scrambled forward, first on all fours and then up onto his feet as panic took hold. The creature matched his pace and chased him down the hall. There should have been a door awaiting him, an exit to the world and to help, but now there was none. The hall stretched on and on, a seemingly endless tunnel to nowhere.
The gangly creature behind him loped down on the hall and then tumbled forward to run on all fours. Its hands and feet grasped at the floor and walls and it spun itself around. It gripped the ceiling and continued to give chases, slavering and chittering a sinister laugh as it raced after him, nearly at his heels.
Van was certain he would not last, would not be able to outrun the creature which gained ground by mere inches as he looked back at it. Its laughter had become wild and raucous and Van begged for it to leave as he pumped his legs as fast as he could.
He returned his attention to the hall, and a sudden sense of relief overwhelmed him. The door had appeared just ahead. A way outside. A way to escape.
He could smell the breath of the monster at his back, foul and rotten, and reached for the door just as it opened on its own.
Van tried to slow himself, but could not. A man stood in the doorway. But like the monster at his back, this was not truly a man. It held out one pale hand and caught Van by the collar, lifting him from the ground as though he weighed nothing at all, and setting him aside. They were no longer in a hallway, but a wide open space devoid of form. No walls, no ceiling, just emptiness.
The monster stood before the stranger. The man that was not a man at least looked more human than the monster. He wore a uniform of leather, the same pale white as his own flesh but stitched with thick, black laces throughout. The tight shirt and pants were hidden behind a full length apron of the same white leather that hung from his chest to his feet. He had no hair on his head, not even eyebrows or eyelashes, and his eyes were pools of darkness. His body was a patchwork of old, perfectly formed scars that formed letters from an alphabet Van could not recognize. His hands, his bare arms, even his face and scalp were covered in the strange, scarred words.
The eyeless monster raged, snarling loudly.
“I claim him,” it roared. The scarred man rolled his wrist like a dancer performing, and a thin, glassy blade appeared between his fingers. He said nothing. He simply sliced the throat of the skeletal monster in one swift, fluid motion.
A river of pus burst from the wound and the monster gulp and snarled, holding its own neck trying to keep the fetid mixture inside. The scarred man turned and picked Van up again.
They were no longer in empty space. They were in Van’s bedroom. The scarred man held up suspended over his own bed for just an instant before dropping him. Van gasped, a scream frozen in his throat as he touched himself and the bed and looked around, unsure if he truly was where he thought he was.
“You should get up, mortal,” the scarred man suggested. Van was not sure if he was truly a man at all now. He was slender and lithe and his voice sounded like many whispers speaking as one.
“What was that? What’s happening?” Van asked, finding his voice.
“The Archfiend Astaroth wishes to consume your soul. A battle for your immortal essence has begun.”
“A demon?” Van said, confused.
“A Prince of Hell.”
“Oh my God,” Van whispered, his voice tinged with panic. The Priest allowed himself a smile, though there was no feeling of mirth behind it.
“God is not yours, mortal.”
“Are you here to help me?”
“I must stop the Deacon,” the Priest stated. Van shook his head.
“Who’s the Deacon?”
“The demon that hunts you, who serves Astaroth. It is Astaroth’s harvester of souls.”
“You killed it,” Van said.
“The Deacon cannot be killed. It is not alive. It has been distracted.”
“Who are you?” Van asked. The Priest fixed him with a black-eyed stare. The bedroom was dark and silent. Van realized that the scarred man was not even breathing.
“I am the Priest,” he answered simply.
“What kind of priest?” Van asked after a moment’s hesitation.
“I am the Priest of the Word of Darkness. I am the end of soul’s respite and the gateway to the knowledge of punishment unimaginable. I am the hand of the infinite cold.”
“Oh,” Van whispered.
“Calm your fears. The Deacon serves a different master than I. If you wish to avoid the eternal torments of Astaroth and an undying horror that will devour your soul again and again until the last stars have faded to desolate emptiness, then you must ally yourself with my cause.”
“But you’re a demon,” Van said. The Priest nodded his head just slightly.
