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

by Vincent Daemon

Chapter IX

Tonight, The Rain

 The alien beast glided in silence down from the purple clouded sky and huddled amid the snow covered treetops, not understanding this dreadful substance of iced water and wetness sizzling painfully on its skin. It whimpered gently, so hungrily, lost and cold...detached from its once infinite womb of cosmic filth, psycho-ecosystem devastation, and eternal consumption. 

 It was more alone now than in the dark nothingness of space, before big bangs and planets and incommunicable leech creatures of other sorts. For instance, the rapacious Time and its infinitely small and ever-expanding tendrils that were to lead to the inadvertent death of all things. The creature sped past the immediate birthing of the damned thing–Time itself. The beast saw the expansion with its one half-opened eternal eye. It glimpsed that vile, squirming tube of the time-entity that we as humans could never begin to understand. We could barely even recognize it as a living thing. Henceforth, humanity would have no capacity to ever truly understand Time or Space.  

  Instinctively, intuitively, the beast somehow understood that about our frail but oh-so-sweet smelling, odd little frames. How could we even function, it wondered, seeing our constant and incessant reactions of fear, and our deluded attempts at overcoming it. The thing wheezed horribly as the temperature continued to drop below 20 F. 

 Its vision had increased greatly with the coming of night, even through the irritating, comet-trail like haze of the iridescent snow. It could see the glow of the town not too far away, lights of red and green shining upwards toward the snowflake drooling sky. This beckoned the creature, and it attempted to hop up and fly toward that glow, but its asthma-like reaction to the atmosphere would not allow it to.  It was weakening from cold and malnutrition.

 So instead it crawled over the tree tops carefully, with a certain innate agility it was unaware it had. It was a slow and creepy crawl, but a creepy crawl it was nonetheless. It moved as silent as could be, muffled by the snow surrounding everything.  Nature’s soundproofing muted its every movement, until the one howl of forsaken confusion it had to spontaneously let out.

 The ferocious howl was heard by the Doc, Julie, and John, and lingered in the odd silence. This group of intelligent, friendly people did not know what to say after seeing what couldn’t possibly be real.  They could not process nor forget what they had just heard. In Julie's case, she wrote furiously in her small notebook with her over-sized pen, simultaneously both notating and purging what she had just seen for the sake of her own sanity. 

 The howl chilled all three to their very core. After climbing back into the back seat of Chorn's car, Julie snuggled closer into Johns arms.  Doc Chorn stepped on the gas, icy roads or not, to get to Corman’s as quickly as he possibly could.

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Chapter X