10/24/05 � Upon rereading my old story �Driftor the Demon Slayer� during a listless time of prolonged leisure I discovered just how bad this story sucked. I mean seriously, who can read that. What disgusted me even more is just how much of this story I accidentally omitted because I was incapable of properly expressing my thoughts. I left out so many details that I almost failed to recognize the event. I thought I was reading a different story than the one that I had clicked on and maybe my links were broken. This was just unacceptable. So, with some careful thought and a thorough rereading of what I had previously wrote I decided to rewrite that atrocious story. This is the rewrite:
This story is based on a dream that I had. For most of you it probably would have been considered a nightmare but I have �bad� dreams all the time so nightmare is a word that I rarely use. This was definitely a nightmare though. It was violent, depraved, mind boggling, and exhausting. The dream was just too real. This dream was so real that when I woke up I had carefully examine my surroundings just to make sure I was where I thought I was. Every image was clear. All dialect was precise and intelligent. If I felt something in this dream, I physically felt it. I could even smell things in this dream. Needless to say, I was there. Please don�t think me to me mad. The following dream occurred on April 23, 2004.
I remember waking up in my bed at about the same time I do every morning to go to school. I zombied my way out of bed and into the shower. I dried, dressed and headed to the breakfast table. I had this dream before my school implemented uniforms so I believe I was wearing some blue jeans and some kind of T-shirt. The jeans were definitely tucked in because one of the school rules was that all shirt tales must be tucked in. The breakfast was eggs; served on time and just like any other day. Doing these routines left in me with the kind of sickness that comes from the comfort of doing the same safe simple things over and over again from day to day. It is similar to that feeling you get in your stomach after eating the same meal three times in a row.
After breakfast I meandered on over toward my truck. My truck was parked in my front yard close to the end of the driveway. The driveway was reserved for my father�s car. The yard curves slightly downhill toward a drain. When I about half way to my truck, I realized that I was looking down on my truck at and odd angle. This was perplexing. After a quick look around I could see nothing unusual other than my point of view. Then I looked down. Much to my surprise, I was not standing on the ground. My feet were several inches off the ground.
My body froze with the fear that a child not wishing to be spotted by the closet monster freezes with. The eggs scrambled in my stomach. I had been walking on air for at least ten feet without noticing it at all. It was as if I had simply continued to walk straight instead of declining with the curve of the yard. After a few seconds of hesitation, I decided to take another step. This time, my foot was stuck at the maximum height I had lifted it too. I did not really want to continue with the step but it did not seem that I could step back down. I stepped up, lifting my body with me. I made my second step a bit higher, and again my foot would go no lower than the height of my step. The process was similar to walking up a set of invisible irregular stairs. A good twenty steps later I realized I was fatally high in the air.
I made the novice climber�s mistake of looking down. Doing so caused my center of balance to shift unfavorably. Then a new fear hit me; the fear of death. We have all had those moments when we realized that this could be the end. It felt like an icy rush down every vein in my upper chest. I held my breath and could only hope for the best since the time of action had so far passed. Inevitably, I fell. The plunge was fast and blissful. I was expecting a big splat, crush, and mush, but none came.
I began to move again, slowly, shakily, but surely. My eyes rolled around looking for something. They found life. Oddly enough I had stopped right before I was about to hit the ground. So there I lay levitating a few inches off the ground after surviving a near fatal fall and the only thing I could think was �I wish I was right side up again.� My wish came true. Slowly, I was rotated to what would be a standing position. Somehow my thoughts wandered. Every place I wanted to go, I simply floated to. More or less, it was flying. My confidence soared higher that my body. Soon, I was jutting vast distances with the utmost speed. While floating a good fifty yards above my house I decided to forget about school today. I mean, seriously, if you could fly would you be in school? I decided to fly somewhere more fun.
Unfortunately, somebody had other plans for me that day. I didn�t get more than two feet toward my fun direction before I just kind of stopped, and slowly started drifting in the complete opposite direction. The harder I tried to fly toward the more swiftly I began to head toward the opposite direction. Let me assure you that there was a legendary temper tantrum thrown in the air. I fought as hard and cursed as hard as I could to go where I wanted to go but that someone else would have none of it. Things didn�t get any better.
