A Demon in Panic

The first patrolmen who entered the little house on Gresham Street were men of no extraordinary constitution. They were merely officers Carl Hensley and Clyde Mercer, both weary from a long November shift, both expecting the commonplace vulgarities of mortal crime: a drunkard's corpse, perhaps, or some domestic butchery performed in a fit of primitive rage. Neither man possessed the slightest preparation for what awaited beyond that warped oak door.

The house itself stood crooked between two abandoned buildings like a rotten tooth left in a dying jaw. Rain whispered against the windows. The streetlights flickered with a sickly yellow pallor that seemed less like illumination and more like decay made visible.

Inside there lingered a smell which neither officer could later describe with coherence. Clyde would call it “burned flowers and dead meat” before the surgeons sedated him. Carl, whose throat was too torn for speech, merely trembled whenever nurses mentioned the place.

They found the body in the dining room.

George Wilcox, fifty-nine years of age, Caucasian, practitioner of obscure satanic rites and self-described warlock, sat collapsed beside a blackened ritual circle painted onto the floorboards in something not entirely identifiable as human blood. Candles had melted into grotesque wax tumors around him. Strange symbols crawled across the walls in ash and charcoal. The man's face had frozen in a look not of agony, but revelation — the expression of one who had seen something vast enough to extinguish sanity in a single instant.

There were no wounds upon him.

Only eyes stretched obscenely wide.

Carl muttered that it looked like cardiac arrest.

Then the room changed.

Neither officer afterward could explain precisely how. The temperature seemed suddenly absent, as though heat itself had fled the premises in terror. The shadows bent at impossible angles. Clyde later insisted the darkness near the staircase had briefly possessed depth, as though it were not shadow at all but an opening.

Carl heard scratching above him.

Not rats.

Not wood.

Claws.

He lifted his flashlight toward the ceiling.

The attack came with impossible speed.

Something unseen tore across Carl’s throat so violently that blood sprayed the wallpaper in an arterial fan. He dropped instantly, choking and clawing at his neck while making noises too wet and broken to resemble human speech.

Clyde screamed.

The flashlight rolled across the floorboards, spinning madly, illuminating only fragments of the room: overturned chairs, ritual symbols, Carl writhing in expanding pools of crimson.

Then another thing moved.

The air itself distorted.

Clyde ran for the front door, but before he reached it invisible claws slashed across his neck. Flesh opened instantly. Momentum carried his body forward, and he smashed face-first into the glass panel of the door hard enough to crack it in a spiderweb pattern.

Outside, neighbors heard only screaming.

Both officers survived, though neither would ever return to duty.

The ambulance arrived amid confusion and rain. Paramedics hauled the mutilated men away while dispatch flooded the area with new officers. Yellow tape appeared around the property within minutes, fluttering beneath the streetlamps like funeral ribbons.

That was when the entity grew afraid.

For George Wilcox had not summoned some ancient god of cold cosmic indifference. No — he had called something smaller, crueler, and infinitely more desperate.

A thing cornered.

The new officers entered cautiously, flashlights trembling through the stale dark. They recovered George’s corpse and began photographing the scene.

Then the violence resumed.

One officer was hurled against a wall by no visible force with such brutality that his jaw shattered instantly. Another began screaming that something was clawing his back, though witnesses saw only his uniform opening in strips while blood spread beneath it. One patrolman fired wildly into empty air before invisible talons ripped the firearm from his hands and slashed his chest.

The spirit attacked not with strategy, but panic.

It feared discovery.

More police came.

More screaming followed.

By midnight half a dozen officers had been hospitalized with deep lacerations resembling animal attacks, though no animal tracks existed anywhere in or around the home. Rumors spread rapidly among exhausted personnel. Some whispered about a cult. Others muttered about narcotics in the ventilation. One trembling rookie crossed himself repeatedly and refused to reenter the building.

Yet the true horror began only after the corpse was removed.

George Wilcox’s body arrived at the county morgue shortly after two in the morning. The medical examiner, a narrow-faced woman named Dr. Elaine Porter, prepared to perform a standard autopsy. Preliminary assumption: cardiac arrest induced by stress or narcotics.

Had matters ended there, the truth might never have emerged.

But the thing that George summoned followed them.

Witnesses later reported sudden drops in temperature throughout the examination wing. Lights flickered. One lab technician complained of hearing breathing directly beside her ear though nobody stood near her.

Then Dr. Porter opened the corpse.

At that instant every light in the room failed simultaneously.

Screams erupted from within the autopsy chamber.

When backup generators restored power thirty-seven seconds later, blood covered the walls in sweeping arcs. One technician had collapsed beside an overturned tray, her face opened from forehead to chin by four parallel claw marks. Another stumbled blindly through the corridor clutching his ruined eye.

Dr. Porter survived only because she locked herself inside a supply closet while something scratched endlessly at the metal door.

Police sealed the morgue.

Which only worsened things.

The spirit, now frantic beyond reason, fled deeper into the funeral complex toward the mortuary preparation rooms where George’s remains awaited transfer.

There worked a mortician named Harold Veidt, an aging embalmer whose greatest concern that evening had been paperwork.

He died alone.

Not by claws.

Not directly.

The entity tampered with the ventilation system in a frenzy of instinctive concealment. Formaldehyde fumes flooded the enclosed preparation room while Harold worked over the corpse. By the time another employee discovered him, his lungs had chemically burned beyond salvation.

And still the attacks continued.

It became impossible for the authorities to suppress the rumors after that. Officers spoke of invisible assailants. Doctors described wounds appearing from empty air. Security footage malfunctioned whenever the attacks occurred, producing warped distortions and brief static-filled silhouettes that resembled elongated feminine forms.

The irony — dreadful and almost mocking — was that none of this would have happened had the entity done nothing.

George Wilcox had died naturally.

A lonely occultist.

A frightened old fool whose diseased heart simply failed during some forbidden ritual.

The police would have ruled it a cardiac arrest within hours.

Instead, the creature’s terrified attempts to cover itself only transformed an ordinary death into something monstrous and unforgettable. Investigators who once sought mundane explanations now whispered openly about demonic manifestations and preternatural violence. Priests were consulted. Occult specialists appeared. Detectives began studying George’s journals with mounting dread.

And somewhere beyond mortal sight, the unseen woman-thing watched with growing fury as humanity drew ever closer to understanding what George Wilcox had summoned into the world.

The End.