Darkness. Light thrown into the alley by the odd passing car. It is dank, water dripping from the gutters, slipping down the bricks, thick with grime. It is an old alley, sandwiched between two old buildings, packed in a system of old, slim, winding streets. Not many people come here, anymore. It is a place people don't stay. It is a place for passing through. That's what she is thinking, as she lies on the floor of the alley. That this is a nowhere place. A place where only those who grew up here stay. A dying place. A place where she is dying.
Over her body crouches a creature, slim and spindly. At first glance, it would seem to be a man; a tall, spectacularly thin man, but a man regardless. Most would let the trench coat fool them; people don't want to think that there are creatures that they don't know about, inhabiting the earth. They prefer to take what they don't know, and let their brains offer them the most rational explanation they can think of, when the most rational explanation is the real one. But they choose invented logic. They see a man. Their brains do not register the strange, thin face; the bulbous eyes, glowing a luminous green; the way that what seem to be forearms, and hands, are not forearms or hands, because at the elbow the arm of the creature melds seamlessly into metallic ivory, a claw that extends from the arm and hooks around, a vicious scythe.
The creature moves its face from the woman's throat, taking back its arm from where it rested against her neck, cutting into the flesh whenever the flow of blood slowed. The lower half of its face, covered in scarlet, gleams in the pale moonlight that manages to fight its way into the alley. It stands, slowly, stretching to its full height. Seven feet tall and unnaturally thin, the long coat it wears hangs from its frame, flapping open around a ribcage that is mostly bone, shards of it spearing through purpling skin as if fighting to be free. The woman, on the ground, gasps out her last breath and dies, her life feeding that of the creature.
It breathes in deeply, slitted flaps of skin flaring on the sides of its face like unearthly gills. The blood on it gleams, as do its arms, and its broken ribs, protruding from the coat. They look like metal, and are just as sharp. Its teeth clatter together, and a small sound comes from its throat; a soft rattle.
The creature looks into the night, towards softly lit windows of old apartments in the distance. It breathes in again, once, deeply, and blinks its eyes shut. And it is gone, the flap of its coat in the breeze the only sign of its going as it runs on silent, elongated feet through the streets.
YOU ARE READING
After Dark
Teen Fiction"Falridge was originally called Fall's Ridge, named after a strange phenomenon where many of the town's occupants threw themselves over the edge of the cliff that borders our forest, falling to their deaths on the sharp ridges of rock below..." Sinc...
