Thursday 12th September.
Cornell First Presbyterian Church.
Tuyen had been sorely mistaken when she thought an emergency church service on a Thursday would be quieter than the normal Sunday one. While the church wasn’t full, it was busy enough for her to feel uncomfortable. She’d been squashed in the middle of a row between two separate sets of grieving families. She vaguely recognised them, but thankfully they were too caught up in their emotions to pay attention to her. Even so, she did her best to make herself as small as possible.
She didn’t particularly want to be here, but she was desperate. Her hallucinations hadn’t gotten any better, and it was getting more difficult to tell which thoughts were hers or
something else’s. She was almost certain now that her shadow was the cause of everything. She didn’t know what it was- a ghost or a demon- but if something awful had been attached to her, maybe it could be removed.
It didn’t seem particularly affected by being in such a holy place, however. It lurked at her feet, tauntingly watching her. Its whispers overlapped with the sermon she was struggling to pay attention to. It even collaborated with Reverend Mars, following his words to tell Tuyen how she’d gone against the teachings and sinned. She wasn’t particularly devout, but her Aunt had instilled plenty of Christian guilt in her. She couldn’t just shake off the Shadow’s words… It was right, after all.
Her hands clasped tightly in her lap and she kept her head slightly bowed as if in constant prayer, her eyes flickering between the Reverend at the front and her feet. The longer the service went on, the more anxious she felt about what she was here to do. Reverend Mars terrified her on the best of days… But who else would be able to exorcise a possible demon from her?
“...After all, my brothers and sisters, turn yourselves to the gospel of Luke! Our Lord Jesus drove an impure spirit from the soul of a man in Galilee!” Reverend Michael Mars spoke with resolute passion, accent occasionally and subtly alternating to a southern preacher or transatlantic salesman - like an actor still ironing out the subtleties of a character.
“I see many sad faces here today; which is why I felt it my duty to offer these additional sermons for those seeking spiritual guidance.” Reverend Mars gently closed his eyes, arms extended as if offering an embrace. “Our children have sinned, YES! And some have, unfortunately, paid the price for it. But what is it the bible teaches us, my brothers and sisters? Hate the sin, YES!... But
love the sinner...”
A solemn gravitas, Michael let that note linger in the air for a moment much like he had when rehearsing yesterday in his office mirror. While his face wore a mask of grim compassion, inside he was beaming. His sermons had all been home runs as far as his performances were concerned, part of him was actually a little envious of the audience - many of whom were too busy crying into handkerchiefs to appreciate the high quality preaching they were receiving.
“Now!” Michael’s eyes snapped back open, almost jarringly cheerful. “I ask you all here today to find room in your hearts for charity and the expenses that go into making these extra sermons possible,” a nod to someone between the pews “my son, Daniel, is bringing the collection plate now. Please, give generously!”
A mumble of sympathy to the nearest mourning elder and Daniel Mars had done his duty of passing off the collection plate. Now left to stand there with his diverted gaze and hollow expression as the plate filled so he could take it back and begin counting the money. He spared a brief glance up at his father who, for a fraction of a second, dropped his kindly look to give his son a contemptuous frown.
Being let out of the house this morning was out of necessity as his father needed all hands on deck to handle the unexpected (and lucrative) demand for religious aid after the warehouse party. Otherwise, Daniel was still very much grounded and in the proverbial doghouse, both for disobeying his parents by going to an evil - probably satanic - underage drinking party and for his sister’s late night tears waking Michael up from his slumber and forcing him to actually parent his youngest daughter.
As the collection plate reached Tuyen, she felt pressured by the stare of the middle aged woman who passed it onto her. She quickly fumbled in her pockets for a five dollar bill, then another as the woman continued to stare expectantly at her. It felt like she was being judged as one of the sinners… Which she
was, but she felt guilt less around the ‘sinfulness’ of the party itself and more her actions during the chaos.
As the sermon finished, Tuyen stayed sitting in the pews as everyone began to filter out. She didn’t want to get caught in the crowd. She was already on the edge being among so many people for the first time since the party, and she couldn’t afford to panic. She had to talk to Reverend Mars. She could do it. It didn’t matter if she was judged, or word got back to her aunt, because none of that was worse than having some evil being attached to her.
Or was it? She didn’t know what would happen if her aunt found out. Min wasn’t around anymore to diffuse things, so Tuyen would take the full brunt of her anger… Was the current situation really worse?
Yes it was. It definitely was. She had to do this.
Tuyen finally got up, joining near the end of people still trailing out. She clasped her hands together in front of her to stop herself from nervously scrunching up her long skirts, taking a deep breath. There were plenty of people who seemed to want to talk to the Reverend on the way out, but most didn’t seem to need more than a few words of condolences. She just had to ask for help, or to talk… Maybe to confess? Was that a thing she could do?
