Mind over Matter   

Asher stood over my prone body examining me. I couldn’t really see him as my eyelids were closed and I was entirely too focused on watching the crazy dots swimming behind them. Still, I could feel his slimy perusal like a nauseating caress over every inch of me. To make matters worse, it wasn’t confined to my physical body. It was like his special brand of taint sought my very essence, his digusting touch sliding through the deepest part of me. It was invasive and horrible and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop him.

Dante and I had been so wrong.

Aunt Celeste was just your average friendly, cookie-baking, Sunday school teaching neighborhood granny compared to this awful creature. How could we ever think we stood a chance against him? I’d barely survived my aunt, and she wasn’t anywhere near this level of nightmare-worthy terror. Now here I was facing this demon alone, fear, doubt, and pain overwhelming me on all levels.

“I am Asher, the soul collector,” he said as if I there’d been any doubt. “And it seems that you and I have some business to discuss, Eliza Rain Taylor.”  

His words assaulted my already fractured mind. I gritted my teeth against the pain and brain numbing fear. I tried to get a coherent thought together, but it was no use. I was trapped in whatever mental hold he had over me. It was like trying to think through the stricken immobility of a full-blown panic attack.

My dad used to say everything was mind over matter: If you don’t mind, it don’t matter. It took me a long time to realize he was ultimately wrong. Sometimes, no matter how much you tried not to mind anything or anybody, they came back and mattered quite a bit. I was a living example. Had I not cared about Chase or minded what Aunt Celeste was doing to people, I wouldn’t be in this utter freaking agony right now.

“Well do I know the fury and complete debasement of being at another’s mercy, or lack thereof as it were. It burns the soul, dear Eliza. That is what you are experiencing right now…that pain? It is not in your mind, it is in your soul.” He laughed then, and I felt the horrible sound echo inside my head until nothing else existed. When he spoke again I barely even knew my own name anymore. “I see that you have cost me the use of one of my long standing mortal employees. Normally I would consider this turn of events highly unacceptable. Celeste and I had a contract, and your actions have conveniently nullified our standing arrangement. Now you shall inherit her obligations, as well as the terms of our prior arrangement.”  He glided around me as he spoke, the smoke and smell of him swirling around me in a noxious cloud.

I made some kind of sound in the back of my throat. Asher seemed to stop and tried to make sense of my nonsensical sound effects. “What was that, mortal?”

I felt the grip on everything I was slacken the slightest bit so I could breathe and speak. Or at least grunt out something more akin to English. It wasn’t much, but at least it was an improvement.

“She. Was. A. Tool,” I managed to squeeze out.

The insult totally flew over Asher’s head as he agreed with me. “Yes, a most invaluable tool. She’d lasted longer than the others.” He mused and I got the impression he wasn’t really that sorry to see her go. "She almost believed she would get the better end of our arrangement. It seems she did, but no thanks to her own actions, but rather because of yours.”

I felt myself being lifted off the ground until I was hanging in midair in front of Asher. I felt my eyes widen as whatever force was holding me up locked me in place so that I couldn’t even twitch. Whatever had me was so dark it froze the blood in my very veins, and for the first time in my life I knew abject terror. It was nothing like Chase's attack, which I’d managed to get through with only a few scratches and a couple of bruises. Sure, Chase had been scary and violent, but I knew he was still inside himself somewhere. Inside that violent, almost crazed mental case, there was his normal, totally sane self being held hostage by whatever thing my aunt and Asher had unleashed. That, along with Dante's help, had helped me pull myself together after his brutal attack. But this, this was nothing even remotely close to that - this was pure horror. This was a darkness so total, I felt something inside me crack just by its very proximity. It was every childhood nightmare, terrifying fear, and scary movie scene all rolled into one.

"Now she is gone and here you are.” Asher spoke below me, looking up at me like I was some twisted form of modern art.  

I felt something slither around my throat and begin to crush my windpipe. At the same time I felt all the air being extracted out of my lungs in a violent pull. Unable to move, the sensation of being suffocated only intensified. I attempted to struggle, to kick out, to do anything but it was all in vain. I felt tears prick my eyes but i was so frozen they couldn’t fall out of my eyes to run down my face.

