He originally found the dark idol in the attic of his old house. The others had picked him for
 the unenviable duty of sifting through what was left of the belongings and he had found it in an 
old cardboard box tucked away in the musty crawlspace beneath the eaves. It was the most revolting 
thing he had ever seen. When he had peeled back one rotted flap of the box and seen what was 
inside, the force of his reaction would have been less if it had been full of snakes. A shriek 
found its way past his lips and he actually fell, cutting the scream off as his teeth snapped 
painfully together. He scrambled backwards to the stairs, his stomach churning and his face pale.

     He was an accountant and prided himself in possessing a sense of reality that was based on 
indisputable logic and rationality. It made sense to take the monstrous thing along with everything 
else; it made absolutely no sense to want to leave it, and he couldn’t understand why this 
imperative flooded his mind. Already he hated it but he just couldn’t leave without it.

     It might be worth something.

     Now, this is not the recounting of one more unimportant stranger but the telling of the 
poisonous and subsuming wickedness that is the demon Shakthe.

     As he came down the interstate he kept thinking about it. The idol in his trunk was just an 
icon, but it was dangerous. Poison worming its way through your skin and eyes and mouth and into 
your brain. Infection. Infestation. 

     It never occurred to him that it could be his imagination because he firmly believed he didn’t 
have one, although it would have struck him as unusual that if he had tried to remember what the 
idol looked like he would have been unable to do so. 

     The twining thoughts concerning the statuette clung to his mind as spider webs might, the
 entire fifty miles home one long delirium, the cocoon strengthening its hold as Shakthe wove it 
around his psyche; as one part of him chattered uncontrollably about getting rid of the damned 
thing, dumping it into a ditch, burying it, burning it, melting it down, the rest of him 
alternated between being amused by his own unaccountable behavior and growing more and more 
disturbed by it, these thoughts that didn’t seem to be his. He couldn’t even remember a time when
 he had felt like this and his scattered thoughts bothered him badly. The freeway had dissolved into 
a vast fever dream from which he couldn’t wake, and he was taken from this reality and placed in a 
different one, a different reality somewhere


(else)


     where there might be no sun or happy dreams, somewhere where there was wailing and gnashing of 
teeth, a place where shadows were dominant and it was always raining and dismal, where corners and 
angles do not meet but plunge past one another into impossible directions that yield strange and 
alien constructs to blind the eye, a place where the people aren’t really people but automatons 
that speak all words at once without pause, and they speak them alone in desolate cities.

     A place of Shakthe.

     He shook himself like a dog after a bath, an instinctual and involuntary spasm that racked his 
body. For a moment he wasn’t sure where he was or what was happening, only the overwhelming cloud 
of despair that festered within his mind. It cut to the fiber of his self, a stark, forlorn 
loneliness that terrified him. 

     What the hell is going on? He had been lost, hadn’t he? He had been wandering in the
 mist. Just as quickly he parried his own thought. What mist?

     He was parked alongside the interstate with the engine idling. His mind pieced itself together
 again, a process that seemed to take an uncomfortably long time, and his next coherent thought was 
that it must be a brain tumor. Scary, yeah. Terrifying, indeed, but rational. It could just be the 
flu, anyway. Didn’t influenza give extremely vivid dreams? He knew it did; like everyone else he 
had suffered as a child from fever dreams throughout his mandatory week with the flu. He remembered 
very well what those experiences were like, and this was not the flu.


(the box)


(in the box)


     He shook again, his skin prickling, and was surprised to see drops of sweat fly from his head 
as he did. It was so hot in here, and oh God all he wanted was to pull into his own driveway and go 
into his home and take off his coat and shoes and fill a cup with brandy, snuggle into bed and let 
this dreamtime eclipse fall away and be over. 

