Catharsis

Number 1~ The Silent Predator

I'm not entirely sure how this came about. I had just read "The Phantom of the Opera" and "Dracula" during this time when I was about fourteen and both include quite sanguinary and domineering characters.

He steps onto the icy cobbles of the pavement. Stalking the innocent creatures roaming about the marble Earth. His noiseless footsteps past; claws of gleaming white veins twist and turn themselves crookedly over the path he glides along. Blazing orbs of lustful fire that burns within him glint in his avaricious eyes- The fires of hell that do not warm in winters but spreads and engulfs those who succumb as defenseless victims of his disease. Once they are drawn, enraptured, to the flame there is no escape from the clutches of evil. Even the emerald leaves of the oak tree, bursting with promise of eternal life and rejuvenation shrivel and crunch into nothing but it's skeletal frames. Caught in the suffocating breeze billowing out from the cloak of death.

In the streets, houses are left crumbling and decaying; the windows dim and crack forever without light as his masterful hands craft trails of plague-ridden ivy to infiltrate and degrade each house brick by brick. Slow and deadly.

As the hazy mist closes around the sites he destroys, chilling screams and howls of the grieved and wretched fill the air in one great primeval wail, strong enough to make the muscles in our hearts tense and clench tight and the blood run cold. All the while, the killer's mouth writhes into a malicious smile, too sickening to see. The fresh blood of his victims trickle from the corners of his lips and stain his clothes of dark ebony. As he slowly moves away, the anguished cries of men still sound, filled with the fury and thirst for revenge of the man, the creature, the thing that scavenged their lives. Though they cannot hear, or see him, they hunt for his shadow. They do not realise he is but a shadow. A shadow that will be the gaoler of their cells of darkness beyond the end of time. They cannot run. They cannot hide. They cannot flee from the chains that bind them together. And at the touch of evil, they continue his soul-destroying legacy in a trance, with the same insatiable crave for destruction in their eyes. The eyes of the Predator.