Possessed by a Cartoon Demon
Henry opens the studio's door, letter in hand.
"20 years goes on fast my friend! Come to our old studio, there is something incredible I want to show you! Signed: Joey Drew.
At the back of the letter, a picture of a huge metal block filled with gears and buttons, a big cylindrical container with an "ink" sign strapped at an end and a giant tap at another end. Also, there is a cartoon devil drawn at the picture saying "Try it!".
Henry sighs.
"Joey Drew, you always knew how to kindle my curiosity." Henry puts the letter in his back pocket and enters. The floor is creaking every step and the man is greeted by mold in the air and a messy room, with the cartoon devil posters everywhere and a, turned on the projector.
"The studio's generator is working somehow, at least I won't be needing this." Henry pulls a lighter and looks at all the papers and the pieces of furniture around made of wood. "Too bad I can't smoke here."
Henry opens and closes his lighter while walking to the next hallway, until noticing something written on a wall with big, black, dripping letters.
"Dreams come true?" Henry takes a closer look and swipes it using a finger. "Vandals are using ink now? What a waste." Henry turns around and smiles. "What a coincidence this is phrase was Joey's favorite motto." Henry's smile goes down. "If he could take his head off the clouds and face reality for a moment..."
Something bumps into Henry, making him yelp.
It was small, all black save his white face with cartoonish round black eyes and wide smile, his body was shaped like a bean, arms and legs shaped like ovals, with big white-gloved hands and big shoes. It was exactly like the devil that is drawn at the letters and the posters but made of cardboard.
"There you are, Bendy. With that dumb smile of yours." Henry chuckles and traces the cutout smile with his finger. " You have no idea how many hand cramps and sleepless nights you gave me when I was animating you.
Henry looks around and then back to the cutout, lifts his leg back and gives a hard kick to it, making pieces of cardboard fly everywhere.
"I always wanted to do that!" Henry puts his hands on his hips and continues walking while whistling.
Henry whistling echoes the place until he finds what was at the letter's picture behind a big open door, whose entrance is written with big letters: " The ink Machine"
"There I am. Now how I turn it on?" Henry asks himself and enters the room.
The big machine sits alone in the room. Henry notices a letter glued to its container
"Find the following objects represented by the plaques and put at the pedestals in the machine room to appease the gods." The letter is drenching in ink and is being used as a glue.
"Really, Joey? Gods? Or you really love your machine or is dumb enough to treat it as magic." Henry shrugs. "Well, time to go appease the gods."
Henry leaves the room and goes into another long hallway. The silence makes his footsteps, the creak sounds of the wood and the sound of drops hitting the floor louder.
Henry looks up and steps back. A piece of the wood from the ceiling falls down with a loud thud right on the front.
"Joey, did you transform this place into a horror house after I left?" Henry comments calmly but shaking his legs slightly.
The next sight when the man turns left in the T section made him question that phrase.
"The hell?" Henry's mouth is agape. There is something tall with a cartoon wolf head, black body with overalls strapped into a lifted up surgeon's table.
"Why is there a real sized Boris doll with a torn up chest?" Henry asks slowly to himself while taking steps near the macabre scene until reaching the table. It had realistic looking bones and the wall next to it had a message, same font as the previous one: "WHO IS LAUGHING NOW".
"I really hope this is a horror house idea. I have a vivid animation and this is not helping." Henry cups his hands and leaves.
But the next room is not better: A huge switch soaked by ink on the front wall and multiple pedestals at the sides of the room, each one with a picture at the wall near their respective positions. Henry looks at them and scratches his head.
" A cog and a wrench I can understand, but a doll, a book, an inkwell and just a music note? What is the logic?" Henry walks away from the room, hand on chin "How I am going to find these things in this mess?
Thump! Henry hits something and almost falls down.
" What, again?" Henry asks himself, puzzled by another bendy cutout in front of him. "Who put this here?" He cups his hands towards his mouth. " Joey, or whatever you are, stop this pranks right now!"
