The Dark Calling

 Detective Thomas Blake had seen his fair share of murders in his fifteen years on the force, but none had shaken him to his core quite like the case of Jason Miller.

The young college student had been found dead in his dorm room at Blackwood University, the scene of the crime nothing short of grisly. His body was contorted in unnatural ways, as though he had fought some unseen force, his eyes wide open in sheer terror. A series of cryptic symbols, drawn in what appeared to be blood, adorned the walls and floor around him. There was no sign of forced entry, no indication that anyone had been involved in the murder in the traditional sense. No one could make sense of it.

Blake had arrived at the scene, an experienced investigator accustomed to the horror of death, but something about this case left a chill in his bones. He began with the obvious questions: Who had Jason been involved with? Was it a rival student or a jealous lover? But after interviewing friends, professors, and roommates, Blake was no closer to answers.

It wasn’t until Blake began digging through Jason’s personal belongings that he stumbled upon something that would change everything. Hidden in the bottom drawer of the desk in Jason's dorm room was a tattered notebook filled with strange markings and words in a language Blake couldn't understand. Alongside it, a well-worn book sat on the shelf, its pages yellowed with age. The title read The Invocation of the Abyss.

The more Blake read, the more he realized that Jason had been involved in something far darker than he had imagined. The book detailed ancient rituals, some of which Blake recognized as summoning rites—rituals meant to call upon entities from other realms. Jason had been trying to open a doorway, one he believed would give him unimaginable power. But something had gone terribly wrong.

The last few pages of the book, hastily scribbled and stained with what Blake hoped was ink, described a ritual that went awry. Jason had succeeded in summoning something—something dark, something hungry—and now, whatever it was, was free. The symbols in the dorm room were not just random markings; they were the sigils needed to bind the entity to the mortal world. But Jason hadn’t finished the ritual. The demon had been partially summoned, left in a limbo between worlds, and it was angry.

Jason’s last notes were chilling: It’s here. It’s coming for me. I’ve opened the door. If you find this, don’t finish what I started. It’s too late.

As Blake closed the notebook, a cold shiver ran down his spine. The situation was far worse than he had imagined. The entity was real, and it had already begun its hunt. Jason’s death had not been the end—it had been the beginning. The demon was loose, and now, it was after Blake.

That night, as Blake drove home, his mind raced with the possibilities. What kind of being could survive between worlds, existing in the gaps between reality and the supernatural? And more importantly, how could he stop it?

His answer came much sooner than he expected.

It started subtly. At first, Blake noticed things out of place in his apartment—flickers of movement in the corner of his eye, strange sounds late at night, shadows that seemed to follow him. He thought he was imagining things, the stress of the case getting to him. But as the days went on, the occurrences grew more intense.

One evening, as he sat at his kitchen table reviewing the case files, he heard a faint scratching at his door. His heartbeat quickened. He slowly stood and walked to the door, his hand trembling as he reached for the handle. When he opened it, no one was there.

But then he saw it—scrawled in red on the hallway wall, the same symbols from Jason’s dorm room. Blake’s stomach twisted in horror.

He ran to the living room, where his phone had been left charging on the coffee table. He grabbed it and called his partner, Detective Sarah Lopez, hoping she could help make sense of what was happening. But when the phone rang, all he heard on the other end was static, followed by a voice. Not Sarah’s, but a deep, guttural voice that sounded almost like a growl.

"You're next."

Blake slammed the phone down, his heart racing. He knew then that he had made a grave mistake. The demon had found him.

Over the next few days, Blake’s world unraveled. The paranormal occurrences grew worse—objects moving on their own, whispers in the dark, the sense that he was being watched. Every night, as he tried to sleep, he could hear the sound of something scraping against his walls, something trying to break through.

Desperate, Blake reached out to an old friend, Dr. Elias Harper, a professor of occult studies at Blackwood University. Dr. Harper had been researching supernatural phenomena for years, and Blake hoped he might have some insight into how to stop what was happening.

When Blake met Dr. Harper in person, the professor's face was grim. He had heard of Jason Miller’s ritual and warned Blake that the demon Jason had called was no ordinary entity—it was one that fed on fear and chaos, and it could not be destroyed by conventional means. The only way to stop it was to reverse the ritual and banish the entity back to the void from which it came. But that was easier said than done.

"The ritual Jason started is unfinished," Dr. Harper explained. "The demon is still bound to this world, but not fully. If you want to stop it, you’ll need to finish the ritual—but you’ll have to do it right. If you fail, the demon will be free to wreak havoc on this world. And it won’t stop with you."

Blake felt the weight of the words crash down on him. But he had no choice. He had to finish what Jason had started and hope that he could somehow undo the damage.

That night, Blake returned to Blackwood University, the site of Jason’s murder. It was there that he would find the final pieces of the puzzle—two ancient artifacts mentioned in the book: a cursed knife and a shard of glass said to hold the demon’s essence. Only with these would he be able to complete the ritual and seal the entity back in the void.

As Blake ventured into the darkened corridors of the university’s archives, he could feel the temperature drop, the air thick with the presence of something watching. The walls seemed to close in around him, and the shadows moved with a life of their own.

He finally found the artifacts in a locked vault deep within the building. The cursed knife gleamed under the dim light, and the shard of glass was encased in a small, ornate box, its surface covered in more of the symbols Jason had drawn. Blake’s hands shook as he picked up the knife and the shard.

Suddenly, he heard it—a growling, echoing from all sides, a voice that scraped at his very soul.

"You cannot stop me, Detective."

Blake turned, his heart pounding in his chest. The demon materialized before him—a shifting mass of darkness and smoke, its eyes glowing with an otherworldly fire. It was not a physical being; it was something far worse, an embodiment of pure evil that thrived in the spaces between worlds.

"You opened the door," it whispered, its voice like nails on a chalkboard. "Now, you must pay the price."

Blake knew there was no time to waste. He quickly positioned the knife and shard as described in the ritual, his voice chanting the incantation as the demon surged toward him. As he spoke the final words, the ground beneath him shook violently, the air warping with the force of the ritual.

The demon screamed in agony as it was sucked back into the void, its form writhing and howling as the rift began to close. For a moment, everything went silent, and Blake was left standing alone in the darkness.

When he opened his eyes, the university was back to normal. The demon was gone, but the memory of it would haunt him forever. Blake had stopped the entity, but at a cost. He knew that dark forces were always waiting, lurking in the cracks between worlds, waiting for someone to open the door once more.

And when that door opened again, Detective Thomas Blake would be ready.