At first it was just a slight hum. Nothing peculiar for one who live in any populated area, it could have been any number of ordinary things. It was not any of those ordinary things. That slight humming quit being slight and quit humming. That infernal sound began to rattle and shake. The noise just amplified with time. Speaking of time, I still begging to float faster and faster toward my destination during this, however I was floating no faster than one could walk or perhaps run. That rumbling just got louder and louder and louder and louder and louder until it sounded about like an earthquake. The noise did not act too dissimilar to and earthquake either. Telephone poles fell down, shoddily constructed houses collapsed, fences rolled with ground beneath them, the sounds of shattering glass and screaming souls filled what little space of sound there left outside of the monstrous noise. When the noise reached its climax, the ground beneath a parking lot of dollar grocery store not far from my house began to show signs of an abnormal amount of damage. Everything else was damaged but this parking lot was really taking a beating. Stranger still, the noise seemed to be coming from that parking lot.
Enough about the noise, the noise is nothing without he beast. From the ground of that accursed parking lot an evil worm shot up. It burst through the ground with terrifying speed, destroying much in its way. It did not look an average worm to me though. It appeared to be similar to one of those giant wormlike creatures from the movie Dune, only this one was slightly larger and covered with a most unusual skin. I guess it must have been at least fifty yards in diameter and at least several miles long. Its mouth was like that of parasitic worm. It was round with many relatively small teeth that surrounded a center hole. I only saw a glimpse of its head. It arched up slightly slower than it had burst from the ground, not because it lack the strength but because it seemed to be finding its was around. It arched itself toward my school, which I then realized was the opposite direction that I was floating toward. A large arch of worm was constantly exposed from the ground as its elongated body followed the path created by the rest of the body. The bad thing was, that I was heading straight for it.
When I got within about eighty yard of the beast I realized just what it�s unusual skin was made of. It was made of flesh, human flesh. At least it looked like human flesh to me. The closer I got, the more grisly details I could see. Its fimbriae (those fibers on a worm�s body that help it move trought the ground) appeared to be skinned arms and legs that were motored by the torn muscles that must have once attached them to a body. The body itself seemed to broken bones held in place by random tissue mass. As drifted closer I could broken ribs taking up a large section while a crushed skull only coverd a smaller section. Some tissues were identifiable too. I saw streached intestines and lots of eyes but most of it was just mushy biological mess. Instead of being covered with mucus like a normal worm, this one was covered with partially coagulated blood. But this whole drifting closer to it thing was a problem.
I tried with what little power I had to make myself more to one side of it. Oh how I struggled to change the path I was set on. At last I realized that my only hope was to maybe use all of my strength that the very last moment to push just far enough to one side to grind past it instead of hitting it head on. When I got close enough to it to begin to try to slide past it I noticed those many many mouths, That hell spawned beast had put every mouth it had along its body. All sorts of teeth and jaws were on the outside of that thing. It must have had one from at least every different kind of animal. I saw human teeth, sharp theeh, shark teeth, flat herbivore teeth, and numerous fanged teeth. The grinding past it idea did not seem to be a very good one at the moment. So I went back to my random fighting and cursing.
Whoever was directing my motions must have noticed my plight as I drifted slightly off course. When I say slightly, I mean by a few inches slightly. It propelled me around, and dangerously near to that ferocious worm. I felt like a planet orbiting that damned worm. Thankfully my speed increased and I was sailing at about fifty-five miles per hour toward my school. Considering the cirucumstances of my day and the fact that the behemoth flesh worm was heading that way I really didn�t want to go to school that day.
I accelerated a little bit and continued to be dragged, through the air, to my school. I was just barely behind the flesh worm. I passed over the highway, over the trees, over red lights and rivers. When I was yet a half mile from the school I saw the flesh worm break through the ground on the Wester entrance to the high school wing. That stick mess of a monster climbed straight up and then, with almost no arch, went straight back down like a roller coaster. It dug straight down into the ground just outside the school West entrance.
When I got close to the school, my body began to descend. Whatever it was was lowering me down to the ground on the East entrance to the junior high wing of the school. As I was being lowered I saw the tail end of the flesh worm plow into the ground on the West side of the school. The large building obstructed my view of what happened next. The noise the hideous thing made did not subside. In fact, it got worse and more grotesque. It sounded like it was doing something besides digging.
When I got about 3 feet from the ground, whatever it was simply let me drop. The drop was unexpected but thanks to my cat-like reflexes I was able to land on my feet. The fall still hurt a bit when feet slapped the ground. But I supposed there are a large number of other landings I could have made that would not have been nearly as nice as that one. None the less, there I was, standing at the East end of the school at the junior high entrance. Not surprisingly the school was completely empty. There were no cars, tractors, four-wheelers, people, or even any sign of life at all. It was very strange to see such a large building that I have never seen empty before to be so completely destitute of life.