”R-Reverend Mars, your sermon was really- really good, uh, can I… Talk to you about something?” An almost quizzical look passed on Michael’s face before it settled back into the smile of a used-car salesman. He quickly grabbed Tuyen’s hand and shook it as he did to every other attendee today.
“Course you can, darling.” Reverend Mars said in a warm, familiar tone. “I have a number of housecalls to make, lotta folk in dire need of wisdom from the good book,” and were willing to pay a premium for outcalling the reverend’s services “just get in touch and we’ll book you in at the earliest available day. Take care now!”
Punctuating his dismissal with a hand against Tuyen’s back, he not-quite-forcefully but certainly not kindly guided the teenager out of the church, following after her and locking the door behind them. One final insincere smile and Michael brushed past Tuyen to walk around the side of the church building, whistling contentedly to himself.
Adjusting his coat, Michael came across his son, dutifully filling the trunk of Michael’s baby blue Camaro convertible with boxes of religious paraphernalia. He was feeling so confident in his salesmanship that Michael’d even had Daniel dig out some of the old, questionably racist Thanksgiving decorations - believing he could rebrand them with some vague anti-sinner messaging and be rid of them.
“Alright, my boy. That’ll do.” Michael announced, slamming down the trunk. “Everything inside prepped for tomorrow morning?”
“Yes, sir.” Daniel said, wiping the sweat from his brow.
“Good. Now the vegetation’s startin’ to look a mite overgrown for my tastes so I want you to go into the shed and trim it some.” Michael opened the door to the driver’s seat, leaning on the door’s edge as he addressed his son. “Now, I’ve got important work to do then a well-earned evening break at the bar. So, I expect you to get your behind home and back to bein’ grounded the second you’re done here.”
“Ok, sir.” Daniel replied with a nod
“Don’t go thinkin’ I’m being too hard on you, boy.” Michael said, pointing at Daniel. “You disobeyed me, left your sister on her lonesome and, don’t forget, stirred me out’ve my top five most favourite dreams.”
“The Oscars dream, sir.” Daniel ruefully acknowledged.
“The Oscars dream!” Michael confirmed, his previously-neutral expression morphing into visible annoyance. “With Billy Crystal handin’ me the statue and- no, forget it. Forget it. I’m just gonna get mad again.”
A slam, Reverend Mars shut his car door and drove off, leaving his son behind with a long list of work to still be done. Daniel watched the convertible shudder down the dirt path and onto the asphalt road. He sighed and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, making his way to the front of the church to start surveying where he’d need to focus his gardening efforts.
Tuyen stood frozen just outside the church door, having not taken another step after being ushered out. Her eyes focused on the ground as she took long breaths to calm herself down. She was all too familiar with rejection, even if this time it had come in the form of a polite dismissal. She didn’t even know how to get in touch to book in… She didn’t realise that was necessary. Of course she hadn’t. She always did things wrong.
And she was still stuck with her sentient shadow, silent as it was being. She’d learned that the quiet didn’t mean good, after a fair few times of relaxing only to be dragged back down into the depths as it went back to tormenting her.
She was snapped out of her thoughts at the sound of quiet footsteps, finally moving. For a moment she looked like a deer caught in headlights. Her obvious shock quickly disappeared for a genuine appearing smile as she realised the footsteps belonged to an actual human- and someone she knew, even if they didn’t talk very often. There was still lingering anxiety in her eyes, but it was otherwise easy to cover up.
”Daniel… Hi,” she said, managing not to sound horrendously awkward. Should she ask him instead? He wasn’t a Reverend, but he was brought up religiously enough he might know how to perform an exorcism… Then again, telling anyone at school was risky. Daniel didn’t seem the kind to gossip, but things could always slip out. She didn’t want this spreading… She couldn’t have Vicky finding out.
”How are you?” She asked, before rubbing the back of her neck with a rueful laugh.
”Sorry, that’s a stupid question after what happened in the warehouse… Uh, am I in your way?” She shifted to the side, out of the way of the door, thinking there might’ve been something left behind he was going to get.
”I’m not planning to hang around and get in your way, don’t worry. Oh, but do you know how I’d make an… appointment with your dad?”“O-oh, Tuyen!” Daniel exclaimed, lost in his world of confusion and chastisement that the quiet girl’s appearance took him by surprise.
“I’m, uh…!”He let his sentence die out, unsure how to revive it. He struggled to look at her, diverting his head entirely. He had nothing but positive things to say about Tuyen under normal circumstances, she was nice and friends with many of the popular folk so that likely meant she was the most popular girl in school. But things were actually going extremely badly, a divine punishment had been enacted upon him, a demon welded to his very soul, everything he knew about life and reality altered irreparably under an ocean of teenaged blood. Other than that, he supposed he couldn’t complain.