“If you wish to use this label. But I serve my master’s will and my master decrees that it is better to lose a soul to a continued mortal existence than to the coffers of Astaroth’s temple.”
“I don’t understand,” Van said.
“I will not allow the Deacon to have your soul, Van Collins.”
Van exhaled a shaky breath. The Priest did not move except when necessary to speak. His body was rigid and still, like a corpse hung from a hook. No breath, no twitches or shifting of his weight. He was not alive, Van could see. A demon, like the other creature. And offering to help.
“What’s stopping you from trying to take my soul?” Van asked, regretting the words as soon as they crossed his lips. He did not want to provoke this scarred man.
“Spite,” the Priest answered as though it were obvious.
“You’ll let me live to spite the other monster?”
“My master will relinquish you to spite his enemy. What is one soul among billions? What is one spot of light in an infinite ocean of darkness?”
“I’m not important enough to care about,” Van realized.
“No, Van Collins. You are not,” the Priest agreed.
Despite the fear, Van felt slightly offended and also relieved by that. Sometimes it was better to be no one than someone.
“What can we do about the Deacon if it can’t die?”
“Death is but one end on a path with many branches. The Deacon’s path can be ended by returning it to its master.”
“We can send it back to Hell?”
“Yes,” the Priest agreed.
“Great. How?”
“You will need to obtain the Liber Officiorum Spirituum. It contains the rite for unsummoning the Deacon to Astaroth’s realm.”
“Is that a book?”
“Yes. Come,” the Priest instructed.
“I’m not even -” Van began. The Priest turned, and they were no longer in his bedroom.
“- dressed.” Van finished. He was still only wearing shorts. The man and the demon were in a dark room surrounded by bookshelves. It smelled of dust and mildew. The floor creaked under Van’s weight, but not the Priest’s.
“The grimoire is here,” the Priest said, indicating a shelf in front of him. The books were old and thick, bound in leather and canvas and other ancient, worn materials that the years had taken a toll on. Van looked around the room.
“Where are we?”
“The library of Allister St. Jean,” the Priest answered.
“Who is that?”
“The mortal who owns the Liber Officiorum Spirituum.”
The Priest pointed to a black book on the shelf. Van reached for it and then stopped, looking at the Priest’s scarred face.
“Why aren’t you taking it?”
“I cannot. It cannot be used by my kind,” he explained.
“Is it safe?”
“Decidedly not. You waste time of which you have very little, Van Collins.”
“I’m just… I’m scared. I don’t want to die.”
“Mortal things often wish to live forever, as though eternity in a body designed to decay over time were a blessing,” the Priest replied.
“I don’t want to live forever. I just don’t want to die now,” Van said.
“When would you like to die?”
“When it’s my time,” he answered.
“According to whom?”
Van stared at the black eyes staring back at him. The scars across the Priest’s face were thin, but they looked deep. The words had been carved down through muscle. He wondered what they meant.
“I don’t know,” he answered.
“The Deacon will return soon. Take the book.”
Van pulled the book from the shelf. It was heavy, and the cover felt brittle in his hands. There were no words to indicate it was the tome they were looking for, but he was not going to doubt the word of the Priest.
“You must find the rite and prepare the unsummoning,” the Priest said. They were no longer in the library, but returned to Van’s room. The Priest left the room and Van followed him into the dining room of his apartment. With a gesture from the scarred man, the table moved to the far wall, exposing a large spot of hardwood floor.
“Here,” the Priest said, indicating the floor.
“Here what?” Van asked. The Priest gestured to the book. Pages turned and opened to a passage written in the same language that covered the Priest’s body. There was a picture in the center of a circle within a circle. Letters and symbols filled the ring between the two circles.
“I have to draw this?”
“Yes. Time is short.”
Van looked around the room, trying to stay calm. He didn’t want to panic, but he didn’t want to see the Deacon again, either. He needed something he could use to draw the circle on the floor.
“Van Collins, you are wasting time,” the Priest cautioned.
“I’m looking for something -”
“There,” the Priest interrupted. He pointed to a bowl on the counter. Van shook his head.
