Satan Says

“You’re a murderer,” shouts Satan, gleefully. Satan is faceup, swimming along the hardwood floor, as if he’s in a pool, doing backstrokes.

“I’m a murderer,” Kyle mutters as he jogs and wildly splashes clear liquid all over the house, down the hallways, in every room. The rooms, to him, look like hungry mouths, the hallways like dry throats. He asseverates that the liquid he tosses is nourishing and ceremonial.

Then he finds himself back in the anteroom, lifts up and points the gun at Satan, fires three popping shots.

The bullets whiz through Satan, borough into the floor, leaving three tiny smoldering holes.

Satan, unshriven, keeps swimming backward, and flashes a toothy, seraphic smile, giggles like a schoolgirl. Satan then cries out in a sardonically phony upper-class British accent, “You can’t kill that which is already dead!”

Kyle snarls and chucks the gun to Satan, then steps onto the stairs, rides the wooden escalator up to the second floor. The house’s walls have turned to mirrors, and Kyle sees his pale reflection. He’s paler, whiter than he’s ever seen himself. His skin looks like silk draped over his bones.

He’s then wearing Teenage Ninja Turtle tighty-whiteys and is hoisted by an invisible arm, given a wedgie by an unseen force, and is slung, atomic wedgie style, into the bedroom.

He finds himself in Colby’s bedroom, rhythmically slapping his feet at the indifference of the wooden floor. His feet are two stools. His arms are slithering green snakes. His neck is in a noose. The noose is fitted from an electrical cable hanging from a black hole that’s been punched in the ceiling.

Kyle holds his phone. The phone is hot and is burning in his hand.

He’s shitting his underwear as he’s messaging his brother a picture on Facebook; he’s sending a picture of their mother, naked and dead, along with the murdered police.

Sirens ring out, police megaphones can be heard; what sounds like a helicopter is hovering, whirling overhead.

Kyle finds that after the message is sent, a Facebook moment has been posted to Colt’s timeline, this one explaining why the house was destroyed, and wishing that a dirty bomb be set to annihilate the entire neighborhood, render it unhabitable, saying this was the only way to appease Satan and the angry spirits.

Kyle grins at the hundreds of hands curving out to him from an oncoming darkness.

Then he heaves forward, toward the hands, and hears a beep and crack.