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Beyond alphabetizing The Hall of Phobias, one demon had an overwhelming amount of work cut out for him from the start. Time was relative for those who existed in Hell. What felt like a minute could be a century in the world of the living; on the other hand, a century in hell could be a mere instant to a human on earth. Frankly, it never made sense to him, but he never asked about it.
This was eternity for him, so it never mattered either way. Once his work on one room was finished, Mephistopheles always opened the door to another mess, another stack of papers and files unread and untouched for an untold amount of time. Sometimes there were spellbooks and remnants of documents and maps from sieges and wars, from the dark ages and encounters with heaven long past. (He often wondered if Mephistopheles just never wanted to admit he had this weird crush on Providence, since basically nobody was cheeky enough to confront his employer to his face about it.)
Today's, or rather, this age's assignment was one of his most daunting yet: hauntings. There were times when hauntings were recorded as audio, but humans eventually wisened up to what was going on. Humans would place empty tape recorders and sensitive equipment in empty buildings, old dungeons and castles, to hear evidence of hauntings. They’d use thermometers and boxes that measured electromagnetic waves, any and all sorts of sensory recorders, in places where horrible murders took place, to hear evidence of hauntings. Sometimes the ghost or demon in question was still present, sometimes not. Instead, many demons kept paper files of their hauntings, but sound was always more efficient in the long run. There was so much more that could be captured with audio than on some forms.
The thing was, for demons and ghosts, time is irrelevant, so even if a haunting took place hundreds of years ago the voices and interactions would remain present, unless driven away or dispelled by some external force. Thus, most hauntings had regular reports with them as well as tapes.
Well, perhaps not really tapes, as Hell never cared much about the power of technology (or lack thereof). Really, they were black rectangles that contained audio. They could be plugged into anything, with any cord, any adapter, or you could just listen to them as you desired. Said tapes were stacked high around the room, clearly labelled, all save for one, which sat atop a fat stack of folders and papers, away from the others. The folder beneath it was labelled "URGENT" in all caps with some sort of sharpie or bold red marker, and underlined several times. If it was so urgent, why was it left in this dusty storeroom for a less-than-secretary to deal with? There had to be some sort of cosmic irony there. Maybe it had been urgent once upon a time, but that was the thing with eternal beings like Mephistopheles. With time as a series of threads, rather than a single point on a timeline--nothing ever was urgent when it could be addressed and repaired later. It seemed almost lazy, in a roundabout sort of way. Then again, what wasn't lazy about hiring a demon with no memories to deal with your "intense documentation of earthly activities?"
He called bullshit. This was a straight-up hoarding problem.
He turned the unlabeled tape over in his hand, briefly wondering it it would be worth the listen. For the sake of organizing. Of course, this demon never really cared for the idea of sound being transmitted directly into his brain. With eternity waiting, he pulled out his headphones and plugged them into the box. What did he have to lose?
--
Captain's Log, or Demon's...report entry #1. I doubt you're even going to read or listen to any of this, Mephistopheles, since you're already obsessed with paperwork and it's going to be dumped in some filing cabinet for the next few centuries until Jonathan cleans it out, but here goes.
Subject: Jonathan Combs.
Age: 19. Yeah, yeah. I've been haunting this kid for two years, give me a break already.
Disposition: Apathetic.
Before I get to telling you why I'm making this recording, I want to set the record straight. Until now, it's felt like there's no way to get this kid to actually kill himself. I've been trying my best, and hey, I'm a seasoned killer, I should at least have an idea of what I'm doing here.
I've tried just about everything I can think of on this guy. He's really just too disillusioned and apathetic to really care about most of my attempts to get him to off himself! He doesn't even care! I pester him in class until he disrupts everyone, I make him uncomfortable while he's eating lunch, I harass him in the urinal, I had him passing balls to a ghost in gym class, and now I'm pretty sure everyone thinks he's crazy, but it's just not getting to him.
