Falter Kingdom. Michael J. Seidlinger

What are you talking about?”

      “Something happened, okay?”

      Becca types, “Oh my god...”

      I know she’s thinking I got with someone. That’s how Becca thinks.

      “No. No it’s not that.”

      “Then WTF are you saying????”

      Say it. Just fucking say it.

      “I ran the gauntlet the other day and...”

      “No...”

      “And yeah. Things have been happening.”

      “You”—Becca’s cursor flickers—“you’ve got to get this gone ASAP.”

      Just say that you know.

      “I know.”

      “When did you go? Hunter, you’re so stupid sometimes. Why would you go to Falter?”

      She’ll pick you apart if you talk about it.

      Becca blasts me with messages, many of them about how stupid I am for running and that it’s even worse because I didn’t tell anyone.

      Then I tell her I went on Friday.

      “Last Friday???”

      “Yeah.”

      That sends her over the edge. Well, she’s already fallen over the edge, so it sends her over another edge, somewhere. The edge after all the other edges.

      “Hunter. Hunter...”

      “I know.”

      She’s worried. I’m sort of worried too.

      I think the lights in my room have dimmed.

      Here comes Becca with all her so-called wisdom: “You have any idea what a demon is?”

      It goes on for paragraphs. I think she copy-pasted them from other sites. I was going to do this anyway, so it works, but Becca’s not going to let up now. But I needed to tell someone. I already feel better for having told someone. It’s kind of like, “Why didn’t you tell anyone?” But at the time, knowing what would happen, as in what’s going to happen from this point on, it makes you dizzy. Like you want to faint. It’ll be easier to just faint than having to see it all pop.

      Becca tells me that demons aren’t people. They never were people. They’re unclean and dark masses. They look for hosts and try to make the host theirs. They populate the earth and maybe come from other planes of existence. No one knows about that part, but demons can take the shape of you or something else who’s close to you.

      Then she lists out the symptoms.

      She lists out the symptoms, and I swear:

      They happen right as I read them.

      Becca says it’s common to see doors opening and closing.

      My door opens but no one’s there.

      It remains open until after she lists out “cold spots” and “noises.”

      My room gets really fucking cold, so cold that I can’t really type, so I go and get another hoodie—I have a lot of hoodies—and put the hoodie on top of the hoodie I’m already wearing. Zip the fucker up, hood over my head. I feel like I’ve gained twenty pounds, everything’s so tight and packed in, but I’m still going to get under the covers. I’m sweating but at least I’m not that cold.

      There’s sort of a banging noise, but I can’t be sure where it’s coming from.

      “Hunter,” Becca types.

      I haven’t been responding, whoops. “What?”

      “Are you having trouble sleeping?”

      “You know I’ve got insomnia,” I reply.

      “No, like, do you wake up at three A.M. every night?”

      I think about this, but I don’t really know. “I wake up a lot at night. That tossing and turning deal.”

      “Think about it. Three A.M. Are you waking up at three A.M.?”

      Shit. I don’t really know, but the fact that she’s stressing it is getting me worried. I ask her, “Why?”

      “Because...” but she doesn’t finish.

      “Don’t get stuck in other tabs, Becca. Tell me.”

      “I’m reading about it. It’s like three A.M. is significant. Dead time, they say.”

      I watch as my bedroom door closes. “Do you believe in this stuff?”

      “In what, demons?”

      “No, not demons, but where they really come from, the whole spiritual thing?”

      “I do, Hunter. I have to.”

      “You don’t have to do anything.”

      “You have to get this taken care of. We need to call an exorcist.”

      I feel dizzy. And cold. And I hear footsteps. Listen to how they seem to go from somewhere near my desk to the foot of my bed and then stop.

      I think, “Okay, that’s kind of scary.”

      But again, it’s hard to take this as real. It’s hard to take it as really happening to me.

      I type out whatever comes to mind: “I’m just really tired all the time. Like more than usual. It’s like I can’t stop thinking. But I’m not really thinking about anything.”

      Becca doesn’t reply for a long time. It shows that she’s seen my messages, but she just doesn’t reply.

      I start searching for stuff on my own. There’s a lot of stuff out there.

      There’s this one guy who had three demons competing for his approval. And another person—she’s kind of hot—who is haunted and documenting the entire thing. She’s already gotten a film option for it.

      I watch an interview with her. She’s pale as hell and keeps forgetting the questions they ask her. Her agent or whoever, the person with her, answers for her more often than she can. She looks like shit.

      The agent says that the demon has already begun infestation. It’s only a matter of days now. And the interviewer asks if they plan on full possession.

      The woman speaks up: “It’s too late for Suz now...”

      Kind of weird how she says it too, there’s a sort of monotone way about her voice.

      I search for the term “infestation,” and I get thousands of results. No way I’m going through all of them. I click on the one at the top, the wiki entry for the term. It goes on about how infestation is only the first in three “prominent” steps in the circle of demonic possession.

      It’s what’s happening to me right now. The haunting part.

      Symptoms: the cold spots, the footsteps, the...

      What literally just happened: a whisper that sounds like my voice saying my name. Kind of like, if I can explain it, “...unterrrrrrr...” Where the “H” in my name is missing and the end of my name, the “r” runs out long. Like a growl, maybe.

      I click around, ending up on a wiki overview of the entire circle.

      Three main steps—the first is infestation, which I know. The next is oppression, which is where “the host is broken down” and it looks like a lot of crazy and really scary stuff happens. I start reading about it but—

      “Hunter, I left a voice mail with Father James, the best in the entire parish.” Becca goes to church. She goes to church every Sunday. I think she’s gone to a bunch of exorcisms too. Religious people like exorcisms; apparently at the end, after the demon is gone,