THREE

The boy listened intensely while Beth told her story.

“Ten years ago I was a silly little nerd with little to no friends, working at the post office. I was invited, well… dared… to attend a séance. There were a few girls in town who were into the whole occult thing. I wasn’t, but I was so hard up for any friends I hung out with them. You might say they were kind of the outsiders in town, like I was. They, because they listened to stuff like black metal and dressed in black. Me because I was a nerdy kid that liked musty old books. So one night, we gathered in one of the girls’ place. There was one of those stupid Ouija boards. To make stuff more exciting the lights were out, the only illumination coming from a few candles. Stupid, childish stuff. Megan, sort of the leader of the group I guess started to move the planchette across the board. She asked the spirit-world if there was a spirit there. The planchette moved to the word ‘Yes’. Some of the girls just giggled. I felt quite uneasy. I told myself it was just a trick, Megan trying to scare us.”

The boy understood intellectually that the situation would be scary to most people. He almost felt jealous for that. “I heard the planchette could move because unintentionally your subconscious makes you.”

“That’s part of what I thought as well when Megan handed me the planchette and told me to ask the spirits who was there. My hand moved, I cannot explain how or why. It spelled a name. A-L-A-S-T-O-R. I let go of the planchette, startled. Megan told me to ask more questions. I told her I didn’t feel like it. That it didn’t seem the smart thing to do. The girls laughed at me. I didn’t want them to laugh at me. So I continued. I asked what the spirit was doing there. The planchette started to move again. A-R-S-O-N. I let go of the planchette, got up from my chair. In front of me the girls suddenly caught fire. They screamed, they screamed so incredibly loud. Their screams seemed to become one long and incredibly high-pitched, banshee-like wail. They tried to extinguish the fire by rolling on the floor. I grabbed my coat and tried to put out the fire that was burning up Megan. It was so strange, the coat didn’t catch fire but Megan and the girls kept on burning and screaming. Suddenly there was no sound anymore. The fire was gone, leaving the girls dead and charred on the floor. I screamed, but heard no sound. That was the last day I ever heard anything.”

“That is… That is incredible. The newspapers must have been full of that event,” the boy said.

“Yes and no. The official story the sheriff came up with there was a fire caused by the candles. Nobody believed my story. And because I didn’t want to end up in an insane asylum I didn’t try to debunk that. I figured maybe I’d been seeing things anyway. It must have been the candles, right? For years doctors tried to explain my deafness. It was highly improbable the girls had been able to scream so loud I would suddenly turn deaf. There were some psychologists who thought it might be a psychosomatic thing. But nobody was able to really explain it or cure it. So I just learned to live with it, becoming pretty good at lipreading. I had a hard time concentrating on my work at the post office, which was pretty hard to do as a deaf person.”

“Sounds like a tough time,” the boy said.

“It was. I started to see things in my mind. Awful things. Demons, images of torture, plagues, massacres. I found out that by painting them I could get them out of my mind and finds some kind of piece of mind. I’d never been able to paint anything good before that. It was so incredibly bizarre, but it was true.”

“Do you think maybe whatever or whoever that Alastor was had anything to do with that strange ability?”

“I looked up who Alastor is. He’s a demon. And yes, to be honest, I do think he is responsible for that. I think those images come from him. But of course, nobody will ever believe that is true. And you probably don’t either. I have no idea why I am telling you this.”

“I’ve been told I’m a good, open listener,” the boy said.

“I guess you are,” Beth agreed. “Lately, the images have started to appear before my eyes. Not just in my mind anymore. That scares me to death.”

“Tell me more,” the boy said, eager to learn more about the frightful.