What follows is an experiment I did with POV. Enjoy.
Experimental Horror.
Trope used- Possession
POV- Plural tight first person.
Lola And Sam
They said I would remember nothing. The half dead old priest held my mother’s hand, she kissed his ring. Inside me, somewhere deep the demon chuckled and gabbled in the Hell born language I’d come to learn.
After there was always a look in everyone’s eyes. They caressed my cheeks and yammer platitudes at me.
“Sweet child.”
“Poor girl.”
They never said I love you or we’re sorry. Their eyes tried to show empathy, but stopped at fear. I was never the same. It was to be expected. Sure, I played and danced, I laughed and grew tits, but, I moved through their world the way they wanted me to but it was all a front. I put on the normal face for them until we could be on our own.
Inside I was remembering how it all started. I thought about meeting the entity in my closet that called itself Sam. I remember it playing in there alone and after a while it invited me to play too. At first Mommy and Daddy thought it was cute. They set places at the table for Sam and while we ate asked after it.
“Hey Sam how was your day?”
Daddy’s tone was shitty, I knew it was shitty, Sam knew it was shitty. Sam growled and I looked up at my Father with all the gravitas a five year-old can muster and answered.
“Sam is gonna go back to our closet now.”
My Father rolled his eyes, my Mother tried to break the growing tension.
“Goodnight Sam. Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
Her nervous laugh fell flat. I ate my dinner and Daddy groused until Mommy got him a fresh beer. Months passed in the same way, Daddy started to lose patience with me and Sam.
“You’re a big girl now Lola. You should have real friends.” And so on.
The less tolerant, he got the stronger Sam got. By my sixth birthday, Sam could flicker the lights and screw with the TV until Daddy bellowed like an enraged bull. I tried to tell him, warn him.
“Sam does it.”
I learned that the truth was the wrong way to go. The truth made him turn on me. Daddy didn’t like my tone or my answers. Once before Sam moved inside me, it had been doing things all night. Things crashed in the kitchen, it poked Daddy awake with icy fingers until he woke up screaming. It was very fond of forming itself into looming shadow men that blacked out the windows and rumbled anger.
Daddy came into my room with Sam riding his back like an insane monkey. It pulled his hair and breathed cold and terror and rage into his ear. Daddy looked down at me while I watched Sam. He said something, but I didn’t look at him.
“Daddy, I always pay attention to you, you’re so mean and loud.”
“You pay attention to me when I talk to you. You ungrateful little brat.”
I knew I shouldn’t have said it. Sam’s black hole eyes told me to go ahead.
“Sam says if you be nice it will stop. It hates how mean you are.”
Daddy’s ashy face glowed in the moonlight like my nightmares. His rage hit me before his fists. Mommy got home from work and found us in the living room. He had beaten me unconscious and knelt over me crying. Sam was back in the closet, Mom called 911. It hurt and I didn’t like it, but Sam promised it would be better for us.
At the trial I told the truth as I knew it. Daddy got mad at Sam and I sassed him. Mommy was a wreck and the therapists decided I was dissociating. Trying to correct them only made things worse.
After Daddy went to jail, Mom was working and so sad. She swung between squeezing me tight against her bony chest apologizing and ignoring me. I understood, I missed Daddy too, but I had Sam.
A few months after my seventh birthday, I sat on the floor of my bedroom with Sam, talking to it while we played with my new tea set.
“Sam?”
“Lola?’
I liked it when it mimicked me that way. It used a voice that sounded just like mine.
“Will you stay forever?”
“I can’t. I don’t have a body Lola.”
I fussed with the bear in my lap.
“We could share mine.”
My whisper was so low I wasn’t even sure I’d spoken out loud.
“I am invited inside?”
“Yes. Stay with me forever.”
The first few months Sam and I were together inside my body we did strange things. A few times Mommy heard both our voices coming out of my mouth. She decided she was imagining things and put us all in therapy again.
I told the truth over and over again. Sam made me feel safe, even when I thought of Daddy’s eyes or had bad dreams. They clucked and tutted. The years of therapy passed, Sam and I learned to live together in my body. I learned to speak to it in our thoughts.
I’ve always hated being accused of being a liar. Lies are a waste. My truths were turned into pathology and I was medicated and by the time I was ten I’d had enough. Around the house I let Mommy see and hear us. When Sam and I lifted my bookcase I told her the truth. When we got angry, we roared in our two voices. Sam learned to burn through the medications that tried to stifle us.
She called them tantrums.
