Joel was never afraid of the dark. But he probably should have been. He got himself in a mess of trouble when we went away to school in Georgia. Like any other eighteen year old man, Joel liked to have fun. Maybe too much. He went to study journalism but started writing what would become a story he never planned on. What Joel didn’t realize was that having fun and living the party life came at a cost. Not just to his health or his reputation or his grades or future. But much worse things can happen when the excesses of mind-altering drugs and alcohol begin to filter out the light of good intentions. Sometimes those substances create a space that invites darker forces to visit the human mind.

Joel was really still just a kid when he went away. His mom and daddy had taught him right from wrong, but he still wondered where the real line was between good and evil and flirted with crossing it. When he was just 12 years old he accidentally ran over the neighbor’s cat with the lawn mower. Not in his young life had he ever seen so much blood or heard such a horrible sound from the injured creature. It was still alive, but gruesomely maimed, so he had to crush its head with a rock to put it out of its misery. He ran to his mother and cried in her lap. That was the last time he would ever cry. Something had changed within him from that day on. Joel grew cold that day. Something inside him died with that poor animal.

Joel and his two roommates, Anthony and Damon, got high on weed and speed and whatever they could get their hands on seven days a week. Anthony had been into drugs and drinking since he was in middle school, but always got good grades so his parents ignored his habits. He got a girl pregnant in his senior year, but his daddy made sure that baby was never born. Damon was new to the scene, but a fast learner. He was always looking for a new way to escape the pain of his old home life, which was religious and repressive. He thought being a Satanist was kind of cool and funny. He tried some witchcraft, casting spells to get help from the demonic world so he could be sexy, rich and famous. He was none of those things. Joel just liked to play along. Then he might write a story about his clever, but stupid roommates, add in some smut, and publish it online for a few dollars. They were just dumb kids, being kids. They never knew all the dumb things they were doing were just what the devil wanted.

Anthony and his girlfriend, Josie, found some new dope from a buddy they met at a party off campus. It was the kind of stuff that made you feel euphoric and sexy — uninhibited and unable to resist temptation. They brought it home to the boys, and everybody started to act pretty wild. Josie had been smoking dope and shooting it up for a couple years. She was skinny and mousy but bossy and conniving when she wanted her way. She got Anthony to convince Joel that they should have a three-way. Damon overheard this and was jealous, but decided he would be happy to watch.

The heat of the moment was what they gave into. Bodies and pleasures and blind, carnal pursuits. It was that place of reckless abandon, the opening space of illusion, where intimate touch becomes carelessly cruel and where agony is masked as ecstasy. Those kids didn’t understand what their four souls were pulling towards them. They couldn’t see how this poison and pain masquerading as pleasure would open an unholy portal to the darkness and fury of the demon realm and unleash the four torments: isolation, disease, insanity, and torture, before their ultimate judgment.

Damon was the first to sense the coming of the torments. Unable to break his jealous trance, staring at the writhing lust before him, he was drained of all sense of connection and belonging. Left out of the game, perhaps for his unattractiveness or his inability to assert himself as a man, he was unable to feel what he witnessed. Isolated, he lamented his lonely, pitiful existence. He looked away from his supposed friends and peered through the dark window, searching for some light to distract himself. There, in the trees outside, he saw many sets of red, glowing, tiny lights. He stood up, half naked, still shaking from the effects of the stimulants still surging through his blood and muscle. He pressed his face to the glass and could see clearly now that the sets of red lights were really many eyes staring at him fiendishly. They wanted into his head. They wanted into his soul. Damon knew these hellish harbingers must be what Anthony and Joel joked about when they made fun of burnt out junkies and meth heads that stayed awake too long. These were the legendary demons who normally lurked just out of sight in their dark dimension, waiting to prey on the weakest part of a man at his most vulnerable moment.

Damon stepped back and hid behind the curtain. He had just seen the Shadow People. He was but the first to notice them that night. One by one they others would fall out of their carefree ecstasy and come to have their own encounters with these human-feeding entities. And by the end of the night, only one of them would live to tell their story.