Inner Demons
A Sensorama Smart Home Drama (E05) – Flash Fiction [#15]
Jamie woke, soaked in sweat, sheets clinging to his skin. Disoriented, he glanced around the twilight of the room. Streaks of light through the shutters danced along the bookshelf next to a small desk in the corner, on the ground, a schoolbag, its contents half spilt onto the floor. Sirens wailed in the distance, growing louder, then fading, rain hammering against the window. Rain. Storm. Thunder. Lightning. The cave. The attack. He sat up with a jolt. Hatori. He saw him fall, saw Seresuto rush to her father. Hatori called out to him.
Raitoburingā.
The door opened. His mother entered.
“Jamie? What’s wrong, sweetie? Did you have a bad dream?”
He was six years old again. She moved closer, her limbs heavy, dragging her feet on the carpet, eyes dull, skin saggy.
“Mother?” His deep voice startled him.
Mother’s eyes turned to narrow slits. Another head appeared at the door.
“Everything alright, dear?” The muffled voice of his father came to him from afar.
His gaze returned to his mother bending over him as he was sucking milk from her bare breast with toothless mouth, staring into her hollow eyes, strings as thin as angel’s hair moving her limbs in concert with his every gulp. Dark liquid poured forth from her, too much to swallow, a stream of black washing over him.
Silence. Was this the beginning? He felt his heartbeat, felt his mother’s heartbeat, the warmth of her womb, until that, too, was gone.
Go back—Back to the—Beginning. Hatori’s words echoed through the veil, repeating endlessly until the word was nothing more but the sound of ineffability, rendering him void.
He ceased to be. Formless. Shapeless. One with the darkness. Before concepts, before constructs, before time, he was nowhere and everywhere and there with him was this indisputable kernel, this speck of light, this tiniest of stars in an endless sea of forever night, irreversible, incorruptible, and he was heading straight for it.
“James McAllister,” a little voice said, a face formed.
Jamie stared at his shadow self at the head of the table in the dining room, doused in a haze of orange candlelight. A strange assortment of macabre dolls, silent spectators, were sitting and lying on the table. He was back at the house.
“Have you come to save me? Lightbringer. I know who you are. Look at you, all grown up. Unlike you, I was never born. Unlike you, I never had a choice. Mother made sure of that.”
Gōsutokirā. Hatori whispered through the void.
There on the ground before him appeared the katana.
“Take it,” his alter ego snarled.
Jamie hesitated.
“Do it. Cut me down. Go on. You know you want to.” Spit slobbered down the corner of the writhing purple mouth.
Jamie picked up the sword, keeping his eyes on this infant body with a bearded, ashen face of a corpse, a few silver strains of hair on a bald spotty head, sockets sunk deep one could only guess the eyes, toothless grin, foul fetid noises, tiny wiggling, wrinkly feet, a singular curly long chest hair hanging down the middle between saggy flesh, wrapped in a piece of tattered loincloth, stained and damp, and the navel, poking out from under it, like a gasping blood crusted mouth. Jamie felt nothing but pity.
“There’s nowhere to go from here but through me,” the infant said.
Jamie kept quiet and sat cross-legged at the opposite end of the table, Gōsutokirā resting on his lap. He closed his eyes, his breathing, his heartbeat slowed, his mind calmed. There was something he was missing, something he didn’t see.
The Beginning. Focus.
“No more games, little man. You came, you saw, go on, you win.”
Jamie exhaled. His heart stopped. His mind’s eye saw the trap, the door, the way of the light. He knew what he had to do.
“The second heartbeat,” Jamie spoke slowly, eyes still closed. He went back to the moment of birth. Two heartbeats. One birth.
“Yes, Jamie. You’re the monster. I never had a chance. You made me vanish. Mother saved me. She brought me here. Now, I’ll make you vanish.”
“No one was saved. We’re both caged. The only way we’ll ever be free is to be one. The only way to break this curse is to become the darkness. Without it, there can be no light.”
“Clever boy. I don’t care. The Between doesn’t care. Life doesn’t care. You are here. Your turn to stay.”
The meagre, bony body, sitting in the chair one moment, now face to face with Jamie, pestilent breath, rot of flesh, tainted soul, awash with anguish. “Free me.” Words unspoken yet screamed from every pore, every fibre of this wretched host.
Clarity came to Jamie like the cut of a blade, clean and swift, without judgment, without hesitation. Gōsutokirā glowed, hovering between them, it sprang to life with a slow hum, increasing, rising, tracing glyphs around them, a web of shimmering blue, and within, two souls, in pieces, spinning, merging, the sword a blur of steel weaving a cocoon around darkness, around light, faster and faster, until they became one.
The high-pitched hum fell, the sphere of light warped, expanded, a wave of falling sound washed across the room, drowning all there was until only a door remained, a simple slab of nothing surrounded by more nothing, and floating before it, Jamie.
He pushed Gōsutokirā through the door until the hilt and turned the sword.
Everything he had lived through happened all at once, in reverse. From the moment the lightning struck, back to the moment he saw himself enter the house that night at Halloween, bumping into the reporters in the corridor and the moment he brought his scythe down on the demon, Helfinger, only this time it was not a scythe, it was Gōsutokirā.
Hatori and Seresuto kneeled beside him on the wet, rugged stones of the plateau. He looked up at them and smiled. Somewhere, a goat affirmed its existence.
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Author’s Note
What a rush. I wrote this in parts, in between places, including on the airplane from Nice to Paris last night. Which part? Does it show? Does it work?
I mentioned in my last post that Jamie would face his demon, and so he did. This concludes the series. For now. Not what you expected? Did you see it coming from a mile away? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
TFTD Community
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I am a real fan of your work, Alexander. I read everything you post on Substack. I read this piece twice and I feel the vibrant energy, the passion, the angst. The words bristle from the page! I have to say, though, that I am old and this one is over my head, like a foreign language I can not quite de-code. Sometimes comprehension does not matter -- the experience is still keen!
Well you persevered and succeeded. Powerful images.