Chapter Text
Mattis wasn’t entirely certain how he’d ended up here. He’d been at his apartment, working on research for an upcoming video, and now he was…at a Halloween party? Worse than that, he was wearing—what was he wearing? A cloak? That was pretty cool, actually. But he didn’t own any cloaks. Or, at least not that he could recall.
This costume party, if that’s what it was, was being held at a house he didn’t recognize. Currently, he stood in a kitchen, in the middle of ladling some pink punch into a plastic cup. He didn’t even like fruit punch.
After returning the ladle to the large punch bowl and setting his half-empty cup aside, he scanned the kitchen for familiar faces. It took approximately thirty seconds for him to deduce that this was a fruitless endeavor, as anyone milling about in the room was either wearing a costume with some sort of mask or one that involved extensive face paint or SFX makeup.
I’m wearing a cloak. Hmm… I wonder what my costume is supposed to be…
The only explanation for his hazy memory was that this was some kind of dream. But, if it was a dream, why did it feel so real?
Mattis wandered into a large living room filled with more masked and makeuped individuals. They talked amongst themselves and paid no mind as he pushed his way toward what looked like a back patio area.
Vaguely spooky music played from unseen speakers, and generic Halloween-themed decorations hung from the walls and ceiling. Swiping at a swath of fake cobwebs, Mattis pulled a sliding glass door open and stepped outside into a crisp autumn night.
In the backyard, he found someone dressed up as a pirate grilling hotdogs and hamburgers while sipping on a can of beer. A few women wearing witches costumes talked at a picnic table while snacking on a bowl of candy. No one acknowledged his existence as he surveyed the yard for anyone who looked even remotely familiar.
Sighing, Mattis walked back inside. As he searched for the front door, intending to leave, he finally spotted someone he recognized. Dressed head to toe in a cowboy costume, Isaiah sat on a rather expensive-looking leather couch. Mattis waved at him, attempting to gain his attention, but Isaiah was seemingly preoccupied in the conversation he was having with a man dressed as a sailor.
“Hey…” Mattis said uncertainly as he approached the two men. “This sure is some party, isn’t it?”
Isaiah’s gaze snapped over to him, but there was something wrong with it. His eyes were their normal dark brown color, but they looked oddly empty.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said in a flat voice.
Mattis blinked, not comprehending. “What?”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Isaiah repeated in that same toneless voice.
“What? Why?”
“You have to wake up.” Isaiah’s unnerving stare followed him as he began to slowly back away. “Aidan, you have to wake up.”
Though he couldn’t begin to understand why, his heart started to race and his palms grew sweaty. He had no reason to assume that something was wrong, especially if this was only a dream, and yet…
“I’m gonna go now,” Mattis said, still backing away toward where he hoped the front door was.
The other partygoers continued to ignore him, but Isaiah stood up suddenly and pointed an accusatory finger in his general direction. “You must wake up. Now! Before it’s too late!”
“I don’t understand. What do you me—“ Mattis started.
The scene around him changed abruptly, switching from the Halloween party to…a church? It was difficult to tell, as Mattis seemed to be on the ground, but he could see stained glass windows and an intricately painted ceiling high above. Something was holding him down—hands, he realized.
“Mattis, stop. You have to stop fighting—“ a familiar voice said.
“Hey, hey, wait. I think he’s back,” a different familiar voice interrupted.
Two faces moved into his line of sight. With twin expressions of worry, Thornbury and Isaiah looked down at him.
“Wh—what’s going on?” Mattis asked, his voice raspy. “Where am I?”
“We’re at a church,” Isaiah answered.
“You got possessed by a demon two weeks ago,” Thornbury added.
“Two weeks ago? I don’t…I don’t remember any of that.”
What was the last thing Mattis remembered? Waking up in a hotel room with a sex worker. Right. That was the last thing he remembered.
“You have to kick it out,” Isaiah said. “Before it comes back.”
“Wh… What about the priest you were gonna call?”
They were planning to call a priest, right? Or had that been wishful thinking on Mattis’s part?
Thornbury’s face grew pale. He and Isaiah shared a pained look for a moment.
“That…didn’t work out,” Thornbury eventually said.
“You—the demon—killed him,” Isaiah elaborated in a solemn tone.
Mattis raised his brows. “What? What do you mean I—“
“There’s no time. You have to expel the demon,” Thornbury cut him off.
“I don’t know how!”
“All you need to do is say its real name and command it to leave,” Isaiah said. “Its name is—“
Oh, I don’t think so.
Mattis’s vision—and hearing—cut out abruptly. Any control he’d temporarily regained over his body ended in that instant. One second he was in the church, and the next he was back at the Halloween party.
The shift was so jarring that he wondered for a moment if the church had been the dream the whole time. In fact, the party didn’t seem so odd now. Though he couldn’t immediately name the costumed guests surrounding him, Mattis knew they were friends.
Why else would he be here, if he wasn’t attending a friend’s party?
Isaiah and Thornbury waved him over toward a table where they were playing ping-pong. Mattis smiled and joined them.
“Glad you could make it, man,” Thornbury said. “Wanna trade off and play a round with Isaiah?”
“Sure!”
Thornbury handed him a blue ping-pong paddle and then went off to the kitchen to get him a drink. Once Mattis signaled that he was ready for the next game to begin, Isaiah tossed the small plastic ball into the air and hit it with his red paddle. Mattis parried it back over to Isaiah’s side before it could bounce off the table, and so the game continued for several more minutes.
When Thornbury eventually returned with a cup of fruit punch, Mattis took a few gulps and resumed playing.
“I feel like I should stop, but this is just so fun,” Mattis said.
How long had they been playing, again? Only a few minutes, probably.
“It really is,” Isaiah agreed.
“D’you want another refill?” Thornbury asked, holding up Mattis’s empty cup.
“Oh, uh, sure.”
“That’s your fifth one, dude. You must really like that punch,” Isaiah chuckled.
Had he already gone through that many? He wasn’t drinking them very quickly…
The ping-pong game continued, along with Mattis’s consumption of the fruit punch. Weirdly, he didn’t feel the need to use the bathroom, even after consuming—according to Isaiah and Thornbury—a total of ten cups of punch.
“I just really don’t wanna lose the game,” he said.
He was ahead by three points, currently, but he knew that could change at any moment.
“It really is fun, isn’t it?” Isaiah said, hitting the ball over toward him again.
It really was.