Clara stumbled backward, her hand flying to her mouth, her voice lost to a silent scream. Julian's hand shook so violently the barrel of his revolver rattled against the cold air.
"What... what are you?" Arthur choked out, his mind violently rejecting the visual data before him. "Where is Gideon?"
"Your sweet, clumsy little Gideon is exactly where his city 'friends' left him—bleeding out in a dark alleyway gutter," the demon said, casually leaning his weight onto the knife handle. He was completely unfazed by the youngsters' absolute horror, the memory alone causing a sickening grin to split his face.
Then, he threw his head back.
"HAHAHAHAHA!"
The demon burst into an earsplitting, manic laughter. He laughed until his stolen stomach churned, wrapping his arms around his middle with absolutely no intention of stopping. The youngsters could only stare in paralyzed horror, unable to believe the twisting, booming sound echoing from their childhood friend's throat.
"Oh, his death... HAHAHA! It was just as pathetic as he was!" the demon gasped, finally catching his breath, wiping a tear of mirth from his eye. "He wanted to end his pathetic life by killing himself at the side of a road, but a speeding car blindsided him, leaving your precious friend entirely alone in the dark, slowly and agonizingly bleeding to death. His face—oh, his face—it was the most pathetic scene I've witnessed in centuries. So full of hopelessness and despair, so full of hatred for the world and himself. And oh, it was so deliciously pathetic that his final, fading thoughts immediately wondered to his friends and family... the ones he would never see again."
The demon watched them, clearly drinking in the breaking expressions on the youngsters' faces.
"You know, it was actually quite kind and generous of me when I offered his slipping soul a transaction: stay in the cold mud, or let me wear his skin so his parents could see him 'alive' one last time. He was so desperate that he agreed without a single shred of hesitation. It was truly a pathetic sight to behold." The demon paused, his expression shifting into a look of hopeless, exaggerated disappointment. "He was so incredibly stupid that he didn't even think of the payment I would inevitably collect. He was just so full of foolish hope to see his parents one last time."
The demon's eyes flashed with a dark, predatory amusement. "And so, I slipped into his cold meat, healed the decay, and came back to town to fulfill the transaction. But do you honestly think it ended there?"
The room grew suffocatingly cold.
"Of course not! You wouldn't believe the sight of Mr. and Mrs. Blackwood. The sheer face of betrayal on their expressions when their beloved son, who had just returned home, stabbed them both deeply from behind. Watching them slowly bleed to death on their own floor... the sight was truly wonderful and spectacular."
Arthur was the first to regain any semblance of logical thinking. He swallowed hard, his voice trembling violently as he tried to find a flaw in the nightmare. "B... but we checked your house, Gideon. We went to your workshop. There's... there's nothing there."
The demon let out a sharp, mocking bark of laughter, pointing a finger at Arthur. "Do you truly think I am so dumb that I would leave evidence so obviously exposed? Poor, brilliant Arthur... what has shock done to your wondrous, logical mind?"
The demon leaned forward, his grin widening. "Of course I threw their corpses straight into the sea after devouring their wonderful, delicious souls. It was quite hard work at first, carrying them down the cliffs in this weak shell, but it made the clean-up so much easier."
He patted his chest with genuine glee. "Oh, and speaking of souls, I have yet to fully digest our dear Gideon's pitiful spirit. It has been quite entertaining to listen to him inside my mind. His endless, weeping pleas and prayers for all of you... begging me for mercy, begging me to spare your worthless, little lives."
Suddenly, the demon checked the grand grandfather clock in the corner of the room.
"Oh my, look at the time. It is quite late now, isn't it? I guess it's finally time to talk about the serious parts."
He slowly turned his head, looking down at the bleeding, trembling figure of Mayor Antosh, whose eyes were fixed on him in utter, paralyzed horror.
"Aren't you curious at all, Charles? About what your grandfather actually did?"
Without waiting for an answer, the demon raised his boot and carelessly kicked the Mayor away. The impact caused the old man to groan in agony, his frail body sliding across the blood-slicked floorboards.
The demon began to hum a tuneless, cheerful melody to himself, sneering as a look of profound, ancient disgust crossed his stolen face.
"Hmm... Your grandfather, Charles... oh, what a wonderfully pathetic, greedy little creature Charles Antosh the First was," the demon spat, stepping over the pooled blood. "He was absolutely hopeless. Desperate for fame, starving for respect, and entirely consumed by a thirst for wealth he hadn't earned. He knelt on that cold beach a century ago and begged for a miracle. I gave it to him. I gave him a harbor where the fish never died and silver veins that never ran dry."
Arthur's mind violently tried to stitch the remaining pieces together. "Wait..." he stammered, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. "The beach... the dark figure we saw three weeks ago... the one chanting that ancient, twisting phrase into the sea... that was you?"
"Why?" Arthur demanded, his voice rising in sheer, confused panic. "What did that chant mean? What does it mean for the world? Is there some kind of apocalyptic alignment happening? What are you trying to unleash upon the earth?"
The demon froze. He stared at Arthur for three long seconds, and then, he burst into a second, earsplitting round of laughter that echoed hollowly off the stone walls of the study. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated mockery.
"For the world?" the demon cackled, wiping away fresh tears. "Oh, Arthur. You truly are a human to the very end, always imagining yourselves at the center of some grand, cosmic tapestry. That dark figure on the beach was indeed me. And that phrase you heard?"
The demon leaned forward, his voice dropping into a guttural, scraping hiss that didn't use human vocal cords. "'G'hath nar slv'sken.' It is the native tongue of the abyssal plane I crawl from. Do you want to know what it translates to, legal scholar?"
Arthur couldn't speak. He could only nod, his heart hammering against his ribs.
"It means: 'This meat is stiff, and the salt water is making my joints ache,'" the demon whispered, his eyes flashing a malicious crimson. "It means absolutely nothing to your world. There is no grand prophecy. There is no dark empire rising. I was simply complaining to myself in the dark because adjusting to human ligaments is a tedious process."
He looked at the dying Mayor, whose face was a permanent mask of betrayal and disbelief as his breathing finally slowed to a dead stop.
"Your world will never care about what happens here, Arthur," the demon smiled, moving slowly toward the four remaining youngsters. "Because none of this is ever leaving this town. I have the legal right to harvest every living soul in this valley to clear the founder's broken ledger. I just dragged it out for a few weeks because your little detective club was the most amusement I've had in a thousand years."
The shadows in the room rose up, crawling across the ceiling like living ink, blocking out the light of the fireplace entirely.
"The theater is over," the demon whispered, his smile splitting his face impossibly wide as the room plunged into absolute darkness. "And it's time to collect the final balance."