Creature

CRASH!

Jonathan woke with a start, hitting his head on the desk lamp that overhung his bed as he scrambled upright. What the heck was that?

The sound of something smashing to the ground in the kitchen had startled him awake. And what was that noise? Was that... scraping?

"What time is it?"

Still not fully awake, he frowned and grabbed his phone from its place on the bedside table. He clicked it on and blinked in the sudden light from his lock screen of the snowy late-February landscape of Halifax, Canada, where he lived. The blue digital letters read 2:27 AM.

He groaned, rubbing his face as he slipped his legs out from under his nice warm covers and planted his feet unsteadily on the cold hardwood floor.

He had to be up to get ready for work in three hours, and his precious few hours of sleep were being wasted by... what? A hopelessly lost raccoon?

Scraaape, scraape, clatter!

Yep, there was definitely something in his house.

Jonathan was about to groggily open his bedroom door and yell at the lost raccoon to leave his house and please close the door on its way out, but then he froze. Didn't raccoons carry rabies? Maybe he should arm himself, just in case.

And so, in his half-asleep state, he chose to wield his copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn like a chakram.

"Darn animals... I knew I shoulda installed a better fence." He grumbled, preparing himself to confront the unwanted intruder. "Cursed things can just climb right over, anyways. It had better not be the neighbor's cat again or I'll - ow, shoot!" Jonathan bit his lip as he accidentally kicked over a wastepaper bin on his way to the door.

Aw, crap.

At hearing the bin over, whatever was making noise in the kitchen stopped moving. Jonathan held his breath, silently debating whether or not to barge out and confront the creature.

He would later thank God that he hadn't.

A sharp hissing noise came from the kitchen (which was located right next to Jonathan's bedroom) and there was the sound of something making a hasty retreat.

Great. Jonathan thought crossly. Now there's a maybe-rabid animal roaming my house.

Jonathan had never liked animals - they were just so messy, and they required attention. Attention which Jonathan didn't have time to give. His job as a Sales Engineer required his constant standby, which was another reason he had never gotten a pet. Or had kids. Or gotten married.

Not that he couldn't have - he was in fact good-looking, with tousled dark hair and a strong frame. There were several girls who would have been happy to be his high school sweetheart, but companionship had never been something he was interested in.

He lived alone in a small house near Chocolate Lake, which he kept spic-and-span. Jonathan's notorious tidiness was his greatest pride - but now there was some dumb animal out there smashing stuff and making a mess.

Taking a deep breath and grinding his teeth, he finally worked up the courage to crack his door open and peek down the hallway into the open space that doubled as a kitchen and a dining room.

"What the... some possum is about to find himself as a rag hanging on my stove." He growled when he saw the state of his house.

Forgetting the dangers of trapped wild animals, he left his bedroom and stalked into the kitchen.

Half of the cupboards were hanging open, and a few of them even had long scratch marks on them as if something had run ragged nails down them in a fit of temper.

Pans and broken bowls were strewn about the floor, pieces of glass littering the walkway and making it hard for him to enter the room without getting his bare feet cut.

"Oh, come on..." He groaned as he saw an open bag of flour laying deflated on the counter. "You've got to be kidding me!"

It appeared that the animal had been exploring the cupboards, and had accidentally knocked a bag of flour from the top shelf. There was white powder everywhere, all over the counter and covering the floor and the stove and dusting the sink and even reaching all the way to the dining table.

Yep, that's it. He was going gluten-free.

Carefully picking his way into the thick of the mess, Jonathan scanned the wreckage only to see that there were a few small splatters of some kind of black goop ticked across the counter and a few on the floor, as well.

At this point, dear reader, he should have listened to the nudging sense of dread settling in his gut and gotten out of there.

But it was already too late for that.

He was bending down to pick up a shard of his favorite bowl when his breath caught in his throat.

When he took a closer look at the flour on the floor...

