It got dark early one afternoon

Part I

It got dark early one afternoon. The orange streetlight glow and the music playing through my headphones were the only things lighting my way back home - despite the build-up of rainy mist fighting its way through my comforts.

Alone, cold, and soggy. Perfect conditions for a horror story in the making:

Friday night is unusually quiet with nobody around me. Someone though (something rather) had found its way into my footsteps. The cracks of the pavement and the occasional puddle kept my eyes occupied until I noticed it behind me. Only a couple of meters behind stumbled a man. All blacked out, hood up, tracksuit and staring straight ahead, sniffling and grunting. Another useless drunk I had pictured being at a pub only a few hours before.

I panicked. Being alone, cold and soggy - you would in those situations. I took the long way home to try and shake it from my tail but to no luck. The thing just kept following. A left turn, another left turn and then another. A right turn and a circling of the roundabout were no use to get rid of its stammering march.

My occupied eyes perceive a stick, small and pointy which I grabbed and hid in my sleeve. I was shaking. Badly. And not because it was cold and I couldn't see where I was or where I was going anymore. Not because the fog had not thickened and morphed into a mass that I had to battle my way through. But because there's something behind me. And it won't go away.

Stick in my sleeve and by the glow of another dim orange streetlamp, I ran and hid in an alley that cuts through two ends of a house; hoping, praying that it hadn't seen me run and hide.

Surely the fog was too thick for him to see?

Surely by now he would have given in and gone the other way?

But it was its face. Its twisted face startled me at first. What was left of a tongue, with no lower jaw to rest itself on, slumped onto its chin. Its cold, grey dead eyes stared into my soul. Its hood had fallen down as it lunged towards me, revealing an empty space occupied by a few patches of long black hair and gashes that exposed the inner workings of the deformed head. Its teeth were blackened and used. Its last meal, dripping from even the inside of its rotten nose. The skin that held it together was the colour of pale moonlight, only duller and empty of vitality, the skin itself dripping from various muscle tissues and scattered bone pieces, trying its best to hold everything together. But to no avail.

As if by instinct, the dead tree kept in my sleeve was shunted into the roof of its mouth, dividing the flesh and spilling clotted lumps of blood into my hand. The creature let out a squeal and I ran into the mist of the night.

End