Encounters by Mak

Mak has been asked to help an Arab family who claim their house is plagued by an evil presence. To get to the bottom of the mystery, he spends the night alone to encounter whatever it is that has been terrorizing the family since they moved in a few months earlier.

Mak awoke with a start to a black bedroom. “Is it here, in the house, with me?” He asked himself in a whisper, his nostrils filled with a rotten stench. 

Turning over to the beside table, he checked his phone for the time. Blinking back at him was not any number he recognized. The figures looked like four upside down crosses in a row. 

He breathed out in surprise. Into the dark he spewed icy drops of air. It was abnormally cold for a summer night. Looking about him, the room was all shadow. Then a flicker of movement in the corner.

At the foot of the bed, suddenly staring at him, sunken eyes, bedraggled hair, pale, pale skin, spidery veins across its cheeks. The teeth, rotten, yet somehow sharp like fangs. The eyes, the eyes. They were now glowing back at him. Mak shrank away, feeling every fiber of his being on edge, every hair standing up.

He stared at it.

With inhuman speed, it launched at him.

He grabbed it by the shoulders, his fingers burning as if he held lumps of ice in his bare hands. 

“Good, you're here. We need to talk,” he said, his jaw set tight. 

The creature only emitted a low growl before uttering a stream of bilious words from what had once been a person’s mouth.

“Get out of this house. Get out.”

Mak let it go and it flew up to the ceiling and then crashed back down, its hideous face inches from his, shrieking at him like a gale. 

He let out another cloud of breath and addressed it as calmly as he could.

"I know why you're here. I know what you think you are. It doesn't matter you see.”

A hissing reply. 

“I will crush you.”

Mak blinked and then spoke, with more authority in his voice this time.

“There's no science yet to explain what you are but you think you're a demon.” 

The thing cackled wickedly back at him. 

“Satan’s waiting, I will drag you to hell!”

It flew around the room.

Mak got up from the bed. 

“I read about you. You believed yourself to be a witch or at least claimed to be. Took the life of your own child before murdering many more, proclaimed yourself Satan's follower, and then promptly killed yourself. All of this because you said your land had been stolen in what the 1600s, 1700s and you would punish everybody for that, for the land being taken.” 

The creature shouted back at him.

“You will all burn.” 

Raising a finger in its direction, Mak tried to reason with it. 

“Except there's no moral high ground for you. Not really.” 

The fiend spat back at him.

“Shut your mouth, I will own you and all you love.”

Mak was beginning to feel more like himself. He collected his thoughts and shared them freely with the foul apparition. 

“No, no, you won't. You see, these things always come to an end. It will come to an end. It is finite. You're not going to be doing this forever. You're terrorizing a family right now. You've terrorized many families, ruined lives. It's going to stop now that I’m here but I've got an offer for you.” 

There was a sneering response.

“What could you offer me? Satan provides!”

Mak raised his palms. 

“Look, can you calm down about the whole hell and the devil and all that kind of stuff? Okay, it's just the story you've told yourself, but I've got a better story for you. You're not really a victim. The land that was taken from you wasn't really yours. I mean, there were people already here before you got here. You know, Native Americans, indigenous people … it's a familiar tale sadly. White people came, settlers came and took the land. You took the land, it wasn't yours. You're a criminal. You deserve to be punished if everybody else deserves to be punished for what they did to you.” 

The creature seemed to diminish a little even as it railed at him. 

“How dare you! They will pay. Everyone will pay. I will do Satan's work.” 

Mak was firm. 

“No, no, no, you're wrong.”

A vicious silence before it spoke again.

“What are you?”

Mak shrugged.

“Someone able to sense things others do not. It is like a sensitivity. Yet there isn’t any hard evidence to explain it. I believe in it, I guess, is the working theory.”

“I curse all of God’s servants.”

The power of its anger had lost some of its edge.

Leaning back, hands behind his head on the pillow, Mak spoke to the ceiling. 

“There is no explanation for what you are or how I do what I do. After too many years spent trying to find one I just decided to accept it in the end. I suggest you do the same and stop all the nonsense.”

The creature frowned and started to shake and moan. It cried out and was fading in front of Mak’s eyes. 

Mak stood up, a hand out towards it.

“Wait … there is a way out for you, something you can do now. There's a place in the world that needs you. The thing that you hate so much, the taking of someone's land, is actually still happening. In Palestine. The occupied territories where settlers make home on Palestinian land, pushing the rightful owners out. The settlers shouldn't be there. Why don't you go and wreak havoc there? Believe me, you'll do good business, and it will last a while.”

The next morning the sun was shining through the windows as Mak drank a cup of coffee. He looked exhausted. There were uneaten scrambled eggs in a plate on the kitchen table in front of him. 

A couple, followed by three young girls, entered the room. The woman looked at Mak and then at the man.

“This can’t be the same house.” 

Her husband hugged her and gathered the children about them.

Mak drained his cup.

“Don't worry, your problems are over. You won't be bothered anymore.”

Two weeks later … 

Mak walked out of a cafe and picked up his pace, weaving through people on the crowded street.

When his ear caught a snippet of something said behind him, he slowed down. 

“It was on the TV news, not some fake video on social, it must be true." 

“Demons aren’t real.”

“No, no, there are like hundreds of families that say the same thing. The settlers, they swear a demon is terrorizing them.”

Mak allowed himself a wry smile as he dashed away. 

Thanks for reading!