Short story about an eternal demon who can leave hell to tell those at death’s door the torturous circumstances that led the victims to their final moments. So Recites the Demon, the Reasons for Your Demise by BW Derge was written in 2025 to explore the twisted nature of humanity throughout our collective history, along with improbable but not impossible quantum events.
So Recites the Demon, the Reasons for Your Demise
By BW Derge
Know nothing else – I am the worst demon to haunt the Earth, and I only appear to those about to die. I am not the grim reaper, but my presence harkens him. While the presence of loved ones may prevent my appearance as you lay on your deathbed, if the size of your sins is large enough, nothing can prevent me from coming forth. What I speak as your being escapes the cage of bones it has been trapped in for however long – the words declare not the sins of the individual but the crimes of mankind that led to their ultimate demise.
Throughout time, I have found absurd sentences flowing out of my mouth, words necessary to properly describe why the poor human before me is about to be greeted by the reaper. Descriptions detailing these deaths is my only purpose, a duty I fulfill for Father Lucifer for but one selfish reason… it allows me to take leave, to exist outside of the pits of Hell.
If you have not been there, it would be impossible to describe what horrors it holds. But I digress... here I present to you the five most absurd things that have I have uttered when performing my eternal task.
Don’t Fear the Magical KaTukTook
There was a helpless, starving orphan in the cold mountains that populated the ice age. This was back in the day where mankind experienced less deaths per day due to the population being much smaller.
During the heights of the world’s population total, I hardly ever had to return back the eternal fire of Hell, but back before mankind had even adopted proper agricultural techniques, it was a mere delight. In the young child’s native tongue, that day, I spoke:
“Well I suppose this one goes back a couple hundred years…
You see, there was a tribe that roamed about a couple thousand miles south of here and although they never really reached these freezing peaks, their myths did. Anyway, the point is one of their men had been struck by an icicle that fell from a tree and killed him and by the time he was found, the ice had melted and it was determined that a mythical creature called the KaTukTook had escaped the spirit world to kill the adult male’s soul. Over the decades, the legend had evolved and the imaginary specimen became to appear as a humanoid monster distinguished by blue markings on his face. Now, funny thing is, your dad was one of the very few humans to locate azurite, which meant he had access to a blue shaded ink and he used it to tattoo his face. So now, a few weeks ago, your dad is spotted by some hunters familiar with the KaTukTook myth. Out of fear and confusion, they murdered him. Thinking they slayed a magical beast, they proceeded to drink his blood in hope of attaining special powers. Had it not been for the blue ink, if they had known it was just another normal guy… he would still be alive. And since your mom died giving birth to you… well, you’re pretty screwed, kid. Funny thing is, that gang of hunters is currently located just a few miles away and would’ve totally taken you to their tribe and revitalized you had found them soon enough…”
Buried Alive in the Mummy’s Tomb
A drugged slave during the earlier years of the Egyptian empire was enclosed in a pyramid, nearing death, beside the mummified corpse of their old master, who was a priest for the Goddess Serket. Upon my arrival into the tomb, I saw the decorated casket of the mummy and remarked, “I remember you from a few months ago…” And then I saw the perishing individual and spoke to their fleeting spirit.
“What’s about to get you, suffocation? No, no, something more peculiar is occurring here.” I approached closer for better examination. “Oh, an infection… Okay, I got it now. Much earlier in the year, you accidently walked in on your master during one of his four daily baths and he claimed to the courts you were stealing grain, which led to the punishment of public humiliation,
surely you remember the flesh of a dead animal draped over your face as you were forced to walk backwards through a temple. It appears that’s when you developed a rare blood infection that started slowly killing you back then. Ironically, the mold growing on some food that your priest offered a statue of cat could’ve healed you rather quickly. But no, despite a Shabti Doll that should’ve accompanied your master to the supposed afterlife, you were chosen to serve your master in the afterlife instead, having proved yourself worthy with grace after being so gruesomely tortured…. And now, as oxygen dwindles and you have been sedated… the infection has spread more quickly than the deprivation of breathable air could snuff you out…”
The Improbable Death of the Farmer’s Wife
A farmer’s wife in the farmlands of Prussia or Germany was laying, pale, on a cot. Her delirium and excruciating pain has made her company most unbearable. Her husband was doing his best to manage their eight children, but believing her condition to be a signifier of witchcraft, or a curse, he has abandoned her on this deathbed in a drafty farmhouse.
I explained to the poor mother:
“This might come as a shock, but considering the unlikeliness of your circumstance, perhaps there was some sort of divine intervention at play… It was neither a curse nor a sin that caused this terrible illness that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. But months before you started to feel sick, a solar bullet from a star that exploded six years ago, from over 35 trillion miles away, a proton energized by a Cosmic Ray, hit our planet.
Of all the places that this one infinitesimally small particle could’ve struck, on all of God’s great Earth, was a single molecule of DNA located in your brain. Off all the cells in your body it could’ve struck, the target was a strand of protein that suppresses the growth of tumors. In just months, the uncontrolled cancerous growth had ravished your head and left you in this final state. You are probably not only the only human that will ever die from such a cause, but perhaps the only lifeform on Earth to pass this way throughout all of time.”
He Simply Ceased to Be
Like the previous incident of ungodly improbable circumstance, there was a similar case where fluctuations at the quantum level resulted in the vanquishment of a human soul from our universe. However, this individual remains the only spirit to ever elude my recitation without the presence of a loved one protecting them from my encroachment.
No, before I could speak, all of his matter and essence simply dissolved away. Gazing upon the empty space in which he had just occupied, I uttered the cause of his death, whispering to myself:
“No external or worldly force caused this.
One of the protons composing the matter that made his heart muscle just tunneled to a lower energy state, outside of this universe. Such rapidly caused all of his protons to vanish, too. There was a man here and now there is none. Could such an occurrence mean his spirit left too – evading both Heaven and Hell?”
Reallocation of Resources
The citizen of an impoverished nation has collapsed in the desert heat, with nothing to drink of any form for their final days. Food trucks used to arrive at intervals that allowed them to survive such crippling thirst in the past, but that stopped. As their body succumbs to the lack of fluid, their brain emits euphoric chemicals that allow the individual to welcome death more freely. In their final moments, I appear in demonic form, and tell them:
“Now, to be fair, the cause of your death likely stems back to this country’s reliance on foreign assistance to adequately provide necessary resources for its people. But yes – the leader of a faraway nation, the wealthiest in the world, decided to reallocate some of that government’s spending and this meant cutting the humanitarian programs that your country benefited from.
The water that would’ve been dispensed into a truck and driven by your village two days ago instead went elsewhere. The leader of the supplying country instead redirected that spending toward powering data centers for Artificial Intelligence, which somewhat ironically utilize massive amounts of water for cooling purposes.
If you want to go even further, the specific funds that would’ve paid for the water truck service instead were used by the AI processor to generate roughly 34 realistic images of a cute squirrel holding a nut in his mouth.”
Want to read more about demons from Hell who visit Earth? Read about the Themes of Faust by Goethe
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2025
© USA
This was a short story composed in 2025 called So Recites the Demon, the Reasons for Your Demise
