When his wife found him, he had only been dead for a couple of hours, and there was a look of terror on his face. The night before, he had been reading an anthology of short horror stories. The first several he read were unimpressive. They all involved the typical horror clichés: murders, monsters, and menacing houses. He had almost given up on finding anything scary in the book but thought he would read one more. It was this story that set off the chain of events.
It was a cool October evening, and his wife had taken the kids to her mother’s house for the weekend and planned to return early the following day. He had been working hard all weekend and was looking forward to the quiet evening alone. He loved reading horror stories this time of year and never expected the evening would take a turn for the worse.
The final story he read had something sinister about it. It was about a dark presence that overtook a man, a reasonable man who slowly drifted further and further into perversion. What distressed him was the kinds of evil the man did. The acts of evil described in the book were so malevolent the only thing that kept going through his mind as he read it was, “This author is messed up.” It read more like a confession than fiction.
He felt dirty after reading it. It crossed the line of every taboo he could think of and some he had never considered. He felt as if he had been polluted, and the dark presence mentioned in the book was now hanging over him.
He was a man of science, so he knew what was happening. There was no presence surrounding him. The story had crossed social standards, sent his imagination to work, and agitated his nervous system. Once this happens, and your nerves are on edge, you will begin to fear things that are not there. That is what he loved about good horror stories. They could give you the sensation of being in danger when you were perfectly safe.
He knew how to calm himself. He went to the kitchen, poured some whiskey, and used it to wash down a Xanax. As for the guilt he felt, he could explain that too. The conscience is the end of a long line of evolutionary conditioning. It is a product of survival of the fittest. There is no real right or wrong. These feelings of guilt that move us away from certain behaviors helped pre-humans survive. It all boils down to chemical reactions in the body and brain. Our ancestors who lacked this died out, and those who had it survived. It is not based on any true morality. If stealing and killing without remorse helped the species survive, that is what the conscience would promote today.
His wife had different ideas. She had bought into the myths and fairytales of religion several years after they were married. She believed that some invisible God, who refuses to give us empirical evidence of himself, created us to know right and wrong. She thinks he wrote his law on our hearts, and those who suppress that truth will face his wrath unless they turn to Jesus for forgiveness. He would have never married her if she was a Christian when they met, but she was a good woman despite this ridiculousness.
Usually, the Xanax and whiskey would have kicked in by this point, but the feeling was still there, giving him a chill. He poured himself another whiskey, a double this time, and turned on the gas fireplace. Right then, he thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. It looked like there had been movement down the dark hallway. He immediately walked over, flipped on the light, and said, “Is someone there? If so, I have a gun.”
He looked around a bit, but the house was empty. He laughed at himself. It had been a long time since a horror story had this effect on him. The last time was when he was a kid, and his imagination was untethered to reality. It was that old Tales from the Crypt movie from 1972. He was only six when he saw it. It was the 80s, and his parents had it on VHS but had told him he could not watch it. One evening, while his friend was over to spend the night and his parents had gone out, they were left in the care of his 13-year-old sister, and she could not care less about what they did.
The movie was also an anthology of short stories. Each story told tales about the evil that someone had done, but the ending scared the kid-version of himself the most. The Crypt keeper sends all the evil characters to hell for their sins and, at the movie’s end, looks to the camera and asks, “Who’s next?” He was glad he had outgrown being gullible to all that nonsense, but tonight, with his fear heightened, he could feel the chill of that story coming back.
He needed to get his mind to focus on something else, so he pulled out his iPad and began looking at Facebook, then Twitter, and as usual, he began to go down his typical rabbit hole. He always ended up on websites with illicit content. Then it happened again. He was sure he felt something brush his neck, and as he turned around, there was movement but nothing there.
His mind was growing fuzzy, and he was having trouble concentrating. The medication and whiskey had never affected him this way before. As time passed, he grew fatigued but could not get up and go to bed. His head was pounding, and it felt like something was holding him down.
His vision was growing blurry, but he could see shapes coming toward him. One seemed to go right into his stomach, making him nauseous. He was confused. It felt like something had come to take him.
Right then, though his vision was still blurred, and he could not make out all the details, stood the most terrifying presence he had ever seen. He grabbed his phone and started recording, and then, after a short period of pure horror like he had never experienced, he lost control of his body, and everything went black.
When his wife found him early the following day, he had only been dead for a couple of hours, and there was a look of terror on his face. She immediately called 911. What happened was that when he turned on the fireplace, there was a carbon monoxide leak that filled the room. The doctors assured her he went peacefully and likely just fell asleep despite the contortion on his face.
A few weeks later, after the funeral, she finally sat in the chair where he had died. She slipped her hand between the arm and the cushion and felt something. It was his phone, which she had not been able to find. Once she charged it and began looking, she found an hour-and-a-half video at the end of his camera roll.
The video’s last hour and 15 minutes were not worth watching—just blackness and silence until the phone ran out of storage or the battery went dead. The footage was shaky in the first 15 minutes and focused on one section of the living room. For several minutes, there was no sound. Then, in the most tortured voice she had ever heard, he said, “Do you see him?” “Do you see him? He’s real,” but there was nothing there. At that moment, the phone flew out of his hand and fell between the cushions. The screen went black. Though muffled, she could still hear his voice. He cried, “It’s true, It’s true. I had it all wrong.”
-D. Eaton
The Fight of Faith 