Demon boyfriend - Part 4 - Nothing yet
When consciousness tugged at you the next morning, you knew you were heavily bruised before you even opened your eyes. Your hip thrummed with pain where it had hit the floor and you had a headache which felt like it was caused by a literal crack in your skull. You groaned into your pillow in remembrance of your awful night, but when you reached a hand to touch your chest warm relief washed over you as you found it dry, no longer oozing blood from the week before’s puncture wounds. You’d take bruising over constant bleeding, so you were counting the night before as a win.
You grabbed your phone from the bedside table and immediately set about ordering yourself a stress breakfast (TWO sandwiches, it had been a rough night. And a milkshake. …And some fries.). As you made the finer decisions on your breakfast order (bread type was always a tough one), something occurred to you: after the ‘kiss’ the night before, Friday had spoken in sentences for the first time. You raised your gaze from your phone screen to stare unfocused at the wall, processing your realisation. What did that mean? Was it just figuring out language, or was it .. blood powered? You shuddered at the thought and lost yourself for a moment before returning your focus determinedly to your phone. THREE sandwiches.
After a couple of days rest when you could once again walk without wincing, you took up the challenge of trying to think about Friday as little as possible. You perused quiet bookshops in an extremely leisurely fashion, you sipped champagne cocktails and read magazines in train station bars, you purely-by-coincidence took a liking to a silver crucifix necklace, you ate four pizzas over the course of two days. By the time your deep purple bruises were fading to yellow, you’d achieved something like the contentment you’d always imagined being free from the need to work would bring you. On Thursday morning, you awoke with a new determination to overcome your dread and make good of the situation. How did people usually ingratiate themselves with malevolent entities haunting their home in an effort to convince said entity to stop throwing them around?
It was a big question, but the answer was clear to you: cake.
You noodled on what kind of cake to make for a moment or two before putting weight on the fact that the only thing you knew the creature consumed was blood. You spent a few tense minutes googling variations of the phrase ‘blood cake’ before finding an article about pig blood curd, and it seemed like a good fit, it looked a bit like a cake but it was made of 100% blood. Gross and perfect. With a project to achieve, your Thursday was about the least tense a Thursday had been for you since your first meeting with Friday. A short trip to the butcher later, you were carefully slicing cubes out of a congealing mass of strong smelling, surprisingly viscous pig blood.
However, once your distraction was safely stored in the fridge, you found that dread once again had room to take root in your heart and belly. You paced uneasily through the house, and (ridiculously, to your own disdain) found yourself tidying up as though you were expecting a guest.
10pm: nervously scrubbing counters, cold sweat clinging to your brow.
10.30pm: pacing slow circuits around the dining table, trying to keep your breathing regular and scripting questions to ask and admonishments to shout if needed
11pm: curled up into a ball on the sofa, staring blankly at the fabric and thinking of how your lungs has burned as it held you under the water
11.30pm: opening all of the doors in the house so you wouldn’t have to hear that awful banging
11.45pm: sitting cross legged on the sofa, alternatively clutching one hand then the other, breathing deeply
You held your phone with trembling hands to watch the seconds count down to 12am, Friday morning with panic prickling at the back of your neck. When nothing happened, you continued to watch the time slip onwards just as a focus to prevent you spiraling into terror. At 12:01:52, the silence in your home was abruptly broken by loud, slow knocking on the door. You flinched and reeled towards the noise with wide eyes, taken off guard. Your breath caught in your throat and you couldn’t force through it to get a lungful of air. You sat quietly, staring at the door unmovingly like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming truck. The knocking stopped.
There were a few breaths of silence, then:
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
You let out a yelp of terror. Something was hammering hard against the door, rattling it in its frame. You got up from your seat, limbs suddenly unwieldy, and rushed towards the door. “Coming!” You called out (as though it was the postman), and immediately felt at hot rush of embarrassment for doing so.
Hands trembling and despite your better judgement, you turned the plastic handle of the door and pulled it open. On the stoop was your nightmare, all teeth and horns and arms. Your motion detector light had come on, and in its glow Friday seemed…. different. More in focus? Its blank eyes were trained on you and its face was split completely in half to expose its bright sharp teeth, but it was completely still. In this new focus, you could make out that its mane extended all the way down to the centre of its chest, and that its horns were shinier than the rest of its body. It stared down at you and you could hear your own panicked pulse in your ears.