The lack of a response makes the man huff and put the cutout under his armpit.
"Alright, if you want company, you got it."
Henry starts his search at Boris' room.
"Hello, Boris. Are you feeling well?" He looks around and finds a book the body's feet and picks it up. "Illusion of living, it reads." Henry chuckles and shows it to the cartoon that has x on his both eyes. "Look! Maybe one day someone can make you pretend to be alive!" At the corner of his eye, he finds an open drawer with a full inkwell in it. "Also, I have this!" Henry shakes the inkwell. "Perfect for a cartoon to drink!"
The corpse did not respond, making the situation awkward, and it did not help with the need of putting random things on his person. The inkwell having a risk of dirtying his pants and the strapping the book in his pants.
The cog and the wrench are found in the ink machine room, unfortunately, the cog his obviously too big for his pants so he uses another arm.
Why is he carrying that cutout?
He comes back to the first room near the studio's entrance, notices and goes to a small room that has gone unnoticed.
"My old desk. I am glad that Joey let me work away from all the mess the studio was." Henry put a hand on the chair and looks at the drawing table and notices a bendy doll. " Would look at that. My little reference model is still there." He puts the cog at the floor and lifts the cutout and the doll. " Bendy, meet Bendy, your new friend."
And then he makes both touch their heads while the grown man makes smoothing noises. Chuckling, he puts the doll in a pocket and gets the cog.
"I wonder what the music note means. I hope I don't need to carry a piano or anything." Henry says while leaning against a wooden table at the projector room. "I wonder how Sammy is doing. He can be stuck up, rude and unpleasant in general, but he does wonders with any instruments he touches and respects you if you can respect his work."
Henry turns his head left and finds the vinyl inches of his leg on the table.
"Whoa! I am glad I did not sit on it!" Henry picks it up with a free hand. "I wonder if he really got his freedom after finally leaving this..." Henry looks around and notices that there are more ink splatters on the ground than before, or maybe he did not notice that before. " Inky hellhole.".
Henry makes his trip back to the pedestal room carefully, avoiding any of the junk to fall and break, and puts every one of the things at it respective places. Unfortunately, Henry finds out that the lever is still stuck. Exhaling, Henry thinks harder.
"You know, actually there is one room I did miss." Henry says while lifting a finger and looking at the Bendy cutout he put against a wall and picked it up.
Henry is now walking in another hallway, longer than he remembered
"Why I am still carrying you?" He asks the cutout.
Creak!Henry turns to see the origin of the sound. There is another cutout of Bendy, taking a peek at the man on the end of the hallway for a moment before moving away. Henry ran after it , until he found out the missing room and the peeking Bendy leaning peacefully against the entrance.
"You know what. You two will keep company." Henry looks at his Bendy cutout. "Meet your new girlfriend Bendy, Bendy." And then puts them together, hands touching.
The animator browses the room: Small, filled with chairs pointing at a screen, with splinters everywhere making it feel crowded. He takes a step inside, and the screen lights up with a loud classical music with a simple animation of Bendy dancing. Running to the source of the image, it is found only a turned on projector with no one else.
"I am so kicking your ass, Joey." Henry looks up and finds a lot of tubes, filled with black liquid."I am going to put these cutouts where the sun does not shine" And then he finds a huge button with a light up message "INK PRESSURE". Henry grunts and punches the button.
The tubes start to tremble.
" It seems I did something right."
Henry goes back to the pedestal room, and can actually move the switch! The flowing sound increases its volume, bumping sounds can be heard, Henry could swear that even the lights are a bit brighter. But then the items at the pedestal stats to slowly dissipate until there is nothing left. Henry swears its a light trick.
"Priorities, Henry. Maybe this ink machine is a pump of some sorts?Let's go find it ."
The man goes his way, but there are so many black tubes at the ceiling, even at the walls. Were they not there before, or he got that distracted?
