He’s here! The Dark Lord has returned. It’s too late, too late for all of us! You think you know it all don’t you? That God waved his hand and created us all? Oh how little you know! He comes! Comes to take back what is his!”
The voice cut off with a click of a button. Dr. Thomas James tilted back in his leather office chair and rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands and released a long slow sigh. Twenty years, he thought with resignation. Dealing with every mental illness known to man; perhaps it was starting to catch up with him. The long nights reviewing patient files, being spit upon, patients pissing themselves and even the occasional physical attack.
“You’re not a young man anymore dear boy,” he muttered. His fingers moved up from his temple and slipped through the wavy hair silvered with age. The cases were always stressful but lately they seemed to be intensifying. It wasn’t just this current patient, this John Doe that had been dumped into his lap. Several of his patients seemed to be sliding back into their psychoses.
Mary Brown was a prime example; she was on the road to getting her life back together, with the proper medications the voices had receded into the back of her mind. She interacted with the other patients and her periods of lucidity had grown to days at a time. That was before John appeared in the ward.
During the last two weeks Mary retreated into her own reality. She had attacked an orderly and attempted to rip out his throat with her teeth. The voices had returned with a demonic vengeance and her lucid periods didn’t last more than an hour before the screaming began. She spent most of her days strapped in bed and fed through a tube.
Dr. James shifted his slightly overweight form and pulled himself back to an upright sitting position behind his desk. He stared at the tape recorder for a moment and considered calling it a night. Come back in the morning with a good night’s sleep and hot cup of coffee.
He shifted his eyes from the tape recorder to the door at the far end of the room. There was so much he needed to do, so much work to complete before first session tomorrow. He should go, just walk away and try again tomorrow. He couldn’t do that. Too many questions remained unanswered. There was something about the nameless man, something that left him feeling ill at ease. With one last glance at the door he steeled himself for a long night and turned his attention back to the tape recorder. He pressed the play button and returned to the open folder on John Doe.
“You really don’t understand do you?” the voice hissed softly through the tiny speakers.
“Perhaps I should start from the beginning?”
“Yes, perhaps that would be a good place to start.” His own voice replied calmly.
“In the beginning there was darkness. In this darkness there dwelled a creature. This creature was ancient, older than anything you could possibly comprehend. It lived upon the land, fed on the lesser beings that dwelt in the darkness with it. Are you following me so far?” the voice asked in a whisper.
“Yes,” Dr. James had replied in his best doctor voice.
“This old thing dwelled in the swirling mist of the unformed world and enjoyed the pain that it inflicted on others. In modern terms it would be referred to as evil.”
“You mean the Devil?” Dr. James broke in.
“No, that’s a bunch of bullshit created by the Christian religion, a bogeyman designed to keep people in line. Remember that Lucifer was an angel first and fell from grace because of his pride. This creature of the darkness knew nothing of pride, nothing of good and evil. It simply existed to bring chaos and pain to the lesser beings that it held in its thrall.”
“Ok I understand, please continue.”
“I don’t know what caused the creation of this universe, perhaps it was God, or the Big Bang. All I know is that when the sun ignited and the light covered the land, the creature was banished from his realm.”
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