As I watched, the wounds on my hands Dante had so recently healed opened back up so wide blood fell in a steady stream down my fingertips to splash on the floor. As my very red blood hit the shop floor, shadows from every nook and cranny stretched out and reached for it. Within a few seconds, every drop was gone as the darkness consumed it. The shadows didn’t move. They waited beneath me, eagerly lapping up all the blood that continued to pour out of my injuries. I suddenly understood how people went insane. I mean totally batshit crazy.

“My children like the taste of you, Eliza. It is quite rare as I keep them so well fed,” Asher remarked.

Utter despair unlike any I had ever known washed over me. I would never be able to fight Asher. He was so beyond anything I could even begin to think I could take on. Why had I thought this was even possible? Why did I think I’d ever be able to resist? Asher was so much stronger than I could ever be. He was everything. He was the very darkness around me. There was nothing I could do to stop him. I was totally at his mercy. I was nothing. I was less than nothing. I was only a speck in the oblivion of…

Hold up. WTF was that all about?  These asinine thoughts weren’t mine. My thoughts weren’t nearly so complicated.

Pain = bad. Asher = really bad. That was how my thought process worked. All this other whiny musings were most definitely not mine.  

Is that what Dante had meant when he’d warned me earlier? I hadn’t really believed him at the time but he did try to warn me. I just didn’t want to believe that I would be dealing with a creature that could manipulate me into believing thoughts that weren’t actually mine. Good thing I wasn’t nearly so self-involved and pathetic when it came to my own internal dialogue.

He laughed now and the sensation was like having black motor oil poured down my throat. It was awful and choking, and didn’t help my current situation in the least. Although it did help piss me off a little and with that burn in my belly I fought against the blood-hungry darkness that was Asher.

“Interesting…no one has been so quick to recognize my touch in a long time. Tell me little Eliza, what else did Dante warn you about?”

My hand pulled at the invisible grip on my throat as I struggled to breathe and speak. I could feel my warm blood slide over whatever was holding me. It reared back a little at my wet touch. “That you’d bargain,” I managed to get out before my throat was locked back up in the invisible vice.

I dropped unceremoniously to the floor. I was so busy dragging air into my lungs that I didn’t care about the broken blood vessels that were starting to bruise my neck and face at the moment, or the blood that was getting everywhere. The shadows fell back as Asher stepped forward, though they seemed to hiss at being blocked for another chance at my blood.

I stared at the shadows and thought I could make out faces in them; small, terrifying faces that would be starring in all my future nightmares for years to come. I stared up at Asher, anything was better than what awaited in the dark.     

“You wish to bargain with me, Eliza?” he sounded surprisingly amused as he looked down on me. “Is that why you got rid of your aunt?”

“No.” As I watched, my wounds sealed back up, all the blood disappearing as if it’d never been. I took another ragged breath, and when I spoke my voice sounded rough and choppy even to my own ears, “I got rid of her because she was trying to kill me.”

“I knew Celeste for a long time. I do not think she tried very hard to kill you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because here you are. If she truly wanted you dead, you would be,” Asher answered matter-of-factly.

“I don’t think she planned on getting sucked into the Monet,” I offered, still feeling a little weirded out by that whole turn of events.

“Perhaps,” But the way Asher said it made me wonder if perhaps he didn’t think it was as accidental as it appeared. Surely she hadn’t meant for that to happen, but now that I thought about it, it would be something that my aunt would do, wouldn’t it? But how would she have known that I would’ve gone for the mirror? How would she have known any of it would’ve worked out right? I figured those questions were best left for another time; another time when I wasn’t trying to keep all my bones and skin intact from a creature that seemed determined to pick me apart piece by piece.  

He turned back to me now. “What makes you think I wish to bargain? You are your aunt’s replacement. Her arrangement is now yours.”

“I never agreed to that!” I hadn’t. Dante and Asher both assumed I would automatically replace my aunt’s sudden vacancy, but I never once said I was doing any such thing. I wasn’t the kind of person that just played ball. As a matter of fact, I was counting on my innate ability to be stubborn and impossible to see my way out of this freaking disaster.  

“You do not have to. It is the way it has always been. Humans are weak, and easily turned to a life of wantonness. It is the job of my kind to exploit such a flaw in your overall design. According to the Bible, some angels fell because of their pride; do not humans share the same major flaw? Don’t you?”