“A bowl?”
“Bring it to me.”
Van did as he was instructed, bringing the empty bowl to the Priest. The scarred face gave away no emotion. A cold, pale hand took Van by the wrist and held his arm up. He sliced his thumbnail across Van’s wrist. It slid like a razor into the flesh and Van cried out in both pain and surprise.
The Priest’s grip was like iron. He held Van’s wrist over the bowl as blood poured from the wound.
“What the hell are you doing?” Van demanded, trying to struggle free. The Priest may as well have been made from solid stone, there was no moving him at all. The more Van struggled, the more he caused the wound to bleed.
“The circle must be drawn with the blood of the summoner. You will survive this.”
“You could have warned me,” Van said, trying to ignore the pain.
“Why?” the Priest asked.
“Well, it would have been nice.”
“Do I look like someone who cares about being nice?” the Priest inquired. He set the bowl of blood aside and lifted Van’s arm. Black eyes bored into his own as he pulled Van’s wrist towards his face.
A sense of revulsion surged through Van’s body as the Priest’s tongue, red and smooth, licked out between his pale lips. He licked the cut in Van’s flesh, cleaning the blood away. The flesh was healed where it passed over. He let Van’s arm gone.
“Draw the symbols with haste,” the Priest instructed. Van rubbed his wrist. It was cold and damp with the demon’s saliva. He looked away from him, taking the bowl and getting on his hands and knees on the floor.
Van used his fingers on the hardwood to scrawl the circle with his own blood. It was not a neatly made reproduction, but it was the best he could do with a lack of tools. He copied the symbols as closely as he could, trying to keep the sizing and spacing even.
“There is no more time,” the Priest said when he was half done. Van lifted his head. There was nothing else in the dining room with them, but the air had taken on a musty, sour smell.
The Priest walked across the floor, his steps silent and delicate. He walked like a dancer and his strange, white leather shoes seemed to absorb any sound as they went. He had the same glassy blade in his hands he had used to attack the Deacon previously.
“Finish your work,” the Priest advised.
The floor shook beneath Van’s hands and knees. There was a faint hum in the air. The Priest stood in the doorway to the dining room, silent and ready for whatever was coming as Van continued his hasty drawing.
Across the room, a cupboard door shuddered. Van diverted his attention from the circle, unsure if he had truly seen anything at all. The door creaked open slowly, a few feet from his face. He held his breath, expecting the monstrous visage of the Deacon to burst forth, but instead there were only the shadowy contents of the cupboard. He stared for a long moment in confusion. There was nothing.
“What -” he started to say. The shadows of the cupboard belched forth like inky black vomit. The Deacon scrambled forth like a spider from the darkness and Van yelled out in fear.
The Priest was on top of the Deacon in a flash. He lifted the monster from the ground and threw it out of the dining room in a swift, fluid movement. The black eyes turned to Van.
“You have no time,” he said.
Van returned to his work quickly. He filled the circular rings with the symbol, saturating his fingers with his own blood and splattering it across the floor to match the drawing from the book.
The Deacon snarled and righted itself quickly, rushing back to the dining room. The Priest removed his white leather apron and, like a matador, held it in his hands as the Deacon approached.
He spun on his toes and wrapped the leather around the Deacon as it attacked. The leather held to the Deacon like glue, the pale material bonding to the Deacon’s own body. It grew over the rotten flesh of the Deacon’s skeletal frame, forming a new skin, encasing the monster as though it were a cocoon. White flesh surged up over the monster’s face and around its body from front to back. Soon the Deacon was nothing but a featureless mass of white flesh, like a man-sized maggot wriggling and writhing as the beast within tried to escape.
Van finished the drawing on the floor and stood, his hand stained to the wrist with his own drying blood.
“It’s done,” he said excitedly. The Priest did not look at him. He focused on the Deacon as it struggled in its flesh prison.
“Stand in the center and read the words,” the Priest said. Van picked up the book and stared at the page. They were not even letters he recognized. He had no idea how to read the book.
