In the bowels of Hell, in the very earthen pits of flame from which spray the incessant geysers of misery unto a world built for pain, for torture, for the eternal suffering of the damned, a demon was born. In this engine of despair, the demon took its first breath. It saw its first sights. It formed its first memories. And it decided that the vision it saw around it, the flame and the ash and the rotting flesh which never seemed to fully dissolve, was good. Was the norm. Needed to be spread further past the incorporeal realm that the demon inhabited.
And so this demon found Ashley. A woman in her thirties who was vacuuming a carpet. Rudely. At night. While her roommate was trying to sleep. Incidentally, although not intentionally, in the shape of a pentagram.
Most people wouldn't expect a vacuum cleaner to explode on them. And neither did Ashley. Plastic shrapnel flung itself across the room and into her skin, negating any possible cleaning effect the device may have had on a floor that had, in all honesty, been mostly clean before she had started. Not that Ashley cared.
Small trickles of blood formed on Ashley's arms and legs, and screams of horror exploded from her mouth. Then spiders. Thousands of spiders crawled out of her wounds and her mouth and all down her body to the floor, leaving thin, white strands of thread as they went.
And then the demon made itself known.
"Hello," the demon said.
"AAAaaaah!" Ashley screamed, spitting spiders.
The demon did not enjoy Ashley's screaming, and snapped its fingers. Suddenly the two were no longer in Ashley's apartment, but were rather 10,000 feet above the ground in the darkened night sky, falling with no restraints to the city below, spiders floating all around them like tiny parachutists trailing a wrecked and crashing 747.
Ashley did not stop screaming, but the wind did drown her out.
"I am here," the demon spoke telepathically, bypassing both wind and shriek, "to torture the ever-loving hell out of you, Ashley."
Ashley took a breath, choked on a spider, and then resumed screaming.
"The hell that I will torture out of you will make your world more like mine. Your life will be suffering. You will know no joy. And from you, from your node of misery, I will bring a little more of my own hell to the earthly realm."
The city lights grew larger and larger, and Ashley felt helpless among her cloud of spiders, beside her demon. The demon that was going to change her life in ways she would be incapable of ever appreciating.
But perhaps her roommate would finally get some sleep.
