The Devil Swam Out

Tales From The Twilight Fish

he exuberance of youth if often crushed as the young grow up to face the real world. My exuberance wasn't crushed it was utterly destroyed and my whole peaceful world mutated into a nightmare.

I was a naive student studying Law at Coventry Polytechnic, not the best place but they took me, so that was fine. I wasn't very good, that's what started it all really. I wasn't very good. I'd spent my life scraping through my exams, but that wasn't going to happen this time. This time I was going to fail and I would have wasted three years of my life.

I met this beautiful girl at a party. She said her name was Esther. I don't normally talk much to people being a bit shy, but I talked to her all night under her strangely hypnotic eyes. I told her all about me, everything, all my secrets, things I didn't even know myself.

I ended up in her bed, it was glorious, the best experience I've ever had in my entire life, up till then of course. I don't remember what happened after that ecstatic night, until I rose from the deep slumber my mind had been in, several weeks later. I woke up in a nightmare of swirling demons, horrific devils and dancing imps. How I survived that night with my sanity intact I will never know. I'm glad I did, for it meant that I lived to tell this tale. I pieced together my lost weeks from the diary I took from poor dead Wilbur, last Marquis of Amesbury and my friend; whom I killed at the end to save my worthless hide.

Wilbur was only twenty, the same age as me, he was studying ancient history. I never really understood why, he knew more than the lecturers. Perhaps it was through a desire to escape from the notoriety of his father's obscure death. Anyway, we became friends when we met, or rather when I staggered into him blind drunk and lost. He made friends very easily, his money I suppose, but only about ten of us were his real friends. You wouldn't go through Hell for everybody would you. Anyway we were friends, we went to pubs, nightclubs, the cinema and other places together. Wilbur had a car, which was very useful and quite rare among we poverty stricken students. We had great fun for two years and then in my final year it all changed when I met the girl.

I was terrified when I'd finished the diary and in a way relieved, even though I'd lost a friend for I'd saved the world from the pure evil of The Fish of Mendes.

It was the day after I had met Esther that the Marquis noticed something odd about me. A strange look in my eye, a bestial grin now and then, quite unlike my normal self. He met Esther as well and was compelled to her in a way he didn't much like, he became suspicious about her. The inverted cross she wore around her neck and her pale drained demeanour. The Marquis followed us that night with a friend Richard Dee, for which I'm eternally grateful. We were followed to a mansion just south of Leamington Spa. There were many other cars there, Roll Royces, Jags, Bentleys, all smart cars. Satanism attracts those who want to be rich and powerful, and gives them that, at a cost of course.

Esther and I entered the house, so that the Marquis and Dick were forced to work their way around the outside of the house to where the sound was loudest. Here they heard bizarre music, which sent shivers of fear running up their backs. The Marquis lifted a curtain with his sweating hand, for it was a hot night and the windows were open. Inside he saw about a hundred of the Satanists drinking and dancing to the vile sounds. All were masked and all were disgustingly familiar with each other. Suddenly all sound ceased as a tall fat man entered the room.

"Greetings" one said "Our coven tonight promises to be a most auspicious one. We must welcome Esther back from her successful mission, and we must welcome the very special Joseph to our brethren. Both will receive the blessing of the Fish tonight and let all rejoice for now our plans are coming to fruition. Soon the whole world will be the dominion of the foul Fish of Mendes. Let us prepare for this glorious event!" The Marquis was terrified, they planned to raise the Devil! Inside, the Satanists limped out to prepare for their debased ceremony. The two coven leaders remained with Esther and myself. The thin one started to speak in a well bred accent. "You have done well Esther and great will be your reward, after tonight and his soul is ours we can open the gateway, so I want you to seize the other one, the Marquis. It will guarantee us a second chance if this vessel can't hold the honour". He said gesturing to me. They walked out escorting me, outside the mansion where they joined the others, all now dressed in blood red cowls and blasphemous animal masks. In procession we trooped through black woods along a well trod path. In a clearing we halted before a peculiarly stained altar of basalt. Before the altar two witches made an invocation to the sky in a hellish unknown language.

A ghastly music started, thumping through ones very bones. Then they started to dance madly around the glade. Stamping feet, gyrating their limbs and sweating profusely. The Warlocks watched in glee as their slaves, like demented folk pulled down the nearest satanist and started to perform the most disgusting acts of perversion I've ever seen. And I in my befuddled state joined in the enjoyment. Then as I lay exhausted on the short harsh grass I felt strong hands seize me and drag me under a damp bush. It was the Marquis and Dick, they had saved me.