I've started to realize, now that he's in college and stuff, that he doesn't really have a lot of friends in the first place. It's not like I'm making him out to be this guy who's totally out of touch with reality and forcing him to drive away his friends, because for some reason, he spends most of his time alone anyway! He doesn't reach out and try to interact with other people, either. He just sits by himself and listens to music and somehow he isn't swallowed by the overwhelming loneliness or fear that everyone hates him or something. I mean hey, I can totally respect that, but it does make my afterlife a bit harder, ya know?
Then, there's also the matter that he hasn't really developed any wildly suicidal or self-harming tendencies. Most people I knew who self harmed did it more to feel alive than dead, so I guess that's a good thing. Somebody who really wants to die is just going to, well, go ahead and do it instead of just slapping themselves on the wrist a few thousand times with a rubber band, or slicing your arm up with a dull razor blade—for the record, if you wanna die, the way to go is vertical, not horizontal like all of those black, white, and red emo aesthetic pictures.
Okay, so maybe I'm not the best at making someone want to do the deadly do, because I like killing stuff, and if given the chance, I probably would've killed other people instead of just me. And hey, I'm smart. I'm researching a new way to get through to him. I've figured out how to make him feel every tiny bit of pain, every misery in the world, so much that he'll have to hate living after this!
--
Sock let his hand drop into his lap, flopping back against the bed. He didn't sink into it, but he liked to pretend he could. He'd been getting the hang of impacting inanimate objects as of late, but it took some practice. He couldn't really touch people, not even his human--Jonathan, and usually they'd brush his touch off as a feeling of wind, or not notice it at all. He'd discovered he could possess people, children, those who were asleep, or those who were near death (so mostly old people who smelled like floral perfume and soap). It was entertaining and fun, but not really useful unless it was a part of his plan, and it left him exhausted.
When he'd first come to earth to proceed with this haunting, he took "weekends off" as free reign to possess people and wreak havoc; but it was short-lived. Within a few months he'd found himself sleeping his Sundays away from sheer exhaustion of possessing someone the previous night. It was an odd feeling, as he no longer needed sleep for anything other than to recharge when he became exhausted. There was something awesome about staying awake for days on end, and it was perfect for annoying Jonathan, but on weekends he found himself sleeping out of pure boredom. He'd sneak into houses and find a room, preferably that of some kid who'd gone off to college, and curl up on their bed.
Come to think of it, he had no idea whose bedroom this was. It looked like it belonged to a boy, mainly because of the plaid bedsheets and sports posters on the wall, but it could also be a girl, if the makeup case on the dresser and the large collection of shoes meant anything. Not like he really cared: it was a warm place to sleep. It wasn't like anyone had bothered him in this room for some time, and no one could see him. The perfect place to practice his haunting prowess. With practice, he could reach out and grab things—pencils, small objects, some paper clips off of the desk—and chain them together. He still couldn't quite get the hang of impacting larger objects, like opening doors or moving chairs. He busied himself that Saturday afternoon with leafing through notebooks and schoolwork that had been left on the desk; not out of a genuine curiosity, but more to see if he could. There was a rubber band ball in the drawer that he added to, pleased he could actually stretch the individual bands over his hand. When leaving one on his wrist, however, it eventually fell through his arm if he ceased to pay attention to it. He pulled a box of dominoes from one of the shelves, contenting himself to line them up one at a time, until approximately 1,682 dominoes later, demonic powers exhausted, he dozed off on the floor.
--
Jonathan Combs knew he was a haunted individual. Everyone spoke of "fighting your inner demons," but his particular demon was very clearly external. His demon looked like a baby-faced teenager, always sporting the same odd getup of oversized hat, scarf and sweater. He smiled a lot. Or rather, all the time. There wasn't a moment when his demon wasn't smiling. He'd go on about death, blood, murder, the satisfaction of killing small animals and how great it was to be dead: all with a creepily genuine smile plastered across his face. All in all, that was probably what was unsettling about his demon. Most scary smiles were fake or sad, or this weird sort of cracked smile that people associated with "crazy" characters like the Joker. This demon's smile wasn't like that. It was the sort of smile a kid had when he got the exact toy he wanted in a kids’ meal, or when he discovered that his family was going to take him to Disney World. He'd talk about death and despair as though the topic of discussion was kittens or video games. He had a "bumpkin" sort of look about him that made Jonathan wonder if he'd come from some town located precisely in the middle of nowhere with a population of about 125, where everyone knew him and no one seemed to care that he was layering knee high socks with jeans and a skirt in the middle of May. That, and that he referred to himself only as "Sock."
