You stepped into the woods while following a beaten path. Your shoes left footsteps behind you in the mud as your walk turned into a sprint as you made your way through the sudden downpour. The breeze smelled crisp and autumnal as it blew a conglomeration of colorful leaves around you, almost like a halo.

As you grew near to the ending of the path, the rain clouds had surrendered to the moon letting it shine brightly and light the way to the front porch of the abandoned mansion. That specific mansion had becams the most notorious ghost story in your town. The story had been passed down from generation to generation and legend said that any one person brave enough to head the dangerous adventure of simply getting to the old house must prove themselves and stay the night. Now you, being the skeptic you were, never believed in the stories and decided for yourself that you should make your way through the treacherous woods and stay overnight in the old Smith Mansion.

You dropped your phone down the old porch staircase and right into the second round of rain that had just began. You decided not to collect your phone because you were already soaked and desperate for sanctuary and it’s a good thing you didn’t go retrieve it. Later the police would find this phone that you decided to leave behind and it would help them find you.

As you opened the door it creaked open ever so slowly and made a sound as if a witch were cackling. You stood in the doorway and peered into the darkness. Lightning illuminated the room from the cracks in the boarded up windows and your flashlight flickered ever so slightly as you clicked it on. Panning around the room, you noticed how eerily still everything was. The wind had suddenly stopped howling like it had been just a moment before, and the only bird that dared preach its melancholy song was a raven that was perched precariously on the weathervane as if trying to warn you, as if it knew of the unseen horrors that resided within the Smith Mansion.

You took a step further inside. A step that would mean you were never leaving the mansion ever again. Of course you hadn’t known it at the time, only the spirits of the Smith’s and the breeze in the trees knew of what awaited you just upstairs. You looked down at your watch and it read three o’clock. Of course regular people call this time in particular, three A.M. But the whispers in the trees know it is much more.

Somewhere in town, far, far away from you and the Smith Mansion, a clock strikes three. It is the haunting hour. The witching hour. The time of night where dreams are at the verge of madness and threaten to become nightmares. The time of night where worshippers gather on bridges in hoods of darkness and despair. The time of night where shadows mingle with the living in graveyards and alleyways and any other place that might be crawling with unforeseen dangers in the night. The time of night when the devil comes out to play.

Having seen the majority of the downstairs, you felt something. A presence called you upstairs. You didn’t know why at the time but you felt an overwhelming urge of sorrow and unease as you reached the top step. As you stepped off of the last step and onto the second floor of the Smith Mansion you saw flashes of _things_. Not living things, nor were they things that were dead, but they danced across the walls in beautiful gowns and tuxedos. You couldn’t make out what, or better yet, who, they were, but you knew they were the spirits of the Smith family. Just trying to appease their new guest who would soon be joining them in their celebration for the dead.

You blinked and the shadows on the walls vanished just like fragments of time that could be blown away in just a snap of a finger. You were alone again. Alone with the darkness and your thoughts. You took a step deeper into the second floor and heard a floorboard creak. It wasn’t unusual for the floorboards of Smith Mansion to creak, and you knew that too, but that fateful creak didn’t come from the boards beneath you.

You gazed into the darkness ahead of you, squinting to see what, if anything, would emerge but you figured it was just the house setting and nothing else. You trudged on deeper into the dark, deeper into the belly of the house, deeper into the long forgotten bones of the mansion. There awaiting you in the old dusty library, just ahead of you, was something darker than the dark.

As you pushed open the door to the old library you were hit with the aroma of rotting books and termite eaten wood. You could’ve turned back. You could’ve left and forgotten all about the Smith Mansion but you decided to push on. You just _had_ to see the library. You couldn’t risk leaving and being the laughing stock of the town.

You reached the middle of the room frozen in time and looked at your surroundings. Bookshelves towered around you, two more stories above, casting humanoid shadows everywhere you looked. You suddenly realized something was too off. The floor was too quiet, and the raven on the weathervane had become too still, but at this point it was too late. **It** had already seen you. **It** was on its way to claim its next poor unfortunate victim.

Huge leathery wings flapped around you, stirring up dust and dirt that had settled over the once crowded library, and you scanned the room in a panic. You couldn’t see the source but you could hear **it** flying all around you. You got disoriented as it swooped past you and nearly knocked you down. As soon as you gain your bearings back, **it** hits you in the back with a sharp object that was unbeknownst to you and it utterly knocked the wind out of your lungs.

“Where are you?” You screamed up at the ceiling as **it** finally went quiet. You tried to bolt for the door, but **it** had locked it from the outside. You spun around as you heard a deep, sharp laugh echo throughout the library and you finally laid eyes on **it**.

**It** was all of the stories you had heard and more. All of the dangerous back alleys and dark streets outside of the comfort of the light that illuminated from the lampposts. Every picture and description from books, and shows, and local history, and wackados you never believed. Every single number six in graffiti. Every satanic ritual on the Goatmans Bridge, and anywhere else. It was the devil.

The last words you heard were that of the devil. It spoke of the past, it spoke of the future, and everything in between. The words that stuck with you the most, the words that followed you into the afterlife were this,

“There is darkness everywhere and there always will be. Your neighbor could be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. Your sister could be the next Black Dahlia. Evil spreads like a plague, corrupting one after the other. There is nothing you can do to stop it. As long as the darkness and the evil of this world has followers and worshippers, it will continue to spread.”

You heard these words as you laid on the ground, broken. You bled out right there on the floor from the hands of the devil. Just like every one who visits the Smith Mansion. Everyone past, and everyone since who has gone there has been murdered. These killings will never stop. Never. If people stop fearing and believing in the creature that resides within, only then will these killings stop.

The darkness will forever reside on this earth.

“Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

((Listened to Square Hammer by Ghost while writing))