Seed

by Ania Ahlborn

“I saw it, Daddy,” she told him, lowering her voice so her mom wouldn’t hear. “I saw it before the lights went out. I saw it just like you.”

Jack knew those eyes, and it terrified him that they had found him again.

Now she resented him for picking up the guitar—something she’d loved about him a dozen years before. Jack was the same Jack he’d always been. It was Aimee who had changed.

but he couldn’t unknow what he knew, and he couldn’t unfeel the certainty that coursed through him like a quick-spreading disease.

There were parts of his past he couldn’t remember—chunks that he knew he had lived through, but they had simply disappeared from his memory as though they had never existed at all.

At what point do parents back away from something they love more than their own lives, put up their hands, and admit defeat?

She’d lose her mind or run away, unable to take it anymore, and Jack would be left alone. But never really alone, that voice reassured him. I’ve always been here, and I’ll never leave.

Churches made Jack feel a lot like that afternoon had, like he was being eaten alive.

If this were Hollywood, the priest would be the culprit. He’d turn to his congregation, hold out his arms as if to embrace them, and smile a demon’s smile before pulling them all down to hell.

God hadn’t been able to help him—He hadn’t even tried—and He wasn’t going to help Charlie either.

“It wasn’t me,” Charlie whispered

It was you, it was me, it was us, it was we.

scratch. She knew there was only one way to get rid of the prickle that had burrowed into her heart: get up, stand over her sister again. Stand over her and wait until she stopped breathing.

The tiny bell that hung above the door marked her entrance with a fairy’s chime.

Every now and again he’d sit up in bed, his eyes wide, knowing that he and Aimee weren’t alone.

This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Not to their family. Not to them.

Even he knew that if demons could exist, it meant there was real evil in the world, and if you believed in the devil, somewhere in the deepest fibers of your being you had to believe in God. He knew, firsthand, that the devil was real; he’d seen it with his own two eyes. But he’d never seen God. He’d never felt God. He’d never been helped by God. For all he knew, wickedness was strong enough to exist in a world without good.

“I don’t know.” The answer startled him. He heard the words, felt them vibrate in his throat, but the voice didn’t belong to him. That was when he knew he would never tell her about his past, and he would never tell her that she was right about Charlie. He would never tell her because he’d never be allowed.

But they were the only ones there, so his time frame was unclear; he was like a greedy, time-pressed tourist in a new and brilliant city, desperate to see everything in far too little time, visiting sites with reckless abandon, never giving himself the opportunity to truly take any of it in.

it must have been a good thing, which probably meant Copeland was a good doctor, no matter how fat he was.

lmaoo?????

But that was how the devil worked, making his appearance when you least expected it.

Somehow he had managed to get away from the evil that had tried to consume him as a kid only to have it take his own child away.

It seemed that those who spent lifetimes sitting in front of pulpits would be the first to believe in things like demons, but in Jack’s experience it was the opposite. The devout refused to acknowledge the possibility that their God would allow such wickedness to exist, let alone get so close to those they loved.

“Do you believe there can be a devil if there is no God?”

He met Reagan’s eyes and waited, hoping the answer would be no, knowing it would be yes.

It seemed odd to Jack that a doctor who was supposed to make people feel better would choose to dwarf them first.

“Don’t be scared, Mommy,” she said. “At least you still have Abigail.”

This was never your family, it whispered. It’s always been mine.

“It was Mr. Scratch. He’s the one who told me. He knows everything, and now he knows I told you and he’s not going to let me sleep ever again.”

He looked like the devil had gone ahead and eaten his soul right out of his body.”

He had been absent, maybe asleep, but as time had gone on he had grown used to losing time.

Charlie was the last person she wanted to deal with in the middle of the night.

lmao girl same

“You know the saying, ‘He seemed like such a nice boy’? That didn’t come from nowhere. The craziest of them all seem nice and normal and happy until some vital part of their brain fries like bad wiring.

He loved her too much to let her live.