Mary and ’Stoph

“I am bored,” the demon muttered.

“Lighten up, ’Stoph,” Mary replied far too cheerily.

“Do not call me that.”

“Don’t call you what?” Mary asked, her tone dripping with playfulness. “’Stoph?”

“Must we play this game, child?” the demon grumbled.

“What’s wrong with ’Stoph? We’ve been together for what,” Mary pretending to be counting on her fingers, “a long fucking time, now, and you still won’t tell me your name. I have to call you something. I figured you’d like Mephistopheles. From, uh…”

The demon sighed. “Faust.”

“Right, Faust. So, what’s wrong with ’Stoph? He was a big deal right? Agent of the devil and all that.”

“Just… do not.”

“Or what?” Mary prodded, “…’Stoph.” Mary’s bladder seized suddenly sending an abrupt warm spurt of urine into her panties.

“Oh, fuck you,” Mary hissed through clenched teeth. Most of the dialogue carried between the two unwilling companions occurred internally, sounding as hushed words spoken in the bottom of a deep well. But the sudden uncontrollable pissing caused her to inadvertently say this out loud.

“Asshole,” she said, returning to their shared internal speech. At the word, her anus flexed involuntarily, and her stomach bubbled violently. “No, no, no!” she sputtered. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was just messing around.” The demon chuckled quietly, satisfied his point had been made. His laugh sounded of two large rocks being scraped together in stops and starts. Mary’s bodily functions quickly returned to some semblance of normal.

********************

Normal was, of course, relative for a woman occupied by a demon for nearly a century. He had wooed her with whispered fantasies of righteous revenge on a cheating boyfriend in her late teen years as she spent a lonely heartbroken autumn watching the occasional Ford Model T drive by her stoop like some inconceivable magic machine. She kept her hair boobed back then and kept a secret short skirt under her mattress for when her parents were away, working or trying to find work. She wanted so much to be like the flappers, those free-spirited women who flaunted their feminine power unashamedly, drinking and smoking like the boys and fuck anyone who had a problem with it. But her parents would have wept tears of blood if they ever saw her knees peeking out from under that secret skirt.

The demon, of course, found her discontentment to be a ripe opportunity. Still, it took him another decade to move in completely. In Mary’s twenties, he finally attempted full possession and that is when matters took an unusual turn. He had not considered that her parents were Catholic by convention if not observation and dutifully had Mary baptized shortly after birth. As a result of an unfortunate technical oversight on his part, the demon became fused to Mary’s soul, unable to leave her and unable to take over completely. He was stuck. Forever.

For Mary’s part, this was extremely disconcerting, at least initially. She endured this unending desperate raging voice screaming the most awful things in her head and she was powerless to shut it out. Soon, the demon had realized he had some degree of power over her and consoled himself with torturing Mary in childish ways. This often involved involuntarily voiding her bowels, random blindness, or sending her into the deep throws of powerful orgasms in very public and inconvenient places.

On an unbearably hot and humid night in the late summer of 1934, no longer able to endure the demon’s tantrums, Mary threw herself from the roof of the six-story tenement building in which her family had been living. The demon, for his part, laughed the whole way down. He stopped laughing abruptly when she struck the pavement, breaking her neck, fracturing her skull and snapping one arm and both her legs. He felt every ounce of the indescribable pain as if it were his own body broken and bleeding into the moonlit gutter. It dawned on him then that if she died, he would cease to be as well.

So, he kept her alive. He had helped her bones and flesh knit back together, slowly, painfully. He also realized that she was not powerless against him and Mary now understood this as well. An uneasy and unspoken truce was made that day and they had lived together as reasonably as possible ever since, the demon growing more and more cynical and disinterested, Mary ageless and undying.

********************

“What is he doing?” Mary asked, seemingly over their last encounter now that the piss in the crotch of her pants was drying. She was surreptitiously eyeing a man rocking in choregraphed synchronization with the rest of the passengers in the subway car.

“Who cares?” the demon replied.