“I can’t,” Van yelled. The white flesh encasing the Deacon tore.
“Stand in the circle,” the Priest said again. Van looked to the floor. He was several paces from the center still. With book in hand, he resituated himself.
The symbols on the page took on an air of familiarity. They did not change, but they made sense to Van. He began to read, the language one of deep, throaty sounds with harsh consonants and drawn out vowels. The alien words spilled out quickly and took on a song-like cadence. He had no idea what he was saying, but it felt as though the words themselves wanted to be said.
The Deacon shrieked. The pale leather trap split open like a kind of perverse egg sac and spilled the monster out onto the floor in a gush of milky fluid. It struggled to find its footing as Van continued to read.
“The soul is mine!” the Deacon hissed loudly, trying to stand on shaking legs. The Priest traced a finger along the side of the monster’s head and spun light as air from one side of the Deacon to the other. He let his hand caress the side of the monster’s face until he came to a stop, pulling the Deacon’s lower jaw completely away from its head with a wet crunching sound.
The Deacon howled, its long, snake-like tongue flapping uselessly under its exposed upper jaw. Blood and pus gushed down the front of its body. The Priest danced around it to a song only he could hear. The movements were graceful and seductive, yet none of the passion touched the scarred face. His expression was as blank and stern as ever.
Pale, scarred hands caressed and stroked the body of the Deacon. Each time they came away, they pulled loose another body part. After the jaw came the monster’s right arm and then its left hand. It tried to defend itself and fight back, but the movements of the Priest seemed to confuse and disorient it.
A new jaw began to grow, new limbs and appendages to replace the damaged bits. The Priest continued unphased, breaking bones or tearing pieces away.
Van finished the passage, and his words echoed through the apartment. The Deacon offered a wordless howl, reaching with a handless arm for Van as darkness swallowed its body whole. The Deacon and all of its pieces were gone. The Priest stopped his dance. He turned, wearing his apron once again, and looked at Van.
“You did it,” Van said.
“I did not. You completed the rite,” the Priest said.
“Is it gone for good now?” Van asked. The Priest gave a slight nod.
“It has been unsummoned. Your lifetime will have long since passed by before the Deacon is able to return.”
Van heaved a sigh of relief. He closed the book and set it on the counter as he approached the Priest.
“Thank you. I don’t understand why any of this even happened, but I’m glad you…” he trailed off, looking around his apartment. The light had grown dim and there was a smell he could not identify on the air. Not the stench of the Deacon, but something stale and old. The air was cold and still.
“What’s happening?” Van asked. The walls of his home faded away, and he was no longer in the apartment at all. Darkness stretched as far as he could see. There was only himself and the Priest. And then a sound rang through the void. It was distant at first, but grew closer. A scream, joined by another, and then another. Many screams formed a chorus.
“You have completed the Rite,” the Priest said. The screams rose higher and higher, a deafening symphony of people in pain. Van could see shadows writhing at the edges of his vision. In the distance, the great darkness seemed to shudder and move, like a mirage. He watched and realized the blackness was not empty at all but a thing, a creature of a size beyond reason. Whatever he was seeing was so massive, it was impossible to view in its totality. It was as though the dark itself had come to life and it was everywhere.
“I don’t understand,” Van said to himself.
“No mortal can unsummon the Deacon. But a mortal may summon itself to my master’s domain.”
“Your master…” Van said. He stared up at the moving darkness. Screams filled his ears from all corners. The cold began to creep into his feet as though he were standing in wet snow. It bit at his fingertips and he felt a pain shoot through his nerves. He looked around, but the great blackness rose up in all directions. It was as though the thing had already swallowed him. There was nowhere to go that he could see. No landmark or destination. There was just darkness all around him.
“You tricked me?” he said. But the Priest was gone. Van stood alone as the screams rose to a nearly deafening volume. He tried to cover his ears to lock them out as the cold surrounded him, seeping into his very bones. He began to run. The world looked the same forward and behind. He could not tell if he was even running straight or going in a circle. There was nothing but the screams, and the cold, and the ever growing darkness. There was nothing else.