Squish! The sound is heard from Boris room. Now the cadaver is now squirting black liquid. Henry shakes his head and continues on his way. But then, at a distance, he sees the ink machine room entrance boarded up. Henry sights and starts approaching.
"Okay, Joey, what kind of black magic you did to make everything so weird?" Henry goes and touches the wood from the entrance, to see if there are something in them.
A black arm shoots through one of the gaps and grabs one of Henry's arms very hard, making Henry gasp.
"Got ya, my old friend!" A shrill voice comes from the black arm owner.
Henry notices that its arm is dirty with black liquid and the being behind it has black horns and a huge, crooked cartoonish smile. Henry frantically pulls his arm away, but it only made the monster behind the boarded-up entrance laugh hard.
Henry uses his free arm to pull the offender arm away and shakes it in several directions, hitting the holder's arm at surrounding wood. Suddenly, he falls down at the ground and notices that the ceiling tubes starts breaking, filling the surroundings with black. Henry gets up quickly and starts to run from the creature whose laughs echoes the halls.
While running, Henry is still feeling the pressure on his arm, and to his surprise the creature's black arm is still there, detached! The surprise made Henry slip and fall into an animator table, breaking it into several pieces.
"This thing is going to break my arm." Henry' calm voice does not show his adrenaline when he takes a sharp piece of wood and starts trying to stab and pry open the hand multiple times.
The ink smell fills the air while the hallway starts to slowly flood. The man decides to get up and restart running while trying to get that arm out.
"This is too ironic to not be a dream." Henry stutters and passes through a waterfall of ink without noticing. He gasps by the sudden flux of liquid but smiles when noticing the exit. With his newfound motivation, he slams the creature's arm at the wall repeatedly and tries prying it once more. The wood spike breaks, but the arm finally falls off, making Henry laugh and run for the exit to be free from this nightmare.
But this nightmare has another plan for its victim. When reaching the doorknob, Henry loses his footing and feels the ground giving away, seeing the door getting farther and farther, until he feels his body hitting the floor. His sight blurs, feels a sharp pain in his back and starts coughing.
"Am I still alive?" Henry slurs, and tries to get up, but the pain on his back makes it difficult, needing to roll sideways into a barrel to use as a support for getting up.
"Why there are coffins leaning on the walls?" Henry massages his hips. "But I am not entering one of those so soon anyway." And also there is another message near the coffins: "THE CREATOR HAS LIED TO US."
As much he wanted to try to find an explanation, the persistent pain makes it hard, so, by leaning on the walls, he walks until finding a staircase.
"Why so many steps?" Henry takes one and feels a jolt. "Press on, soldier, press on."
Then the animator goes down painfully slowly, feeling every step until reaching the last flight, where he gets impatient and tries going faster, just to slip another time and practically climbing down using his butt.
"Am I on a sketch right now?" Henry exhales and uses another nearby barrel as a support, and notices something interesting and sharp on it. "A fire ax." Henry picks it up. " I want to relieve my frustration at something now."
Luckily, there is another boarded up door nearby. With a smile and head down, he walks while ignoring the pain and strikes the wood with his newfound tool with violence. Not satisfied with all of them out the way, he also clobbers the door multiple times, cracking it. Henry straightens up, smiles and then tackles the door, breaking it.
There is a slightly flooded room with water and more standing up pieces of wood that had fallen from the ceiling and walls. Nothing better than violence against inanimate objects to brighten up this horrible day.
After destroying the obstacles on his way, the pain lessens, making the man smile, whistle and hauls the ax to his shoulder. He faltered when he saw something else...
"Coffins and a huge pentagram on the ground. Now it's official. Or cultists entered this building of Joey have gone nuts." Henry steps closer to the pentagram, but he suddenly feels something drawing him in. Henry takes a step back, and the room starts to rumble. Looking behind, the way he came has collapsed with rubble and ink.
