Have to say I thoroughly depressed myself in under a 1000 words writing this one. Think I was channelling a lot of very bleak sci fi films from the 70s and 80s.
The Night Stalkers
It was Bert who first called them Night Stalkers. Before then they’d had no name. We avoided talking of them altogether as if this omission would aid our plight.
Night Stalker seemed fitting, almost too fitting for it matched them so well that to speak it brought back all the horror of their being.
Why they came only at night we never knew. We’d thought in those early days when Philip and Petra were still living, that they were some type of bat. We became convinced for it explained what that strange clapping noise was that always preceded their arrival. It was their wings beating, Philip had said and it explained too how they departed so swiftly with their prey.
It’s easy to convince yourself of anything when you’re frightened. They have no wings. That we know for sure now. So the clapping must be something else altogether.
Philip believed they must have some kind of infra-red vision, it was the only way to explain why they were so successful in hunting us down.
Course Bert said that was rubbish, like he said everything was rubbish. Like when he’d told Mika that his trap would never work. He’d been proved wrong that time for the flash bulb went off and the image the camera took was how we know they have no wings.
I think I miss Bert the most of all of them. That relentless scorn he heaped upon our every theory, our every plan for escape. At least he gave us someone to rally against, to fire up our tempers, to feel something in our veins.
When Bert was gone and it was just and me and Mika, that was when we gave up. If that grizzled old veteran all leathery skin and hard eyes could be plucked so easily there really was no point in fighting them any more.
When daylight came Mika and I moved our stuff from the mansion house into the bunker. We’d found the bunker after the first couple of nights, Philip so sure that the Stalkers must have a nest, a warren, a something where they rested during the day where we would find them and destroy them all. Philip had watched too many vampire films Bert had said and I tended to agree with him.
We never found any sign of them, not anywhere. What we did find was this bunker. It dated back to the cold war, those days when the worst thing you could imagine was being vaporised off the earth. We knew better now.
We had tins of food, jerry cans of water, torches, a generator powered light supply. We bolted the door, an act of surrender.
Inside our concrete cell we couldn’t hear that dreadful clapping and the squeal the stalkers cried whenever they caught one of us. We couldn’t even tell if it were day or night. We’d thought that would be a relief, that it would lessen the abominable dread that grew as the sun lowered in the sky.
Except it didn’t, it merely prolonged that agony for we were now alert to every sound, any scratch or hiss or knock. We were always on our guard, taking turns to sleep. Except Mika didn’t sleep.
I don’t blame him for what he did. I really don’t. But it’s left me in a situation because Mika is starting to stink now, his skin is green, bloated. I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. Soon it will ooze and in our sealed cell there is nowhere for that ooze to go.
So I will have to open that door and kick his body out. But I have no idea if its day or if its night.
I can bear it today I decide. But tomorrow, whenever tomorrow is, I shall open the door.
LJ Trafford 