It was my eighteenth birthday, the day that I was officially an adult in the eyes of society, and all I wanted to do was sleep. Was this what it meant to be an adult? I hadn’t expected it to set in so quickly, the perpetual tiredness. Actually it had been going on for a while by this point. Since about last week I was in a perpetual state of tiredness, barely lumbering through every day like a zombie, reliant on caffeine to even keep myself going. Paradoxically no matter how much I slept I still woke up as tired as when I went to bed. Last night I went to sleep at 10:00 PM and then woke up at 6:00 AM. That was a full eight hours, and I didn’t wake up in the middle of the night at any point. And yet that morning I woke up as tired as a had been that night! I was tired, I was so so tired. Tired for no apparent reason. All I did that day was go do nothing at my homeschool group, then come back and do nothing at home.

Well okay maybe I didn’t entirely do nothing. At home I mean, homeschool group was the exact same as always. My body was present during Photography and Dungeons & Dragons class (it was less of an educational group than a hobby/social club) then I sat in the lunchroom while my sister was in drama class and engaged in a hilariously pointless debate on the Leigh Leblanc Discord, a debate entirely over the semantics of Leblanc’s interpretation of a heretical text written by an insane naked Byzantine man a thousand years ago called the Seraphic Bible. Coincidentally (or maybe not) this book was one of my birthday presents from my Aunt. Me and my younger sister had been following them since 2013. Half the time Leblanc’s essays and videos were excellent thorough analysis which combined their personal perspective with their vast knowledge of the occult and cinema. Other times… honestly they came off as kind of insane. Their fixation on this particular text provides an example, while the analysis of it as an amalgamation of Mesopotamian Polytheism, Judeo-Christian core theology, and even parts of Eastern philosophies such as Buddhism and Taoism paints a portrait of a work unlike anything else at its time, whenever Leblanc tries to connect the text to their actual spiritualism they lose me. They’ll go from scholarly theology straight to babbling about ancient aliens or reincarnation as a “device for the prophecy of the end times” or something. It was actually this jarring mix that kept me and my sister watching. The Leigh Leblanc channel was an absolute trainwreck bouncing from astounding highs to dizzying lows, a constant rise and fall as compelling as any television show. Leigh Leblanc was our favorite Shonen Protagonist.

Anyway besides that I got a couple of gift cards, I was at the point where I didn’t really ask for anything for or want to do anything special on my birthday. Just getting some money and maybe a book was fine enough for me. We also had subpar fast food and a frozen cake before Aunt Catherine had to go to work. By this point I’d zombied my way through social interaction for about eight hours straight. Time to go back to bed and sleep. Even though I knew it wouldn’t help I really couldn’t think of anything better to do that I actually felt like doing.

Unfortunately my sister had other plans. Plans which threatened to drag my barely awake ass even farther from the rest I sorely needed. I was sitting on my bed when she barged into my room, she had never bothered to knock with me, smartphone in hand, immediately taking a seat right next to me. Normally I’d say something witty like “Come right in” but that day I was just too tired to care.

“So you remember that thing I was talking about yesterday?” Kish said.

Oh god, not that thing. I think. Of all days why’d it have to be today? “What thing?” I said. Lying about not remembering to hopefully buy myself some time.

“The thing in the abandoned church!” She practically shouted. “Remember? There was that article about the guy who said he kept seeing demons come out of it? The one who mysteriously died right after?” Since we started living here with our Aunt we’d passed by that church every time we ever went out. It was burned down in the 50s and for some reason in all the decades that followed no one had bothered to rebuild or clear the ruins out. It still remained as an ominous relic smashed just across the street from their modern suburban neighborhood.

“Okay what about it?” I said, still playing dumb even though I know exactly what the answer will be.”

“Obviously we have to go in there and video tape the whole thing.” She said. “Internet fame awaits if there is like, a gateway to hell in there, more importantly we could get ourselves rich if something really good is in there.”

“Okay but our Aunt told me to watch you and keep you out of trouble. I’m pretty sure that includes no running off into old ruins looking for portals to hell.” I said, hoping it would dissuade her.

