The Silhouette

           "You don't find the answers, you find pieces of the puzzle," my father's voice ran through my head.  He'd been away for some time now, on an 'important' business trip.  I was just trying to pass some time by going through all my playlists, skipping all the songs that I didn't want to listen to (pretty much all of them.)   Getting fed up with that pattern, I pulled out my copy of The Giver to start reading.  As I opened the tattered front cover to read the oh-so-familiar prologue, I noticed a peculiar sound coming from the basement.  The sound was almost a cross between a lion's roar and a baby's squeal.  It lasted only a few seconds.  Instead of investigating, I shrugged it off as a noise my odd cat had somehow made.  It continued for a few minutes, just on and off.  It was only after the first chapter of my book that I started to get fed up with it, and I went downstairs to check it out.  Everything was in order, and nothing made a sound while I was down there.  Oddly enough, though, my cat wasn't in the basement.  I had remembered that I let him outside earlier.  As soon as I came to this realization, the house started shaking.  Because we live in San Francisco, I didn't think much of it.  But then the house really started shaking.  Things flying off of walls, windows shattering, lights flickering on and off at a rapid pace.  It was only after the noise that I realized something was not normal about this.  It was that horrid, raging noise that made me understand that this was not a natural event.  It sounded as if 5,000 babies were screaming in unison, along with the roars and bellows of all of Hell's beasts.  I had covered my ears, it did little to help me.  I was so confused, I did not know what was going on.  I was about to reach for the phone to dial for help.  But when I looked, there was no phone.  I looked down the hall a little bit, and the only thing I could see was an outline of a man.  Little did I know at the time, but this was my first encounter with a Demon.  He was dark and absorbed light, so I couldn't get a good look at him.