“He’s acting strange,” she said. The man was leering intermittently at a woman seated nearby nursing her baby beneath a small lavender blanket draped over her shoulder. Looking more closely, Mary realized that the blanket had slipped just enough to expose the soft pale side of the woman’s engorged breast. The man would grin and then cover his mouth, looking away suddenly then, just as quickly, look back.

“Pervert,” she said.

“Many men rather enjoy breasts. Is this news to you?” the demon asked lazily.

Mary rolled her eyes, which she supposed made her look a little strange to casual observers. “No, it’s not news to me,” she said mockingly. “He’s just… I don’t know… being more pervy about it than you might expect.”

She sweetened her inner voice, suddenly. “You know, you could just…”

“No,” the demon interrupted.

“What?” she asked, feigning indignation. “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

“Really?” the demon asked exasperatedly.

“Ok, maybe you did,” she acknowledged. “Look, couldn’t you just reach out and see what’s going on behind those rotten peepers? It sure would make me feel better.”

“No.”

“Oh, come on! When is the last time I asked you to do any of your demon act?”

“This morning. At breakfast.”

“What? No.”

“The oil splashed you and burned your hand. I healed it.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Mary said. “That hurt you too.”

“Why in the world would I bother? I sincerely hope he begins violently masturbating right here on the subway. It might break up the monotony.”

“You are so fucking messed up,” The constant bargaining always wore gratingly on Mary but she knew it was expected. “What do you want?”

“Whatever could you mean?” the demon replied coyly.

“Stop fucking around. What’s it going to be this time? Male or female?” Mary asked, prodding impatiently. The demon often required some sort of act on Mary’s part that was either immoral, illegal, or more often than not just degrading and distasteful. Mary had grown accustomed to it decades ago and could no longer find the will to be appalled at what the demon thought of as entertainment employing the casual use of Mary’s body.

“Hmm,” the demon considered. The leering man began tapping his foot nervously and was no longer trying to conceal his enrapture at the scene in front of him. “Canine.”

“For shit’s sake, I’m not fucking a dog.”

“Ok, then kill one… painfully.”

“What is wrong with you? No!”

“Maim?”

“No.”

“Ok,” the demon grumbled, his disappointment obvious. “Male,” the demon said. “No, female.”

“Which is it?” Mary said frustration building while she continued to eye the creep across from her.

“Both.”

“Both?” She sighed.

“At once.”

Mary shook her head. “Fine,” she conceded. “But, only if I find willing participants.”

“Agreed.”

Immediately, she felt the demon’s presence unspool from her in sickly tentacles, reaching for the man. Mary could see the demon’s manifestation as a yellow-green vapor, but he was invisible to all but her. The green spiraling branches surrounded the man’s head like a gauzy hood.

“Hee hee hee,” the demon giggled. “Oh, this is… fantastic!”

“What?” Mary asked, her inner voice carrying her irritation heavily.

“Well,” the demon said softly while the tendrils of vapor retreated back into Mary’s body. “You need not worry for mommy. He has no interest in breasts.”

“Then what’s his deal?”

“He’s hungry.”

“Oh, that’s fucked up,” Mary said, looking disgusted. She supposed offhandedly that breastmilk was a natural thing in the right context; but the visual that came unbidden to her mind made a bit of breakfast threaten its return.

“No, no,” the demon said, still giggling. “I told you he has no interest in her ample provisions. His tastes lean more toward a certain sort of, well… veal.” This time, a healthy portion of breakfast did make the trip up and Mary quickly swallowed it back down.

“He wants to eat the baby?” she asked unbelievingly.

“Indeed,” the demon answered. She knew he was not lying. He could not, in fact. It was a strange side effect of their fusion. “He plans to take the child at the next stop.”

“New deal,” she said, a new rage boiling in her chest.

“No changing the deal now,” the demon growled warningly. “Sexual congress with one male, one female, at the same time. Anal optional. A promise has been made.”

“No one said anything about anal,” she started offhandedly. “It doesn’t matter. How would you feel about a murder, instead?” Her eyes were boring hard into the monster across the aisle.

“Oh,” the demon said genuinely surprised as their smiles merged as one. “Agreed.”

To be continued…