Those indents looked almost exactly like human footprints.

He dropped the piece of glass and clutched his hands to his chest, straightening up as his heart threatened to burst out of his chest. Had someone broken into his house? Were they trying to rob him?

Trying to keep his panic down, he surveyed the wreaked kitchen with new eyes. Yep, those footprints were definitely human. But what had they been doing in the the flour cupboard? And why barefoot?

Wait...

His heart jumped into his throat. The broken glass was shattered at the base of the fridge and in the space between the bottom of the cabinet and the fridge - it could only be that way if it had been thrown. What kind of freak would purposefully throw something and make a loud noise while sneaking around somebody's house?

A sense of dread filled him as the realization clicked.

The kind of freak that wanted him to know they were here. The kind of freak that had wanted to get his attention and get him to come out of the safety of his room.

"Oh, no," He managed to gasp, whipping around. His eyes landed on the door handle - locked. Just like it had been when he went to bed. "Oh, no, no..."

The intruder was still in the house with him.

The flour had just been a distraction to hold his attention. And now he had no time to get out.

"Grrrrrr..."

A throaty growl came from somewhere just behind him.

He slowly turned only to see the being of his worst nightmares crouched in the corner of the room above the fridge like Spiderman. Except that it looked more like Venom.

All Jonathan wanted to do was scream and run, but his throat constricted and all he could do was let out a horrified gasp and fall over backwards, cutting his palms on the broken glass in an attempt to scramble away from the demonic figure.

It was humanoid, but the proportions were all off. Its torso was the size of an average human's, but the creature's limbs were way too long. Its skin was black, and hung tight on its visible ribs. Its eyes were large and pale blue, with a white algae-like film over them like a second eyelid.

Bile rose in Jonathan's throat as the being cracked its thin lips apart in a crude imitation of a smile. Its lips parted to reveal rows upon rows of thin, needle-like teeth that appeared to be hollow like a snake's.

"No!" He shrieked as the creature hissed and lunged down to the floor, where it hunched on all fours. It gave a slight shudder and made a guttural clicking noise. Black saliva dripped from between the beast's crooked fangs, landing on the floor with soft sizzling noises.

Great, it has venomous saliva, too.

Man and beast made eye contact for several heartbeats - and then the man's time was up. The creature darted at Jonathan, hissing.

"AHHH!" He finally was able to scream, frantically grabbing a handful of flour and glass shards to throw into the creature's eyes, causing it to give a pained shriek and clutch its eyes, shaking its head wildly. Jonathan rolled to his knees and scrambled upright to dodge the creature's long-fingered grasp.

Shaking most of the flour and glass from its eyes, the figure gave a roar of fury as Jonathan made a mad dash for his bedroom, skidding to a stop as it dragged a trail through the flour.

Terror flooded his veins as he blindly smacked into the corner, groping and shoving the wall so that he could dart into his room. This can't be happening - this isn't how I die!

His legs felt like jelly and his hands were shaking in horror, but after what felt like years he was able to round the corner and lunge into his bedroom, the creature hissing at his heels. In a state of consciousness beyond consciousness, he realized that the creature wasn’t trying all that hard to get to him. It could have caught him before he even left the kitchen, but it wasn’t worried about him escaping. It was toying with him.

“GRAAHHHSSSS!!”

Giving a chilling growl of rage, the sickly thin being slammed into the door and clawed at Jonathan’s face, giving his reflexes one millisecond to kick in and save him from needing an eye patch.

“NO!” he screamed, not necessarily at the creature. Tears of fear streamed down his cheeks as he slammed his full weight into the door, his bare feet dragging across the floor.

The white-painted door creaked in protest as Jonathan frantically shoved against it, screaming. This was the kind of thing that only happened in horror movies - the kind of horror movies that Jonathan disliked, because they gave him nightmares. This was no horror movie... but it was a nightmare.

"Please, no, somebody help me!" He wailed, though there were no neighbors within eight miles.