A strange compulsion moved me onward. Upon reaching the doorway I casually wondered how many years it had been since I had made a entrance trough this doorway. Thoughtlessly I entered the building. Even though I was not being flown around, it still felt like I was being guided toward a specific destination by some higher intelligence. My steps inside were slow yet deliberate. They were slow because I was afraid of the flesh worm outside the other end of the building and deliberate because I was being extremely cautious so as not to upset it. I found all the doors to be closed and all the lights off. The building seemed to be empty except for one single open door with a radiant yellow light emitting from the room.
I moved to right side of the hall to get a better view inside as I approached. Peering inside I saw my English teacher Mrs. Freeman sitting at the desk that was not hers in a room that was not hers. She is an average height, has blonde slightly frizzy hair, a petite face, and a naturally good disposition. I find it rather odd the Mrs. Freeman showed up in this dream simply because she is one of few people that I know who appeared in it. Also at the time I was writing this she was my absolutely least favorite teacher. During the first week of my freshman year, I had asked her a rude question about the Free Masons while in her class (I simply asked if they were a cult that regularly killed people.). She was not happy. She took it upon herself to explain to me that her father, brother, and husband were Free Masons; and that they were certainly not a cult nor did anything wrong. For the next two years both my grades and conduct in her class were exceptionally low. She has long forgiven me now of course. But at the time I was writing this she was by far my least favorite teacher.
The desk she was sitting at was empty. She spotted me. I honestly can only remember fragments of this conversation. I will include all that I remember and whatever else is needed for the conversation to make sense. �Come in,� she called out to let me know that she knew I was there, �I�ve been waiting for you.� I entered the room more rapidly than I had done anything else the entire day. I walked around to the front of her desk and looked down at her. She simply smiled and asked, �Do you know why you are here?� There was almost no time lapse before I answered with an inquisitive �No.� This was obviously the answer she had expected. She said, �You are here because you are supposed to be here. God has chosen you to do a task for him.� Before she could continue with her prepared speech I interrupted asking her, �What task?� This interrupted her train of thought and subsequently it took a few moments before she found the right words to answer my question with. �You are here to slay a demon. A very specific demon.� Along with many other interruptions came another by me �Ugghhhhh, no. You can kill your own demons. I�ve got better things to do than die.� She quickly tried to rebuttal with �But you��. Again I interrupted her by saying �But nothing. I�m not doing shit. I�m going the hell home, alive, and in one piece. You can find somebody else.� I turned to leave but that master of the English language would have none of it. She snappily retorted, �How are you going to go anywhere with that monster outside?� She had me. I had completely forgotten about that beast, and she was right that I was not going anywhere with that thing nearby. I stopped walking away and turned around to face her again. Knowing that she had my unwavering attention she continued, �That monster outside is no monster. It is a demon. It is the very demon that you must slay. And do you know what�s even worse? It knows that you are supposed to destroy it, and it is here only to kill you before you can kill it.�
It was clear to me know that the only way out of my accursed school was to kill the flesh worm. Without realizing the finality of my words I asked her �How do I kill it?� Mrs. Freeman informed me, � �she� is the proper word. She is an old voodoo priestess. I really don�t know how old she is or where she came from. She often takes the form of a human but that monster you saw is her true form. She has damned the souls of thousands and has caused death to come to thousands more. I was told to tell you that in order to put her away for good you must kill her three times. The first two times, she will come back, but the last one will send her to hell once and for all.� I began to frown a little bit. Mrs. Freeman must have noticed my indifference as to what the demon is and how I must kill it so she quickly shifted to how I must kill it. She continued, �You have been chosen by God himself to slay this demon.� I angrily interrupted, �Why doesn�t he do it himself?� She wisely replied, �Why don�t you ask him.�, to which I frown some more. Again she read my thoughts like many of books she has read to her classes. As if I were ungrateful for being chosen to fight a three mile long, million ton, demon she said, �You should be grateful. Most people spend their entire lives searching for purpose and few find it. Here, now, today, you have been told what your purpose in life is and have been give all the means to fullfil that purpose.�
I think she was about say more but I was tired of being told how much of a bastard I am. Aggressively asked for the second time, �How do I kill it?� Mrs. Freeman sighed, shook here head, and reached under her desk. She pulled out form under the desk a long wooden box. The box was about five feet long and about a foot wide. Neither of us said a word. She faced the box toward me, unlatched its simple latches and opened it. Inside lay a sword. It was not just any sword either. She must have noticed my excitement. She said, �Go ahead, take it.� I reached in, and grabbed the sheath with my right hand. Pulling it to my body I looked down the sheath and at the grip. I was like a fat kid in a McDonalds when I had this thing in my hands. I grabbed the grip and carefully unsheathed it. The blade came out easy as butter. The sword was very light and very very sharp. After the initial fun of holding such a sword I began to wonder what type of sword it was. I looked at and I honestly could not identify what type of blade it was. The sheath was black; not a shiny black, but a smared and lusterless black. I call the color stealth black. The blade itself was indistinct. It was much longer than any katana or Chinese style blade. It was not wide at all but it had retained an insane amount of sharpness. The grip was definitely Japanese though. The bend of the blade was slight but still a noticeable bend. The point of end of blade was European in style, it was extremely sharp at its tip, and had a very slow thickening to it (as apposed to and asian forty five degree angle increase from tip to maximum thickness). To tell you the truth it was a mix of just about every kind of sword but most of the features that stood out to me were European or Japanese. The best thing about it was that it fit me live a glove. From the moment I picked the sword up it was like I knew just how to check it, just what to look for, and just how to use it. Oddly enough the blade slid in and out of the sheath so easily I wonder how it even snapped in there at all. Also, like any good sword it game with fair amount of small rope so that the blade could be tied to the body. To say the least, it was a perfect fit.
