The ways of the enemy are myriad. Complex, strange, and almost impossible to predict. Where one might be capable of creating illusion, tricking one’s perception through sight and sound, another may be capable of igniting matter with their mind, and yet another might carry strength enough to heft a carriage above their heads. Only through careful investigation and consistent awareness might a hunter properly ascertain the capabilities of the enemy that they hunt, and even then, it is best never to consider oneself truly wise to their ways, lest you find yourself caught unawares.

  Always remember- they wear the faces of men and woman, but they are beasts of hell, blessed and beloved only by the devil. Be wary, lest you find one of their kind blossoming from the flesh of the god-fearing like a sickly tree, hungering teeth and claw ready to take one’s throat.

  -A Guide ‘Gainst The Enemy, 1745, by William Hunt

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  “I’m leaving, Jonah.”

  “Ya been missing three fuckin days and you just up an leavin, that it? You want to fuckin keep this job, do ya?”

  I try to sigh, but it comes off a bit too growly for that. “Already apologized, Jonah, and my shift’s 7 to 3. It’s 5. You don’t need two bartenders on a Thursday night, and even if you did, that’s not my shift. I don’t care if Tommy’s late, it’s been two hours and not a word from me. I’m heading of.”

  He grumbles, his voice deep enough that it comes off like something of a bear-growl. “Fine. Don’t wanna pay your ass any more anyways. Next time you lose a fake grandma, you call me before you fuck off, or I swear I’m burning your resume.”

  “It was an uncle, and I’ll do my best. Bye.”

  He just grunts, and I close the door to the office on my way out.

  It’s not quite far enough into the colder days that five-o’clock is sundown, but it’s getting closer all the time. The sun’s getting low, and the sky’s starting to turn from clear blue to hints of orange across the clouds. It’s a beautiful evening, all the moreso from being away from the smells Carlo is exuding from the kitchen and the clientele are exuding from the bar.

  I wish I could feel it.

  I can see it, sense it, even, but it’s away from me. I’m behind a little wall, made half of glass, and half of a feeling of pressure.

  It’s one thing to know, in broad terms, that something is out there. A vague, indeterminate thing, existing out and past what can be understood. It’s another entirely to be faced by a person, a real, breathing, seemingly living person, capable of wielding strange magics and putting me in more direct dangers.

  That’s the issue about that little speech of mine. I’m primly and perfectly aware of just how thoroughly I can hurt someone- and just as thoroughly aware of how capable people are of hurting me. And the unknown is almost always worse than the known. Painful awareness of all the ways that Chuck and his boys can hurt me, or how those like him can hurt me, carries over. A stranger that I can’t see coming, that I can’t properly read or protect myself from, has all of those dangers and many more.

  I make it to the car before I hear it.

  Scraaaaape.

  I don’t freeze, but it’s a close thing. A close fucking thing. I’m there, pretty much at the door, keys in hand, when it comes by- and it comes from above.

  The road here isn’t gravel. Neither is any of the dirt to either side of anything. That sound was like someone scraping along gravel- and it didn’t come from me. Didn’t come from the floor.

  I turn to look around, making it slow and clear. I don’t need them to think I didn’t hear- I need to find things, see what made the noise.

  …nothing. No one around. This section of town is as dead as every other, the lights of the bar behind me taking up most of the visible spectrum around me, the only cars in the parking lot matched easily to the people inside.

  I try my best to keep things quiet. Keep myself aware. I look all around, trying to see if I can find one of those weird eyes, or sign of a writhing stinger someplace- nothing. I do my very best to try and make sure that I’m noticing things that I’m not noticing, either, trying some version of the same trick that let me see the person’s lipstick.

  Nothing.

  Except it’s not nothing, is it? It wouldn’t be nothing. Nothing would be too easy. You know what they say- it’s not paranoia if someone’s really out to get you. And I would bet anything in the world that whoever I spoke to, and whoever else they were referring to, abso-fucking-lutely is out to get me, for one reason or another.

  I get in the car, and start driving.

