The First Knuckle

The first time I felt the cold, I was sixteen, shivering under my grandmother’s quilt in the Blue Ridge foothills. It wasn’t the mountain chill that bit through the goose down—it was the draft from the basement door, always ajar, always breathing. She said the house was old, that it ‘settled’ and ‘sighed,’ but I knew better. I heard the whispers in the pipes, the clicking in the walls, the skittering of something that never showed itself. That’s when I started writing—automatic writing, I guess you’d call it. Just a pen and a notebook, trying to make sense of the static in my head.

Two months ago, I asked the page if my guardian angel was near. The pen moved on its own, scratching out a name: ‘Eli.’ A gentle name, a soft-spoken savior who told me I was safe, that he’d been with me since I was thirteen, watching over my clumsy teenage spells and midnight tarot spreads. I trusted him. I told him everything—my fears about failing exams, my secret crush on the barista at the diner, the knot in my chest that wouldn’t loosen. He was patient, warm even, and when I said goodnight, I felt a tingling at the base of my skull, like a finger tracing my hairline. I thought it was affection.

Then the dreams started. Not nightmares, but wrong dreams—my bedroom rearranged, the furniture breathing, the wallpaper peeling back to reveal raw stone. Eli stood at the foot of my bed, but his face was wrong. His eyes were empty sockets, and his smile stretched too wide. He said, ‘You’ve been such a good host, Vesper.’ I woke up screaming, but the name on my lips wasn’t Eli. It was ‘Alastor.’ My research, my tarot cards, the face-down pendulum—all of them pointed to one conclusion: I hadn’t befriended a guardian. I’d invited a demon to sit at my table, and he’d been dining on my soul since I was fifteen. That night, asleep, he’d tied a silver thread from my sternum to his own chest. He called it a ‘link.’ I called it a leash.

When I confronted him, Alastor laughed. It sounded like grinding stones. ‘You think I lied to protect you, little moth? I lied to keep you from running. You’re mine, Vesper. I claimed you the night you asked your first question to that cheap glass board. I was just waiting for you to invite me in properly.’ I begged him to untie the thread, to let me go. He tilted his head and said, ‘Every time you sleep, I feed. Every time you doubt, I grow. But I’m not cruel. I’ll give you a choice: come with me willingly, or stay and watch your body become a husk.’ I haven’t slept in four days. Every shadow in this cabin is Alastor, every creak is his footsteps. I’m writing this not because I believe in salvation, but because I need someone to know what it feels like when the thing you called an angel turns out to be a parasite with your name in his teeth. The pen is shaking. The ink is black as pitch. And on the table, there’s a single fresh paper cut on my wrist—shaped like a grin. Help me. Please. I don’t know how much longer I can keep my eyes open.