His demon, Sock, was invisible to the rest of the world, but punctual; harassing him every Monday through Friday. It began every morning promptly at 8am, but sometimes earlier, and ended at 6pm, though sometimes later. At one point he was pretty sure it had been 9-5; but the demon seemed to enjoy following Jonathan's schedule, rather than his own.
That was why weekends had become his time of peace. If this was a job (as he had surmised from a few of the demon's extended conversations with himself in the kitchen, living room, or even in the shower), that his demon in particular took weekends off.
At first, he used weekends to sleep when he otherwise hadn't had the chance to, or get his homework done in calm silence. He used weekends for writing papers and eating whatever he wanted; but as time went on, they began to feel lonely in a way he couldn't quite place. He welcomed the quiet, the ability to listen to his music uninterrupted, the ability to read without being pestered about his work, or quizzed about some completely inane thing (almost immediately followed with a "well, who cares, you might as well just kill yourself already,") for no logical reason other than to be annoying and convince him to commit suicide.
Annoying someone to death was probably the most tedious and roundabout way anyone could kill someone, but he had to hand it to his personal demon for his tenacity. He was vaguely reminded of those old internet videos about the "incredibly slow and drawn out murder with a spoon," or other equally inefficient methods of killing. It was almost comical, except for the part that his demon was actually totally serious.
There were a few times over the past two years, when Sock had asked him if they were friends. Jonathan rarely knew how to reply—mostly because his answer was somewhere between "fuck no" and "why would you want to be my friend?"—but eventually he settled on an answer that he relied on time and time again. "Friends don't try to make friends kill themselves." It always managed to divert the conversation somehow, and the demon would resume his upbeat demeanor instantaneously with a gruesome comment of some sort.
Once the usual methods of relaxation on a weekend had been satisfied (interaction with a friend or two, time alone, doing homework, and so on), Jonathan busied himself with something he couldn't do when his personal demon wasn't around: research. At first he researched demons, the occult, and exorcisms, but much of the information proved to be too cryptic and outdated for him to actually find any of it useful. Now his topic was a bit more specific: he needed to learn about his personal demon. Of course, most demons had the names of fallen angels: noble and chilling names like Astaroth, Samael, and Uriel—things completely unlike Sock, which was more of a name for a child's teddy bear than any demon.
A different route of investigation was in order. Sock had mentioned being alive at one point, and he had also mentioned his penchant for killing things (probably people, if Jonathan was lucky. Unlucky for the people, but lucky for research purposes) more than once. If he'd been a murderer in his lifetime, there was probably some record of it. The topic of "murders committed by teenagers in the last 50 years" was a bit broad for a google search, yielding approximately 81 million results, and he pushed his chair back from his desk to stare at the ceiling.
He half-expected the loud "Hey, hot stuff! Whatcha thinkin' about?" Sock would say at this moment, grabbing his shoulders and floating up above him with his usual grin and a chuckle that gave Jonathan the urge to punch a wall. But, thankfully, he was alone today, so he had the moment to collect his thoughts before he tossed his phone and some notebooks in a bag, pulled his worn, grey hoodie over his head, and stepped into a pair of broken-in green converses as he headed to the library.
A sour-faced librarian with wrinkles comparable to most Disney villains pointed him back towards the periodicals, handing him a key to the back room with a projector no one had touched since 1995, and Jonathan mumbled his thanks without making any eye contact. She definitely had something in her teeth. He didn't want to think about what it might be, or how long it had been there.
