The Annals of Fear

Mello paused as he reached the sitting room and listened. He had stopped here for no other reason than it was the first room not overlooked by windows to the rear of the house. The other three could not be watching him from the yard. He was both relieved and a little concerned by the fact that he did not hear Matt following him. Mello understood that he must have really hurt the redhead. That was acceptable. That had been the objective. It would keep him from this house, whilst Mello did as he planned to do. Mello took the anxiety and isolated it in his mind and emotion, then threw it away.



The house felt watchful, waiting. Mello had steeled himself inside in readiness for anything. He was good at this. He had learned impassivity at Wammy\'s House, then perfected it in the Mafia. 90% of fear was allowing oneself to feel fear. To boldly step on with the understanding that no fear would come was a huge weapon against oneself. Mello had probably just ordered the death of two men, but he had been damned for a long time. If Mello could not repent those already dead, then what more could Satan and Hell have in store for him, that wasn\'t already poised to pounce in anticipation of his demise? That was practically carte blanche to do what he would, because nothing worse could happen now. He was above the law and God had already played his heftiest cards. Now it was Mello\'s time.



Mello shielded his emotions and wore a smile. It penetrated in darkness and malicious intent. The house did not initiate any of its tricks. The atmosphere was as dense as ever, but there were no footsteps now. No music seering the air. No visions of apparitions nor explosions from the long deceased. Mello was grateful to Flight Lieutenant Lees. That shock in remembrance had purged his mind of the need to not see what had happened in Gorskica. Mello had cried his last. He could think now of Yugoslavia as a tragedy of childhood, not the devastation of a life. He stepped towards the stairs unsheathing a chocolate bar.



At the foot of the stairs, Mello deliberately turned his back on them rising above him. With one hand he held his half-devoured chocolate bar close to his lips. The other bar was held aloft. Mello hissed into the still air. "I know you\'re watching me. I fascinate you." He smirked. He took a bit of chocolate, but held it between his lips. "You are always watching me, too afraid to kill me." Mello didn\'t allow himself to think that he might be wrong. This required his full concentration. This was life and death. And if nothing showed, then he could just walk away. No harm done. There was no-one alive witnessing this. "Peering down upon me." He glanced sidewards, his eyes glinting. The Mafioso glamour was upon him now. "Come on! Show yourself." He sucked the square into his mouth, unconcernedly passing it over his tongue. The taste of chocolate was all over his mouth, coating it. He chewed and swallowed, replacing it with another square between his teeth. "Mmm, lovely chocolate. It tastes," he paused, sensing attention, "so nice." The second bar was held even higher, above his head. Mello growled. "Ok, I\'m bored now." He crunched the square between his teeth. "Sidoh! Show yourself or else I\'ll take your Death Note off you and you will die."



There was a frozen moment, when the house appeared to hold its breath and the air remained resolutely empty. Then creature in front of him was huge, towering several feet above Mello. Its canary mouth quivered beneath parallel rows of razor sharp teeth. The white wings, folded like tattered cloth, draped over his shoulders, torn through with long, tapering talons, drawn up like an insect\'s. Yellow and red reptilian eyes stared widely back through slits in the layered white scales of its head. Yet, for all of its dread appearance, the Shinigami shook like a deer in headlights. His voice quavered with fright, stammering out, "Y-you can\'t take it! How would you take it?"



If there was a kernal of fear inside Mello, it was drowned under the avalanche of triumph. He stated, slowly and precisely, "Do you want to put that to the test?"



"You have no power." Sidoh produced a long list of rules, scanning them with huge, frightened eyes. "If a human has..."



A chocolate bar arced through the air and landed on the parchment. It passed right through it, but Sidoh swooped down to retrieve it. "Chocolate is so tasty!" He spluttered as he took several large bites. "I could find nothing like it in the Shinigami realm. I looked and looked and looked."



"Come on." Mello\'s tone of command passed from Sidoh\'s ears straight to his skeletal legs. The shinigami followed him right up the stairs and into an empty room. Mello stood in its centre and barked imperiously, "Tell me who is here."



"W-what?" Sidoh gasped.



Mello was staring unblinkingly at him. He sneered. "You can surely see it. Or aren\'t death gods that good?"



