H.G. Tudor - Darlings and Demons

Darlings

And

Demons

By

H G Tudor

All Rights Reserved

Copyright 2016

Darlings and Demons

By

H G Tudor

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Insight Books

Must End Soon

For the forty-second day in a row you arrive at work and find that there is an offensive voicemail waiting for you.

You left without paying and you will soon do so you fucking bitch. Nobody leaves without paying. Understand?

You replace the handset and feel the sick sensation rising inside you again. Why does this keep happening. You do not recognise the voice, in fact is sounds somehow synthesised or distorted, no doubt to mask who it is. Notwithstanding you know this message came from. All forty-two messages have. The messages are always left on your work voicemail, never anywhere else. They are left at different times, always different times but at some point between 9pm and 6am, accordingly you are never at your desk when the message comes in. You would deactivate your voicemail but you need it and of course I know this. That is why the messages are always left there. You have changed your work telephone number three times and you really do not want to ask the infrastructure team to have to do it again. You saw the eye-rolling last time. It is not as if they cannot believe you, you have played the messages to them but you know what they are thinking. Deal with it, it is just some crank who will tire of it soon enough. Well six weeks have passed and there is no sign of tiring, no a sniff of fatigue. The messages are as savage and as vitriolic as usual. You changed the number but still the messages got through. Someone here is obviously telling me about the changes. Who could it be? Someone in the infrastructure team? Your secretary? Another colleague? So many potential suspects but then you always did wonder why I took such an interest in meeting so many people from where you worked. It could anybody out of twenty people and you cannot go around accusing them without some concrete evidence. Another fact that we know and wish to exploit.

You tried to ignore the messages but after fourteen days of it, with the messages making threats about retribution and revenge you confronted us. We pleaded innocence and told you that we would not do something like that. We looked shocked and concerned but then we would since you took a witness with you Still we enjoyed the fuel from you turning up. We tried to get you to come in so we could discuss it further but you must have been alerted to the whine of the hoover as you stood firm. There is time yet. There is always time.

The messages tend to stick to a theme of punishing you and that is what makes you think it is me. You hoped your please on the fourteenth day went heeded, that even though we had denied it, you were on to us. The next morning you saw the red light flashing on your phone indicating that you had a voicemail message from overnight. You toyed with getting someone else to listen but then it might be something else so you dialled the code and listened.

Think you can stop the punishment do you? Never. You have sinned and you must atone.

You sat down and began to cry as the words, each one spat out in a staccato style had their effect.

By the twenty-third day you had involved infrastructure in trying to trace where the call was coming from but they drew a blank. By the thirty-seventh day you had opted to call in her majestys finest to solve the problem. You had saved all the messages and handed over the audio file of this disembodied voice. You somehow managed to persuade the police to visit me and I was of course most co-operative and charming. I let them look through my call list on my mobile phone which had no evidence on it. I even produced evidence that demonstrated that I could not have made those calls even if I had wanted to on several of the nights in question and that convinced them that they were barking up the wrong tree. Of course they were, you do me a dis-service if you think I would get my hands dirty with this particular campaign. I have others to do this for me, to avoid detection and still I get to gather the fuel as I picture your frightened and shocked reaction as I still manage to penetrate your attempts to evade me.

You are wondering when it will end. Surely I will not keep this up forever? Surely I will move on to someone else and be preoccupied with them? I have someone else and they are far better than you but you still deserved to be tormented and tortured for your treachery and your deceit. You deserve to be punished. You think it must end soon. I know it wont.

Food Glorious Food

Food is a weapon. It is a commodity which is readily utilised in the further pursuit of manipulation. Food provides a means of asserting my dominance over you. Food enables me to exert control. Food allows me to underline your inferiority. There are several ways to do this.

Most people are conscious about their weight. The overweight know they ought to lose some weight and will not like the fact of their eating habits being scrutinised. Comments about how much this person is eating, made repeatedly soon start to hit home. They may not do anything about their weight, which, in all likelihood is not that bad, but they may have a few folds about the tummy or the archetypal paranoia about the size of their bottom. The comments turn into denying them their favourite food, forbidding a particular take-away and vetoing dining out at certain restaurants. The beauty of doing this is that I am of course doing it for your own good. See how good I am? I care about your health so I am going to tell you what you can and cannot eat. I am going to stipulate when you eat. Of course I will find you breaking these rules because you lack the willpower and when I do I will chastise you all the more. I will tell you how much you have let me down despite my best efforts. I will tell others that I have been trying to help you but you just will not listen. This proves a very good precursor to establishing that you have the type of pig-headed attitude which means that you do not listen. It may well be true, albeit exaggerated, when it comes to my lectures about healthy eating and it does not take me long before I have extended that to other things which you purportedly do not listen to me about. I will turn your occasional over-eating into not only a stick with which to beat you about your dietary habits but I will use it in order to create an image of you with other people which I can then exploit.

Another way is for me to be territorial about food. I have instigated this technique on a number of occasions. I have my loaf of bread. Nobody else is to touch it. It is hardly something for a special occasion is it? A loaf of bread? It is not as if I have bought some cakes for some anniversary or a party which should not be eaten beforehand is it? The mundane nature of the foodstuff however works in my favour. If you take a slice and believe me I have a memory for how much of the loaf is left, how much of my bottle of soda is left, how many sweets are left in the packet. I know and even if I did not I would make it up in order to provide me with the means of attacking you. I will make it abundantly clear that the relevant item is mine and not be touched. When I decide I need to use it as a weapon I will point out that you have taken it. You will fall right into my trap and will say something along the lines of: -

No I didnt eat any of it, what are you talking about?

(So you are calling me a liar then are you?)

Calm down it is only a bit of bread.

(Oh I am over-reacting am I? Excuse me for pointing out you are at fault.)