This story is part of a series I’m doing on childhood dreams, nightmares, and distorted perceptions of reality. Some of the stories have autobiographical ties, but they are mostly fiction. And some of the stories reflect fiction I was writing at that age. It might help to consider all of them and how they all fit together.
You can’t see the devil. He is like a ghost and moves around us all the time. He can’t read our minds, but he can listen to us talk to our friends and he figures us out. He likes to attack people on boats because they don’t have anywhere they can run and if the boat doesn’t have a priest there’s no one to cast him out. He also likes to attack people through water because he can kill them faster and take them to hell. There’s a scripture that says he rides on the water and that no one is safe there.
Once there was a little girl who lived with two older brothers. She believed her house was safe from the devil. Her oldest brother tried to tell her that the devil can get you through water when it’s dark and no one is around. She didn’t listen to him. Her mother said her brother was telling her stories and lies to scare her. Her mother told her brother he better stop it or she would beat his little butt till it was blue cuz she didn’t want the younger kids waking her up at night.
One night, the little girl had to go to the bathroom really bad. She had a nightlight in her room and wasn’t scared. The hall to the bathroom was very dark. It scared her. She wore a nightgown. She tiptoed super fast through the hall to the bathroom. The bathroom had a nightlight near the door. It helped and she felt better. She pulled down her pants and sat on the toilet. When she finished, she was still sitting on the toilet when she flushed. She reached down to grab her underpants when all of a sudden she felt cold, slimy fingers with claws grab her bottom. She started to scream but another cold hand grabbed her throat and stopped her voice. Her eyes bulged out of her head. She fought for breath but couldn’t move. The water in the toilet spun in a circle and she felt the hands sucking her into the water. They started to crush her. Her blood went everywhere in the toilet. She got folded up and smashed into tiny bloody pieces and then her body went down the toilet with the water.
The next day the only thing her parents found was bloody water in the toilet. THE END.
The Living and the Dead, by Gordon Laws 