“….Hello.” You ventured lamely. It didn’t respond. You stood there in your pyjamas in front of your open door, completely at sea as to what to do next. “Um…” A cold draught blew against you. “I made you a gift, it’s in the fridge. I’m not sure if you’ll like it.” You stepped back to allow it entrance to the house as you searched its face, increasingly desperate for any sign of a reaction but it was statuesque. You stood there wordlessly for 20 or 30 seconds before frustration bubbled up in your chest. “Will you just come in?” Friday immediately ducked under the door frame and strode into the house and you had the gut wrenching feeling that you’d just done something very, very wrong. Taking quick, shallow breaths, you slammed the door closed and rushed away from the creature towards the kitchen. With the new swell of fear in your chest, you felt ridiculous having made the thing a present. You plucked the plate of soft brown-red gelatinous cubes from the fridge and your face was hot from fear and embarrassment. As you turned back towards the front door, you let out a brief scream as you found that Friday had silently followed you, and was crouching down so that it was at eye height, less than a foot away.
“WHAT IS FRIDAY’S GIFT” It questioned directly into your mind, mouth unmoving. Within your home, the monstrosity was in even clearer focus than it had been just moments before. You were starting to be able to make out the texture of rough skin, almost like dark tanned hide.
“Um..” You proffered the plate towards it with trembling hands. “I didn’t know if you ate anything other than blood. So I made a blood… thing.” You forced yourself to take a deep breath. “You don’t have to eat-” but its face had already split in half to allow its long white prehensile tongue to emerge and grasp at the contents of the plate. You watched with horrified fascination as it plucked individual pieces and deposited them soundly within the thing’s gaping maw. When the plate was empty, Friday’s face snapped closed and it regarded you again with those inscrutable white eyes. You felt your lip tremble, every instinct you had was telling you to run.
When no follow up comment came, you ploughed on with what you wanted to address. “I’d really appreciate it if you could not throw me around and hurt me any more.”
Friday stared at you blankly for a couple of seconds, and then you felt the bottom drop out of your stomach as its face slowly cracked in a wide toothy grin.
“YOU NAMED FRIDAY, NOW YOU THINK YOU HAVE CONTROL.”
Cold terror gripped you as you choked out a hoarse reply. “No.” Its expression was completely unreadable. “Not at all.” You were hit my a foreboding that it was about to prove to you how little control you had, so you scrabbled around desperately for a distraction. “Do you.. have you named me?”
“YES.” Came its reply, quicker than you’d expected. It still hadn’t moved.
Your fear was pricked with genuine curiosity as you questioned it, “What.. have you named me?”
The noise which it projected into your mind in reply was a mocking imitation of one of your own screams of terror. Then it laughed, cold and high and piercing. To your own surprise, a smile touched your lips at the name it had given you. Its sense of humour was cruel.
You placed the plate you’d been holding down on the counter to your side. “Friday, why are you here?” You asked flatly, with more bravery than you felt.
There was a pause of a few moments as it regarded you.
“HUNGRY.” Was its reply, and your blood immediately ran cold. You took a step backwards and it watched you go, then clarified. “FRIDAY WILL EAT YOU.” Your eyes widened and your chest felt tight as you took another step away from the creature, not sure where you were intending to go but desperate for some distance. “SOON.” Soon? Not now? A pathetic whimper of fear escaped you as your back touched the far wall, the furthest you could get away from the beast, who was still crouched at the far side of the kitchen with its bristling mane and sharp black horns.
“I don’t want to be eaten.” You croaked, feeling tears prickling in your eyes as you raised your arms to hug yourself, providing very meagre comfort. You couldn’t get a full breath, you couldn’t finish a full thought, all you had was mind-blanking terror.
“WE CAN DELAY FRIDAY EATING YOU.” The creature was watching you with a full face splitting grin. “IF YOU GIVE KISS.”