  5pm, and the roads are fucking dead. It’s weird, living in this town. I was a suburbia gal myself, back when I still lived close to family, but I was also painfully close to the highway, and the difference it makes…

  All these buildings, and not one person I can think of in them. All these buildings, lovely little old buildings, half closed down and boarded up- and the entire time, not a single person on the road. The cars that I do see, heading out to the edges of town from the center, are exceptions to prove the rule.

  Scraaaaape.

  Loud enough that I heard it inside the car, over the sound of ailing brake-lines and an engine that likes to sputter rather than purr. Not as close as it was when I was listening for it back at the bar, but louder, more abrupt, like the sound was in a hurry this time.

  The roads aren’t gravel, and the sound- it has weight. I look in the rearview, the side mirrors, the blind spots- nothing. No one in sight. The streets are almost depressingly quiet, the lights more for my benefit than anyone else.

  Where in the fuck-

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  Ah.

  A flash. A moment of bright-eyed insight, brought about, in part, by the distance from things.

  Rooftops have gravel.

  Fucked if I know why, but just about every single rooftop I can think of has gravel on it.

  I don’t look up. I can’t look up at the roofs beside me while driving.

  I can look at the ones ahead and behind, though.

  I look into the mirror, checking, and-

  There. Behind me. Up on the rooftops, a glimpse of something.

  Big. It’s three buildings behind, but it’s big. Uncomfortably so. Like catching a glimpse of a wolf, and then the trees it’s hiding behind, and getting a frame of reference for how much larger it is than a dog.

  There. Back at the beginning. The first scrape.

  Why?

  Running as it is, that part I can figure, that much weight going along rooftops all constant, leaping with that much of a frame- but the beginning. Right at the start.

  Did it want me to know? A warning? Something to unnerve me, or make me run scared?

  I have three people at home. Near-strangers, but decent people, and ones I don’t wish any harm on. And I don’t exactly have weapons there either.

  I could go to the sheriff’s office. Trans woman, total stranger, moved into town barely two years ago, going to the sheriff’s office of a town like Hollow Springs, talking about being followed. I’m more likely to end up in a lockup than not, and that’s a temporary solution at best, if not a way to trap myself into even more of a fucking corner- and that’s just the best case scenario sort of situation. I’d be trading uncertainty and danger for uncertainty and danger.

  …fuck.

  I hit the last light between me and my house, and turn right instead of heading straight.

  It’s not much- but there’s a space well behind back of the condo. Someplace still in development, half empty lot, half partially constructed building, cheap would-be homes ready for further production and eventual habitation.

  I try not to think about the fact that they look so much the same. Like a spreading fungus, I’ve seen buildings just like it in every state I’ve driven through. I saw them in Ohio, when I visited for a graduation, I’ve seen them in New York visiting family, I’ve seen them in Virginia and near DC when I was a kid. They always look the same, grey and off-white spreading between touches of suburbia and the buildings of urbanity, near identical. Empty. Soulless. Quiet. Designed to be habitats, not homes, and seemingly always in construction, ever and ever, amen.

  As shit a place to die as any.

  There’s construction materials there, probably. Some tools from the recent construction Chuck was talking about, or some two-by-four I can rip up for a weapon. Fuck, I’d take a lost brick at this point. I don’t have a gun. I don’t have anything, really.

  A little part of me wants to call me a liar. Demands that my instincts shut up, that I just go the fuck home, that I’m exposing myself to more risk by wandering into a darkening construction site than I am by just going the fuck home where my imaginary monster can’t actually hurt me.

  It’s a small part of me, and behind the glass the way that I am, it’s easy to put it away. Seeing little signs, half-imagined things, led me to BLEED, to that empty house, full of pictures with the faces rubbed away. It led me out of the game, out of the bright red world full of ever-hungry things. To believe, for a fucking second, that the glimpse I saw along the rooftops, the sound I heard coming behind me, so soon after the un=person I saw, is just a coincidence? Silly. Human, yes, but silly. As stupid and poorly designed a behavior as so many others we, as a species, are designed with.

  Old friends, with old voices, wriggle in my mind. How easy it would be to give up. That if I die, I don’t have to think these thoughts anymore. I don’t have to feel these feelings. I don’t have to worry about hurting anyone else.

  They’re wrong. They always, always are. I won’t have to worry because I’m gone, not because they’re not hurt. But in the face of the last few days, and the ongoing fear tickling the back of my spine, they’re loud.

