Demon Stories

Josephine: Wicked Seed, 1815-1819, England

He's lying to you. HE'S LYING. HIS WHOLE LIFE IS A LIE. 

Its not real, the demon inside had reasoned on the train. How can it be bad to take it away if it was never real in the first place? You're dead. You're not real. Take it away. Take it all away. 

Maybe if I had seen a compassionate human being on the train it would have been different. Maybe I would have turned away after talking about something of sanity. What's in the news, how politics are doing. But if the person spoke about their marriage it would have been worse. The little wife. The good husband. 

But all I could hear as I knocked on the door frame and saw her head snap up, her little perfect mouth beginning to scream, was him repeating his name for me. 

Josephine. My little Jo~sephine.

There was no turning back. It was done already. When he called me Josephine, it was done already.

As she screamed and clawed my face, as I ripped and tore her flesh indiscriminately and the bed filled with blood, herself splattering all over my face and running down my body, I whispered to her. 

"Its not real. Its not real."

But very slowly, as her pink flesh became exposed and the cuts bled into eachother, my mouth became a being of its own, screaming its own weeping. Madness. Inhuman.

"Die. DIE! DIE!! DIE!!!"

My true feelings. Naked. Exposed flesh.

1816

Pink.

His tongue was pink in my mouth. There was nothing else I could think of at that moment. 

His grasping my now long red hair, the hair he requested for me to grow. How pretty it would look, he had said. My Josephine. 

My previously disgusting name had taken on new meaning. Whenever the boys mocked me in the hallways, I wore it proud. They pulled my hair, but that only reminded me of him. They could do whatever they wanted. I didn't care anymore.

By day, we'd train in the small music room. I'd sing out his favorite songs, all female parts. He taught them all to me. He would slip behind me and hold me from behind and my voice would wobble. His hands would explore and my voice would crack and falter completely. 

Many nights, against the rules, we were together in his office alone. We sat by the large floor to ceiling window, staring out at the moon and stars. He held me on the floor, my body pressed against his securely. He felt almost like a father's warmth. The largeness of his body soft yet firm, warm, so warm. His strong arms around me, causing me to feel as if I could never fall or hurt myself. 

Yet there was something off. That small nagging at the back of my brain. It was becoming more apparent. There was something that knew, even then. It knew he was not this perfect man my heart so envisioned. But my heart struggled and pushed away from the brain's concern.

"Josephine, sing for me," he whispered and kissed my ear.

"Please, now? Someone will hear."

"I don't care. And please use your sweet voice when you speak. How will you be the female role in an opera if you speak like a man?"

"You never said that before my voice changed."

"Its too bad it did."

He was looking at me in the reflected glass of the window now with an angry face. He saw me staring at him, and he quickly changed his face to a smile, but I saw.