The Book of Enoch

Chapter 8 – Darkness

A day earlier, Beth would have considered the whole idea of demons mostly laughable; something used by parents to keep their kids in line. But now… Now her world had changed. Suddenly there were very evil forces prowling unseen, and everything she knew and trusted was in jeopardy of falling to pieces. Even her own home was no longer the sanctuary she needed to survive the cold and ruthless things that she witnessed in her job day to day. She had seen the results of murder and rape so many times that she thought she had grown hardened to it. But now her shell had been cracked wide open and she was literally exposed for all the evils of the world to see and plunder.

She continued the steady stream of numbers as she looked down at herself. She wasn’t at all sure of what had happened to her, or if it were actually a dream or a reality. It had certainly seemed real… felt real. No dream she had ever experienced had ever seemed that tangible. Or that intense. Real or not, the layer of slime that covered her was certainly hard to ignore. It looked identical to the substance that the nun had been submerged in and she shivered. Had something similar happened to her? They knew the nun had been raped. Perhaps she had been in a dream as well. But Sister Laura Clemens was dead, where she had survived – saved by a chance phone call from the last person in the world she expected to call her.

She looked around her small apartment. The lamp on her night table cast only a weak light around the living space, and left large shadowy zones that seemed to crawl and bulge in her heightened sense of fear. She could see the rug, which looked completely normal on the floor now, but had earlier morphed into something so vile. She could still imagine the stringy tendrils wrapped around her body, binding her… seducing her.

She groaned and concentrated on the numbers as Professor Manatee had said. She needed to stop thinking about the dream… but it wasn’t easy. No matter how she tried, memories of her struggling naked form sinking into a writhing pit of flesh persisted even when she closed her eyes. She remembered how they had captured her, spread her open, and then…

“No!” She said aloud. She wouldn’t go there. Don’t do anything, he had said. Just count.

“… fifty-two… fifty-three… fifty-four…”

The substance on her skin felt warm. She knew that it should have felt cold, cooled by exposure. Runnels and drips collected in a wet pool around where she sat in the middle of her bed, her knees drawn up to her chest. It completely covered her, even her head and hair, as though buckets of the stuff had been dumped over her. She wiped it from her face as best she could.

“… sixty-three… sixty-four… sixty five…”

At her chest her nipples ached. She wasn’t at all surprised to find them engorged with blood, hardened and aroused to the point of pain. She could almost still feel the slippery fingers swirling over her wrinkled areolae, trapping the cones of her nipples. A shudder ran down her spine in the form of remembered pleasure.

“… eighty-eight… eighty-nine…” she continued, a bit more forcibly.

A somewhat larger runnel of slick fluid dripped down from the underside of her left breast where it fell to her abdomen and continued into the valley between her thighs. It ran down over the cleft of her gates and she gasped and twitched slightly as she fought to ignore the sexual arousal that flashed up from within her. Her sex made wet squishing sounds whenever she moved even a little and she knew that more of the slime was slowly oozing out from where it had somehow been pushed deep inside by her ‘dream’.

“… one hundred and four…. one hundred and five…” she chanted a bit louder, holding her eyes tightly shut and hugging her legs.

Suddenly, there was a quiet knock at the door and she jumped. Looking up, she stopped counting and started to get out of bed… and remembered.

“Who is it,” she asked softly.

There was a slight pause. “It’s Professor Manatee. Open the door, Beth.”

The voice certainly sounded like his. But he had told her to wait until she had counted to 250. Was she close enough?

“Beth, open the door. I’m here to help you.”

“I… I need to wait,” she answered, her heart rate climbing.

“There’s no time. Open the door, Beth.”

Something wasn’t right. It was his voice, but there was something about the words… the emotion.

“I can help you, Beth, but only if you let me in. I can’t keep you safe from out here. Come open the door. You can put on a robe first, just open the door.”

Gotcha. Instantly she knew that the voice on the other side was anything but the Professor’s. She had never mentioned her state of dress on the phone. For all he knew she was wearing heavy pajamas. Moving quickly back to the middle of the bed, she pulled the sheet in front of her, staring at the door the whole time, and as though it knew it had been found out, the voice had gone quiet again.

Fear and adrenaline pounded in her ears as she sat there in the dim light of her bed lamp in near panic. She half expected to see the portal unlock itself and creak open but it remained closed. But something was happening within her apartment. There was a sound, or almost a lack of sound that was moving in the shadows. In one corner near her kitchen was a deep recess that blocked the lamp light. Like an inky well, she could see nothing of the table and chairs that she knew must be there. Her stomach tightened when she remembered that the kitchen window had always let in enough light that she could see a small section of the table’s surface from her bed. That sliver of illumination was absent. Something was in the way.

She couldn’t move. She could hardly breath the fear was so great. Something large and horrendously evil was standing in the shadow between her bedroom and the kitchen, and she knew that it was focused entirely on her. She wanted to scream, but she couldn’t. Her body was literally paralysed with horror. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. It was several seconds later that she started to hear the slithering. Her eyes fell to the floor of the apartment and she stopped breathing. There, slowly stretching across the wood slats were dozens of pale tendrils. They came out of the shadow and were headed straight for the bed… for her.

Somehow, her body found the means to start sobbing. It was simply too much. Too horrible. Far too frightening to even watch anymore. But that wasn’t an option. Her eyes seemed fixed on the approaching death. And she was certain that it would indeed be her death. They would take her again… take her and fuck her until her very soul was ripped out, just like Laura’s… Just like Mary Agina’s… just like countless others. A tiny squeak was all she could force from her lungs as the white pulsing fingers crept over the end of the bed and started for her.

With a deafening crash, the door to her apartment burst open and a cloaked figure stumbled into the room. A moment later she was blinded as a white-hot light erupted from the top of a stick the figured carried and bathed the entire apartment in a bluish glow. Like a violent supernova, every corner of her home was briefly illuminated, and for the shortest of moments, she saw it.

The creature was indeed standing between her bed and the kitchen table. It was huge, having to literally bend over in order to even fit within the vaulted ceiling. She expected some terrible winged vision of hell, but by any standard, it was beautiful. Not human, and not entirely flesh, it looked like a figure-shaped jellyfish composed of sparkling, swirling particles held within a semi-clear mass. Then there was a deep, reverberating bellow, as though a train were passing through her apartment, and it was gone. It had arched back and simply fallen through the back wall as though it were not there. The light faded, and when her eyes adjusted, she saw the cloaked man more clearly. It was Professor Manatee.