If you are reading this because you just came from my Facebook post, welcome. I know I left you hanging right at the most intense moment, just as the smoke was clearing and that monster was turning into a pile of ash on his living room floor. You clicked because you needed to know what I saw under that cheap, ugly rug. Take a deep breath and settle in, because what I discovered that night didn’t just explain the horrors going on next door—it completely changed my eternal existence.
The Silence After the Fire
The living room of apartment 4B was dead silent. The kind of heavy, suffocating silence that only comes after someone has screamed their last breath.
My hands were still glowing, a fierce, angry orange beneath my skin, like coals left in a campfire overnight. Slowly, I willed the fire down. I forced my human disguise back into place. The blistering heat in the room began to fade, replaced by the sickening smell of burnt synthetic clothes, scorched wallpaper, and the unmistakable metallic stench of a dark soul being sent exactly where it belongs.
I turned my back on the pile of black ash that used to be my loud, arrogant neighbor. He was gone. Erased. His tough-guy act had melted away the second he realized he wasn’t the scariest thing in the dark anymore.
But my job wasn’t finished.
I looked over at the corner of the room. The little girl was still huddled there, her knees pulled tight to her chest. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, her pajamas oversized and threadbare. She hadn’t made a sound since I kicked the door down. She didn’t scream when I burst into flames, and she didn’t cry when the man who had been tormenting her was turned to dust.
She just stared at me with wide, hollow eyes. Eyes that had seen way too much evil for one lifetime.
“It is over now,” I said. My voice was still a little raspy, carrying the gravelly echo of the underworld. “He can never hurt you again.”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she slowly raised one trembling finger and pointed at the center of the room.
During our brief, violent struggle, the man had tripped over the large, cheap area rug that covered the center of the living room floor. He had kicked it aside as he scrambled backward in terror.
Now, staring at the exposed hardwood floor, I felt a cold chill run through my veins—something that shouldn’t even be physically possible for a creature born in the fires of the pit.
The Trapdoor Beneath the Floorboards
There, perfectly cut into the old, worn floorboards, was a square outline. It was a trapdoor.
That didn’t make any sense. We were on the fourth floor of an apartment building. There was no basement beneath us, only the ceiling of the apartment below. But as I walked closer, my boots crunching on the charred debris, I saw the heavy iron ring sitting flush against the wood.
The man hadn’t just been abusing this little girl in his living room. He was hiding something in the crawlspace between the floors.
I knelt down. My hands were back to looking like normal human hands, but I still had the strength of the place I came from. I grabbed the iron ring. The lock was heavy and secured with a thick padlock, but I didn’t care. I pulled. With a loud, violent crack, the wood splintered, the metal groaned, and the padlock shattered into useless pieces.
I pulled the heavy wooden hatch open.
A wave of stale, horrible air hit my face. It smelled like old paper, damp wood, and something metallic. I reached into the dark cavity between the floor joists. There was a large, heavy metal lockbox hidden inside. It was lined with lead—probably to keep out moisture, or maybe to keep out creatures like me who can sense dark energy.
I hauled the heavy box out and dropped it onto the floor. The little girl flinched at the sound, pressing herself harder into the corner.
I ripped the lid off the box. I expected to find money. I expected to find drugs, or maybe weapons. Human criminals are usually so predictable. So painfully boring in their greed.
But what I saw inside froze my boiling blood.
There was no money. Instead, the box was filled to the brim with hundreds of small, cheap polaroid photographs. And beneath the photos lay a thick, black leather-bound notebook.
I picked up the first handful of photos. My stomach twisted. Every single picture was of a different child. Some looked terrified, some looked numb, standing in basements, warehouses, or unfamiliar living rooms. Attached to each photo with a paperclip was a small trinket. A plastic hair clip. A drawn picture of a dog. A tiny, missing shoe. Trophies.
This man wasn’t just a loud, abusive neighbor who took his anger out on a kid. He was a collector. A monster who hunted the defenseless for a living.
The Weight of Mortal Sins
I dropped the photos and reached for the thick leather notebook. I flipped it open. The handwriting was neat, precise, and entirely devoid of humanity.
It was a ledger.
Page after page was filled with names, dates, and locations. But these weren’t his victims. These were his clients. The ledger detailed an entire underground network of human trafficking. It listed the buyers, the transport routes, the safe houses, and the prices paid for innocent souls.
The little girl in the corner wasn’t just his victim. She was inventory. He was holding her here, in this apartment, waiting for the buyer listed on the last page of the book to come and collect her.
I have spent centuries in the underworld. I have seen the absolute worst that humanity has to offer. I have punished dictators, murderers, and tyrants. I have heard every excuse, every plea for mercy, and every pathetic lie a condemned soul can spit out.
But in the underworld, the evil is already done. The victims are already hurt. The pain is just an echo.
Standing in that cheap apartment, holding the physical proof of ongoing, calculated human evil, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a thousand years. Genuine, pure disgust. Humans choose to be monsters. They wake up, drink their coffee, smile at their neighbors, and then quietly destroy innocent lives behind locked doors. They hide their darkness under cheap living room rugs.
Demons don’t ruin the world. Humans do.
“Are there more bad men coming?”
The tiny voice broke me out of my thoughts. I looked up. The little girl had finally spoken. Her voice was barely a whisper, shaking like a leaf in the wind.
I looked at the ledger in my hands. I looked at the hundreds of names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who thought they were untouchable. People who thought their secrets were safe in the dark.
“No,” I told her, my voice softening as much as a creature of fire possibly can. “The bad men are going to be very, very busy.”
A New Mission in the Ashes
I couldn’t stay. The fire alarm down the hall had finally registered the smoke from my little supernatural execution, and I could hear the distant wail of police sirens cutting through the night air. I couldn’t be here when the human authorities arrived.
I walked over to the little girl. I knelt down so I was at her eye level. I didn’t want to scare her anymore than she already was. I placed my hand gently on her forehead. With a quick, silent push of energy, I clouded her memory of the last ten minutes. She wouldn’t remember the fire. She wouldn’t remember the demon with the burning hands.
She would only remember that the bad man was gone, and that she was safe.
I grabbed my jacket from the floor. I tucked the heavy black leather ledger securely inside my coat. I left the metal box of photos wide open on the floor, right where the police couldn’t possibly miss it. They would find the evidence. They would find the ashes. They would piece together what they could, and they would take care of the girl.
I walked out of apartment 4B just as the heavy boots of the first responders started pounding up the stairwell. I slipped down the fire escape, blending easily into the dark, damp city streets.
I used to wonder why I was drawn to the surface. Why I felt the urge to leave the pit and walk among the living. For a long time, I thought I was just restless.
But as I walked away from that building, feeling the heavy weight of the ledger against my chest, everything finally made perfect sense.
The underworld is for punishing the dead. But the living monsters? The abusers, the cowards, the predators who prey on the defenseless and think they can hide behind locked doors and thick walls? They need a consequence before they die.
They need someone to bring the fire to them.
I opened the ledger to the very first page. I read the first name, memorized the address, and smiled into the darkness.
If you ever hear a little girl crying in the night, do something about it. Speak up. Because if you don’t, I will. And trust me, you do not want to be the one standing in my way when I finally drop my disguise.
The monsters of this world have always thought they were at the top of the food chain. But as of tonight, they have a predator. And I am just getting started.
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