Something inside me burst into flame – not the Lust filled kind, but rather the righteous fury version. Now, I always considered my usual anger to be righteous because that’s what I always thought I’d felt. It wasn’t. The absolute fury running through my veins at this moment was so beyond any petty or selfish feeling I’d ever had about myself, that I knew this was the real deal. This was just so much bigger. It was so much more that I couldn’t tell where it began and I ended  - it was everything.  

I stood up and faced Asher, and if I trembled a little that couldn’t be helped. At least I was satisfied in the knowledge than when I spoke the words came out relatively firm.  “Yes. We can be prideful and hateful and all those things, but your kind manipulates innocent people into doing horrible things, then you take their souls. If you’d left them alone, they would’ve never done such horrible things in the first place.”

Asher shook his head and I got the distinct impression he was laughing at me. It was really freaking annoying. “So young and naïve. Do you really believe that?”

“Of course!” I was so sick and tired of everyone saying that to me. Yes I was young, and quite possibly naïve, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be right. There were decent people in the world. Chase had been decent before I’d gotten him wrapped up in something evil and terrible. His parents had probably been decent before Aunt Celeste and my own mom had intervened in their lives. People were relatively decent – it was something I wouldn’t have believed until now. But now, after spending time with the real Chase and his dad, and comparing them to damaged people like my own parents or truly horrible people like Aunt Celeste, I knew it to be true. Decent people did exist, but sometimes it was their exposure to others that ruined their lives.   

Asher seemed to shrug, caring little for my opinion on the matter. “It is of little consequence either way. I have a job to do. Celeste was my employee. You have interfered in our arrangement. Now you work for me.”

“I won’t do it. I’m not killing or damning anyone.” I stared back at him defiantly. He could melt my eyes right out of their sockets if he wanted to. I wasn’t about to replace my aunt and damn decent people to hell.  

“You do not kill or damn them. You simply sell them what they most desire,”Asher pointed out, “What the individual does afterwards is merely their choice. It is always about choice dear girl.”

Was he really trying to be reasonable about the whole set-up? God, he was even more insane than Aunt Celeste was. Whatever line of crap he was trying to feed me, I knew better than to buy. “Selling them a mortal sin, cursing their eternal soul and making them kill themselves is still not my ideal career choice.”

I was struck down by that invisible force again, landing hard on my knees. It tried to press me down flat to the floor as Asher spoke above me, his voice layered with so many other voices it was terrifying. “You do not have a choice.”

“Yes, I do,” I breathed out, trying to think past the terror of the moment. This was all in my mind. It wasn’t real. If he’d really wanted to kill me, he would’ve done it already. He was just playing with me, trying to scare me. Too bad for him I was already tapped out on the old fear reserves.

“Your soul is already tainted. What are a few more stains at this point?” I could feel him studying me like I was some kind of pinned bug on a wall, or the floor in my case.

“Is that how you convinced Celeste?” I asked without thinking.

I felt the invisible boot in my back let up a little. “Celeste was led by her heart. She was a fool.”

I snorted, my face still just a few inches from the ground. God, her floors were really pretty filthy. You would think a witch as powerful as she was would’ve been able to handle a mop.  “Heart? What heart?” My brain was going a million miles a minute. I needed to find a way out of this mess. I needed to get Asher to negotiate with me. I really needed to get vertical again. “What was your exact agreement with my aunt?”

“Celeste was my purveyor on this plane. Seven souls each marked with a mortal sin. So long as she met the terms of her annual quota, she was granted one more year of life.”

"Ok, so if I do this, what do I get? I’m not that old. Why would one more year be worth all that trouble for me?”

“Are we back to bargaining then, Eliza?” he asked, this time a curious tone overlaying his words.

I knew Dante was right about Asher. He was a creature that couldn’t help bargaining. He was old and bored. What else did he have to live for but finding new ways to make humans miserable? He totally got off on that sort of thing. He was probably trying to figure out a way to get one better over me even as I lay flat on the ground. Asher seemed like the kind of creature that would jump at the chance to outdo himself, even his own arrangement with Celeste.

That was something I could work with.

“Yes, if you’re up for a little negotiation,” I ventured. This was my chance, and I was going to take it. I lifted my head and rose slowly, but only to my knees. What was the point of getting all the way back up if he was just going to slam me down again? At least this way, it was a shorter fall.  

Besides, if Asher thought he held the upper hand in our little negotiation with me on my knees so be it. I had to get him to work with me.

Anything beat the alternative.