“It’s scary to be down here all alone, isn’t it?” a voice whispered.
Nest jumped inside her burlap prison. The demon. She swallowed and exhaled quickly, noisily.
“All alone, down in the dark, in a black pit where your greatest enemies dwell. Helpless to prevent them from doing whatever they choose. You hate being helpless, don’t you?”
The demon’s voice was soft and silky. It rippled through the silence like bat wings. Nest closed her eyes against its insidious sound and gritted her teeth.
“Will someone come for you, you must be wondering? How long before they do? How much more of this must you endure?” The demon paused as if to consider. “Well, John Ross won’t be coming. And your grandparents won’t be coming. I’ve seen to that. So who else is there? Oh, I forgot. The sylvan. No, I don’t think so. Have I missed anyone?”
Wraith!
The demon chuckled in a self-satisfied way. “The fact is, you have only yourself to blame for this. You should never have tried to follow me. Of course, I knew you would. You couldn’t help yourself, could you? It was all so simple, making the suggestion to young Danny Abbott. He’s so angry at you, Nest. He hates you. It was easy to persuade him that he could get even with you if he just did what I told him. He was so eager, he didn’t even bother to consider the consequences of his act. None of them did. They are such foolish, malleable boys.”
The demon’s voice had shifted, moving to another part of the cave. But Nest could not hear the demon himself move, could not pick up a single footfall.
“So, here you are, alone with me. Why, you might have asked yourself? Why am I bothering to do this? Why don’t I just… drop you into a hole and cover you up?” The demon’s voice trailed off in a hiss. “I could, you know.”
He waited a moment, as if anticipating her response, then sighed anew. “But I don’t want to hurt you. I want to teach you. That’s why I brought you here. I want you to understand how helpless you are against me. I want you to realize that 1 can do whatever 1 like with you. You can’t prevent it. Your friends and family can’t prevent it. No one can. You need to accept that. I brought you here so that you could discover firsthand what 1 was talking about yesterday, about1 the importance of learning to be alone, of learning to depend only on yourself. Because you can’t depend on other people, can you? 1 mean, who’s going to save you from this? Your mother is gone, your grandparents are old, your friends are feckless, and no one else really gives a damn. When it comes right down to it, you have only yourself.”
Nest was awash with rage and humiliation. She would have killed the demon gladly if she had been free to do so and been offered a way. She hated the demon as she had never hated anyone in her life.
“I have to be going now,” he said, the location of his voice shifting again, moving away. “I have things to do while the night is still young. I have enemies to eliminate. Then I’ll be back for you. Danny Abbott won’t, of course. By morning, he will have forgotten you are even here. So you have to depend on me. Keep that in mind.”
Then the voice dropped into a rough whisper that scraped at her nerve endings like sandpaper. “Maybe it would be wise if you were to use your time among the feeders to consider what’s important to you. Because your life is about to change, Nest. It is going to change in a way you would never have dreamed possible. I’m going to see to it. It’s what I’ve come here to do.”
The silence returned, slow and thick within the dark. Nest waited for the demon to say something more, to reveal some further insight. But no sound came. She sat wrapped within the hot blackness of the burlap, embittered, frightened, and alone. Then the feeders returned. When the touching began anew, her resolve gave way completely and she screamed soundlessly into the tape.