The Haunting of Ed III

​When I entered the house I spun on the spot to close the door. As I did I could see the create crawling up a tree in the rain. No doubt it was another illusion of the demon, but it might have been one of the minions to the demon. I could not bear to find out, so I settled on the idea that I was not in any real danger.

“Doctor, we are glad you are alright,” the priest said behind me. “Ed is...he is in the dining room.”

I turned to look at Cornelius with fear and a few hints of anger.

“Shouldn’t you be in there with him?” I asked him. “We need your help to destroy this creature.”

The priest looked down in shame, but in truth I really couldn’t blame him. It was not safe to be around Ed. He was a walking disaster with that leech of a demon on his shoulder. Still, I committed myself to the job so far and I felt it only right that I finish it. Ordering the priest to follow me, I walked through the crumbling home into what must have been the dining room. Ed stood at the end of the table, most likely where he sat as a child, staring into empty space.

“You remember it now, Ed, don’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah...I sat right here…” Ed replied. “I watched as my mother jumped across the table and my dad meet her with a knife like hers...and…”

Tears began to form in Ed’s eyes.

“God...I can’t take her voice anymore,” Ed weeped. “She keeps telling me to do it, but I can’t. That isn’t how I work, it isn’t who I am...I can’t do it!”

“Ed, you need to calm down, now,” I warned him, holding my hands out. “Whatever she is, we will put an end to her soon. Just fight her as best you can, like you’ve been doing.”

“This room is so dark,” Cornelius murmured.

I turned to look back at him. He stood at the entrance way, his hands folded in prayers, looking around the room, thoughtfully, ignoring Ed. The light above him fluttered to life, bathing him in a yellow glow. His face, darkened now as a silhouette, turned to look at me.

“Doctor, I cannot do this...my faith,” Cornelius murmured. “My God...has abandoned me.”

With those words the priests hands flung apart as he was ripped down the middle. There was a terrible snapping as bones broke, a sickening splashing as blood splattered on the ground.The priest had been divided from head to crotch, but the cut was not clean. It was harsh and violent.

“Ed! Get here now!” I roared.

Ed moved over towards me, my words seeming to cut through the chanting if the demon within him. He stood by me, pale, sickened to his core by what happened to the priest. Yet, there we both stood, not knowing how the demon did it, but wondering when it would happen to us.

“Ed, close your eyes and kneel in prayer,” I ordered him. He did so without question, knowing now was the most important time to embrace God.

As Ed fell to his knees and began murmuring his prayers I pointed my gun at his head. I wished I had already cocked it, because when I did he heard the click clearly and his prayers fell silent. Poor Ed’s heart must have broken in that instant before I pulled the trigger. My patient, a victim of his parents own foolishness, but a child that found God and lost him in seconds.

Ed collapsed, dead by my hand, on the floor of his old home. His blood seeped through the cracks in the floor, a face of grief stretched from ear-to-ear. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel sorrow for Ed, but after the years of hell people have no doubt experienced because of the demon that latched on him, I think the world is better without him, surely.

I wrote a fiction novel on the experience. Even though I became a devout believer in God and Satan, I still could not bring myself to let the world know that what I had been through actually happened. I wrote the novel from the perspective of a made-up character, but the story was the same.

I have often wondered if I had made the right decision in killing Ed, there have been many discussions if the character in my novel had made the right decision. It was too late now, but my heart felt so ready to accept that guilt. However, it had turned out to accept fear in the end.

My novel had made a fair amount of money and I ended up selling the rights to the story for a fortune. It went to some hot-shot production company who planned to turn it into a series or movie; I don’t know which. That money I invested into a large home in a county that was far away from Black Water.

It only took one late night for the truth to be revealed to me. I was reading over the files on Ed and soon discovered something that turned my blood cold. Ed had a sister yet-to-be born, that much information we knew, but what information I didn’t look over was the full-family biography.

As it turned out, Ed would have been a middle-child, being the second-born in the family. He had another sister, born three years earlier, but under financial circumstances the family had their daughter taken by child services. As I read that information, my home did not feel so quiet anymore. I stood up and walked over to the largest light and flicked it on. The light switch was by the door to the hallway, so it was impossible for me to miss the figures standing in the darkness. It was impossible for me to miss the blood-covered woman standing beside her grief-stricken brother. Impossible, to miss the tall woman that stood behind the two, starting at me in the flesh and then all three disappearing into nothing.​