     He looked up, not realizing that he was even moving until he saw the sign fly past, his hands 
gripping the wheel. It had said KENT 19MI. Home, home, 


(home)


     home, whispers in his mind, his eyes tracing the road, the road painted with the shattered 
beams of the setting sun, his vehicle the only one on the freeway, the cloud so thick about him 
that he could taste it, the brackish and metallic spike at the back of his mouth from an old well 
in a dead forest, the impotent crunch of dry leaves underfoot, the knowledge that he was completely 
and utterly alone, free as the cold winter wind that searched ceaselessly through the dark. He 
drank knowledge from the old well and he finally saw what was behind the surface of the world, the 
shadows bleeding pools of ink that soaked the light, consumed the light from all around him until 
he realized that he had fallen underneath, and the screams of the damned echoed out from all 
around...

     He woke from the fugue still hearing screams in a rising chorus, and a freezing presence 
danced through his soul. Confused beyond belief, he failed to remember anything after seeing the 
sign that said KENT 25MI, nothing but the sound of the wind in the forest, and he had no idea where 
he was now except that he was again in darkness. He was in bed. Apparently he had managed to 
somehow drive the rest of the way home, unpack everything into his living room, undress and go to
 bed as normal without remembering a damned thing. All he could think about now was the idol. Had he 
also brought the thing into his house? That didn’t seem like a good idea, he actually couldn’t 
stand the thought, and so he spent an hour searching through all of the stuff stacked neatly next 
to the couch, growing more and more frantic as he found nothing. He had already checked the car, 
where else could it be?
 
     A scene flashed across his mind like a memory, but he refused to consider it as one: himself 
in bed, sound asleep and ignorant of the idol that lay on his chest, then against his cheek, 
actually touching him. His stomach clenched tight and then ignited, bile spilling into his
 mouth and between his teeth. What was happening to him? Was this what insanity was like?

     It wasn’t in his bed. He knew that right away, just as he knew it would be in the closet and 
when he opened the closet door, it was. Again he experienced a savage urge to flee. This time he 
repressed it and, still feeling like he had touched something nasty, he looked down at the idol. 

     It looked up at him with its one open eye and its unnatural grin seemed to grow further, 
stretching obscenely across its mottled and pitted head. Its mouth was filled with a ridiculously 
large number of fangs that would be impossible on a real creature. It had no nose or ears, the head 
and face set so close together so as to preclude anything more than the one rolling eye and a 
needle-filled monstrosity of a mouth.  Short and squat, the figure was formed of black stone that 
was roughened with past scars and stubborn fingers of grime clinging to the surface. A crude 
pendant was etched into the chest. Otherwise it was naked; the rest of the figure plain except for
 its incredible phallus that jutted out like an armored snake. Its erect member was at least as long 
as the statue itself, curving upwards away from the body and covered from beginning to end with 
thorn-like shards of obsidian that glinted wickedly in the artificial light. The idea crossed his 
mind that the statue had been actively used in the past for perverted practices beyond his 
comprehension, probably for torture. Any other use besides torture seemed laughable as his eyes
 trailed over the dozens of thorns covering the unholy organ. They looked as sharp as glass. 

     He had even placed it on a sort of pedestal, his footstool raising the figure to an elevated
 presence that filled the room with malevolence. For some reason he had placed it in here; he had 
even unconsciously positioned it in a seat of power by raising it from the floor. The trouble was 
that he didn’t remember doing any of it, and it was exactly the opposite actions that he would have 
done during his strange


(journey)


     sleepwalk. Struggle as he might to convince himself that it meant nothing, that it was just a 
bizarre paperweight, he knew that it wasn’t so. He knew that it was something that had come from 
somewhere else. He could feel it just as he could feel the air this close to it struggling into his 
lungs like sludge. He couldn’t bear to touch it, had no idea how he had managed to get it in there 
in the first place. All he really wanted to do was to go back to sleep but he couldn’t tolerate 
being so close to the ugly thing. Being past midnight he really had no inclination of seeking a 
motel or really going anywhere, and after a few minutes of pacing and muttering aloud to himself he 
finally did the worst thing he could possibly do and fell asleep fully clothed in the guest room, 
praying for deep slumber, but the dark dreams flocked together and found him there.

