There are memories we have from when we were kids that are so hazy or bizarre or horrifying that it’s hard to say if they ever happened at all. The brain has a funny way of dealing with trauma, it will essentially lie to itself, the same way it does with paranoia and love, the brain will swear to itself, like a man on trial, that things we remember we in fact don’t remember. It buries memories so deep that they surface in flashes, like clips from an old movie you weren’t supposed to watch. A face, a room, a spilled cup of red drink all over a white carpet, or in this case, a southern lake right before the sun goes down. The older I get the more indistinguishable hours stretch between me and that lake, and that man, and that smell. The older I get the futhurer away the things that happened on that day crawl from me. I’ve always known what I saw was real, despite the frantic efforts of mind trying it erase it. But the older I get, the more life that sprawls out around me, the more I begin to doubt my eyes, the more I doubt that jolt I get when I hear the sounds that only ring out at night when the lights are off. So I’ll say it now, with conviction and assurance while I’m still able too, I saw the devil when I was 7 years old by a river in Louisiana.
Like I said, the details of my meeting with Satan are hazy. The location was most defiantly a river, I remember the sun setting, turning the water into that gold color you see in paintings in the lobbies of hotels. I asked my Grandma a few years back was there any lakes by her old house in Bogalusa, Louisiana and she told me that me and my grandfather would go fishing at Jennings lake about a mile away from their home. I’m sure that there must have been a river somewhere thou, because I remember a current traveling to the east carrying an old tire. I wasn’t with my grandfather either, I was alone. I don’t remember much of my grandfather except that he had a perfectly grey mustache on a perfectly brown face and that he was very nice man, better than I guess he could have been seeing as thou he wasn’t my biological grandfather.
Yeah, I was alone and the sun was going down. I sat on the ridge of the lake or river. I could see the other side of the water, tall grass and dirt roads. Dragonflies hovered around, sporadically going from cat tail to cat tail, settling then disappearing.
I was enjoying the smells. Fresh water has that dirty scent, The kind of dirty one can over look because the same grime that makes it stink is the same scent that sticks on your clothes and makes people think you had worked hard. The breeze rolled over me every so often, like it was reminding me that it hadn’t forgot me. My fingernails were dirty and I might have been wearing sandals because I remember an ant crawling on my toes, although that could be from another memory. When you’re a kid you don’t seem to mind the weather much, but I do know that the temperature couldn’t have been over 80. My fishing pole rested against a tree a few yards away. I didn’t like fishing, I didn’t like touching worms, and I hated when ants crawled on my open toes.
How long I was there before I saw him is lost in my subconscious but I don’t know that I wasn’t five minutes away from packing up and continuing the walk back. I twitched at first, my neck jerked to the left and for a microsecond I felt sadder than I’d ever felt. A minute passed and an aggressive wind blew. A gust that seemed angry, not at me, but at itself. A guilty wind, guilty for what it was carrying. There are those times in our life where we are sucked out of our heads and we a given permission to view ourselves as instances happen. Usually in these out of bodies experiences we seem to be on autopilot, everything happening at a reflex, but for about 30 seconds I could see myself. Long enough to ration that is was an out of body experience and that something was wrong. I felt my mouth drop open and I saw it first hand as if I was sitting next to my body doing it, those seconds seemed an hour and a became doubtful of my own existence. My view of myself began to fade and I was being dragged of the ground and into sky, across the water, my body looked up from the ridge and as I extended my hand towards it extended it’s hand toward me. There was a little less than a half mile of air between me and my body. I was sweating and panicking and about to scream when I heard.
‘Hello there little boy.’ I was back in my body, back on the ridge. But after hearing that voice, that even toned almost singing voice, I wished to every God I could have just kept floating into clouds. I looked to my left and there was figure walking toward me, dressed in church clothes. He face seemed to change forms completely about three time before he got close enough for me to make it out, as if the devil was searching for the perfect face to scare me with. And as he closer he seemed to grow unnaturally tall, as if he was adjusting his height. Soon he was right next to me looking down and smiling the way a stranger does when they hold the door open for you.
