Chapter
Tick ….. Tick ….. Tick …… Answer
The damp, cold air, on the icy rock walls, formed thin vapors of water, which slowly coalesced and gathered into droplets, following, drop by drop, drop by drop, releasing a monotonous, yet interesting music.
Here ….. Where is it ……..
After giving a few drops of water to fall successively on his face, George Luther opened his eyes hazily. Luther opened his eyes hazily.
It’s so dark here, there’s no light at all, there’s silence all around, but then there’s this huge hollow echo, it’s so scary, it’s so scary!
Mom, where is mom? Why hasn’t he come to his rescue yet? He wants his mommy. …..
The darkness seemed to appear a lot of ghostly faces, teeth and claws to lunge at him, each face is so hideous and horrible, each voice sounds so miserable, the body wounds seem to ache together, the ten-year-old boy can no longer hold back, in the cave cried out.
He remembered why he was here!
George’s mom, Jennifer, is a professor of history at the University of California, and this summer she joined a school archaeology team that traveled to Maine territory, somewhere on an Indian reservation, to conduct an archaeological research project.
George’s family had a dusty old house in the neighborhood, and because she was worried that George would have no one to take care of him at home, Mom stopped by and brought the only son to be cared for nearby.
I remember when he first entered the house, his mother opened the window and pointed out the crimson rocky mountains and the banks of the Ruin River, and told him that hundreds of years ago this neighborhood had been a place of worship for the Indians, where they worshipped shamans, held human sacrifices, and also drove sick prisoners who were terminally ill or who had committed serious crimes to the river, where they were confined to a circle and imprisoned for life until their deaths.
George couldn’t for the life of him figure out why his ancestors would build a house in a place like this. However, judging from the reaction, at least Dad was aware of the allusion, he had given strict orders that no one was allowed to return to the old mansion, Mom had made seven or eight requests in the past for the sake of her research work, all of which had been punched back, and this time they had come on a purely personal trip, without informing Dad beforehand.
Mom had fallen out with Dad, I think, and even though they usually put on an appearance of husband and wife and joy before their children, neighbors, and each other’s friends and clients, George knew that there were many conflicts that existed between the couple that had long since appeared to have fallen out.
And being a freak of nature is one of the things that makes parents disagree, I guess!
Not being able to see the light, it was impossible to know the exact time, and I didn’t know exactly how long I had just been unconscious. I’m afraid it’s been a few hours. According to the time, mom should have driven back from the ruins three miles away. But even if mom came back and found her son missing, would she come to the backyard to look for him? Would she figure out that her son’s wheelchair was smashing into a hole in the ground in the backyard?
Damn, how could I have never imagined that in the backyard of the old mansion, there would be such a big hole in the ground, hidden under the grass, pushing the wheelchair out to blow the wind, a little bit of inattention, and then the whole person fell to the bottom of the hole in the ground.
The wound hurt again, the wheelchair had absorbed most of the impact when it fell again, it was now a piece of scrap metal, and I had probably broken a few bones myself!
George sighed and looked at his only remaining right hand and right foot, his right hand was limp and couldn’t be lifted. In the past, every time he was lost or bullied, he would cry out, waiting for his mom and sister to come, help him solve the problem, and gently comfort him, but this time was different, no one would come here, and since no one would hear him if he cried muffled tears, he might as well not cry at all!
Will he or she just die? …………….
Surprisingly, his mind was unusually clear at the moment, and George thought of many things, many things that should not have occurred to an ordinary ten year old boy. Perhaps, for a ten year old boy, he was not supposed to be ordinary, or perhaps I should say …… monstrous!
Would anyone be saddened by this if they just died?
Those guys at school must not, George has no close friends in the outside world, ever!
Well, what about family?
“Daddy must not,” George had an affirmative answer.
That guy has wanted me to die early since the day I was born …..
George and his twin sister, Lillian, were Siamese twins, born with their bodies joined together, and the doctors, after asking for permission, made the decision to sacrifice George by cutting off the arms and legs they shared to Lillian, leaving George with the odd appearance of only having half an arm and leg. Even his heart was quartered, which caused him to have a serious heart condition from birth, and he could die violently at any time as a result.
