Demon Butcher

He awoke in an unfamiliar room. He had seen plenty of rooms similar to it, and had even had one with some stark similarities. Design choices with a single colour spread out among all of the walls and furniture. Books on a shelf, posters on a wall, collectibles placed carefully on a clean work desk.

But it wasn't his.

A sharp, throbbing pain pierced his head over and over, the pain so bad it felt like he was going to go blind. His mouth was dry, and his stomach felt more twisted than a box crammed full of wires.

He sat up and looked around the room, his body aching through the effort. Vomit covered clothes lay on the floor, making a path from the door to the bed. He didn't recognise the room, and there were no obvious signs that pointed to the identity of the person who it belonged to. The colours were a neutral beige, and the different pieces of memorabilia were for popular movies and artists, so none of them could really indicate who owned the room.

'Where the hell am I?' he thought, raising a hand to his head and rubbing with his fingers, the effort made to try and alleviate the sensation.

Figuring that he would learn nothing about where he was if he stayed still, he decided to move. The house beyond the room was rather small, with a compact corridor that led to another door and a staircase that ran down the wall. Going down, he saw a single room on the floor, one that contained all of the furniture for both a kitchen and a living space. Unfortunately, there were no signs of anyone having been downstairs that morning, nor for a couple of days, if he was being honest. Disappointed, and a little unnerved, he decided to head back upstairs to see if he could find out anything else.

Heading back into the bedroom, he spotted his phone lying on the floor by the side of the bed. How he hadn't thought to check it was something he asked himself, but it didn't really matter now that he was about to.

As he picked up the phone, the screen lit up as he had a video call come in from a friend of his. He had been out with this friend and a couple of others the night before, so he hoped that the call would be able to answer some of the questions that he had about the position he was in this morning.

"Yo, Roady, what's up?" he croaked, his voice quiet, almost too quiet to hear.

"The hell did you do last night, Evan?" his friend responded, the urgency and panic clear to hear in his voice, something that teetered on the edge of primal fear. "Nah, that couldn't have been you. It wasn't human."

"I don't know, I can't remember anything," Evan responded, peering out of the window that watched over the bed in the room. He was surrounded by trees for as far as he could see, not that his line of sight stretched out too far from the house thanks to the sheer thickness outside the window.

"Nothing at all?" he breathed, trying to compose himself. "Well, the last time I saw you was when you left with some girl. You didn't seem that bad at the time, so something must have happened after then. But still…"

"What happened, Mark?"

"I had a feeling that there was something off about her. Something twisted in her mind, the way that she was talking about all that occult stuff."

"Occult stuff?"

"Yes, Evan. She was talking about some kind of summoning she wanted to try, and a ton of other stuff that I couldn't make out. You were eating it up, though. I figured it was just something that you were doing to get her in bed, so I didn't bother to interrupt. But now… I saw it on the news, and I'm sure it's her. She's dead."

"Dead?"

"Well, that's an understatement. Her body was scattered around, miles and miles apart. Like it was done by some feral beast."

"Did you think that I did it?" Evan asked, genuinely confused why his friend had phoned him.

"…"

"You did! You thought I would have been capable of, not only killing someone, but tearing them apart and scattering them over a huge area. What the…"

"No. I'm just freaked out man. It's not everyday you're so obviously close to a murder, especially not when it's this bad. Cut me some slack."

Evan stayed quiet, the amount of information he had received combined with how bad his body felt mixing in a bad way.

"You said you're in some kind of forest, right?" Mark continued, breaking the silence that had fallen over their conversation. "You'd best get out of there, get back to civilization proper. Your best outcome is probably being found and accused of the killing, so be careful as you make your way back. See you soon, hopefully. And, sort out your hair. I don't know who told you red was a good look on you, but it's not."

'Red?' Evan thought, raising a hand to his head as he looked attentively at his image in the corner of the screen. His jaw was covered in the same thin pathetic excuse of a beard that it had been before, his eyes were still blue, and his nose was still a little too small for his liking. Even his body was the same. It was big, but not excessively toned. He wasn't muscular, but depending on his outfit he could be mistaken for someone who had a second home at a gym. It was only his hair that was different.

Evan looked around the room briefly before deciding to leave. As he headed past the shelf where the books were, he noticed a specific one that caught his attention, something that he did undoubtedly because of what he had just heard on the phone.

"Angels, Demons, and the Supernatural," he whispered, reading the title as he took it off the shelf and began flicking through it. There was a lot of different information contained inside, but with in his condition he couldn't make sense of anything that he saw. Things like order of power, and some kind of classification.

He dropped the book, not bothering to put it back where he found it, and headed down the stairs and out of the building. He ran, without knowing why he should run. Something deep inside him urged him on, pressing him forwards as he broke free of the building and plunged into the dark maze of the forest outside.

There was a feeling inside him, one that he knew he should be ashamed to feel given the circumstance he found himself in. There was something off about the situation that he was in, and it excited him.

Eventually, he spotted something. A limb, something connected to a hand that he couldn't quite make out through the leaves and bushes that separated them. His mind immediately went back to the news of the stranger that he had been told about, but some primal instinct told him this was different. And whatever it was, it had noticed him, too.