mistersatan

"Now remember, Michael- no one who's seen what you're about to see has made it outside of this house. If you do..."

I fixed him with a sidelong glance- "That's not your problem- if I make it out of this house, you'll never even remember meeting me."

With that, he finally seemed satisfied.

And then he opened the door.

Now, I've been doing this job for some time now- not as long as some, but more than most. I'm no rookie. But even I was unprepared for what I saw.

The room was smallish, and mostly empty. There was a man slumped in a wooden chair in the middle, hooked up to some kind of machine- I couldn't tell very well- there was only one light, and his back was to me. The old man motioned for me to step inside.

"Go ahead, Michael, take a look around. You don't mind talking a little shop, do you?" I turned to him- he was actually grinning, the sick old fuck.

I walked in further, and saw that the machine was some sort of life-support system. It seemed to be hard-wired into the man's chest and left arm. There were multiple scars, freshly inflicted- he was relatively new. His eyes were shut, giving me a nice view of how purple and sunken his sockets looked. He appeared to be sleeping, but one close look told me the truth- he was exhausted.

The old man walked over to where I was standing. He was obviously proud of his handiwork.

"Two weeks ago, my security department caught this gentleman snooping around some property I own, down by the docks. Industrial sabotage, or some such thing. Anyway, they brought him to me, and we've been here ever since." He started to reach for the buttons on the machine. "Now watch this." He pushed one of them, a small black one near the bottom.

All of a sudden, the man woke up with a start, like from out of a nightmare. He immediately started to simultaneously scream and sweat. The noise was deafening in the confined space of the room. His muscles had tensed up to the point where they looked like sprung steel- he was in pain, and lots of it.

"Beautiful, isn't it? I love it- it's better than going to the opera!" He waved his arms in the air, like a conductor- all in time to the poor bastard screaming his head off in the chair next to us.

He pushed the button again, and the man immediately shut off- he collapsed back down into the chair, held there with heavy kevlar straps over his wrists. The old man reached down into the back of the machine, and pulled out a small vial- it was full of fluid, a dark green substance the consistency of watery blood. He held it up in the light and turned it around, looking at it intently.

"Know what this is, Michael?"

Of course I knew what it was. You don't spend the amount of time I've spent in this job without getting to know intimately the various contents of the human anatomy. Still, I kept my mouth shut.

"Pineal fluid. Isn't it beautiful? See, every so often, I need... well, call it a 'tune-up'. Only about every twenty years or so, you understand."

He really wasn't telling me anything I hadn't already guessed at this point, but I let him keep talking- he seemed to be enjoying telling me, like that was the real reason I was here. So, I let him talk.

"How old do you think I am, Michael? Sixty? Seventy?" I could guess he was playing with me, so I humored him.

"I don't know- how old are you?"

"What if I told you I was over eight hundred years old? Huh?"

Here it came.

"See, Michael, I guess I'm what most people would call a 'vampire'. Except, I don't need blood to survive- I need fresh pineal fluid, straight from the source. Otherwise it isn't any good. And the best stuff, the freshest stuff- comes from people in the heights of fear- like our friend here." He waved the vial towards the man in the chair. "Oh, I've been keeping him alive, feeding him through tubes and such, but eventually, he'll die, like the others- the human nervous system can only take so much. But then again, that's why you're here, isn't it?"

He took a step back. "Well, I've rambled on long enough- time to let you get to work. I'll get out of your way, Michael." He was actually rubbing his hands together in anticipation. Jesus.

I bent down in front of the man in the chair, and set my bag down on the floor next to the machine. The glow coming out of it now was a little bit stronger. I opened it, and got it ready. The Mahakala knew that the time was approaching for it to feed. The old man saw the open bag, and the top of the Mahakala as well. "Ooooh, nice surgeon's tools. Where did you find those?", he said from over in the corner. I held my finger up to my lips, to remind him to be silent.

See, the Mahakala looks like whatever the viewer wants it to look like- and since it's usually the last thing they see, it's usually what they want the most in life. The fact that the old man had seen gleaming surgeon's tools simply reinforced the reason I was there.

I made it look like I was fiddling around with the buttons on the machine, but all I was really doing was warming the Mahakala up so it could get to work. I squatted there for a few more minutes, pretending to adjust the machine, while the Mahakala glowed just a little bit stronger- it was almost time now. I looked up at the man in the chair- he would be dead soon, and not by my hand- the old man had drained him too badly for me to recover.

I stood up, walked over to the opposite corner of the room, and lit a cigarette. The Mahakala was glowing strongly now, rivaling the lamp hanging from the ceiling.

"What the hell are you doing? Get back over there! This isn't what I paid you for! Finish the fucking job!"

I simply waved him off. It was time.

The Mahakala suddenly leaped out of the bag, and toward the old man's chest- straight for the sternum. What it actually looked like, was a cross between a steam engine and a slug- all mechanical parts co-mingling with squirming, oozing mollusk flesh. Of course, if you saw this, it meant that you were about to die. It started to burrow into the old man's chest, spinning around while taking root inside. I explained it to him while it was doing so.

"See, he's not the reason I'm here, you old buzzard- you are. You've cheated me for too fucking long, and now it's time to pay the fiddler."

Which was true- this guy was a black mark on my record, not to mention all the others who had held my position- the agency doesn't like the ones who cheat the system.

The Mahakala had finished burrowing into his body and had taken hold. I pressed a switch on the inside of the bag, and the Mahakala started to... suck. I stood in the corner and smoked while it did its work. The old man seemed to... collapse, from the inside out. Vampire my ass- he died, just like the others. No matter how old he was, he couldn't have gotten away with this forever. Suddenly, the man in the chair woke up, and saw what the Mahakala was doing- he died of fright, simply from seeing it. Had he been stronger, perhaps he could have survived- but no matter. My assignment had been to take the old man, cost be damned.

There wasn't any trace of the old man left, save for some scraps of clothes, a hearing aid, and some hair and teeth in the corner. I patted the bag, and the Mahakala crept back inside. I opened the door, stubbed my cigarette out on the jamb, and walked up and out of the dank hallway.

Either the butler was deaf and/or indifferent to human screaming, or the whole downstairs was soundproofed- he registered nothing on his granite-carved face as I walked past him and dropped one of my business cards on the tray he was standing by. I walked outside and looked at the sky- it was going to be a beautiful sunset. I heard the door shut behind me, and I could guess that the butler was reading the card I had left. It said:

You Have Been Just Visited By
A Representative Of
GODS, INC.
Supernatural/Paranormal Happenings
Our SPECIALTY

Shiva/Mahakala, aka DEATH