Pan Demonium, part 1

I sat hunched over my computer keyboard. There was a demon chained to my ankle. It's hard to write with a demon chained to your ankle.

I keyed fast, just to get it over with. The stuff I was writing was crap. I mean literal crap, as in the contents of an outhouse hitting the you-know-what. They like a little gross-out in the fiction, and I can gross with the best.

The demon yanked at my leg. “Quit that.” I don't even look at the thing when I talk to it. The effect of familiarity. You know what they say. Familiarity breeds.

I finished the crap scene and went on to do an autopsy, a gang rape, a case of diarrhea.... All in a day's work. I saved the document to a crystal which I took out of the machine.

The doorbell rang. I ignored it. The messenger girl came in anyway. “Did you finish the work for the Cruz mystery?” the girl asked me.

I grunted for yes and threw her the crystal. She caught it and handed me another. “The latest Tegan Carroll romance novel,” she told me. “They want five explicit sex scenes, two excrements, three tortures and a disembowelment.”

What, no brains splattered on walls? What kind of romance novel was this? I took the crystal without subjecting the girl to my opinion.

The girl looked at the demon, which dug its claws into my leg hard enough to make me yelp. “Isn't it hard to write with that thing chained to your leg?”

“It would be a hell of a lot harder to write with this thing not chained to my leg. They can get into stuff even the cat can't reach.” I heard a thump-thump coming from behind the couch. The cat. Braver than usual. He usually hid when visitors arrived.

The girl looked at the demon again, wrinkled her nose. “It smells like matches.” She left.

I got to work on the new project. Wished I had a match. Might be nice to see if a computer crystal could be set on fire.

c 2007-2011 Nissa Annakindt

Who is the narrator? Why does he, she or it have a demon chained to his, her or its ankle? Do the cat and the demon get along? Is the demon symbolic of something or is the author just being weird? WARNING: any response may cause Pan Demonium part 2 to be written and posted.