Sickness (Short Story)

“He was never right in the head." Said the sadistic bitch who raised me. The sentence was told to her friend on the phone as they discussed what a problem I was. As this conversation took place I remained on the floor watching the blood flow from me. That was when I knew I would one day kill my mother. I was eight years old at the time, and this was before any demon. No, rather it was before the demon that resides within my own body. How could anything other than a demon open her own child's flesh claiming it was for the one she called God?

Let me explain. My name is Ventre Vey... Well, it is now; my name has changed a lot over the past. At the time of my birth and on the certificate they produced I was named ‘Kyle’. As I grew, it was ‘Child’, ‘Useless’, ‘Worthless’, ‘Thing’, ‘You’... well, those were the words that most often escaped the woman’s lips when she spoke to me. Now, before you go all righteous on me, I do not blame God for the way my mother treated me... I only say, because it is true, that my mother did what she did to be using Him as her reason. I never knew my bastard father and if I met him today I would not hesitate before applying a vice-like grip to his neck. After he left my two month pregnant mother she turned to the church as some do at their worst moments, and the priest there had told her to raise me ‘right’. To ‘remove all evil traces’ from me so that I did not become like my father. So my childhood was spent as her faithful servant, cleaning and even cooking for her once I was big enough to reach the stove. Any time I did or said something she didn’t like she beat me until I bled then made me wash it all away. She said that if she beat me then the evil would leave my body and if I washed it away then it would not be able to return. When I was a child I believed her, I was stupid. As a child I decided I’d rather be evil than live a life of pain. I truly wanted my mother to die.

At eleven years old my dream came true in the form of what at first appeared to be a nightmare. In an effort to reject my mother’s holier than thou lifestyle I had begun spending time around a group of stereotypically gothic teenagers who went to the school I had just started. They seemed fairly nice despite the names my mother had called them and I never suspected they had other motives for keeping a child around. I hold no grudges against them; they gave me my greatest accomplishments. They took me to a forest one night and told me that we would be meeting with demons. I was happy. If my mother had seen me it would have made her so angry. However, that night ended with me tied naked to a tree, a long gash having been cut down my chest with a dagger. The teens gathered around me, one of them reading from a strange book. Tears ran down my cheeks, knowing that I was to be sacrificed to the creature to make it come. I was afraid but as it continued I became angry and wished for the demon to kill me. My life had been nothing but worthless so far so I saw no reason for staying alive. The only one who crossed my mind at this time – Spike. Spike, formerly Anthony, had been my neighbour and best friend since we were babies. He was the only one in the world who knew and understood me. It was him alone I would miss.
A fog descended over us at that point. My vision, my thoughts, began to blur slightly, and I felt as though I were drifting to sleep. I saw someone in front of me but due to my impaired sight all I could see was a dark shadow.
“Do you want me to help you?” He asked, his voice sending a strange shiver through my body. I could not form words, so I simply nodded before passing out. I awoke at sunrise, early in the morning, untied and curled up under the tree. The cut was gone and so had the strange blur that had affected me. In fact, all of my senses seemed clearer than ever. So it was fast that the foul stench reached my nostrils and I looked around to find all seven teenagers dead. I ran home and jumped into bed before my mother found me missing. The deaths were mentioned on the news but no trace of me was ever found and the only person I told was Spike.

I was fifteen when my mother died. Strange things had occasionally happened to me but nothing like that night had happened before. I was knelt in front of my mother after she had beaten me. She was shouting at me about what a terrible son I was and that she should have never had me. I wasn’t really listening to her. I looked down at the floor I was on, feeling her hate flowing into my body as the hate I felt for her burned within me more than I remember it doing so before. Ever since the night I had decided to be evil, I had tried not to cry in front of her, not to show her I was weak. But now as the blood seeped down my skin as she stood above me, tears seemed to cut my cheeks as they fell. A strange feeling filled my body and I realised it had been there before, I was only just noticing as it increased in power. It felt in a way like the night four years prior when I was tied to that tree. I fell to the floor as a sudden pain hit my side. The weird feeling grew in strength again as it felt like my insides were contracting as if to crush me as I convulsed on the floor. Sweat coated my body and I realised my mother had frozen. I managed to catch site of myself in the mirror and was shocked. My eyes had turned a violent shade of red. For just a moment my face contorted and took the shape of some hideous creature and I heard my mother scream. The convulsions stopped as I returned to normal, aside from my eyes, which remained red.

I looked up at my mother as I rose to my feet, suddenly knowing what had happened, and of the power that I possessed. I knew what was inside of me; I felt his claws on my brain as I stepped toward the woman. She was no longer my mother. For the first time in my life, she was a simple human, and for the first time I felt her fear. Not just felt, I could smell it, I could see it. She was afraid of me; our positions had finally been reversed.
“What are you?” She whispered to me. “You aren’t my son.”
“Are you surprised?” I asked. “You never treated me as a son; you treated me as a slave. You wouldn’t have cared if I died. Somebody will die tonight, but it will not be me.”
I smiled as she backed away.
“You make me sick, you terrible creature.” She tried to sound angry but her voice shook. “You wouldn’t hurt me...”
“The world is a scary place for a young boy.” I told her. “Young boys need their mothers to show them everything will be okay. You never did that. You told me that there was evil within me and you hurt me. You weren’t destroying the evil in me, you were putting it in place, destroying the good, the innocence that all children are born with.”

The woman who used to be my mother moved backward again and fell. She screamed as I walked toward her. In my head I could still here my own screams from childhood, the way that I used to beg her to stop hurting me. Tonight, she would be the one to beg.
“You didn’t have to be such a bitch my whole life.” I said just loudly enough for her to hear. “If you had shown me even one moment of kindness, I may have considered letting you live. But you forced me to live in hell, so that is where I will send you now. I don’t believe that your God will spare a woman who hurts her own child in such a way when he created mothers to protect the children.”
I came to a stop, standing over my mother. I knelt down in front of her and saw the look of horror in her eyes as I continued.
“Tonight you’ll find out what it’s like to be beaten as you beat me. You will never raise your hand to me again.”

My senses returned as I awoke in a pool of blood. I slowly stood, paying little attention to the corpse, and as always when I awoke in blood I went to the shower to wash the evil off my skin. As I washed myself I smiled, knowing that I was finally washing away the greatest evil that had been with me since early childhood.
As I stepped out of the shower I fell to the ground again, convulsing as I did a few hours before. I felt a massive pressure on my body then something was flowing out of me. As the feeling lessened, I looked up to find myself staring at a demon. He didn’t look quite as the warped face I had seen in the mirror earlier, but he was not quite human either. He spoke to me and finally introduced himself. He was Necat. (Necat, I later found out, is ‘Kills’ in Latin. Why is it always Latin?) He explained that he had been living within my body since the night four years ago. He had let me live because he felt sorry for me and because it gave him a way to reside in the human world. He showed me how to make myself appear innocent when the corpse was found. After that, there were many nights when Necat would take over and make me kill. He, and as a result I, developed a taste for blood. After he tried to make me kill Spike I tried harder to control him. It was many years from the night I killed my mother that I was able to gain some kind of control over Necat. But all of this is irrelevant here. It is all for another story, this one is simply to tell of my relationship with my mother and the truth about how she died.


[Note: I'm not sure I like the way I wrote this one as much as I did when I first wrote it, and it isn't exactly in my normal style, but I wrote this more to figure out exactly how Necat entered Vey's body and how everything around this time happened, rather than to be an actual story. Still, I thought I'd share it and hope you enjoyed reading it.]