Beneath the Soul

They were silly stories that my grandma used to tell me and my brother Benjamin. I don't know if she told them to scare us, to warn us, so we would pass on to our future children, or just for fun.

Silly as they were though, I still remember them crystal clear. They were stories of demons.

"You two should get to bed now, don't you think? You wouldn't want the mares to get you," the eighty-year-old woman that I loved would say.

"Grandma, what are mares?" I asked.

"A mare is a horse!" Benjamin squeaked from the bunk above me.

"Yes, that's right, Benjamin," Grandma said. "But in this case, they're really demons. Night demons to be exact. Have you ever had a nightmare?"

"Is that where nightmares got it's name? From the mare demons?" I asked.

"Yes. It's said that whenever you wake and you're breathing hard and there's heaviness in your chest, that's evidence of you being visited by the mare demon. They come in the night and corrupt your dreams..."

"Just like you're corrupting my children right now, Mother." My mom stood in the doorway with her arms crossed across her chest and a glare on her face.

Grandma stood up and sighed. "Oh, Helena. You never did learn to have fun in life."

"And telling little ten-year-old kids meaningless stories about demons is fun?" Mom looked at me and Benjamin and said in a stern voice, "Get to bed and stay in bed." She paused and locked eyes with me. "And lights out. I don't like it when you read late at night." She waited until Grandma was out of the room and then left herself, closing the door shut tightly behind her.

But I wasn't ready to give up yet. I still needed that story.

When everything was quiet downstairs I sat up in my bed, slipped my slippers on, and quietly yet quickly tip toed down to the living room where Grandma was supposed to sleep.

She wasn't sleeping when I entered the living room though. She was sitting up on the couch next to the lamp, reading and thick novel.

"Grandma," I whispered, not wanting to wake Mom up. "Can you finish the story?"

She looked up from her book and smiled. She set it down on the table next to her and opened her arms for me. "Certainly," she said.

I ran over and climbed into her lap and snuggled up against her.

"Ah, Katie, you never did like the usual prince and princess happy ending stories," she murmured. "Now, where was I?"

"You were just finishing telling us what the mare demons were," I reminded her.

"Oh, right." She straightened up a bit. "Well, there are other demons besides the mares. Many, many different kinds. You've got the Fene, Gallu, Hisa-Me, Gin, Citipati...Well, you've got the idea. There's lots of 'em. Demons are really fallen angels."

"So they're good," I said.

"No. Definitely not that. Fallen angels are bad. But anyway, demons absolutely hate humans. You could say that in a way they envy us because the Lord loves us so much." She smiled at me. Then she continued, "The demons wish to assert their rightful rule over all the earth, crushing the upstart humans, and destroy their souls. The demons want to make the humans worship them instead of their Creator, offering corrupting gifts and pleasures as a reward for that worship, at least at first."

I had to admit that her stories did scare me a bit. But I kind of enjoyed the thrill that they gave me. Plus I found them very interesting. Who knew some angels could turn out to be so bad?

"Yet other demons wish to force the humans to revile themselves, admit that they are as evil and corrupt as the demons themselves, to prove that God doesn't really love them. In general, demons hate any human they can't exterminate, or any angel who remains unfallen, but even so, many demons retain a perverse sense of honor, or perhaps, irony..."

I had fallen asleep at some point during the end of her story and Grandma carried back to my bed. Mom never woke up, which was good.

I love my Grandma dearly, but now that I was older, I knew better than to believe in her stories and to take them so literal.

But they were only stories. Nothing more, nothing less.