I was delirious, but they watched the proceedings below us in paralysed terror. The Warlocks had drawn forth a squalling babe and were sacrificing it with a wicked obsidian blade. Their coven was chanting a mind numbing dirge and still no one noticed me missing. The Warlocks continued with their ceremony and in the centre of the dead infant, out of the spilt blood was arising a black scaly shape. An avatar of the Fish of Mendes had arrived. It surveyed the now silent crowd with its ichthyan eyes, it screamed its displeasure and leapt upon the fat Warlock and locked its needle teeth into his plump neck. The thin one looked around desperately and then started to order his troops to search for me. The Fish slowly away back to the nether regions from whence it came, dragging the still struggling fat Warlock in its mouth. An eternity of damnation awaited him. The Marquis and Dick barely made it back to their car before the horde of half mad gibbering wretches were upon them. The Marquis fortunately managed to lock the doors and then drive through the maniacsm, crushing some beneath his wheels.

There followed a mad, helter sketler ride back to Coventry and the comparative safety of our house on Bramble Street. The Marquis and Dick dragged my unconscious body into the lounge, then the Marquis rushed up to his room and returned with a box of occult paraphernalia. Quickly he rolled up the moth eaten carpet and set about drawing a large pentagram on the floor. In this we lay and the Marquis placed white candles at the corners and drew occult signs about us.

"Damn no holy water" he muttered "No one must leave this pentagram if they wish to live peacefully again. Dick you must also stop Joseph going when he wakes."

Then it started, as the Marquis was writing in his journal, the temperature dropped. Tendrils of smoke slithered under the doors. The candles one by one went out in the damp draft and then the furniture started to move faster and faster in a crazy maelstrom, dashing against the walls until nothing remained but broken sticks and stuffing,. Out of this mess arose a distorted likeness of the thin man, but now grotesquely distorted.

"Give us Joseph" his voice creaked like the chair from which he was made.

"We'll let you live, all you have to do is give him to us!"

"And what will you do with him then, use him as a gate to bring forth the Fish of Mendes. Never while I still have breath in my body!" replied the Marquis, sweat dripping from him despite the chill.

"It's either him or you Wilbur. Make it easy on yourself. We'll win in the end, we can't be beaten" came the reply muffled by sofa stuffing.

"I'll kill both of us first" the definite reply.

"Okay you've asked for it!"

It disappeared, all was silent and still for half hour, nothing happened. Dick stirred, panic his eyes, he was ready to break. Then it came the suddenly, scuttling across the floor, an enormous snake, Dick leapt up and started to run, deftly the Marquis drew his revolver and knocked Dick unconscious barely inches from crossing the line. More demons came, each more terrible than the last, none had any effect on the Marquis. Then a figure appeared, a middle aged man in torment, fire licking at his feet, rats gnawing on his exposed entrails.

"Father" choked the Marquis, standing and staggering to the apparition. He stumbled over Joseph's body and suddenly came to his rational senses again.

"You don't exist, you are nothing, just one of the devil's phantasms." It faded before his eyes to be replaced by a scuttling scorpion, its tail poised to sting. I, roused by the Marquis's trip, woke to find this monster bearing down on me, and to my everlasting sorrow I broke and ran across the line of safety.

Instantly we were some where else, a dark cold room, I slipped and fell heavily on ice covered flags stones. The Marquis drew his gun, but was set upon by some bloody eyed cultists. The guns was flying out of his grasp and it spun over to me. But I was winded, so I could only grope impotently as the bore him up and tied him to their bloody altar. The Warlock approached and started the invocation which would bring forth the Fish of Mendes physically to this plane. No mere avatar but the Fish in all its monstrous glory.

The Marquis's body started to convulse and the satanists started to come to me. There were too many, they would overwhelm me if I fought. So I fired twice, once at the ecstatic warlock and once to blow the Marquis's head off to seal the gate. I would have killed myself also at that point, but I paused in my despair as out of the Marquis's body came a disgusting polymorphic creature. Not the Fish of Mendes but a terrible parody of it. The gate had closed half way, trapping the Fish. It roared, I don't know how, for it had no mouth and seized a trembling cultist in a pseudopod and sucked him dry, exuding a stale fishy odour. Then it turned its gaze on me, though it had no eyes. I jumped up and ran blindly down a long corridor. There was a door at the door which was getting smaller the closer I ran. I could feel the foul wind of that wind which followed me on the raised hairs of my neck as I leaped through the door into the wreck which was my home. I sat down and wept, the door through which I had come had disappeared, I was safe from the Fish. Dick was still alive and I helped him to his feet.

Then there was a knock at the door, Dick staggered through to the next room. I heard him open the door and give a heart rocking scream. Then before I ran I heard, through the door, an all to familiar sucking noise and a gruff watery voice of pure evil say

"The Devil always gets his due!"

It's hunting me now, it always gets what's due to it and somehow it thinks I'm due. So I keep running and praying but to no avail. The Fish of Mendes will have what's due to it.