A SILENT NIGHT (FOR A DEMI-GHOUL): II

by Vincent Daemon

Chapter II

Angelfire

 A lone family of four deer (comprised of an immense eight-point buck, an exquisite doe, and two mid-sized fawns) had quite the short-lived startlement as the large glowing red rock came barreling through the trees and right onto their feeding ground. The deer scattered as the meteor struck piles of dried leaves and pine needles with a loud dull thud, leaving a noxious scent in its wake and a small but quickly burnt out brush-fire.

 The tight knit herd of Cervidae very slowly returned to inspect the sizzling rock as it began to cool, crackling as it did so. They gathered around, not only due to that innocent curiosity deer seem to have about new things introduced to their territory, but also to appreciate the heat rapidly fading away with the low and deep reddish glow of the three-foot diameter ball from the sky. 

 As the deer cautiously moved closer and closer in, the cooling spheroid continued to crackle, this time with a much louder ripping-of-rock sound, stopping the deer dead in their tracks again. As the rock split in two from the inside, a bright red light emanated from within. The light blinded all four deer into complete stillness, freezing them from acting upon their usual nervous nature, and they didn’t seem to notice the heaving, hunched form lurking from within that forceful red glow. 

 With nary a warning or sound the monstrous thing leapt up and out of the radiance from within the rock, and with a set of massive, purple razor-sharp claws it spun around counter-clockwise in an unexpected explosion of sheer bestial rage, tearing the throats of all four of the deer family haphazardly out in one fell swoop, their bodies falling to the ground and gibbering through breaths torn open with gurgling sounds of anguish. The creature who did this emitted a brutal roar of something most assuredly not from this earth. 

 The beast looked down at its still not quite dead, twitching, oblivious prey. It then hunched back down and began to feast upon its fresh kills like a greedy and starving homeless schizophrenic left alone in the shelter kitchen for too long. It stuffed itself sick, vomiting up the contents almost immediately, bone fragments and all, then re-stuffing them back down into its all too eager guts. The beast’s meal stayed down after it sucked up the vomitous remains, this apparently being a part of its eating process. The sloppy belches, regurgitation, and suckling broke the still of the night in two.  

 In fact, it had already broken the fabric of many a-thing. The beast surveyed its surroundings, its night vision in any circumstances being of the utmost perfection. It looked at the dark woods, at the pile of fresh and steaming remains it had just left of the easy prey, and inhaled the crisp December air deep into itself, exhaling out a second, different kind of sound, low and more like an extended raspy wheeze. It then examined the crystal clear, starry night and spread its immense arms wide, upon which a set of purplish-red, thick leathery wings splayed out, attached to its back. With a small bend of its hyena-like legs, the bizarre creature launched itself up into the sky, bashing through the thick tangle of dead leafless tree branches with all the ease of having kicked over a Lincoln-Log house. 

 As John wandered the dark road, mind already a-flutter with racing thoughts of his ever-mounting frustrations, he realized this was the thing he could have sworn he saw soaring, almost formless in the dark and starry moonless night. A silhouetted shape not of anything he’d ever borne witness to.  A monstrous thing larger than any human or the wingspan of some night bird. The thing’s silhouette blocked out the shimmering glow shed from all the dead stars that littered the empty blackness. 

 But this thing was blacker than any of those empty spaces. This thing felt to John like that blackness.  He spotted it, of course, immediately after two of the worst animalistic howls he’d ever heard. They were not the sounds of any standard creature in the Dolton area. John at first thought the sounds may be due to foxes in heat, but that is too recognizable, and this was the wrong time of year. These sounds came from no fox, no stray bear or mountain lion. He had no idea what they could have come from. But after seeing that ghastly form in the sky that blocked out the stars only moments after the blood-curdling screeches, he began to triple-time it to Corman’s. Visions of the first attack from An American Werewolf In London danced in his stressed-out head, sending shockwaves down his shivering spine, flowing like the primordial warnings they indeed were.

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Chapter III