“I don’t know.” He finally admitted, eyes still gazing out at nothing.
“I could give you our house phone number; but he told me he’s using a wait list to create a sense of urgency. So…” Normally he’d offer an apologetic smile, a dedicated effort to try and find a solution or, if nothing else, a personal ensurement to whatever hurting soul that their concerns were being valued and heard. But, lost in his own world, all he could do was stifle a pained expression as he cast his eyes down on the ground.
“Um… I’m sorry, Tuyen, but… I, uh, actually have a lot of work to do.” Daniel stood there for a moment, a deep shame washing over him. Solitude would be nice, but where would he find it? The demon within him was largely indifferent to the mundanity of Daniel’s life and therefore made its presence largely ignorable, but all it took was a perceived failing, jaywalking, littering, agreed upon social contracts being flaunted and broken. Daniel rubbed his right hand, faint bite marks on the palm and back from the last time he managed to, barely, force the demon back into its cage. Even if he were damned and marked, Tuyen had done nothing to him and deserved the respect he’d failed to show the Lord.
“I’m sorry.” Daniel gently said, finally looking Tuyen in the eye.
“Everything’s just been… very hard.” A ghost of a smile passed on his lips, reassurance that even if their struggles were unsolvable, they were struggling together.
“I’m not a skilled preacher like Father, but I happen to be a good listener. If that’d help at all?”Tuyen hesitated a moment, before nodding. Normally she hated inconveniencing someone else. The moment Daniel said he was busy she was ready to leave, back to the self made prison of her room at home. Even when he offered to listen, she still took a moment to decide that she'd take him up on the offer. She felt guilty for doing so, since he was clearly struggling himself… But she was really desperate. The longer this went on the harder it was to hide how much she was suffering. Just telling someone would make it harder to keep suppressing it around everyone else. Maybe she could help him too, then she wouldn't just be burdening him.
”Thank you. I think that'd help,” she replied with a warm smile, though she really didn't know if it would. Maybe he'd just think she was going mad.
”What kind of work do you need to do? Maybe I can help while we talk… I can do most things.“It was a genuine offer that helped ease her conscience a bit. Then she'd be a bit less of a burden.
”Since the party, have you… Noticed anything different? Strange things or, uh, voices?” she asked, testing the waters first before delving into what she actually wanted to talk about. She'd barely gotten up the confidence to try talk to Reverend Mars about it, and there'd always been a high chance she'd wimp out before admitting there was probably a demon attached to her.
“Oh, it’s no trouble, I just have to clear the grounds a little. I wouldn’t want you to get dirty on my account.” Daniel insisted, his smile becoming a little more natural, worrying about chores made it easier to delude himself back to normalcy.
Until Tuyen mentioned strange voices.
Daniel buckled as if the words dropped on his shoulders like weights, a tremble in his knees and a forlorn expression as he again looked away from Tuyen. An attempt to ground himself by retrieving the clippers resting in his back pocket and trimming at the edges of a nearby hedge.
“I’m… I’ve heard a lot of different things from people.” Daniel admitted, remembering the sleepless nights following the party where he scoured social media trying to make sense of contradicting recollections.
“I’m not really sure what to believe.”Perhaps its ears were burning, a tightness clutched Daniel’s heart, not enough to be painful but plenty to draw a sharp inhale from the boy. He had no idea what happened to Tuyen, what she’d seen or been party to that hellish night. Perhaps she was also trying to make sense of the claims others had made, magic, demons, the walls of reality coming undone. He didn’t want to frighten her, but the burden was tearing at him more each day.
“That night...” He said, softly, weighing how best to word it, what to admit and what to conceal.
“I’ve been hearing something, in my head.”He looked up at Tuyen, the dark circles under his eyes hollowing his stare more under the morning sun.
“I prayed that night, and I think something answered. I’m afraid of what did.”Tuyen felt a hint of relief, followed by immediate guilt for being relieved someone else was suffering like her. She wasn’t relieved because Daniel was suffering, sharing the same dark circles under his eyes- but because it meant maybe she wasn’t going completely insane. There was a chance they both were, but… she wanted to believe that wasn’t the case. Especially after seeing proof magic was real.
”Me too,” she admitted quietly, hands clutching her skirt. She felt confident enough to speak about it at least a little bit after Daniel’s answer.
”I mean, I’ve also been hearing something in my head. It didn’t answer any prayers, it just… appeared. I don’t know what it is- if it’s anything- just that I’m afraid of it too. I want to get rid of it.”You’ll never be rid of me.She barely suppressed a shudder, glancing down at her feet- or more accurately, her Shadow. It was the first time it had directly responded to her in a way she could easily tell it apart from her own thoughts.
