"I can’t help it, doctor. They’re fucking everywhere. Nobody knows but me."
“Knows what, Larry?”
“About the demons! They’re everywhere!”
“Tell me about the demons, Larry. What do they look like?”
“Leathery, shiny black skin. Spindly limbs with single claws for feet. Wings like reaper’s cloth. And the eyes!” The man on the couch shudders.
“What’s wrong with their eyes, Larry?”
“They’re huge. They take up half of the face. They don’t even look like eyes, they’re like a million eyes clumped together. And they’re red!”
“Okay, enough about what they look like. What makes them so terrifying to you personally? Do the demons have an attraction to you? What is it you don´t like about them?”
“Well, I know all kinds of things about them. They go into graveyards and crawl into the earth and feast on the flesh of corpses at night. They get into food and poison it with their own vomit. They eat rotting carcasses of animals right off the side of the roads. They float around people who don’t notice them, and they pop their claws into their flesh and inject them with disease and rot and all of the pain of all the corpses they’ve fed on before. They’re disgusting, loathsome, creatures, and-“
“Okay, Larry. Now tell me where you see these demons.”
“Everywhere! In the park, they hover in the air behind families, and the people don’t even see them. Then they pop their claws into their flesh, and they inject disease and-“
“Okay, Larry. You’ve said that before. Now I’ll need to see you twice a week from now on. Are Wednesdays and Fridays good for you?”
Larry nods as he is led out the door by two escorts in white. When it opens again, the psychiatrist’s secretary walks in.
“Did you find out why that schizophrenic won’t eat anything?”
“Yes. I’m afraid he’ll have to be force-fed for awhile longer, though. He thinks demons are everywhere, poisoning food. We’re going to have to find a way to get rid of his pteronarcophobia.”
“Ptero…what?”
“The fear of flies.”
—
Comments