Henry looks at the only door of the room, to reach it he needs to get across the pentagram. Henry hesitates, but another rumble makes him swallow dry and go over the creepy drawing.
But the moment he steps inside of the macabre marking, nausea flows down his stomach, a headache suddenly appears full force and his back started to hurt even more.
"I can't...not like this." Henry tries to use his ax as a cane, but it just slips as he goes down to the ground, his vision starts to blur until everything darkens.
"Hey, Buddy!" A voice, familiar to Henry, echoes around the darkness. Suddenly, the sound of a projector turned on is heard, and Bendy, the cartoon itself, appears in the middle of the animator's vision, with his trademark wide smile and arms open wide."Contragulations, Henry! You are dead!" Bendy starts pacing around and lifts one finger to Henry. "And I am going to say three reasons why!One: Stupidity! Seriously, you don't go entering old buildings without things falling on or below you!" Bendy lifts another finger. "Two: That fall! Damn! That one did break some of your bones! I am amazed how you were still walking!" Bendy then stops, walks towards Henry vision, and lifts his third finger. "And three: Did you know that my weird lanky lookalike? He just filled your whole body with ink!" Bendy points at his own arm. "The ink that enters thru your skin and makes a sloooowly transformation into one of the lost souls of this place!"
Henry is disturbed by how Bendy speaking without breaking that jolliness. He wanted to do something, but he could not feel his...anything.
"Oops, I forgot!" Bendy interrupts. "You are too dead to make questions! Let me fix that!"
And with a snap of Bendy's fingers, all the senses turned on, making Henry breathe hard to the sudden need to breathe. But he still feels that is swimming into something sticky, but it wasn't entering his ears or mouth, or obstructing his view!
Bendy snaps his finger close to Henry's face.
"Earth to Henry!Or something near the earth I guess!" Bendy laughs and straightens up his neck ribbon. "Anyway, I am offering you something that will answer the questions burning inside your brain, and give a chance to get out here." Bendy takes a step back and opens his arms. "Your life!"
Henry could feel some kind of hope until Bendy puts his arms back and leans towards the man.
"Buuuuuut there is a catch."
Of course, there is a catch, he is a demon! Cartoon or not.
"I need to enter in there!" Bendy touches Henry's torso.
"What?" Henry asks and Bendy sighs.
"I need to possess you, silly!" Bendy puts his hands on his hips. "So my powers can work!"
"I don't know. I don't know If I can..." Henry stutters and Bendy shrugs.
"Unless you want to be resurrected by the ink and transform into an ink ghoul to make others company." Bendy turns slowly his back to Henry.
"Alright, alright! I accept!" Henry says in desperation.
"Great! I will get the contract!" Bendy claps and a feather pen materializes in a hand and a piece of parchment into another and offers them to Henry that gets it, and lifts up a brow.
"I will willfully give my body to house the soul of Bendy Drew, and in return, he will return me to life." Henry reads out loud. "This contract is too vague." Henry slaps the paper with his finger. "What are you going to do with my body?"
Bendy mocks a listening gesture with his hand on his head
"What is that? Is that a voice of someone who wants his own organs replaced by copious amounts of ink?" Bendy makes an "ooh" sound. "I am not bragging, but I am a better choice because I want you with your organs and free will in place!"
Henry finds everything so suspicious and weird, the flowing motions around him seems dreamlike, but the coldness of the liquid flowing on his limbs feels so real that he is hugging himself.
"Well, if you are already at the bottom , the only way is up." Henry says to himself and puts the pen at the cross. "Press on." He says and quickly signs the contract and gives it to the small demon.
Bendy puts the contract away somewhere in his back, cups his hands together and gives the most wicked smile Henry has saw a cartoon do.
"Amen." Bendy slowly says while grabbing Henry shirt and using it to climb. "We are going to have a lot of fun. Aren't we?
Henry did not have time to scream before Bendy rammed his whole hand into the animator's mouth.