SEVEN
A scream, high and shrill like a shark attack victim, half mad with terror, staring down into blood red water and into the black maw of the deathly grey beast coming up from the murk for another bite.
It was the flashback again, that sickeningly vivid memory of the night not so long ago when Michael Davis had seen the face of hell leering over him as he laid helpless on his back waiting to die in some anonymous cheap hotel room. That mouth with row after row of jagged misshapen teeth so close he could feel its breath like rotting meat on his tear soaked cheeks.
The demon had appeared out of nowhere as it always did in the nightmare. A black blur of stinking filth which he had first mistaken for a shadow cast by the tatty lamp shade that clung forlornly to the over-head light fixture in his room. Davis had been dead drunk, as was usual in those dark days. Hoping to find solace at the bottom of a cheap bottle of booze.
But this shadow had a mind of its own as it crawled from the top corner of one wall and slithered down the mildewed wallpaper in direct defiance to the meagre light the shrouded bulb could muster. Davis watched all this through a haze of alcohol as he lay on his musty bed, contemplating his woeful existence.
He had lost everything and everyone he had ever cared about over such a short space of time. His life had turned to shit in a matter of weeks and those whom not so long ago had called him friend (usually when he had the money to buy their devotion) had fled for fear no doubt of drowning in the same shit as he was now.
He spent night after sleepless night, obsessively going over all the lives he had ruined in his lust for fame and fortune. All those fresh faced young starlets he had cajoled and towards the end threatened into performing a quite dizzying array of depraved acts for the camera. What had become of them, he wondered in his misery? He hoped that a least some of them had fared better than their corrupter.
“I’m damned,” he slurred to himself in between mouthfuls of liquor.
That was when the shadow, which was now crawling across the floor towards the bed spoke to him. “You’ve got that right,” it had said. The sound of its wretched voice instantly made Davis void his bowels.
He let out a yelp of disgust and got to get to his feet, but the creature, more flesh now than shadow had leapt upon him and knocked him to the threadbare carpet, where it then jumped on his chest. Its talon like fingers closed around his throat, cutting off his windpipe. He saw blooms of light explode before his terrified gaze as it slowly throttled him.
“This,” it hissed into his face. “Is going to take a long, long time. And oh how it is going to hurt.”
Davis knew he would never fully recover from that traumatic moment, it was carved into some dark subconscious part of his terror frozen mind, where it would surface from time to time, like now, usually just when he had thought he had banished it forever. Over time his body would heal, but he was forever mentally scared by the memory of this impossible creature that had made a nonsense of the reality he thought he knew. You just don’t fully recover from that find of undiluted horror.
He was never fully sure of what happened next. There was that nerve shredding scream, which he had initially thought had been his own, but then the creature was flung off his chest. Davis turned painfully onto his side to see the thing convulsing on the floor next to him, flailing wildly like a downed bat. All the theatrics of its dark shadowy first appearance shed like so much reptilian skin. It was now just that emaciated, spindly limbed creature he would later know as Mister Minx.
Then Davis noticed the figure standing in the open doorway just off to the right of where he was sprawled. In his fear addled state, Davis had first thought one of the other residents had come to see what all the cacophony in the next room was about.
He was an unremarkable looking elderly man, even given the context of this appearance, perhaps in his late sixties, dressed for a winter walk, with a long heavy coat and a somewhat out of place beanie hat.
“You, you see it, right?” Davis asked hoarsely, his throat raw from his surreal attackers grasp. He was desperate for this not to all be in his head, but still half expected the old man in the doorway to look at him like he was a lunatic, fighting with a demon of his own imagination, covered in his own shit.
It was strange but sometimes in the weeks that followed Davis thought that scenario would have been the more preferable one. It would have been bliss just to put that night down to nothing more than some brief psychotic episode and get on with the rest of his life, such as it was at that time.
“You see it, right?” He repeated half hoping for a response in the negative.
Indeed at first the old man did looked at him like he was mad, but put paid to that notion when he came into the room and closed the door behind him, which Davis now saw had been kicked open with no little force. “Of course I see it, you fucking idiot,” he said in what sounded like a strong German accent. “It’s right there!” He gestured to the still convulsing creature.
Then out of nowhere the sheer absurdity of the last thirty seconds hit Davis like a freight train and before he knew what was happening he began to laugh uncontrollably, which won a raised eyebrow from his unlikely looking saviour. The old man took off his coat and crouched next to the still manically fitting creature.
It seemed impossible in the midst of that unbidden nightmare to fathom how Davis had gone from a gibbering wreck to cutting a deal and buying the creature, but he had. His ego would tell him in his waking hours that he hadn’t been as scared as the dream portrayed him and he was happy to accept that lie. Besides the proof was locked away in a warehouse even now as he slept.
Then Mister Minx, his would be assassin suddenly leapt up from the floor and knocked Davis to the floor. This part of the dream was new, a terrifying development to the half-forgotten narrative. The creature grabbed Davis by the throat once more its face was an inch from his.