My amazement with this sword soon wore off. I looked up to see Mrs. Freeman sitting quietly behind the desk already looking at me. Then my mind began to both wander and wonder. I realized that it is pretty stupid to try to kill anything with swords these days. So I simply asked her, �Is there anything else you have for me?� This time I read her mind instead of her reading mine, or was it the other way around because she sure as hell had something else for me. She quietly opened the drawer on desk. She pulled out another box and set it up the desk for just like she had the sword. But this box was different. It was cardboard, plastic, and styrofoam. It had words on it too. I never read the letters so I can�t tell what they said. Inside the box was a beautiful weapon, almost as beautiful as the sword. She gave me a .50 cal Desert Eagle, or Deagle for short. The gun had an silver chrome plate. Everything on it was silver. The damn thing was big though. It weighed about ten pounds. I looked at the box and saw that there were two clips in the box, both empty. Again I looked to Mrs. Freeman and asked, �You wouldn�t happen to have any bullets would you?� She reached into her pocket and upon setting down a small box of .50 cal AE rounds she said, �Right here.� I took the time to load both clips with the bullets. I shoved the few remaining bullets in my pocket for later. Like I said, it was a little box of bullets. I check the gun, turned the safety off, loaded a clip, and cocked it. Mrs. Freeman exhorted, �You might need this� as she tossed me gun holster. This was an old school holster. It was made out of some kind of black polymer; nothing unusual there. The belt that connected to the top part of the actually holster was designed to be wrapped around the waist like a belt (and it had slots for extra ammo clips), so naturally that�s how I used it. The small belt that connected to the lower part of the holster looked like it was designed to be wrapped around one�s thigh, so that�s how I used it. There was only one catch. It was a left-handed holster. I can�t remember complaining about it being left-handed or anything, but I do remember thinking about how dangerously inefficient it would be to draw with my left and swap on over to my right hand to shoot. The gun strapped up, I decided to go ahead and stap the sword to my back. It took no time or effort. It was as if I had done it a thousand times before.
So, there I was, a sword on my back, and hand-cannon at my side. I looked over at Mrs. Freeman and began to leave without saying word. She jumped up and exclaimed, �Wait! I need to say a prayer for you before you go.� I obliged, turned to face her, and waited. I suppose she expected me to lower myself, bow my head, close my eyes, or do something. Any of the previous actions would have been proper and respectful ones but I was in no mood for doing anything than what I was already doing. She did all of the previous actions and started praying. I can�t remember a thing about the prayer except that I was standing up, eyes open, starring at her like a damn heathen would. After a few minutes of intense prayer, she rose, looked at me and said only, �Go.� I took her advice and went. I left the small classroom, reentered the hall, and started walking toward the West wing of the high school building.