‘I said hello, have you no manners?’ He said still smiling. He wore black slacks and a white shirt with the first two buttons undone. His hair was wiry and silver and he had grey stubble. He had deep blue eyes, almost like at one point they had been very bright.
‘Oh now don’t be rude boy.’ He sang. ‘You’ll hurt my feelings’ He rose his hand and I flinched. He grabs his heart and frown, the corner of lips went so far down it scared me.
‘Hi, who are you?’ The words rushed out of my mouth.
‘Who am I?’ He laughed “Who am I? What a question to ask. There is no possible way I can answer that.’
He takes his hand and run it through his hair as he looks up into the sky with a smirk still lingering on his long pale face. ‘ You can ask what I am, even when I am. And if you’re particularly brave you can ask me who I’ve been. But who I AM? Oh no no no, I can’t tell you that my boy. In fact, who are you? Hmmm, can you answer that? HmmmmMMMmmm?’
‘I’m Adam’ I stuttered a lot when I was younger so I wasn’t very talkative for fear of stumbling on my words and looking foolish. But around this man my voice seemed clear and full of a certain spirit that, if used on anyone else, would have been quite impressive.
‘Oh well I knowWWww all that. I mean who are you, inside.
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I mean who are you when are angry? Who are you when you are alone in your head where no one can hear or see the things you want to do? Who are you when you can get away with it? You see people are just persons in public, they fearRRrrRR the judgment and persecution from the very people that in their dreams they murder and steal and covet. Things aren’t like they were Adam, things aren’t like they will be.’ He laughs and asks me again ‘Who are you, on the inside?’
‘I..don’t know.’
‘Well,’ he knells in front of me and I smell burning paper on his skin and clothes. ‘Maybe I should cut you open and rip your guts out the see who you are inside.’ He has razor teeth and a snake’s tongue, and I picture myself in a puddle of dirt dried blood on the river bank with my stomach and spleen and lungs and intestines and kidneys on the ground. I’m coughing blood the man is rolling on the ground in tear he is laughing so hard.
‘Please don’t.’ I start to cry.
‘I suppose that would be rude.’ He looks disappointed then looks at the lake and smiles. ‘Say boy is that your fishing rod?’
I turn around to the tree its resting on and it isn’t there, my head whips around and he has it in his hands, standing over the lake.
‘I’m going to go.’ I say, but I know he won’t let me.
‘Not yet AdammMMMmm. I want to send you home with a delicious diner.’ He looks intent at the water. ‘ Oh he’s deep down there, this my take some time.’ He laughs as he reels something up. I finally get to my feet and begin to back away. He yanks at the pole and a bloated blue corpse emerges out of the water and flops on the bank. The body has large patches of hair missing. It eyes are shut likes it in a deep sleep, but its mouth is open, the lips seems to be dissolving slowly. It smells like ground beef when its left in the sun.
‘How appetizing’ He laughs loudly and the grass around us starts to die, I start running. Fast. So fast it hurt, my feet crash against the ground. I look back and he is laughing, doubled over clinching his gut. I’m crying and the wind is blowing at my back, trying to help me. I turn around again and he is dancing with the body. I get further, but the laughing is still in my ears. I look back a final time and his figure has changed, he is no longer the slender man in the sacks, he is now a 12 foot tall beast with the legs of a pig and antlers, not horns but deer antlers that sprout out in every direction.
It’s hard to say what happens next. I know I didn’t tell my grandfather of grandmother because for some reason once I saw the blue wood panel of their house I felt a divine safety. I knew they wouldn’t believe me, I really didn’t believe me, My brain has veiled the run lead me or the events of the next few days. But I do know that I was scolded for loosing the fishing pole and when my grandfather and I went to go try to find it the next day there were large burn marks in the grass and on the walk back home my grandfather made me walk in front of him and he looked back every few yards with his fist clinched.
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