  I don’t want to die. I just want to not be afraid, and not have to hurt. Some of the deepest, most human wants of all.

  I’ll have to settle for wanting not to get my roommates killed. That, at least, there’s a chance I can achieve.

  scraaaaaaaape

  Slower that time, and quieter. Further away. There aren’t that many buildings this far out, and none that sound quite so high up as the condos I’m currently driving past, three stories high to the two of most other structures around.

  I’m driving slow, and the scrape was longer this time, more dragged out. It wants me to hear.

  Part of me is a fan of that. I like the thought of something with desires, something that can be tricked or manipulated, with wants that can be exploited.

  Another, bigger part of me wonders about wandering into a dark place with something that wants me to hear it coming. That doesn’t speak to a lack of confidence, or to a gentle demeanor.

  But I’m behind the glass. I make sure of that. It’s easy to go back behind it on purpose, once you learn how, once you’ve been there enough. I haven’t needed to be back here in a long time. I’ve wandered back, now and again, on some of my darker days, but I haven’t needed to pull up the glass on purpose in a while.

  It’s like back in the game. Not quite the same. That was more about not thinking of things, putting them away in little boxes, keeping those thoughts away from anything that mattered. I was still me, I was just a me that wasn’t thinking of those things, that was focused and active and aware. I needed to be, because I had to be creative, explore, find places and people and things.

  I don’t need that now. I need to make myself capable of violence, and I need to survive the upcoming encounter with whatever the fuck is chasing me. I don’t need to be a person for that, not a full person.

  I need to be behind the glass. Looking down on everything, but safe behind it.

  It feels strange. I haven’t been back here like this, on purpose, since I was a teenager.

  It feels familiar and new in ways that I don’t like.

  I hit the gas and break through the padlocked gate of the fence surrounding the construction. My car doesn’t mind the damage, considering the shit she’s already got, and if I’m wrong, getting fined for it is a hell of a lot less of a problem than getting killed.

  I park the car, get out, hold my keys in my hand so that my house, car, and mailbox key make a shitty, improvised set of brass knuckles, and step out.

  I look behind me.

  It’s there.

  It sits on the road like a dog, but it’s not shaped right for it. It’s got person arms. Big boulder shoulders, rolling hills of meat and muscle, half-hidden in the growing shadows of sunset. I drove slow on the way home, and the sun is turning the sky more red and orange than blue- soon, the streetlights will come on.

  But not yet. For now, the thing sits in shadows made from dying sunlight.

  It’s like a gorilla, kind of. Hard to tell the details of it, but it’s proportioned similarly, front-heavy and leaning to compensate for that fact. It’s sitting like a dog, but it’s like a squat, gone so deep that its haunches are touching the ground, but not like it’s relaxed. It… it doesn’t look like it can relax. It sees me staring, and its head cocks to the side, one long ear flopping lazily as it does- the movement is like a man wearing a fatsuit, or layered under a dozen sets of armor-pieces.

  I can’t see the details of it in the fading light… but it doesn’t have any fur, and its skin is a grey-black blend that looks distressingly camouflaged in the setting light, and, I imagine, will continue to look that way when the streetlights come on.

  I’m a big fan of wikipedia. A firm believer in community-driven sharing of information, through nothing but passion and a desire to educate. Sometimes I like to browse it.

  An average gorilla is capable of lifting, pushing, or pulling objects to the tune of approximately 1,800 pounds. 1,800 pounds of force, delivered on a human body, is enough to pulverize most bones and liquify some organs.

  This thing looks bigger than most gorillas I’ve seen, and it doesn’t… it doesn’t look nearly so well-balanced or gentle.

  It sits perfectly still, it’s head cocked to one side, as I walk backwards, slowly and carefully, towards the half-constructed buildings behind me. Only when I feel my heel bump into something that isn’t gravel or dirt do I look away, turning to sprint inside the closest building.

  I hear something like claws scraaaape along the road outside the construction site- and then I hear a thick, heavy padding of muscled limbs over dirt and gravel, coming towards me.

  +8 (officially! KEEPS GROWING!) chapters on Patreon (one more than last week AGAIN! The value increases!), and more to come!

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