His father’s wishes were that his misshapen lump of flesh should have been thrown in the trash, but his mother refused to do so, and that’s how a little life was saved.
George hated the old man from the bottom of his heart.
Not just for the cutthroat factor, but for knowing all too well what this man is all about.
Dad was considered to be full of money, but it was all patrimony, and all the generations of George’s ancestors, before him, had served in the priesthood of the Christian Church, and even the man himself, before he was secretly excommunicated, had been a pastor.
The reason for excommunication was simple, an impure sexual relationship with a parishioner; basically, Christian ministers are allowed to marry, but if the other person is an eleven-year-old girl, that’s another story.
In his youth, Dad was a flirtatious pastor with a special interest in young girls. At that time, he took a liking to Mom, who attended weekly church services, and initiated all sorts of tactics to get her on board, and the two of them took advantage of confessions to have rendezvous every time they were in the confessional until Grandpa found out.
Grandpa, a super old fart, was furious and would have come to the door to make amends and apologize, but by that time Mom was pregnant with her sister Elizabeth, which made Grandpa determined to force Dad to marry Mom five years later when she was just about to reach legal adulthood.
George thought to himself:
“Honestly, I have to thank Grandpa for his curmudgeonly ways, or else Mom probably would have aborted the baby like the rest of the dozens of girls who were victimized; and Grandpa worked pretty hard on this one, so if he hadn’t desperately tried to hang on until the middle of his sixth year before he died, Dad would have surely forgotten all about it and continued to create victims.
This is the marriage of father and mother. And because of that, that man that don’t hate to see me, as soon as he sees me, he remembers what sins he has committed, and because of the sins he has committed, God has given a child like him as a punishment.
Dad must have hated Grandpa because it was written in his will that as soon as he got divorced, the inheritance of his property was canceled, forcing Dad to be forever bound by the sins of his own making. Coincidentally, I hate him too, and it seems that mutual hatred between male parent-children is a fairly long-standing family tradition in our family.”
George followed, thinking of his mother, who would have been the one to cry the most if his body had been found.
Mom, beautiful mom, Jennifer, is just shy of thirty-three years old, and you would never guess that a woman so beautiful and mature would be the mother of three.
Mom was very good at reading, and with nothing to do after marriage and the family’s financial abundance, she worked her way up to a doctorate and was promoted to professor, and the three children in the family should have inherited their good brains from their mother’s side.
Undoubtedly, as far as a woman’s happiness is concerned, the mother is very unhappy, having to take care of such a deformed son all by herself and not being able to get any semblance of solace from her husband’s side, who, fortunately, has two daughters who can be called honorable.
Sister Elizabeth Luther is a twenty-two year old nurse. Sister Elisabeth Luther, a twenty-two year old nurse, is a young woman with a kind heart who is somewhat influenced by her brother’s direction of practice.
As far as I could remember, the ones who would come to help with any problems they had were their sisters and their mom.
Sister is recently getting married to her boyfriend, Johnny, who is a policeman and six years her senior. George hates this future brother-in-law, a man who seems to be jealous of his sister’s concern for him, and every time she’s not around, he pulls out his sidearm, aims it at George’s head, and pretends to say, “Bang! Bang! Bang, bang, bang, you freak”, and then enjoys George’s fearful expression.
A sister who’s as good as mom, but wants to marry this kind of man, it seems like she doesn’t have much of an eye for men either.
The last thing that comes to mind is the sister, Lillian B. Luther, for George, was the one relative with the deepest blood ties and the hardest to make a judgment on.
Lillian hadn’t been much help to George as he grew up, but that was purely due to lack of power, and the little girl’s incessant dripping of tears whenever George was hurt or something was enough to show her sincerity.
But George hated her, the correct term is that George desperately tried to make himself hate her.