Your eyebrows furrowed momentarily as you watched the thing, leaning your back against the cool kitchen wall with your arms still wrapped tightly around yourself. It slowly raised an arm to make a come hither motion to you with one of its long thin index fingers. You balked. You could feel the blood draining from your face. Every fibre of your being was telling you that you must under no circumstances get any closer to the creature of darkness crouched in your kitchen. It was still bidding you forwards.
But what choice did you have? You swallowed dryly and with a gargantuan effort managed to take a step towards it. It laughed cruelly as it watched you. Feeling very much as though you were marching towards your own death, you nervously walked across the cool tile floor of the kitchen back towards the beast. Standing less than a foot away from it with its lidless eyes staring into your very soul, you reached a hand to touch its mane to steady yourself as you stood on tiptoe, finding it coarse and deeply unpleasant to the touch. You closed your eyes and pressed your lips as lightly as you could to the rough hide of its forehead, placing a kiss there before immediately retreating back two steps and shuddering in disgust and fear.
“GOOD.” It boomed with something like amusement. “NOW FRIDAY WILL ONLY EAT YOUR FEET.” You hadn’t even taken in a gasp of air to scream when it grabbed your ankles and yanked hard, pulling you completely off your feet and slamming your back and coccyx hard against the tile floor, causing you to cry out in agony and terror. It pulled your ankles towards its gaping mouth, easily sliding you across the kitchen floor. You tried to pull away, writhe and struggle, but its grasp was impossibly strong. You screamed as it plunged both of your feet into its mouth amongst its rows upon rows of sharp teeth. You screwed your eyes shut and turned your head away, desperate to not see the gore which was about to spill forth. You felt its teeth graze against your skin and its tongue lap against your toes, but the pain you experienced was much less bone crunching than expected. Hesitantly, you opened your eyes to look at it.. and found it making a big show of gnawing on your feet, but actually barely breaking the skin. Your brow furrowed in confusion. As soon as it saw you watching it, it released your ankles and erupted into loud piercing cackles in your mind. You half-crawled half-dragged yourself backwards across the floor away from it as quickly as you could, leaving wet smears of blood from your cut feet on the white tiles as you went. You retreated as much as possible into the corner at the far side of the kitchen, hugging your knees to your chest and watching the creature with desperate panic written all over your expression. When it had finished laughing at its own sick joke, it fixed you once again in its stare. You might have been hallucinating from lack of blood flow to the brain, but you thought you saw the shadow of a grey iris in its previously blank white eyes.
“WHY SO SCARED?” It questioned you, and the voice in your mind had changed.. it was clearer, you could make out more intonation. “WHAT HAS FRIDAY DONE? NOTHING YET.” Yet. You made a high pitched noise of pure terror, and it started to crawl towards you on all six limbs. “LITTLE PUSH. LITTLE KISS. BROUGHT GIFTS. YOU STAYED.” You were too scared to even scream as the white eyed monstrosity crawled across the blood stained floor towards you.
“What’s happening?” You stammered breathlessly “You’re different!”
Friday laughed as it reached you, grabbing your bloodied ankle to drag you across the floor towards it. You tried to grab onto something, but the surfaces around you were all too smooth to even give you a chance. “EASIER TO BE HERE NOW, CONNECTION STRONGER. FRIDAY BEDDING IN.” It dragged you underneath it and your vision went dark around the edges, your head felt light, cold panic was pumping through your veins and it was all you could do to fight losing consciousness.
“Bedding.. in?” You questioned wildly, anything to snatch a few more seconds of life before it surely bit off your head.
“GIFTS ACCEPTED, BLOOD TAKEN, ALLOWED ENTRY, KISS GIVEN. EASIER THAN FRIDAY THOUGHT.”
You writhed desperately against its grasp, tears spilling from your eyes and clouding your vision, you were making noises half way between gasps and screams as you turned your face away from it to avoid having to look at its face inches from your own.
“DON’T WORRY,” it sounded downright amused. “PLAYTHING IS GOOD AND OBEDIENT, DIDN’T RUN FROM FRIDAY WHEN SHE HAD THE CHANCE. THIS IS WHY SHE STILL HAS ALL OF HER TOES.” It cackled inside your mind as it licked the side of your face with its long tongue and it was more than you could take. You felt your body go limp and the world around you went dark as you lost your fight to stay conscious.
