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“The one who saves a soul from hell saves this soul and his own as well” – St. John Vianney
Many people make excuses for their
sins and call them necessary evils or not sins at all. Zayden is a young man
who has done this before but has now seen the results of his actions in the
light after a simple prank almost costs him the life of his only friend, Elias.
Everything is put into perspective as he begins to repent for every crime he
has committed and everyone he has hurt. To show that he is serious, he tries to
cleanse himself of a demonic ritual that he performed to gain success. This locks
the doors in his house and seems to transport his house, three people who are
important to him, and himself to a dimension where no one can see them.
He is put in the living room with
the three people who wonder what they’re doing in his house. They are then
transformed into hideous versions of themselves. Abagail, Zayden’s teacher who
has a relationship with, becomes taller and her feminine features are
exaggerated as the rest of her appearance changes to be more alluring and
freakish at the same time. Zayden’s father is turned into a monster of rage with
a long elongated mouth that’s restrained from completely opening. Multiple eyes
have popped up on his head while his skin has turned as black as ash with cracks
and scars on them. Elias, Zayden’s only friend that was recently mentioned, has
two faces now, four arms, and six spider-like legs.
“I’m the one who has to pay! Leave
them out of this!” Zayden says to the demons that he can’t see.
“A price needs to be paid. One life
for the broken contract, one life for yours, and one life to escape. Kill them while
they try to kill you and we’ll consider the contract void. It should be easy. You
hate these people after all,” the demons say.
Before Zayden can say anything
else, he avoids his three hunters who leap at him to get an easy kill.
“He’s mine! I am his teacher, and I
should teach him a lesson or two,” Abagail states.
“No, I should take care of him. A
father should erase his mistakes,” Zayden dad counters.
“I don’t care what either of you
say. Revenge is mine for what he did to me,” Elias says.
The three fight amongst themselves
as their state of mind is warped. Zayden uses this opportunity to run upstairs.
Seeing him get away from them, causes them to stop fighting and chase after
him. With nowhere to really go to escape, Zayden runs into his room and throws
things in front of the door to block it. He tries to go out the window only to
see an endless black void beneath the house. To see if it really is an endless
void, Zayden drops a ball and watches as it continuously falls. This doesn’t
help his nerves as he struggles to figure out what to do. Suddenly, two
elongated arms stretch through the doors of his room and try to grab him.
“Come here! Don’t you love my
embrace?” Abagail says as she tries to catch him in her arms.
Zayden dodges and rolls around the room
until he enters his closet. Now in the room, his three predators bang and break
down the closet door. Zayden backs into the closet as far as he can until he
falls down a trap door that makes him fall down to the family room.
“I don’t remember that being there,”
Zayden thinks to himself.
With room to breathe, he thinks to
himself how he can save himself and the people he cares about. He then
remembers a book from his deceased mother that she wanted him to read as one of
her dying wishes. Zayden’s father then breaks through the floor and almost lands
on him.
“Look at what you’ve made me do!”
his father says, “I should’ve gotten rid of you when I had the chance!”
His father then charges around the
room breaking everything in his path to get to Zayden as the other two descend to
the lower floor. With his back against the wall again, Zayden retreats into
another closet in the hopes of finding another hidden trap door and happens to
find one that drops him in the basement. This is where he quickly looks through
to find his mother’s book. He doesn’t have much time to look for the section he
needs to read before Elias comes down.
“You’re dead for what you did to me!”
Elias says as he rushes towards Zayden.
Zayden tries to make Elias lose
sight of him but can’t seem to.
“I literally have eyes on the back
of my head. You can’t escape me!”
It seems like there’s no way out
until Zayden’s father comes down the stairs and charges at him. Using his
father’s blind rage, he manages to get his father to knock Elias into a wall to
temporarily incapacitate him. His father’s eyes then zero in on the mess that
he’s made of his deceased wife’s possessions and begins to sob and weep over
them. Abagail is the last one left standing who almost catches Zayden as he
watches his father despair. Since the basement is has a bunch of supply shelves
and pillars, Zayden uses this to tangle up his teacher’s arms. He then runs all
the way upstairs to his parent’s bedroom and hides in the closet.
