Yes

“Yes.” David rasped, accepting the bargain offered. “Please...I'll do anything!” He cried out as the creature kept grinning, its teeth now thin and sharp like those of an angler fish, its grin stretched wide across its face.

“Then we have a deal.” It said, reaching down a clawed hand covered in rough scales, the broken man in the mud reaching up to grasp it as his vision went black.

“Oh shit!” David cried as he pulled hard on the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding colliding with the fence on the edge of the road. His heart was beating quickly and he struggled to catch his breath as he continued driving, trying to shake the memories of lying broken in the mud from his mind. Was it just a daydream?

Twenty minutes later he pulled into the driveway of the small suburban home he shared with his wife and daughters, still shaken from his near miss and wondering just what he'd tell his wife. With a sigh of resignation, he stepped out of the car and made his way into the house.

“Hi daddy!” came the voice of his youngest daughter Kayleigh as she gave him a hug. She was a perky young girl with light auburn hair in her senior year and already looking to move onto college. “Mom's just got dinner ready.” She told him as she headed towards the dining room.

David followed, trying to hide the stress from earlier as best he could and gave his wife Linda a kiss on the cheek.

“Tough day at work?” She asked him with a kindly smile, placing a plate down in front of him as he took a seat before taking her own. Linda was an attractive woman in her mid forties, her hair still the same sandy blonde it had been when they married, though she had begun to show signs of sagging.

“Something like that.” David admitted in a half truth, **** to confess to losing his job just yet. He helped himself to the chicken and potatoes on the table as his eldest daughter entered and took her seat. Unlike the studious Kayleigh, Abigail was more outgoing and extroverted. She'd finished school the year before and was taking a year off.

The rest of dinner passed without incident, the usual mundane chatter passing across the table, though David found he couldn't focus on any of it. Even the food tasted...off to him and he had a pounding headache in the back of his skull.

Most of the rest of the evening was spent in a semi-haze, his mind playing over and over the daydream where he'd crashed the car and made some kind of bargain with a monster. Was it a daydream? It had seemed so real...but that was impossible. “It's just stress...” he told himself as he climbed into bed that night, kissing his wife on the cheek as they settled down to sleep.