The Gifted

                                                  CHAPTER ONE-Oli                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

The man/woman Thing scrabbled at the window. The blood ran down its neck and onto its clothes. I stayed still, praying it wouldn't see me. Praying that what were left of its eyes were too full of its own blood to see me through the thin sheet that hung from the bottom of the bed, just barely concealing me from view.

I was watching it through a small tear in the fabric, watching it jump at the glass again and again. Thank the gods Dad had had the good sense to get triple glazing. It would be a long time before it even made a crack in this glass. The Thing was pretty useless, really, just a floppy bag of blood and bones. No good at anything but freaking people out a little.

Its lips had been torn away, so it appeared to be grinning constantly. Its eyes swiveled manically in its skull, unsupported by eyelids. The bloody mound of cartilage in the middle of its face suggested a nose, surrounded by a landscape of red, still bleeding in places, but slowly beginning to congeal. It opened its teeth and let out a high-pitched keening that worried me a little.

It continued to scrape at the window with ragged fingernails. They screeched down the pane, making no marks on the stubborn glass. It grunted in frustration, then started wailing again. The Thing seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It whined gently, and slobbered at the window, smearing a mess of blood and mucus down it.

It knew I was there. It would have given up long ago if it hadn't known. It didn't know where I was hiding, but it knew I was there somewhere. Somehow. Who knows how it could tell? Maybe it could smell me. But one thing was certain. It knew.

After about an hour of this; scrabbling, keening, looking around, slobbering, over and over; I started to consider rolling out from under the bed (the side the Thing wasn't on) and crawling into the bathroom. Because, and I will not lie, I was really starting to need to pee. Just as I started to follow through with this plan, something started happening outside.

I pressed my eye to the hole in the sheet. Another Thing was shuffling into the garden. And another, another! They were crowding underneath the apple tree. My apple tree. Most of these had found themselves a face by then. They milled around for a while; then, as one, they moved towards the window. The first Thing hadn't been making noises for the fun of it. The first thing had been calling reinforcements.