Subconsciously, George couldn’t let go of the feeling that it was his sister who had stolen his life, the left half of his body, and that if it hadn’t been for Lillian, he would have been like any other ten year old boy, living a healthy and active life under the care of his mother, and even happier than all the other boys of his age.
But because of Lillian, she herself has become a monstrous monster cursed with the need to hide from the eyes of others.
This flame, when seen in Lillian, burned particularly brightly. Obviously, she had performed a cutting operation, but Lillian, apart from the occasional slight limp, could run, jump, and dance without any semblance of after-effects at all. She was like a small white flower growing in a spring meadow, blooming luxuriantly and beautifully, radiating sunrise-like vitality, while in contrast to his sister’s splendor, George felt extraordinarily gloomy and ugly, which made him even more intolerable.
But none of those things mattered now; he was probably dying, no, in the process of dying.
Though his own death would have given his father a good laugh, something that rather upset George.
However, mom, sister ….. And Lillian, all shed tears for themselves, I guess!
Such a life is quite enough ……..
‘Do you really think so?’
In a daze, George heard strange noises and his eyes, which had been half-closed, snapped open.
“Who?”
‘What you just thought, did you mean it?’
It wasn’t a hallucination, some voice was really talking to him, and George half braced himself and peered around, surrounded by nothing but rock walls, let alone half a person.
“You ….. Where are you …. What are you?”
Perhaps because he was still young, or because people are naturally fearless in desperate situations, George felt a little weird, but he wasn’t scared at all, and sat up, groping for the rock wall behind him.
‘Not that way, behind you on the left, yes, a little below, there’s a recessed area, yes, that’s it, open that up!’
It wasn’t technically speaking, as the voice was going directly into George’s head, and George knew that there was something out of the ordinary that had happened to him. There was a small depression at the indicated stone wall, and incredibly, George actually felt some sort of pulsation when he touched it at his fingers; the rock itself didn’t move, but something did send a message in it. Regardless, this was good news for a situation that was as bad as it could get right now.
George was excited, but to break the rock wall with his bare hands, which is not his ability, under the dilemma, the idea, from the wheelchair has fallen into the scrap metal pull down a rigid bar, right hand grip, dead to the depression to dig. He has only one hand and one foot, these in the eyes of others easy action, in his but spent a lot of hard work, in short, when the shovel to the nineteenth, the rock wall, “knock” sound, revealing a hollow, George reached in, groping for a while, grasping a square thing, busy will be tugging it out.
It was a square iron box, heavy and heavy, I don’t know what it contained, the iron box was stamped with some kind of emblem, so familiar, he had seen it before, yes, it was the emblem on the fireplace in the old house, the cross and circle, it was the representative emblem of their Lutheran family ah!
‘Open this box, you can do it, boy!’
George’s hands were trembling, the box seemed to be sealed with some kind of heavy metal lock, it seemed difficult to open, but that was no reason for him to hesitate, somewhere in the boy’s mind there was a distant cry, a warning message from his genes, “Danger, put it down, don’t touch it”. As if in a trance, his hand slowly left the box.
‘I can get you out, don’t you want to get out of here?’
The sound awakened George, who leapt forward to catch the iron box, and just at the moment his fingers touched it, the iron box, which had seemed so solid, opened with a crash.
“This is …..” There was something dry and shriveled inside, and George stumbled backward in shock as he looked closer. It was a palm that had shrunk to the size of only six or seven centimeters, with all five fingers, and at first glance it looked weird and eerie to the core.
”Don’t be afraid, it’s a monkey’s paw! It’s not human, you don’t have to be afraid.’
The voice from earlier appeared again, and George, boldly, approached and picked up the monkey’s paw, and suddenly a certain story he had read before flashed through his mind, and he turned to it, and asked in a whisper, “Are you …. something …..”
”I am the God of the Underworld, the Chief of Evil who oversees the twenty-three layers of hell and eight hundred billion demons, and my name is…”
George didn’t believe it at all, he was not very old but he knew much more than an ordinary child, he could hear from the tone that the other party was bluffing, it didn’t have that much power at all, and there were only eighteen layers of hell, not twenty-three.