Now with a second to breathe,
Zayden looks through his mother’s book to find the page he needs bookmarked
with her rosary bracelet. Reading the pages reminds him of his mother’s kindness
that he never got to experience since she died after he was born. He is
reminded of her faith and how she always tried to bring people to God since she
believed that the salvation of her soul was as valuable as the salvation of other
souls. The words are highlighted in Zayden’s eyes as if by a divine force as
the idea is put into his head.
“I have to save them if I want to
save myself,” Zayden thinks as he puts on his mother’s rosary bracelet and
crosses himself for the first time in years.
Before Zayden can exit the closet,
Abagail finds him and sits on him with her hand over his mouth as she closes
the closet behind her. Zayden struggles to get her off him as she shushes him
while peering outside.
“I’m trying to help you,” Abagail
says as the other two are searching around upstairs.
Abagail throws a vase downstairs with
her long arms so that the two will investigate downstairs instead. Meanwhile,
Zayden is feeling his senses numb from something that is emanating from Abagail.
When it’s clear, Abagail removes her hand from Zayden’s mouth and is about to kiss
him before he pushes her face away.
“Why did you help me?” he asks.
“We’re still in a relationship,
aren’t we? A girl’s gotta help her man when he’s in trouble. Plus, I wanted to
have you all to myself like this. This may be uncomfortable, but we’ve been
together in less comfortable situations before.”
“Back off!”
Zayden struggles to get Abagail off
him and the two fight until Zayden and Abagail touch hands. In an instant,
their past memories come back to them. Abagail was a new teacher fresh out of
college teaching at Zayden’s high school. At first, he saw her as easy prey to get
him on her side to let his cheating and actions go unnoticed. The age gap
between them was reasonable enough at least for Abagail for them to be secretly
dating. She was alone and nervous, and Zayden was the only support for her
through the years they knew each other. Their most intimate moment wasn’t one
of their many degenerate sexual encounters. Rather, it was at a time when
Abagail was about to turn to drinking to calm her nerves.
At this time, Zayden was used to
getting his father to not even touch a bottle of light beer as per one of his
mother’s dying wishes and did the same thing he did with his father. Zayden pushed
the bottle aside embraced Abagail and told her everything was going to be okay
and to talk to him about what was going on and what she needed from him. They
talked for hours and from then on, they respected each other more and Zayden
didn’t use her much to get ahead in school. This is also when they really meant
“I love you” when they said it to one another.
Seeing this miraculous development
take place, the demons whisper in Zayden’s ear, “Remember that she’s your flesh
puppet to use for your pleasure, academic success, and to get you out of
trouble. She is nothing more. She won’t replace your dead mother. It doesn’t
matter if you’re eighteen. A boy like you can’t be with a woman her age.”
Similar things go through Abagail’s
head as she begins to lose control of herself.
“Abagail!”
“Don’t you say anything! I’m just a
tool for you to use! You never loved me!”
“I do love you. I’m sorry for using
you like I did. I was a manipulative brat who wanted to take advantage of you,
but that’s not me anymore. I promise you that I will change for the better and
truly love you.”
The honesty in Zayden’s words is
felt by Abagail’s heart as she turns back to her normal self and forgives him.
“You’re back to normal!”
“It’s all thanks to you. Thank you for
saving me. I would try to help you with the other two, but I’m feeling really
exhausted for some reason.”
“Don’t worry about it. They’re my
responsibility to deal with anyway.”
“Be careful.”
“I will,” Zayden says before
kissing Abagail and heading downstairs.
While going down to the family
room, he sees that his father is the only one here with Elias presumably in the
basement. His father tears apart every part of the house until he calms down
after ripping down off the refrigerator door to find bottles of alcohol in it.
Zayden wonders to himself how could that be in there and assumes it may be a
trick from the demons just like the trap doors in the closet, but this one
doesn’t balance the playing field as the trap doors did for him.
“Don’t you think about it, dad!”
Zayden calls out.
