What Crawls Below

Prologue

On the night of his birth, halfway across the world a tsunami took almost a thousand lives. The day he took his first steps, an earthquake split the ground open and swallowed several hundred people.

This should not prove any relevancy, but perhaps those who swallow superstition along with their morning coffee might believe this child was cursed.

He was born to a painfully mundane American family: a postman and his secretary wife.

There was nothing amiss about his family. No outstanding debt, hardships, or health concerns; no intra-family feuds to keep anyone up at night.

Then the child's father blew his brains out, and his mother took to drinking herself into an oblivion where she could not hear the child's cries. It was better, safer for her, than thinking of the last time she'd seen her husband: his blood splattered all over the toddler's face, which was morphed into a grin as he watched cartoons on the television. All the while, his father's body was limp on the floor mere feet away from his crib, hand still clutching the pistol.

Upon beginning school, he didn't get any attention from his peers, either. Eventually the child learned silence held a much higher power. He became mute, at least to those who believed in using a physical voice to sound out words in order to communicate.

Another indication of his strangeness: he slept like the dead, still and sound throughout the night with no memories of anything that might have plagued his mind. Any normal child should have had a constant barrage of nightmares with the life he'd already led thus far, but it was blindingly obvious he was not normal. Then sometime in his first few years of elementary school it finally happened.

The dream was...well, upon awaking, he couldn't be sure it even was a dream. It had felt so strikingly tangible. Starring in it was one single person: a young woman, and something about her was terribly familiar. He had never seen her before, but it was as if he knew her from a past life...No, that wasn't it. He was going to know her, many years down the line.

The girl - on the precipice of adulthood, it was hard to describe her as either child or woman - was wearing a white nightgown that blended against her already pale skin and made her appear ghostly. Splattered all over it, and painting her palms, neck, even coated deep under her fingernails, was blood. Not her own blood, that much was obvious as the girl looked from her own trembling body to the one at her feet.

Then the shaking subsided, and for a flicker of a second, the corner of her mouth lifted. Just a fraction, just briefly, but it was certainly a smile.

This dream became a nightly occurrence, at least until the demon came for him.

The child knew there was something different about the man immediately when he showed up on his doorstep one night, holding the buzzer down for several whole minutes until the boy finally crept past his snoozing mother and opened the door. The man towered above him, craning his head to keep it from hitting the door frame above him; rain was pelting his slick black suit, but this did not seem to bother him. His eyes were the color of the cigarette ashes left all over the boy's home, but underneath them the child saw another face: skeletal, with a leering grin and glowing crimson eyes.

He stepped aside and let the man in, unshaken.
With that ever-present grin stretching across both his human and true faces, the man curled a sharp-nailed finger towards himself and whispered when the boy crept closer, "Where is your mother?"

The child didn't point a finger or open his mouth but knew the answer: under a pile of quilts on the living room couch. After a silent, motionless moment passed, the man nodded softly and walked down the hall. He stopped at the edge of the sofa, eyes trailing to the assortment of empty beer bottles on the coffee table and back to the woman. Then he looked back to the boy.

"Your mother is very sad. But you're an intelligent child. You know that already, yes?"

A silent, motionless moment passed.

The man nodded. "Yes. And you can help her." He directed his gaze once again to the bottles, picking one up and grasping it at the neck before smashing it against the edge of the table. Glass rained down to lodge in the shag carpet, one long and jagged piece remaining in the man's hand; the sound did not disturb the woman. "She wants this. You know what to do."

A silent, motionless moment passed.

"No," the man said in response, staring back at the child before him. "She won't be upset with you. Not where she's going," he added, pointing a single claw downwards.

The boy took the crude weapon from the man, and he made his mother happy again.

• • •

The boy followed the man into the rain and down the slick black streets of the city to the subway. No one else on the train seemed to see what the child saw, but nonetheless leaned away from the man accompanying him and averted their eyes. The child was used to such behavior directed at himself, and felt some of the loneliness dissipate from his being.

It would all leave him soon, under the demon's care and teachings, just as the dreams did. But those things, very human things, would return to him over a decade later. All it took was a little coaxing.