I braced myself for the conversation I was so desperately eager to engage in. The one that tells me all the secrets of Samson's life. At first he didn't say anything. He opened his mouth quite a few times, but he struggled to tell me. Maybe he didn't know how to start.
"I-" He started to say, and then sighed. "Okay, I guess it started when I was 5. My friend brought a Ouija board over my house and I had no idea what the thing was but we tried it out anyways. You know how those things work right?"
I nodded. "Okay well we started talking to this... spirit, I guess." As Samson was talking, he frequently looked over his shoulder in panic but he continued the story. "It told us that it was friendly... Like, we asked it questions and it spelled out different words, but it was kind of a comforting feeling. It just made sense."
"What was it saying to you?" I chimed in.
"We asked it what its name was and it spelled out..." He stopped and started to breathe deeply. "Well, it spelled out its name. And at first I thought my friend was moving the thing in the center but he swore that he wasn't."
He looked to me to make sure I was still paying attention. I couldn't be more aware of the conversation.
"Well, I started talking to him. The spirit we were talking to. But I didn't tell my friend I could talk to him. I didn't tell him anything. I kept it all to myself... It was like my thing. I didn't want to share him with anyone. My parents just assumed I had an imaginary friend, and I let them believe that. The spirit would tell me to do things. Nothing bad, just the occassional "wake up" and commands like that. I always obeyed him. It's like I had to listen to him. I had no choice."
I could see the lump in his throat as he tried to swallow it back down. I put my hand on his shoulder to remind him that I was here for him. He looked at me and said, "Then the commands started to get more violent. If I even thought about disobeying him, he'd yell at me. So I'd do it anyways. I beat up this kid at my school because he told me to and I got suspended."
"Did he tell you to do anything else?" I asked, almost eagerly.
Samson nodded. "Yeah, I mean, he told me to do all kinds of stuff. Steal money from my mom, take different pills from the medicine cabinet. And I always did it. There was no question about it anymore. I just did it."
I saw tears form in his eyes but they refused to leak down his face. "That's when the second spirit started talking to me. I knew he was different because he had a different voice, and he told me his name and it was different. He told me to do even worse stuff, like hurt kids at my school, but to hurt them really bad. He led me to a pocket knife in my dad's room... and..."
He heaved a sigh. "And I stabbed this kid in the leg. As soon as I did that, I felt this feeling that I've never experienced before. It was overwhelming and I still don't know how to explain it. All I knew was there were hundreds of spirits trying to get my attention. They were all evil. All of them."
"Have they ever gone away?"
"No. See, that's my problem. I don't know how to explain this at all... I've never told anyone this before."
I rubbed his back soothingly to comfort him, and finally I could see the rise and fall of his chest as he took a deep sigh and made up his mind to tell me. "The original spirit. He told me that I could make it all go away. I just had to do him one favor."
"What was the favor?"
Samson clenched his jaw. "He told me that if I killed my mom, the spirits would all go away."
I almost gasped. I wasn't sure if I was prepared for what he was about to tell me, but I kept rubbing his back and I wasn't sure if it was to comfort Samson or myself.
"One night, I took the knife I used to stab that one kid, and I snuck into my mom's room when she was sleeping, and I... I stabbed her in the heart. I remember her eyes... They shot open in terror. And she looked at me like she was really confused. Her hands wrapped around my wrist as she tried to pull my hand away from her chest but I was too strong. Eventually the life left her eyes and I just left."
Samson stopped talking and I assumed the story was over. He wasn't crying. He looked angry.
"They made me kill my mom, my own mother when I was 10 years old. And they lied. They never left me alone. I believed them and I killed my own mom and they never left. They're still here, 11 years later and they're still here." He was yelling and angry tears ran down his red face. "They're not spirits, they're demons. Filthy, dirty demons who need to go back to hell,"
After he said those words he was thrown on the ground. He didn't do it himself; I saw the shove course through his body. His hair was pulled up and then his head was smashed down hard against the floor. It wasn't invisible this time. I could see a dull figure doing this and it didn't look human. It was demonic. I've never seen anything like it before.
"Samson!" I yelled, and as hard as I tried to shove the thing off of him, I couldn't. Every time my hands made contact, my body slowed down and got red hot until the force shoved me on my back.
Samson cried out until finally, the demon went away.
"This used to be the place I went where the demons couldn't get me. Now it's infested again and I just..." Tears betrayed him. "I don't know what to do."
"How many are there?" I asked.
"Hundreds. I can't count how many."
"Do they ever leave you alone?"
Samson paused and shook his head slowly. "Sometimes. They always scream at me and tell me to do things. I don't notice it too much anymore since it's been happening for 11 years now. But I don't know how much more of it I can take."
"That one demon, he said you knew how to make it all go away. What did he mean?"
Samson cringed and said, "He told me that if I killed myself, all of this would stop."
