Listen to a reading of this story by JP Relph:
The night I killed my father, a demon came to me, hot with brimstone and belladonna. Somehow sensing the great, black tear in my soul that violence had created. Seeking to use it. I carry him now, for the rest of my life, as any other might carry grief or guilt. A tattooist went mad needling him into my flesh. The demon slumbers there, in slinky inky lines, until his hunger for a fatty, corrupted soul consumes us both.
My father was a man of few words: any uttered were barbed as prison wire. I spent my childhood in a pit of silence brooding with menace. My mother had left with a fallen priest while I still crawled dirty carpet looking for scraps of takeout food among all the wrappers. My father always seemed surprised, amused even, when I survived another night. Like I was an experiment in neglect. I did survive, living like the rats and roaches. Stealing food and staying in shadows.
When neglect failed, my father chose to bring about my demise more quickly, more deliberately. He started beating. I was a weedy kid with no priest to charm; I bruised and bent and woke to blood in my mouth so often, I relished the taste. It meant I was still alive. I was a weedy kid that was tenacious as the rats and roaches. Equally underestimated.
I waited until his eyes fluttered open from whiskey-sour sleep. So he’d see it was me, straddling his chest, holding the axe. My skinny arms shaking like saplings in the wind, my filthy knees pinning his fleshy hips. When I slammed the blade into my father’s laughter, I felt my soul ignite inside me. My flame-seared breath erupted with each blow until I was spent. Collapsed on the floor while the axe still thrummed in my father’s ruined face. Thrummed in every bone of my hands. I was charred inside, bitter-black on my tongue. That’s when the demon came, crunching my soul-crumbs to ash. He whispered like hemlock smoke into my mind, promising a kind of sanctuary, before descending on my father’s corpse.
Without a complete soul, there’s an intoxicating sense of freedom. Oblivion even. I walk among people bristling with joy, fear, anger while I am without feeling, desolate. A flower made of paper. A bird made of wood. The demon guides me, riding my back like a demented toddler. Drawn to the cruel, the abusive, the sick of soul. His hunger becomes mine. I quiver with it.
I am after all, my father’s monster.
This night, we find one in an alley with all the other vermin, his fists still bloody. On a bus bench a woman curls around her wounds as we pass. She has a broken heart tattoo on her shoulder. My tattoo pulses from my neck to the top of my buttocks. Ravenous.
Licking his knuckles, the beater is shocked when I remove my shirt. His eyes ugly-glinting for a moment before growing wide and wet. He sees the tattoo lifting, flexing, the demon’s spine peeling from mine. Inked limbs that were pressed along my flanks, stretch with impossible muscularity. The head, tucked into my neck like a grotesque bird’s, snaps free of the inkwork. Finally, a thick, crocodilian tail slides slowly, almost sensually from under my jeans, whipcracks free.
The demon shakes, stalks towards his prey. Clawed feet make the concrete scream. His face is of asylum nightmares, eyes like pustulant wounds. His grinning mouth a black hole promising only torment. When the demon snarls, it crashes through the alley and sulphurous breath blisters the beater’s face. I redress, go to the woman on the bus bench. I reach to pull her denim jacket over her broken heart. Behind us, the demon takes the beater’s soul. He takes nothing more. He does take it all, leaving the beater twitching, hollowed. Unable to feel freedom or oblivion, just endless nothing.
When the demon returns to me - undulating, coiling, pressing, until he’s ink on skin - I always welcome the reassuring weight and warmth. Like a good coat in winter. Like an embrace. Lost to her own nightmares, the woman smiles weakly; a thing that flits in and out like joy in a brutalised child. I feel her pain.
I feel.
As I walk away from the alley, I begin to understand why the demon hunts so many, takes so many. They’re not only for him. He’s feeding my soul, bringing it back from ash. He’s nurturing me. In the lonely night, I feel his heartbeat synchronise with mine. I feel soothed. Like that first time in a room stinking of blood. When I was a weedy kid who slayed a monster, and a demon came to save me.
JP Relph is a Cumbrian writer hindered by a chronic health condition and four cats. Tea helps. She frequents charity shops to source haunted objects. JP writes about apocalypses a lot (despite not having the knees for one) and her collection of post-apoc short fiction was published by Alien Buddha in 2023. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions and Best Microfictions. JP recently got a zombie story on the Wigleaf longlist which was perhaps the best thing ever.