Possession by Proxy
by Dawg
In the rotting heart of a city long past caring,
where towers hunched like broken vertebrae
against a permanent bruise of a sky,
Clare moved through her days as a ghost might:
invisible but not unseen,
present but somehow erased.
At first, the encroaching darkness revealed itself
as minor infractions in reality’s order.
A flicker in the corner of her vision that never resolved into form;
a phrase she’d written in her own hand but had no memory of thinking;
cold patches forming in her flat,
clustering in corners like invisible bruises.
When the blackouts began, there was no warning.
She simply ceased to exist,
then returned, battered and gasping,
to a body that felt less her own each time.
The dread settled in stages–
slow, methodical, patient as poison.
She studied herself in the mirror
and found her own expression impenetrable–
her face belonged to someone else,
or perhaps to no one at all.
Old Madge, half legend, half threat,
the city’s oracle and its embarrassment,
followed Clare’s every move with eyes
feral and bright as cut glass.
“It’s not just you in there, darling.
You’re full of holes, and something’s leaking through.”
“Possession,” Madge said.
“A parasite in the soul.
A demon that’s learned patience.
When you vanish, it walks. It practices.
Each time, it grows bolder.”
Sleep became treacherous–
her bed a raft on dark, uncertain waters.
She woke to strange wounds and stranger cravings,
her dreams violent–
a tangle of red hands, staring eyes,
and voices chanting in languages she’d never learned.
Jason–her last link to normalcy–
found her on the steps of a derelict church.
“Clare, what’s happening to you?”
She flinched. “Don’t.
It’s inside me. Something old. Something hungry.”
“We’ll fight it together,” he insisted,
but Clare heard the laughter bubbling up inside her,
dark and cruel and utterly not her own.
In that moment, Clare realized the true horror:
possession was never about loss of control.
It was about erasure–
a slow, methodical rewriting of a life
until only the shadows remained.
The city would not remember her name.
The demon would.
And that was its greatest victory of all.