From inside our body Sam threw dishes and made the walls bleed. It rattled the foundations. We spoke in tongues, resurrected dead languages, it taught me to snarl in it’s hell made mother tongue. Mommy dragged us to therapists and psychic healers. One of them laid their hands on us babbling fake Navajo words, she was a liar and we threw her into a wall.
Mommy called The Church. We listened to her cry on the phone, then spoke to her in our soft dual voice.
“Leave us alone. That’s all we want.”
She screamed and screamed. Sam went silent, we were too frustrated and it wanted to destroy her. I talked it out of that course of action, our alternatives were unknown foster homes and the system. I knew about the system and wanted no part of it. When the priests came we showed them the truth. They made their notes, they recorded us talking and Sam slammed doors and blew cold and fear into them.
At their behest Mom pulled us out of school and I admit I pitched a tantrum. Sam and I moved our body like a spider up the wall and growled at her. We peeled the paint off the walls with our rage. I have to admit, it felt so good.
A month passed before the priests returned. In protest of our forced seclusion, we had been eating only raw meat; we perched on the table naked and grinning at Mom with bloody teeth. We stopped speaking English and spoke only in a particular dialect of German we thought my Mother would appreciate but, she only wept.
We spoke only to each other, out loud to keep her out of our room.
“Sam, promise again.”
“I promise. You promise too. You have to fight.”
“I promise. I will fight.”
We got ready. Sam told me what the Priests would do. It had been forced out of other bodies before and it was afraid.
“Let them think I am in charge. When they believe they are winning, we attack.”
The priests began.
Sam said the Lord’s Prayer backwards and we screamed and cursed them and their burning holy water. We spoke infernal curses and twisted words from the Bible. For one terrifying moment when the old priest with sharp eyes held us down with a crucifix burning against our forehead, I was afraid. I felt Sam weaken and fade.
I panicked and held tight to Sam and we hurled that old bastard off of us, wailing that we would not be torn apart. We waged war for seven days and nights. We broke one of the priest’s legs, the young one had impure thoughts when we spread our legs and offered him sweet, young virgin pussy.
He was weak. We saw the truth in him.
“Father, do you want me to call you Daddy? Do you like what’s under here?”
We spread our legs wide, terribly wide and pulled up our tattered nightgown. Our hips rocked at him, the crotch of our panties strained as he shook and began to weep. We cackled. It was too easy once we saw, once we knew their weakness.
Finally, it was the old priest and us. Sam hissed through our teeth in his face. I felt safe at last, Sam would not leave me. We slept and plotted together in dreams.
“I will end you priest.”
For the first time in my life I lied. I said the prayers I didn’t believe in and the old priest regained his confidence and we had him.
The old priest’s sin was pride.
When we subsided, the old priest’s voice rose and held a strength he pulled up from the very depths of his ultimately hateful soul. Sam pushed me behind them, it was time for it to have a moment in the full glare of this priest’s wrath.
I could neither hear nor see the final battle. I was so tired. I struggled to peer around Sam to see, but it shushed me in its way and I subsided.
When it was over I woke to Sam whispering in the back of our mind. Wake up Lola, cry now. Weep for them while I sleep.
Of course I did what Sam said. My eyes fluttered open and I did what I was expected to do. I asked what day it was, I asked for my Mommy.
“Mommy? Mommy, I don’t feel good, I-Mommy, where are you?”
The rising inflection of panic brought her from where she almost genuflected to the old priest. She held us close, she kissed our hair and cheeks and eyes. She told us how much she loved us.
After our body recovered Mommy packed our things and tucked us into her car to move far away from the thing that would not be spoken of, our illness. The old priest came on the day we left, he blessed our bedroom and kissed our forehead.
His hands were clammy and his lips were dry. We smiled sweetly at him.
As Mommy drove away, we turned in our seat and grinned. Sam stretched our mouth until we showed a gaping maw of darkness and rows upon rows of teeth, the old priest clutched his chest and crumpled as the car made the turn onto the main road. Death by hubris. By sin. It seemed appropriate enough. Mommy saw nothing and only found out months later that he had died.
When Mommy looked at us in the rear view mirror, we gave her our fake sweet smile. She smiled back at our round cheeks and sparkling eyes.
Sam and I have lived happily together in this body. As an adult we have learned to move and speak as one creature, we do not haunt nor do we scare often. Occasionally, we meet another demon who wants to join us or some psychic person who wants to cleanse us and we have to fight again.
~
Come back next week for a craft lesson on how to play with tropes, ways to use them to jumpstart your writing or to play in genres/styles you aren't comfortable with.