It was a long walk down the hall. Again I began to feel that creepy feeling. You know the feeling, the bad kind, the kind when you are all alone in a big dark place and you can not shake the feeling that someone or something is watching you. I had that feeling. That feeling got a lot worse when all the ungodly noise that the flesh worm was making stopped. For just a moment I stopped too, too afraid to move onward. But after the brief moment I began to walk toward the evil again. Destiny drove me. It was so damn quiet. The loudest thing was my footsteps. I could see the end of the hall very clearly. The doors to the flesh worm numbered two, side by side, opening in opposite directions, with big push bars, and shatter proof glass windows. I tried very hard to see what was outside those windows but I could see nothing. All that could see was solid white. It was as if the school had been surrounded in fog. Or at least I think it was fog. It could have been light, or dark energy, or me just having a blank spot in my memory. Who knows? Anyway, I walked right on up to the door and stopped in the doorway. Still, it was dead quiet. I reached for the handle to push the door open.
What a wasted effort that was. Not one nanosecond before I could touch the door, it blew open. More specifically, it blew open my way, breaking the hinges on the door, and smacking me with a two hundred pound metal door. If you have ever been stupid enough to be running full speed and not be paying attention to what is infront of you, and if you just so happened to ran into a wall, the feeling ins comparable to that plus getting punched in the face. That shit must have knocked me back at least ten feet. The bust door fell down over the left of the doorway after it had hit me. I somehow landed on my feet, ninja style. I was still sliding backwards when my feet hit the ground so I just leaned forward to compensate. It was a truly badass landing.
There must have been a lot of fog outside because I remember seeing it flood into the building in a very eerie way. Perhaps �flood� was the wrong word. It was almost sentient in it�s movement. The fog swept into the building quickly and never rose more than a foot above the ground or got closer than a foot to me. The wall around me was thick as hell without any diffusion to bridge the emptiness between the fog and me. It was as if the fog was afraid to go near me. Then the fog began to swirl a little to left and a little to right about the same time I saw a dark figure approaching the doorway.
The figure very rapidly glided toward me. When it emerged from the fog and showed itself I was rather shocked to see an old Negro woman. I guess my teacher wasn�t lying when she said that he demon was old because this old woman looked like she belonged in home somewhere. She had a solid gray afro. Her manner of dress is best described as grandmotherly. She was a bit on the portly side. The demon was not too fat but chunky with that old people kind of fat. Hell, she even had glasses hanging from her neck. There wasn�t the first indication of evil in this being, at least from an outward appearance. The only thing even remotely disturbing about the situation was that she floated in the air, but above the air so that I never saw her feet. And she never looked at me, she just kept her eyes pointed at the ground. That is, until she stopped.
While levitating her way her way around still, she slowly lifted her head and opened her eyes. Those eyes were pure evil. There is an old saying that man�s eyes never lie and to a careful observer I believe this holds true. The outer layer was just too white; there were no blood vessels or anything. It looked like a poor fake to me. The second circle of her eyes (the one in which all people hold their eye color) was solid red. Then that pupil, it was the darkest of dark, like a void. And her stare was had only the malice in it. She opened her mouth to speak revealing her serrated teeth and fangs.
�Are you the one who has come to kill me?� she asked in a voice much deeper than that which would belong to a grandmother. I answered with an unusually deep �I am.�; trying to intimidate her a little bit. For a few seconds she just hovered there staring at me. It seemed as if she was sizing me up. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes for just a second, then focused her malicious eyes on me to say, �I have always believed in fate, but now it is time for me to undo it.� As soon as those words left her forked tongue I was pushed backwards by some invisible evil.
The only thing I could think to do was to lean forward and to push against this power with what little strength I had. Come to find out, the Almighty had endowed me with a whole lot of strength. I quickly regained my balance and could feel her invisible touch slowly fall off of my body. Thinking that that evil was gone was a big mistake however. I tried to a take a step forward but was again pushed, but pushed much harder. I was flung head over heels into a locker. That wench then slid over to side of the hall and began to press me against the lockers the lockers on the left side of the hall. The weight was unbearable. There was no air, the pressure was so intense that I did have the strength to expand my lungs against it. The lockers began to bend and break. Speaking of breaking, that damn sword almost broke my back. Without thinking I remembered being able to fly earlier and hoped to God that I could fly myself away from this fight.
Using the same train of thought that I had used earlier that morning, I tried to fly up and away. In a matter of seconds I could feel the weight lift from my chest and I could breath again. My body began to slide up the lockers causing me more pain than any of that demon�s infernal pressing could do. With more resolve than I�d had all day I decided to use my ability to fly to push against the demon. As soon as I did so I heard the floor crack and I was dropped to my feet again. At the sight of me fighting back, that demon pushed harder. So I pushed harder. She seemed a bit more powerful than me but I had just got started with my push. Quickly I decided to push hard to the right. My push worked like a charm. She shifted to the left and back into the middle of the hall. Most importantly, I was no longer in danger of being squished up against something.