     He was in the room with the screaming children. The chamber was dimly lit against the darkness
 only by a pair of smoldering torches that served to fill the air with dancing shadows that only 
confused him further. The small room was crowded with the dirty and naked children, many of them 
shrieking or weeping in terror, some of them quietly and blankly staring at nothing, looking like 
concentration camp survivors. Simple hooks were set high on the wall, dulled and rusted, the 
unidentifiable remains of a large animal carcass hanging from one of them. 

     The grinding scream of jagged metal arced painfully into his ears as the huge iron door inched
 open, letting a faint glow of light into the room that reflected fully from the faces of the dozens 
of children now huddled against the opposite wall, revealing gray smears of faces that made them 
look like disembodied spirits floating in the dark, their features twisted by anguish.

     What looked into the cell was a man with no face, or that’s what it seemed at first, but the
 figure appeared to be wearing a white mask, empty except for a pair of slits for eyes. The children 
were quiet as it entered the room. The children were waiting to see who would be chosen next.

     The person grew closer in his view, raised something in its right hand and touched him above
 the eyes with it, dripping tendrils that prickled his forehead and marked him with a warm liquid 
that ran slowly down his face, and he knew that it was the blood of the previous sacrifice, and 
that he had been chosen. He followed it out of the dark, glancing back at the luminous faces as 
they watched him. Strange and pale will o’ the wisps lost underneath the world. 

     He felt no fear, only recording everything, his internals a calm, a blank slate, a hierarchy
 of nothing. Everything had already been set and he was just following through his paces. He 
registered no surprise to find that he had been witnessing all of this from a small child’s 
viewpoint, the giant ahead of him just a regular man, the mountainous supports on either side of
 the amphitheater only pillars. His distorted viewpoint only made it all the more surreal. 

     It was a dark cathedral, an unholy temple. It was a nightmarish citadel found only in 
disturbed dreams. The far-flung walls rose together into an arc that slid into a ravenous blackness
 and he wondered just what one would see if they so happened to rest their gaze on the zenith of
 that dome, and without question he knew that it would be a hideous masterpiece, the reigning 
juxtaposition of Michelangelo’s genius work in the Sistine Chapel, a mocking abomination like the
 Lord’s Prayer chanted backwards. He followed the figure into the center and saw the others, their 
faces as blank as the first with masks of pale ivory on heads lowered in silent worship of that 
which they surrounded. Then they parted and the image burned into his eyes, the horrible specter of 
that black idol resting unevenly atop a pile of cracked human skulls. He saw the blood dripping 
from it, the chunks of gristle and meat lying at its feet, and finally his mind yielded, almost 
sluggishly crumbling into a thousand pieces, ending his sentient awareness before the true horrors 
even began.

     A small mercy.

     Slowly he awakened, his mind the soft white and blue of the ocean. He felt nothing and knew 
nothing, a puppet that happened to breathe. His skin was the savage yellow of a corpse and his hair 
had turned white. He rolled over and the idol was there in his face with the evil leer near his own 
mouth, close enough to kiss, and in his head he heard the laughing of the demon as it came to 
finish him.

     Then he dreamed, knowing it was not a dream, not a dream at all. And the idol chased him, but 
it was not the idol. It was what resided within the idol, the ancient remains of a demon named 
Shakthe, and demons can never die, everybody knows that, demons can never truly die...

     Shakthe followed him through the maze that was its home, within the heart of the demon buried
 inside the statue. He was forsaken, lost. He ran, but he ran not for long, and his screams overcame 
even the tearing and ripping sounds.

     It didn’t even make the news. He was an accountant, someone with few friends and not enough 
money to be interesting, a nobody. People tended to go missing; it happened. Sometimes they left on 
impulse; sometimes they were murdered or kidnapped; sometimes they just completely disappeared as 
if the world had opened up and swallowed them whole, to be lost somewhere beneath the surface of 
the ordinary. 

     The accountant’s body was never found, but somehow the idol would make itself available again. 
When the time was right.

     When it grew time to search.

     When it grew time to feed.

THE END