“As I got older, I became more and more curious about the flickers and what they revealed to me,” Atlas shared. “My grandma told me to stay away from them. My parents didn’t believe me. They tried to medicate me, sure that I had a mental illness. I couldn’t stop though. I wanted answers.”
“I’m sorry, Atlas,” Bel said.
“Me too. Maybe if I hadn’t been so obsessed with them—”
“Tell me what happened,” Bel urged.
“There was a house across the railroad tracks from our house. I wasn’t supposed to go into that part of town since it wasn’t safe.” Atlas had stalked that house for weeks. “There were at least three of them that lived there. Or so I thought. There was more.”
“A pack,” Bel said.
“Must be. I would sit and watch that house for hours. Try to figure out why…what the flickers were telling me. I suspected they could shift. Transform. I never saw it for myself. I was reading a lot of supernatural books. I even went to the library to look up old myths and legends.”
“You tried to make sense of everything,” Bel said.
“They must have seen me. I made some kind of mistake,” Atlas told him. “They came after me. Except I wasn’t home.”
“Your family,” Bel whispered.
“I came home from work and…they had been…torn apart.” He barely managed to get the words out. It had been horrible. Atlas still saw that scene when he closed his eyes.
Bel hissed.
“My parents didn’t make it out of the bedroom,” Atlas said. “But my grandma, she ran, they caught up to her in the backyard.” Just remembering what he found made Atlas want to vomit.
“Shh.” Bel held up the glass again. “Drink more water.”
Atlas sipped as he thought. Remembered. The scene currently as fresh in his mind as the night he’d returned to that horror.
“Good boy,” Bel praised.
Atlas smirked as he pushed the glass away. Bel was so sweet. He’d have to thank Cary and Asmos when he finally met the demon for sending Bel in for popcorn. Their need for human junk food changed Atlas’s life.
“Better?” Bel asked.
“Yeah.” He just wanted to get the rest of this out. “I called nine-one-one and sat with my grandma until they arrived.”
“That—” Bel shook his head.
“It was bad. I cried and told her over and over how sorry I was. That I shouldn’t have left them alone. She was already gone but I just continued telling her how sorry I was.”
“Then what happened?”
“The cops thought I was traumatized. I was traumatized! I told them who did this. I begged them for help,” Atlas said. His voice rose and he remembered being frustrated and terrified.
“No one believed you,” Bel stated.
“I had been taken to the hospital. After the cops left, I knew they weren’t going to do anything. I got dressed and walked out.”
“The hospital staff just let you go?”
Atlas shrugged. “No reason to stop me. I hadn’t been injured.”
“You went to the house.” It wasn’t a question.
“I did. I walked across town. Took me over an hour. By the time I arrived I was determined to make them pay.” Atlas had even found a piece of rebar abandoned on the side of the road to use as a weapon. He wasn’t a killer but he would have been that night.
“And?” Bel asked.