The voice seemed to sense George’s skepticism and immediately changed its tone, ‘Yes, you are so wise, please forgive my boring lies, I am the Monkey’s Paw Elf and am here at your disposal.’
“Why are you in my family’s metal box, are you sealed up?”
‘No. A long time ago, your great ancestors made the Monkey’s Paw as a way of granting wishes for the children of the Luthor family, and the family crest on the iron box is proof that I am a family heirloom.’
George asked, “Granting wishes? What kind of powers do you have? Can you manipulate other people’s minds?” Even his palms began to sweat at the thought.
”No, I can’t cast that kind of ability, that would have to be a demon of the fourth level or higher, I can only stimulate the endocrine secretion through thought-sense waves, slightly affecting the creature’s emotions.”
Affecting Emotions ….. This may not sound useful.
It seemed to be an elf of little use, and George was somewhat chagrined that this represented a shattered dream of beauty in the story.
“Can you get us out of here?”
‘Yes, the house above is already occupied, and I can take your message of call for help and reinforce it to go directly into their hearts.’
Great, George smiled to himself, it’s like a megaphone …..
There was no other way out at the moment, and it would not be a bad idea to get out of the trap if he could summon someone.
”If you agree, you must make a contract with me.”
“Signing the Deed! “
‘Yes, in accordance with the rules that were in place when I was created, I can only be used at one time by one of the Luthor bloodline, with whom I am contracted to be at their disposal for the rest of my life.’
It’s a contract ah ….. If that’s the inevitable way to use the power, it can’t be helped.
George nodded and began to listen to the rules of the Monkey Paw Elf’s contract. Basically nothing special, one could even say a lopsided contract, George only had to promise not to abandon the Monkey Paw at will, while the Monkey Paw side promised not to disobey orders, not to lie when answering the master’s questions ….. and other conditions.
Finally, both parties whispered the contents of the contract once, and it was finalized.
During the low chant, George had a flash of insight that there was a clause in the contract that guaranteed that the master would gradually learn about the power of the magical path after using the Monkey’s Paw, and he surreptitiously spun the words, not TEACH but TRANSLATE.
After it was all over, the sound of human voices came from above, the monkey’s paw beckoning with its power, and George responded to their voices, the bamboo basket with the rope tied to it being dangled after it.
One’s paternal blood relatives never left one anything good, but only this time …..
George thought this and put his monkey paw in his breast pocket while mentally saying, “What shall I call you from now on?”
‘I have many different names, but I like the name Mephisto.’
“Alright! Mephisto, please teach me more in the future.”
The bamboo basket was slowly pulled up, the sun shone into the shadowy cavern, and the ten-year-old boy was back on the ground.
And of course, there’s it …….
The demon was happy that now, after hundreds of years, it had finally left that iron box. Before that iron box was sealed and buried into the ground, multiple prohibitions were placed on it, and unless one was of the blood of the Lutheran family and possessed a certain trait, one would never be able to open it.
A certain trait ….. Not bad at all!
The boy was interesting; he was young, pure, simple-minded, untouched by any powerful temptation, and possessed a certain quality to be developed.
If the soul of every human being could be compared to a stone of some kind, then the soul of this boy is a pure black diamond. With good faceting, it would soon become priceless.
Hundreds of years of imprisonment, the iron box in the holy fire burning, it is now very weak, only like a fledgling inferior demon, if the iron box is discovered a few years later, maybe it just ashes and disappears.
But, now it’s out and has a lot of time to get to know the new world well.
Darkness that will slowly extend ……….
This is a story I wrote in imitation of the Demon Amulet, and where it will go in the future is uncertain, and while I’ve thought of some plot points, I haven’t decided on the fine details yet either.
I’d like to ask for your help and input here, if you were this demon, what tactics would you use to lure a teenager slowly into the dark world of crime, depravity, horror, and sex.
I will consolidate the various views and then proceed to the next direction, so please feel free to comment.