#bellsins

In the blanket of a gray, monotonously saturated expanse devoid of noises, objects, scenery, and humans, Bill meticulously hovered in slow circles over the baby crib he had conjured to situate the toddler, who was teething on his stubby fingers. Bill’s eyelid scrunched in visible disgust as he halted to a stop, he then lowered himself and hooked his cane on the crook of the infant’s elbow, and pried Dipper’s salivated fingers away from his mouth. Pausing a moment to tap his index finger thoughtfully above his bowtie, Bill blinked slowly as the small boy extended his arms out, wriggled in his crib, and emitted soft noises of discontentment.

“Kid,” Bill chided, “we demons don’t do hugs.”

The display of affection exchanged between the human race of interlocking their arms against the other party and knowingly permitting even the slightest trace of vulnerability was disgusting.

He redirected his attention on the child’s unwavering persistence, and to sate the boy’s necessity to fumble with something solid beyond the thin bedsheets, Bill reluctantly tossed his cane beside the crib’s bedposts.

Dipper garbled a few sounds of childish surprise, idly distracted by the sulfurous black mist that expelled through the cane’s shaft as he attempted to snatch the wispy coils escaping through the gaps of his closed fists.

Bill, however, considered aloud, “What do I even do with this drooling bag of flesh.” He advanced to the overhead mobile, and shot a bolt of electricity to haywire the musical box. Bill admired the mobile’s extensions: plastic spiders hung by a thin wire, and their beady eyes was lined with red, gleaming gems that would cast a haunting glow of scarlet in the darkness.

Flicking a plastic spider, Bill asked amusedly, “So, kiddo, know anything that gives you the frights?” Allowing a pregnant pause to register in their shared and silent ambience, Bill snapped his fingers and the hollow, gray area dimmed into a gradual, seeping darkness. “Yeah, I figured as much.”

A discordant melody wailed from the music box, and a single, flickering spotlight of white cascaded over the crib. Bill retreated into the blackened void, and in an otherworldly echo, he said maliciously, “We’ll just have to find out!”

In retrospect, Bill mused, he had plenty of small plans miserably fail.

Although the physical constant of time did not reach his realm—days and hours had no relevance in a domain where he could fashion his surroundings into brimming clarity or plunge it into an obscuring darkness on command—he had recorded, for the sake of relevancy, that he had studied the crippling emotion of fear within the toddler for three days. At unplanned intervals throughout his experiment, he had permitted Dipper to consume the formula from his bottle that he had stolen from the realm of humanistic reality, but he never consumed much as he trembled underneath his blanket in broken sobs.

The acrid taste of fear repulsed Bill, but he continued under the assumption that he had not cultivated the emotion to its ripe extent. Shortly after snapping his fingers to magically fit the toddler in clean diapers, Bill approached the crib and plucked the blanket from the child’s back. Glancing forward, Dipper’s eyes brimmed with a sheen of hope, and his miserable frown upturned at the corners in a soft, relieved smile that cracked the film of dried tear stains over the grooves of his faint laugh lines.

Bill pressed his hands against himself and hooked his fingers through the ridges of the aligned, golden bricks and slowly pried the modified amalgamation of golden skin and darkened bile. The elasticity of manipulated flesh stretched unnaturally until it tore apart to reveal a row of serrated fangs stained at the tips with black. Dipper’s eyes boggled fearfully, and before Bill could spout a cynical quip through his newly formed mouth, Dipper’s whittling smile curved downwards.

And Bill blinked, dumbfounded, and nearly cringed as Dipper burst into a fit of piercing wails.

In his surprised stupor, the surrounding area regained its dull but bright gray pigmentation, the mobile’s glitched and low hum had ceased, and Bill frantically rubbed at his fanged mouth until it disappeared and regressed into a flat plane of gold.

“Kid, kid! Calm down!” Repressing his uncertainty and reluctance, he shrunk himself into a diminutive height and hovered close to the crying infant, and just as frantically waved his arms to catch Dipper’s attention. “C’mon, I made myself a puny lil’ runt! Stop crying!”

Bill’s outburst softened Dipper’s loud, tearful sobs into a hiccup as he peered below and spotted the small, yellow demon flitting near his hands. Sniffling, he grabbed Bill by his sides and gnawed at a corner.

Bill yelled in horror, his arms and legs flailing, and his disruptive racket spurred the tiniest giggle from Dipper perking a warm smile-

The aroma of his soul was brimming with a taste so tantalizing, so captivatingly delicious that Bill withheld himself from his ongoing, futile struggle in order to quell his growling appetite.

The vestiges of fear disappeared—how bland and displeasing the emotion was on the human soul, Bill gathered—yet the replaced emotion enveloping the infant that he couldn’t wait to harvest had vanished as Dipper rested his head against his pillow and immersed his fleeting subconscious in his first calming and soothing slumber since his arrival.

Bill lowered his eyelid in resignation, and although huddled within the toddler’s frail clasp, Bill weaved Dipper’s dream to replace the humans he recognized in his life with supernatural creatures nurturing and playing with him in the same manner his family once had.