A Growing Hunger

I have no use for it, this feeling that grows for you in my chest. As a collector of souls, it is antithetical to my practice; as a demon, it is a moral affront. It’s practically useless; I cannot harness it for anything productive. In fact, I fear that its main purpose is to unnerve me. It distracts me from my summons. I rifle through the voices calling to me, and even though I know it will never be you, part of me hopes that I’ll divine some way to get you to see me, and we will finally meet. I see so many people who are not you.

I trawl the streets for lost and desperate souls as a distraction. I find all the usual sorts, the gamblers, the addicts, they are good in a pinch, when I’m really hungry. I don’t bother with the animals; their souls have no complexity to them. They have no inner turmoil, no ethical conundrums, and no darkest desires. They are but a drop in my unending well of hunger. The flavours of a soul are important. Certain ones sustain me for longer. Some humans have a grit and a sourness that make them the most coveted amongst my colleagues. It’s always a matter of who can answer the call first when a rich, flavourful soul becomes available.

Your soul had an intoxicating smell. I caught wind of it downstream of a river running through a park. The thrum of a city alive with people surrounded you, but you were perfectly still. You sat alone at the water's edge. Your legs were crossed, hands contemplatively resting atop one another in your lap. Your eyes gazed down, scanning back and forth, watching fireflies skip and dance over the water, watching the river run. Every once in a while, your concentration on the river would break, and you would glance down at your phone, waiting. I peered over your shoulder, your thumb pressed down, hard, into your palm. Selfishly, I hoped the situation was dire, terrible enough for you to call to me, so I could appear and coax your soul out of you from between your teeth. Your soul had the metallic tang of a restrained anger, and a sweetness I couldn’t place. It was not the smoothness or the brightness of an optimist's soul, or a baby’s. It was thick and cloying, like an overripe fruit at the base of a tree.

You were no less mortal, and no less normal, than anyone else I had come across, but suddenly I did not want to leave you. I wanted to examine your life and to work backwards to figure out what parts of a human created this concoction.

I followed you home that day, back to your tiny apartment. One of hundreds in a city-sized grid of little, inconsequential lives. I watched you take your shoes off at the door. I watched you sink into the couch, bones heavy with exhaustion, and I watched you cry. Later, while you were sleeping, I took the soul of the man who lives in the apartment above you. He called me for help with his money problems. His daughter was sleeping in the next room. I choked down his soul. Its flavour didn’t thrill me as it once would have.

Over the next few days, I familiarise myself with your daily routine. It is a hunger I long thought dead that has revived itself in me and will not leave you alone. I watch you go to and from the hospital every day. I watch you wait in an endlessly long grocery line. I wait for some indication of inner weakness or anything that would indicate a susceptibility to my playbook of tricks, but it never comes. In watching you, I become familiar with your ferocity. I see how the unrelenting rhythms of any given day cause you to spike and fall in your anger over and over again. I see how that anger is what keeps you alive and pushes you on day by day. I often wonder where this anger stems from.

I recognise that ferocity well. For me, it is the byproduct of a life spent chained to a purpose you did not ask for. I feel it in the weariness of my own long, continuous existence, and in the responsibilities that have chained me to this earth. Day after day, I am held to the commandment to be a corrupting influence. I am to coax the good and the weak towards a life of damnation, over and over again, for eternity. Having grown exhausted by this, I have often thought of letting the life force drain naturally out of me. To live out whatever existence I have accrued from my bounty of souls and then fade away. I do not find pleasure in taking any more, but I do it, out of a terrible determination not to let this relentless punishment break me. It’s a growing resentment I notice is mirrored in you.

What is it that traps you in this pain? Humans, in my experience, are known for their ability to distract themselves from many great pains. Yet you do nothing but sit in it all day, you reckon with the consequences of actions I wish I could ask you about.

Every once in a while, I’ll notice that sickly sweetness around you again. It comes to the forefront of your soul in large swells before disappearing in an instant, leaving behind only the anger. It’s a form of joy, I think, but a happiness bred out of circumstance. Whatever this deep pain is, you mask it with the feeling that things could always be worse. It wafts to me from behind your ears, a pathetic gratefulness for food, water, and a roof over your head. You have not yet realised that your life could be so much more than the motions of anger and relief. I could give you more if only you would call for me.

I desperately want you to call for me. I often imagine what it would be like for you to see me for the first time. Would you recognise our common burden? You would have no idea the rareness of the soul you carry, but I would make you a good deal anyway.

I make deals for petty things; you would not believe what someone is willing to trade for their soul. Wealth, power, beauty, they are all fickle pursuits, and only to make one life better before spending the next thousand in my grasp. They always regret it. On their deathbeds, they bargain with me for a reduced sentence, and I can do nothing but uphold the deal that they made. They don’t realise that the binding is unbreakable. They think I am being selfish, that I want to spend the next thousand years in their misery, playing with them like dolls, taking them out of the toy box to do my bidding. I used to enjoy the trickery and the torture, even that I have grown weary of. I have no interest in holding onto these people beyond their ability to sustain my own life. Their job is to satiate my hunger, and my job is to convince them to do it.

More than this, they do not go beyond my most base offerings. They do not realise the cocktail of reality I could create for them if only they knew the right words. I have the power to transform the fabric of their material world, to reweave the threads of the universe to their will, but they only ask me to help them survive this world, not give them a new one.

I long for the day you ask me to give you any of this. I would perform feats so brazenly unnatural they would have no choice but to cast me from hell as they had heaven. I would twist and form reality over and over again until I found something that would make you smile. Then maybe we could both be free. It’s not so uncommon these days to make a deal with a devil, but you never once entertain the notion that your problems are anyone else’s responsibility but your own.

Where there was nothing before, there is now a quiet knowing that I will never take anything from you, but I would offer you the world, and there is the ever-present desire to reach out for your hand.

Today I stopped and watched you pass by me on the street. I watched you walk until you disappeared from view.

Then I followed a gambler down a dark alleyway.