All the eyes on Zayden’s father’s head
concentrate on him before he snaps to rush at him. Instead of completely
dodging out of the way, Zayden tries to get in close enough to touch his father’s
hand to get the same kind of connection to happen between them as he did with
Abagail, however, his father seems to have an aversion to him as if there’s an internal
struggle going on within him. His father squirms and screams as he both slashes
out and intentionally misses until Zayden manages to touch his hands. In this
one moment, his entire life with his father goes by while his father’s mind
remembers all the times he spent with him. Moments of joy and moments of regret.
There were times that Zayden’s
father wished that his son wasn’t born so his wife could live, but most of the
time he hated himself for the thought even existing in his head. He works and
tries so hard to make Zayden happy and be more like his mother than himself.
Instead, the opposite happened, and Zayden ended up being even more of a
trouble maker than his father was in his younger years. On one particular day when
Zayden was caught, he came back home with bruises after a fight.
“Are you going to yell at me?”
Zayden said as he expected it.
With a sigh, Zayden’s father said, “No.
It looks like you got your punishment already.”
“Then are you going to lecture me
again?”
“No.”
“Tell me what mom would say?”
“No.”
“…”
“Sit down and tell me what
happened.”
Zayden explained to his dad how he got
in a fight with someone making fun of Elias and him, but primarily Elias. Surprised
that Zayden got in a fight to defend his friend, his father congratulated him
for standing up for him.
He then said, “I used to get in
fights for your mom all the time even when there wasn’t a fight to be had. I
was really possessive of her back in the day. Want to go out for ice cream?”
Despite it being the first time a
while that they got ice cream, they went out and enjoyed being together for a
while.
By the time they left, Zayden
asked, “Dad? Can we do this again some other time?”
“What? Get ice cream every week?”
“Yeah.”
Zayden wanted to enjoy spending
time with his father and didn’t mind if it was over ice cream or anything else,
but he used ice cream as an excuse since he didn’t want to admit it.
“Sure, I’d like that.”
From then on, Zayden and his father
got ice cream every week or did some activity like sports, biking, or sometimes
just making fun of people on TV if you could call that a bonding activity.
Again seeing their advantage
disappear, the demons whisper in Zayden’s ear, “He wished you weren’t born. He
beat you. He screamed at you without understanding why you were hurt. He let you
indulge in your sins. What kind of pathetic excuse of a father would do these
things?”
Shaking off these temptations,
Zayden says, “Come on, dad! You’re stronger than this.”
“I’m pathetic! Look at me. I’m the
way I am on the inside.”
“No, you’re not. You’re the
strongest dad I know taking care of me by yourself. I know I can be difficult
to deal with most of the time, but I’m going to change. I’m going to be someone
who you can say that you’re proud to call your son.”
Zayden’s father then starts to
shake and violently convulse until he freezes in place. A hand then pops out of
his body as he breaks out of the monster’s body.
“Dad!” Zayden says as he hugs his
father.
“I’m already proud to call you my
son.” Hearing this makes Zayden begin to cry until his father wipes away his
tears. “I’m proud that you’re taking responsibility for your actions. Your mom is
probably smiling down on us from Heaven. You take so much after her.”
“I take after you too.”
“If you say so. You’ll have to take
of your friend by yourself. Something is weighing me down.”
“I got him.”
“You do, son.”
Zayden kisses his father then heads
downstairs to see Elias tearing apart the basement.
“I just tore apart your precious
porno mags, Zayden. Whatcha going to do about it?” Elias says.
“Forget them. I was going to burn
them anyway.”
“Really? After all the effort we went
through in stealing them? When did you become a saint?”
“I’m not. I’m just going to try to
change to be like one.”
“Hahaha, you’re funny. Both of us
know that you’re the last person in the world who could be considered a decent
person, but enough about that.”
Elias charges at Zayden with his
hands out not knowing that he’s doing exactly what Zayden wants. The two touch hands
and begin to remember their past. Elias was the perfect student while Zayden
was the worst. Elias got good grades and was liked by most while Zayden was the
opposite and had to cheat to get the same grades Elias got. When Elias saw
Zayden and Abagail’s more intimate moments, he wondered how he could cheat life
like how Zayden did. Later in the day, he would tell Zayden what he saw as a way
to get him to teach him how to cheat.