Awareness of his surroundings dawned slowly upon the shinigami. He became conscious of the crowding of other beings. Not human. Sidoh\'s head turned from side to side taking in the sheer volume of them. "Ghosts!" He trembled, terrified. The Mafioso man was unmoved. Mello just gazed straight at him, waiting for more. Sidoh shook. "I hate ghosts!"



"Tell me about the ghosts, Sidoh." Mello reached into his pocket and brought out a second block of chocolate. "Just ghosts?" His sardonic smile suggested that he knew otherwise. He waved the chocolate, then snatched it back as Sidoh would have reached for it. "Tell me what\'s here first."



Sidoh peered nervously about him. "Everything!" The room was thick with the dead, watching him with soulless eyes, which nontheless seemed brimmed with emotion. Yet none were scarier than the human before him. There were other creatures too. Denizens of planes rarely seen on this one. "Ghosts! Hundreds of ghosts!"



"Ghosts frighten you." Mello observed with a gloating edge to his voice. "They don\'t scare me. What do they want?"



Then Sidoh saw it. He sensed it more than anything. The source of power permeating the area. He understood. The ghosts had come to be warmed. It felt like the door to a shinigami realm, yet it was not and that scared him too. "I don\'t have to tell you anything."



"Yes you do." Mello yelled and Sidoh took a step backwards. "Or else I will take your Death Note off you and then where would you be?"



It occurred to Sidoh that he could remove this fiend from his life. "Or," He considered it, wishing that Armon was here to ask about the wisdom of this, "Or, or, or I could write your name in my book!"



Mello just laughed at him. "Go ahead." His stare took on an even more terrible aspect. "But tell me, do you really want me dead? I wouldn\'t be confined to the human plane then. I could go wherever I wanted. I could hunt you down and what would you do then? You cannot kill a ghost."



Sidoh stood frozen to the spot. He practically shrieked, "There are no humans in the shinigami realm!"



"Yet." Mello\'s eyes blazed, causing Sidoh to take a step backwards. "Write my name in your book. I dare you."



The shinigami tightened his grip on his Death Note, but he didn\'t use it. "What will you do to me?"



"I\'ll leave that to your imagination," said Mello, who knew the power of fear and how the mind could always conjure up worse than any reality, "so picture it well. What will I do to you?"



Silence hung between them. Sidoh broke, gabbling out, "It\'s not just ghosts. There are things here."



"What kind of things?" Mello gestured dismissively towards the window. "I know about the banshee."



Sidoh had not even seen the dreadful woman until now. She floated just outside, her white dress rippling in the wind and her black hair moving around her face as though independently alive. She stared back at him through eyes so black that no white shone through at all. She was a creature of such pure malevolence that the sight of her almost sent him fleeing back to the realm from whence he\'d come. She opened her mouth and his ears rang with the sound of her wailing. Sidoh wondered at the power of this human, who saw things hitherto even invisible to death gods. He stared about him. "All sorts of things. Can I go now?"



Mello chortled. "One more thing, then maybe I will let you go." He pointed towards the hole in the floorboards. "What\'s down there? There is something bigger than all of this. Is it a demon?"



"A wh-what?"



"A demon!" Mello

yelled suddenly. "From the Greek daimōn, meaning a higher being. An avatar; an angel cast from Heaven as the Fall of Satan; a flyer in Castañeda\'s shamanic experience. A fucking demon. Do you need me to spell it out?"



Everything was watching him, crowding in. Sidoh\'s psyche crawled with terror. "Y-you want me to go down there and see if there\'s a demon? Down there?"



"Yes." Hissed Mello.



Sidoh pulled out his rules again with shaking talons, unable to think properly through the screaming of the being outside and the horrific stares of those inside the room. "I really don\'t think I have to." He quaked. "You don\'t own the Death Note."



"No." Mello smirked. "I never did. But that doesn\'t matter, because you know what I am capable of and...."



"I\'m going." Sidoh spluttered and went before he could change his mind.



Mello stared at the empty space before him. "Sidoh!" He screamed, but there was no answering cry. The room felt clustered around him and freezing cold. Mello waited, gripping the spare chocolate bar until it snapped. "Fuck." He growled, but he could feel those urgent messages from his suppressed, panicking self, desperate to be heard. He decided to leave before they made it through into his emotion. "Until next time." He rasped at the invisible crowd. "Fuckers." Then took off down the stairs.