Blindly shoving and stabbing, he felt a cold dry hand clamp down on his right forearm, yanking him forward.

Searing pain unlike anything he had ever felt erupted in his right hand, and he didn't have to look to know that the creature had bit off his finger. Maybe multiple.

After a lot of screaming and a few desperate kicks, he managed to slam the door shut and lock it before vomiting at the sight of his mangled hand.

Hot blood streamed from the stubs that used to be his ring and middle fingers, running down his wrist and dripping onto the hardwood floor, leaving a crimson stain that wouldn't be coming out any time soon.

The sickening crunching sounds coming from the other side of the door told him that the beast was enjoying its prize.

Flashes of red light pulsed in his vision, and he knew that he was going to slip into unconsciousness if he didn't get out of here and get help soon.

Trying to ignore the unbearable pain in his hand, Jonathan stumbled to the window near his bed and scrambled to unlock it, silently praising that his bedroom was on the ground floor. He had to get out of there.

Not giving a second thought to the fact that he could no longer hear the figure scratching around outside his bedroom, he shoved the window open - chomping down on his tongue hard enough draw blood to avoid crying out when his injured hand smacked against the window frame.

There was blood everywhere now, dripping down the window, swept across the floor... the delusional part of his brain that assumed he was going to live through this fretted that his room was going to have permanent red stains on the door.

Hesitating for only a heartbeat, he threw himself out the window, vaulting over the snow drift that had accumulated underneath the windowsill and crashing down a few feet away, painfully jarring his ankle as he landed. He scrambled to his feet, gasping at the cold and clutching his now three-fingered hand to his chest, trying to cut off the blood flow.

I need to get out of here... need to run... but where? Nowhere to go... He began to run blindly towards the woods at the edge of his property, cursing his shaking legs and pulsating vision.

He had just made it to the treeline when the worst possible sound came from behind him.

"Hisssssss,"

In a final wave of desperation, Jonathan threw himself into the woods, sobbing and tripping over snow-covered logs and crashing into low-hanging branches.

It was a very dignified retreat.

No matter how fast Jonathan ran, the beast kept even pace, almost as though it knew these woods. Had it been watching him through the windows from within the trees? It didn't matter now; Jonathan was in the process of blacking out from pain and blood loss - he could barely see two feet in front of him, much less retreat into a forest he had been into all of twice in the four years since he'd bought the house and outrun a demon-thing with freakishly long legs.

His feet were throbbing and torn up from running barefoot in the snow and kicking so many tree roots, and his hand was leaving a constellation of red freckles across the white snow.

Finally, his legs gave out and he collapsed, hitting his head against a tree on the way down.

The creature made an odd shriek-growling noise, rushing forward on all fours and tilting its head.

Head throbbing and blood filling his mouth (How did that happen? Oh - he had bit his tongue pretty hard before jumping out the window), he pulled himself up onto a fallen log.

The whole forest seemed to hold its breath as the creature moved closer, giving off the stench of acid and wet leaves.

"No, no, please no..." He sobbed, leaning against the log. The creature crept closer, the pale light from the moon giving its skin an unearthly sheen.

The creature let off another round of the guttural clicking sounds, low and rumbling.

Ice-crusted pine needles pressed into his wrists as he pressed as far away from the figure as he could.

"Cr-cr-cr..." The demonic figure rumbled, its throat convulsing with the guttural clicking. Black saliva dribbled from its jagged maw, landing in the snow with soft sizzling noises.

This is it. Jonathan thought, swallowing a mouthful of blood from his tongue.

This is how it ends.

Giving a violent shudder, he wilted against the log, tears running down his neck. He weakly looked up, meeting his predator's pale, lidless eyes.

There was a horrible moment of silence - and then the creature lunged, its jaw unhinging to reveal rows and rows of deadly fangs closing in on Jonathan's neck.

And then there was dark.