Bethany 
As Edward Alexander Crowley grew, it was all too evident that he was no ordinary child. By his third birthday, the small, quiet house in Royal Leamington Spa was heavy with tension. The air seemed to thicken whenever the boy was present, and a strange aura clung to him like an unseen cloak. He was unusually intuitive for his years, his black eyes often glinting like a magnet focused on something others saw not at all, something brooding just off the edge of perception. “Edward,” his mother whispered that evening, clinging to her Bible so tightly the knuckles blanched over her fingers, “what’s wrong?”
The boy stood in the corner of the dimly lit room, not turning. Instead, he reached a hand toward the shadowed wall, his tiny fingers brushing the air as though stroking the fur of some unseen animal. “The black cat,” he said simply.
Emily’s blood ran cold. There was no cat in the house, black or otherwise. She had taken every precaution to ensure their home was a fortress of purity, filled with holy scripture and free of worldly corruption. Yet, Edward would often speak of things that weren’t there: dark figures that whispered in the night, glowing shapes that danced on the ceiling when the lights were out, and creatures with eyes “like fire.
His father, Edward senior, dismissed these tales as childish imagination, not believing there could be anything unnatural about his only son. “The Lord is testing us,” he told Emily sternly. “We must guide the boy back onto the right path.
But Emily wasn’t so sure. The boy started showing other abnormal tendencies. He would hum during church service when hymns were being sung by the congregation, such discordant note which sounded incongruent to the hymns being sung, or during praying time, opening his eyes while staring blankly at the cross, with an apparent little smirk in the corners of his mouth, as if deriding salvation.
One night, just before his fourth birthday, Emily woke up to the sound of muffled laughter. She rose from her bed, lit a candle, and followed the sound to Edward’s room. She pushed open the door and froze in the doorway, her heart thundering in her chest.
Edward sat inside the room, surrounded by his wooden blocks, not situated in towers or strewn across the floor like one would think. Instead, they went along an intricate pattern of an unnerving spiral-like design almost as if deliberate. And in the middle of this spiral, Edward sat cross-legged, laughing softly to himself.
“What are you doing?” Emily demanded, her voice trembling.
Edward turned to her, his smile widening. “Playing,” he said innocently. But his tone carried a weight far beyond his years, as though the word itself hid something deeper.
Emily hesitated, her eyes darting to the pattern on the floor. It wasn’t just a random spiral—it was a symbol. She didn’t recognize it, but something about it felt…wrong.
“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked, clutching the doorframe to steady herself.
The boy tilted his head, his gaze piercing. “The black cat showed me.”
Emily’s scream cut through the night. Edward senior rushed in, his face red with rage. But when he saw the pattern on the floor and the look in his wife’s eyes, his bluster faltered. He swept the boy into his arms, carried him back to bed, and whispered harshly to Emily: “You will not scare the boy with your superstitions.
But deep down, Edward senior felt it too—that strange pull, that sense that their son was marked by something neither faith nor reason could explain.
In the weeks that followed, Emily redoubled her prayers, her whispers growing frantic. “Lord, deliver us from evil,” she begged every night, clutching her son’s sleeping form. But Edward would only smile in his dreams, the corners of his lips curling in a way that chilled her to her core.
Still, the mark of the Beast was not upon him, but shadows whispered it would not be for much longer.
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