“You’re just scared aren’t you?” Of course she’d say that. To be one hundred percent truthful fear had nothing to do with it. Right then I couldn’t have cared less if there was a portal to hell in our damn living room, I just wanted to sleep.

“No, I just don’t want to waste my time getting barely legible footage that people will pick apart as proof demons exist.” I said, finally cutting to the heart of my argument. “That’s what the damn ghost hunters on Discovery channel are for.”

“Let’s flip a coin.” She said. “Heads we stay here and you can lay around all you want, tails we go over there.”

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and thoroughly exhaled it. She never made it easy. At least this way there was a 50% chance this would get completely finished. And even if not I could still figure out a way to weasel out of it. “Okay, we’ll flip a coin, but if it lands heads I don’t want to hear about it again for the rest of the day.”

“Sure fine.” She said. We didn’t flip an actual coin, but rather used a coin flipping site on her phone. She pressed her finger on the screen and…

Tails… damn it. I’d always had bad luck, I should have known better than to agree to this. Kish knew it too, a self satisfied grin stretched on her face. “Looks like we’re ghost hunting.” She said.

And I didn’t even feel like standing up. You know what? Fine. We’ll go over there for a second, peak around, see that there is nothing there demonic there because obviously there would not be, and then go home. If Aunt Catherine asks we’ll say we went on a walk. It wouldn’t even be a lie. It’s a fifteen minute walk from the house just following the sidewalk on the one street connecting our house and the surrounding neighborhood to the highway the church was on. Besides I was an adult now. I had reached the age at which I could legally supervise my sister rummaging around an abandoned ruin of a church. So exciting.

When we got there I realized that I’d never seen the church up close. It had always been brief glances from the car window passing it by. Moss had covered much of the stone the building was built with while almost any wood was covered black from where the fire had burned it. Only one of the double doors at the entrance remained and even it barely held at the hinge. Getting in wouldn’t be hard, and apparently nobody had bought the land so they wouldn’t technically be trespassing. Superstition had kept anyone from tearing the thing down and putting a McDonald’s in its place I suppose.

The roof of the church had gapping holes and large parts of it were just gone, so the interior was illuminated by the daylight. The floor had been covered by overgrown grass and past the altar almost the entire back wall was missing. You know what wasn’t there? A portal to hell. Though honestly even if there was one with thousands of demons pouring out it could not matter less to me. I was going home, and I was going straight to bed. I turned off my phones video recording feature. “Well Kish, this was a bust. How about we go home?” Except that when I turn around she isn’t there. Had I been so tunnel visioned that I hadn’t even noticed she wasn’t behind me?

Oh god, where the hell did she go? My head felt like it was going to explode. I’d been getting headaches on and off since around the same time I’d started feeling tired all the time, but most of those were minor. This felt like I was getting stabbed through the head, over and over, every other second. It was happening so frequently that at a certain point I just became almost numb to it, but at the same time my brain was still telling me that there was something obviously wrong here. It was a feeling like having ants inside your skin, all you think you can do is scream.

Except I didn’t scream. I had to find my sister, so I sucked up and ran outside the church. She wasn’t there either, instead what greeted me was… unsettling. On the ground just next to the highway was the body of something that wasn’t quite human. From a distance it looked normal but the closer I got the more I realized how strange it was. It had humanoid shape, but its arms and legs were much longer than its thin body, it had twelve inch long fingers protruding from its hands still moving back and forth even as the rest of its body laid lifeless on the floor, possibly dead? The spike shoved in its neck confirmed, definitely either dead or on the way.

What the hell?

I was so busy processing that… thing that I hadn’t even noticed the woman standing above it, presumably the killer. She was about six feet tall, wore all black, had an eyepatch over her left eye, and had short olive green hair. She stared at me, not a hint of surprise in her one eye, dare I say she had recognition. The weird part was that she seemed familiar for me too, though I’d no clue how, or if this was good or bad recognition.

I didn’t wait for her to say anything. I started running, running as fast as I could back to the neighborhood. Running past her. I had to find my sister.

I had to find her before those things did.