”Maybe we’re dealing with the same thing. Have you also… Been seeing things that aren’t there?” An ache formed in Daniel’s throat. Sympathy, kindredship, despair and relief. He heard some of the rumours, others having been afflicted with similar - for lack of a better term - conditions. Other than Lynn, who perhaps had the ability to save Daniel’s sorry hide, he hadn’t met anyone else in the haze of police and ambulance lights that followed that night. He hadn’t known for sure what was real and what was hysteria when the survivors began spreading accounts of that night, all he knew was that magic, in some perverse way, was real. It was attached to his soul, after all.
“No.” Daniel said, quickly rising to his feet and looking at Tuyen with intensity.
“It’s- it’s like… someone else’s thoughts, forcing their way into my head? He’s- it’s always listening, judging.”“It…” He looked hesitant, the catharsis of sharing his woes stumbling. Would Tuyen make fun of him? She’d always been a nice person, but even Daniel would have a hard time believing this from someone else. He swallowed and let his voice drop to a whisper.
“It can change me. I know how that sounds. But, at the party. It did. I don’t… I don’t know how to get rid of it.” Tuyen’s expression filled with sympathy, while internally she began to downplay her own suffering. She was also dealing with someone else’s thoughts forced into her head, but at least it wasn’t changing her. Everything was seemingly internal for her. It just seemed to be pushing her towards the edge, like it wanted her to plummet into a pool of despair she couldn’t get back out of. She couldn’t figure out why.
Would it take over her body then?
”Mine hasn’t tried to change me but- but it's been showing me hallucinations since. I can’t always tell what’s real, and it seems crazy, so… I believe you.” She gave him a comforting smile, recognising his hesitation and nervousness over sharing that. After all, she felt the same. She was terrified of people thinking she was going mad, or of them digging and realising just what her demon was feeding off of.
”I don’t know if mine can do anything physical… It’s just always there watching me. I can always see it even when it isn’t forcing thoughts into my head.” She looked down at the floor, at her shadow. She wasn’t sure if she should tell him exactly what it was, or her suspicions about what it had done that night-
no, what she’d done. She’d killed those people. It wasn’t all it.”Has it changed you since the party?”“It hasn’t, thankfully.” Daniel replied, he didn’t sound entirely convinced.
“But I am sorry you’re going through that, Tuyen.” As violent and unwanted as the demon within him was, Daniel at least had managed to glean that it had little interest in his daily life, much less altering his perception of it.
“Has your… has it shown you anything useful? Anything you can make sense of?” Behind him, Valor was not there, he knew this. Yet he also knew, instinctually, that the black knight was looming over him, looking down at Tuyen.
No, looking past Tuyen. To something not bound by this reality much like itself, entwined with the soul of another.
Tuyen shook her head.
”It only shows me things I don't want to see.” It was a roundabout way of saying it was digging up her deepest fears and insecurities. She couldn't exactly admit to what it was showing her, because that meant being open about things she didn't want to share. She couldn't burden him with something like that. It would still be there when she was rid of the shadow, just… better.
Was it really better?The Shadow was still at her feet even as it whispered to her, as if it couldn't sense the presence of another Apparition like itself. It didn't care about external factors after all.
”Most of it's realistic enough that I'd believe it. So I can make sense of them, but they don't mean anything. I think it's doing it to torment me, and no other reason, like a… demon would, if that's what it is. I was hoping for an exorcism.” She gave a small, sad smile. It felt unfair that where others were getting magic they got parasites. But if anyone deserved that it was her.
”But maybe we can help each other if we're stuck like this. I'm not sure how… but it's better than being alone.”“Help each…?” Daniel trailed off, realisation settling in. An exorcism wasn’t within his ability to perform, especially while host to a demon of his own. His father, knowledgeable as he was, might not even be able to do so, if he ever had the time to try.
“Ah…” He said, softly. They could support each other, in whatever small ways. Emotionally, spiritually, and, if the worst came to pass…
Daniel said nothing else, looking at Tuyen with his eyes unblinking. Warm blues appeared to pale in the sunlight.
“Are you sure you’re capable of upholding that promise?” Daniel asked in an abruptly harsh, accusatory tone, any trace of characteristic warmth wrung out of him.
“Are you?” Valor repeated.
Tuyen’s eyes widened, biting her lip nervously. She couldn’t answer, because she really wasn’t sure.
She couldn’t, the Shadow thought for her.
And it didn’t care what that uptight ghost did. It could kill the boy for all it cared, as long as it got it meals. Though it didn’t bother with any verbal response to show its presence, a shadowy arm manifested as if out of nowhere. Sharp claws scraped across the church wall, causing rubble to fall to the ground and leaving even more of a mess for Daniel to clean. It responded by doing something it could sense would piss off Valor: flagrant vandalism.
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