This started a mutual friendship that
most people in the school didn’t understand. Through their friendship, Elias looked
to be a better student while Zayden brought down the others with his pranks and
slightly changing their grades. Despite being what could loosely be called friends,
they enjoyed the simpler moments with one another such as relating to each
other’s families, sports, and when they were scheming. When Zayden defended
Elias from a jealous schoolmate, they realized that they had become actual
friends after months of pretending to be. They continued to enjoy their life
together until the day that Elias got into an accident.
The two boys liked pulling pranks
on each other as much as they liked pulling pranks on others, so when Zayden
was going to pretend to knock Elias down a hill, he didn’t think how much
it could hurt his friend, especially since he was going to catch him at the
last second. This didn’t end well as Elias ended up in the hospital because of
his injuries. Elias felt betrayed and no matter how much Zayden apologized, he
didn’t feel like accepting it.
“He uses you just as much as you
use him,” the demons whisper at Zayden, “In fact, he’s worse since he knows
that he does the wrong thing. At least you have your excuses. You might’ve
saved the other two, but this one doesn’t want to be saved.”
“I’m sorry for what I did to you,
Elias,” Zayden says while still locking hands with Elias.
The two struggle back and forth and
Elias tries to step on Zayden’s feet with his spider legs.
“I don’t want to hear it from you!
You pushed me off that cliff as a joke!”
“I will never pull a prank on you
or anyone else ever again.”
“Yeah right. As if I’ve never heard
you tell a lie to get out of a sticky situation.”
“He’s telling the truth,” Abagail
says as she crawls down the steps with Zayden’s father.
“You changed them. How?”
“I told them that I would change, I
meant it, and they believed me. I’m sorry for bringing you down with me, Elias.
I should be the one learning how to be a better person from you rather than you
learning how to be terrible like I am. I promise you that I’m a different
person now. I’ll visit you when you’re in the hospital and help you get better
and then we can do better things than cheat and pull petty pranks on people.
What do you think, brother?”
Elias recoils as he feels Zayden’s truthful
and strong spirit. He then changes back to normal and lies on the floor. Zayden
holds out his hand that Elias takes so that he can stand up. The demons scream
in defeat as the house shakes, twists, and turns until it turns back to normal.
The four of them are sitting in the family room. Happy that everything is back
to normal, Abagail hugs Zayden and kisses him.
“Um. You’re going to have to explain
this to me,” Zayden’s father says.
“Oh, that’s right. He doesn’t know,”
Zayden says while looking at Elias.
“You want me to explain it to him?”
Elias says.
The four of them have a nice chat
for a little while before Zayden’s father says, “Oh, I should get you back to
the hospital, Elias.”
“Nah, it’s good to be out of there.
I’ll stay here for a bit longer. It’s going to be difficult explaining this to
them anyway.”
Meanwhile, Abagail and Zayden are
by the front door with Abagail holding Zayden.
She says as quietly as she can, “Um.
This may not be the best time to say this but…”
“Just say it. Nothing can be more
surprising than what happened to us.”
“I’m pregnant.”
“What?!” Zayden’s father says
before Elias talks to him about parts of Zayden and Abagail’s relationship that
they left out.
“I…I see.”
“I know you’re graduating from
school soon so this is a lot to put on you, but I can take care of myself-”
“No. I’m going to take
responsibility for my actions. I’ll work whatever job and go to college if I have
to so I can take care of you and our child.”
“Why?”
“Because I love you. I really do.”
“Oh, Zayden.”
The two kiss as Elias smiles and
Zayden’s father throws his hands in the air.
“My son gets us into trouble with
demons and he’s the one who gets the girl in the end. I can’t believe it,”
Zayden’s father jokingly says.
“I love you too, dad.”
“I love you too, son.”
“You don’t need to tell me you love
me, Zayden,” Elias says.
“But you know I do. Not in a homo
way though.”
The four of them laugh and have
dinner together to celebrate having made it through such a difficult trial.
Zayden crosses himself and looks above to thank God and his mother for the
strength they gave him to repent and change his ways.
The End
