A desperate social climber who sells his soul for power becomes a vessel for unspeakable horrors, leading to his execution — only for something far darker to awaken in his place.
Copyright © Priya Florence Shah
The night James Whitaker sold his soul, the air tasted of copper and whiskey.
The Brotherhood had gathered in the basement of an abandoned church, candles flickering against stone walls soaked in centuries of sin.
A robed figure held out a dagger, its obsidian blade reflecting the crimson glow of the sigil painted on the floor. James grinned as he pricked his finger, the alcohol dulling the sting.
“You do this,” murmured Victor Crane, the man who had introduced him to the cult, “and you’ll never have to beg again. No more kissing asses, no more clawing your way up. Power will find you.”
James had spent his entire life fighting to be seen. Raised in a crumbling tenement, abandoned by a mother who chose a needle over him, he had learned early that the world only valued the ruthless.
He had climbed, schemed, and sold pieces of himself along the way. If carving his name into something ancient meant never being hungry again, so be it.
He pressed his bleeding finger to the sigil. The moment his blood met the ink, the room went silent. The candle flames bent inward. A heavy presence coiled around his ribs, squeezing, whispering.
“Mine now.”
James staggered but forced a smirk. Probably just the bourbon.
Victor clapped him on the back. “Welcome to the real world.”
At first, nothing changed — at least, nothing he noticed. Deals still swung in his favor. His name carried weight in rooms that once ignored him. He drank more but never suffered hangovers. The nights blurred together.
Then the gaps started.
The first time he blacked out, he woke up in an alley, his shirt damp and sticking to his chest. A sharp ache gnawed at his hands. He turned them over, blinking at the raw skin of his knuckles, the crusted blood in the creases.
His phone buzzed. A message from Victor: “You’re in now. Enjoy the perks.”
James tried to laugh it off. He’d always been a drunk. What was one lost night?
But then it happened again.
And again.
Each time, he woke in strange places. A park bench, an empty parking lot, a bathroom stall with vomit streaked across the floor. His muscles ached in ways that suggested a struggle. And then came the smell. It clung to him — thick, metallic, wrong.
And the dreams.
In them, he saw himself moving through dark streets, his body a puppet on invisible strings. He heard the wet sound of a blade meeting flesh. A woman’s breath hitching into silence. His own voice, low and unfamiliar, murmuring in a language he didn’t recognize.
One morning, he woke to find a deep scratch down his forearm, the skin jagged and red. Beneath it, written in shaky letters, were the words:
“Don’t drink. Don’t sleep.”
He stared at the message, his own handwriting, though he had no memory of writing it.
That night, he poured the whiskey down the drain.
The news broke the next morning.
A woman found disemboweled in her apartment. No signs of forced entry. No fingerprints, no weapon. The only evidence was a single word scrawled on the wall in blood: “OBEY.”
James retched into the sink.
He turned on the shower, scrubbing himself raw. But as the water swirled down the drain, something dark slipped between his ribs, something cold and laughing.
“You thought this was about you?”
His body jerked. His fingers twitched. He slammed his hands against the tiles, his breath ragged.
“You’re just the vessel.”
A sharp knock at the door made him freeze.
Through the peephole, flashing red and blue.
The trial was a spectacle. The media called him “The Hollow Man,” a killer with no memory, no remorse. The Brotherhood never came for him.
His lawyer argued insanity. The jury saw the evidence. The photos of bodies torn apart. The recordings of his voice muttering strange phrases in the dead of night.
They sentenced him to the chair.
On the night of his execution, the air in his cell turned heavy. The guards strapped him in, avoiding his gaze. The priest muttered empty prayers. The switch loomed.
He felt the presence before he heard it.
“Now, we begin.”
The switch flipped.
Electricity roared through his body. His spine arched, his teeth clenched—
And the lights flickered.
The warden shouted. The guards staggered back.
And James — James, who had fought to be more than nothing, more than a body used and discarded —
Laughed.
The air turned ice-cold. The shadows in the room twisted, stretched, swallowing the walls.
The last thing James saw before everything went dark was the horror on the warden’s face —
And the black, empty thing that smiled through his eyes.
The next morning, the guards found the execution chamber empty.
Only the restraints remained.
And on the wall, scrawled in burning letters, was a single word: “AWAKEN.”