The projector room was dusty and filled with cobwebs, and Jonathan briefly wondered why anyone would even bother putting newspapers on tiny slides anymore when it was the twenty-first century and you could just scan things and store them digitally. As if a public library had the funding for any of that.
Based on his manner of speaking and his clothes, Sock was probably born after the year 1985. The ripped jeans were definitely a 90s thing; and despite his round, childish face, he'd mentioned being "older than him" when they'd met, which put him in high school before he died, which also meant he had to have been born earlier than 1995 in order for him to be seventeen years old (and dead) by 2013. Close enough. Ten years was a sizable timeframe, but what he needed was the date of the murders. He didn't have any other plans, so maybe it was best to start at the year 1998 and go forward. Why were they even still putting things ON slides in 1998? Computers and the internet existed by then. Searching a database would have been infinitely easier, but the universe was content to play his life as a cosmic joke, so he lay back in one of the chairs, propping his legs up on a dusty table, corded remote in hand.
Newspaper image after newspaper image clicked by over the course of hours. He was sure the library would be closing soon; or they'd already closed, and forgotten about him in this back room. He'd dozed off at one point, and sat up, rubbing his eyes. He clicked the remote a few times to reach the end, ready to pick up his bag and leave. On the last page, there it was. It wasn't a headline, if anything it was a smaller article next to a picture of the former president shaking hands with some foreign official.
Startling Triple Murder Shakes Community; 3 Found Dead.
In the tiny town of Nowhere, Oklahoma, the Sowachowski family was found buried on a hill at the edge of a graveyard on November 1st. Norman and Miranda Sowachowski were stabbed to death in their home and buried beside their son, Napoleon Maxwell Sowachowski, who was found dead in an empty grave beside them. The murder weapon was found in Napoleon's body, and officials believe all three murders were perpetrated by the same person. No sign of forced entry or evidence of an intruder was found at the Sowachowski residence. The bodies were discovered by Silas, the graveyard caretaker, who could not be reached for comment. The Sowachowski family had no known enemies, and no major connections outside of the town of Nowhere. The investigation...
A dry laugh escaped Jonathan as he read. Though small, the boy in the picture below the article bore an uncanny resemblance to his demon, right down to the same oversized hat and toothy grin. That name, though? He'd save it for blackmail later. It might make the demon be quiet, for once. Triple murder didn't sound quite right, though. It sounded more like Sock had killed his parents, then himself, and whoever was writing the paper just didn't want to believe it. Well, maybe he'd consider killing his parents, too—if they'd named him Napoleon Maxwell.
In a strange way, it gave him some reassurance. Now he knew exactly who he was dealing with, but not how to make him go away. He still had classes, exams, and (now that he'd started college) studio hours to worry about. He liked to go to studio hours on the weekends, so he could draw without disrupting the class and paint without annoying any of his peers, but the nice thing about art school was that everyone was a little quirky, and being the "weirdest kid" was more of a competition for a seat of honor rather than cause to be shunned. Like anyone in his classes had any idea what "weird" meant beyond unflattering haircuts, smoking weed, painting with your toes, eating vegan, and shopping entirely at Goodwill. “Weird” was being haunted and followed by a ghost-demon who never stopped talking, who offered a strange measure of companionship he'd never admit he sometimes enjoyed.
“Weird” was the result of dragging his tired self to the photography studio the following morning to develop his 35mm film, fumbling with it sleepily in the black bag. He was glad to be one of the first people in the studio that morning, as no one was around to hear his startled grumbles of "what the fuck" after draining his developing tank and rinsing off the finished negatives. They were tiny and blurry, but it was there. In multiple pictures, obscured in inverted greys, Jonathan knew it couldn't be anything else. He had to get up, go get a coffee, and blearily return to look at his negatives and make sure he hadn't been seeing things. They'd be even more obvious on his contact sheet. It rendered several of his favorite pictures unusable for class, but at this moment, it didn't matter.
He had photographed Sock.