Jon was having an excellent day - until he decided to stop at the bank coming back from an after-lunch walk to take care of some business he had been neglecting for quite some time.

He should have turned around and left after seeing the long lines, but since he was already there, he decided to stay. The lack of air conditioning should have hinted him to choose another one; the kid in front of him in line was particularly irritating, but he decided to stay.

The kid wouldn’t stand still, and his mother was doing her best to keep him under control, but nothing worked. He fidgeted non-stop, talked non-stop, danced non-stop. Then he decided to sing - nothing in particular, only a sequence of noises that he unsuccessfully attempted to string together to resemble a melody; after some time, however, he finally reached a sequence of sounds that were actually melodic and… different. The kid noticed that, so he kept singing it, over and over again. His mother told him to stop, but it was like the kid was in some sort of trance, singing and moving his body along with the tune, oblivious to everything around him.

Jon’s head began to bother him at that point. It started as a muted, but persistent pain like nothing he had experienced before - headaches usually happen in the periphery of the head, particularly in the forefront. This one was different, though - it seemed to come directly from inside his head. Initially Jon tried to ignore it, but the repeated singing made it progressively worse, sharp, like cutting inside his brain. Jon held his head in his hands, pressed his temples, but the pain kept getting worse and worse. When he finally decided to ask the kid to stop singing, he realized he couldn’t speak or move anymore. It seemed like something was taking shape inside his head, controlling it; the pain was becoming unbearable, Jon wanted to scream, but he couldn’t - but then his body took a life of its own, it started to move, and it finally laughed; a terrifying laugh, in a deep and rough voice that had no resemblance to Jon’s own voice.

* * *

The police arrived at the scene responding to several frantic emergency calls. People were terrified of the unearthly noises, voices and screams coming from the bank. Someone had shut the doors from the inside, with furniture piled up in front of it; horrific screams were coming from the building, and while they were trying to open the glass doors, what seemed to be a human brain smashed against the glass.

Someone drove a police car through the doors to open them, out of pure despair, and the fairly large police force ran inside. The Achnahannet police force was proud of its training and ability to deal with all sorts of situations, but nothing had prepared them for what they were about to witness. In fact, nothing could have prepared anyone for what they expected inside that bank, not years of experience, not psychological resilience, not deeply held religious beliefs, nothing. It is only human to freeze when faced with danger and evil, even more so when the essence of nightmares are distilled and concentrated and dropped right into your eyes. Unfortunately for a couple of officers it took everyone a few seconds to react before killing that which once perhaps had been a human being. May they rest in peace along with all the others who met their fate that day.

What they found inside that lobby will be forever implanted in the memories of those who had the misfortune to get in there. The more resilient ones quit the force and moved far away; the weaker ones become only shadows of what they were before, unable to sleep, always speaking with a hushed voice, looking over their shoulder, afraid of the dark.

Blood was everywhere - the floor was flooded with it, viscous, repugnant, making it hard to walk without losing your balance. The human body holds over a gallon of blood, and there were many people in that lobby, all but two dead and completely drained by the time the police went in. The characteristic smell of blood was sickening, and the fact that it was all human blood made it worse to tolerate.

Then there were the conditions of those bodies: all torn apart; limbs ripped off their sockets, flesh sliced, organs spilled on the floor. Large predators go about eating their prey with some logic, but the condition of that which once had been human beings was an expression of madness in its purest form.

Then there was Jon. When the police rushed in he was finishing with the last person, ripping off her throat with his teeth. Needless to say, after all that carnage he was covered in blood and other things that are better off left unspoken; he looked up, his eyes flaming in triumph, like a caged animal that finally had the opportunity to bite the arm of its captor. Then a completely inhuman scream came out of his mouth and he jumped like a cat on the two unfortunate officers that were closest to him, literally pulling their windpipes out of their necks with his bare hands - and then he laughed, if laughter we could call that.

The other officers snapped out of their paralysis and drew their guns, shooting at Jon repeatedly while he continued to laugh like bullets couldn’t harm him. Finally the laughter subsided, and he fell to the floor, dead.

The police had the common sense to cover all windows and doors, lest someone could take a picture of the horror that had just taken place there; unfortunately the police had to take pictures for their reports and paperwork and some of those leaked and went completely viral. Most people, however, refused to believe them, preferring the explanation that they had been edited or that someone simply stole frames from a third class zombie movie to make a quick buck: yes, that was a better explanation, no human being, no matter how psychotic, could do those things - and they were right, no human being was capable of that.

And then there was Jon’s body itself - it was completely covered from the blood of the carnage, but nothing could have prepared the coroner for what he would find after cleaning it up and examining it.

First, there were the broken bones - all major bones, to be more precise, were broken in several places. How he could have possibly moved around like this (let alone jump like a cat) is beyond explanation; the theory that he was drugged was quickly discarded once blood tests revealed nothing out of the ordinary in Jon’s system. But this was far from being the most intriguing item in the coroner’s report.

Jon’s body was completely covered in symbols, carved deep into his skin and flesh. The orientation of those symbols and subsequent examination of Jon’s hands and fingers revealed that he was the likely author of all that horrific self mutilation. Some of those symbols were hieroglyphs; others, however, caused a mixture of sickness and panic to those looking at them, as if the most primitive parts of the human mind, the ones that deal with fear and the deepest survival instinct, screamed about the corruption emanating from those simple lines.

The Department of Egyptology of the Achnahannet University was called to help make sense of those hieroglyphs; and although the translation was never made public, people close to the autopsy say that they contained so much evil that they were better left alone. Professor McCaig, the oldest professor in the History department, was never the same after looking at those symbols; after a few days wandering on campus and talking to himself he passed away.

People who tried to talk to him say that he was not coherent at all; he kept talking about “the other side”, “chants that can tear the fabric of space”, how “the demons’ time had arrived” and that “not even God can protect us”. He also started murmuring a tune, the same tune, repeatedly but with small variations as if he was trying to remember a long forgotten song.

Perhaps in his last moments of lucidity, he pointed out the similarities between the hieroglyphs from Jon’s body and the ones from the papyri translated by Demian; in fact, they were so similar that people wondered how Jon could have possibly learned an ancient Egyptian dialect, and carve symbols in his body which had the same minute details as the ones written by someone millennia ago.

That must have been too much for the professor. A jogger found him sitting on a bench in the beautiful University’s Central Gardens overlooking the lake. The gardens have always been a place of peace and serenity, but the expression on McCaig's face was one of total fear and despair. His notebook, which he carried everywhere to take notes, was covered with hieroglyphs, and the last page had a single sentence - “We are doomed.”