His eyes strained to peer down the worn and tattered dark hall way. It was a filthy, shadow coated passageway. Cluttered with black oblongs shapes and mulled color breaks along the ground, all folded under the murky darkness that filled the corridor. The hallway stretched all the way down the old, crumbling building, which the man stood in. The dimly lit area was shaken like a snow globe, with fat globs of dusty chaff drifting through the air. A wafting starchy smell of mold hung just above his nose as he edged further into the darkness. Stained carpets clotted with thick dirt, finally turned a colorless textured brownish black. It peeled and frayed along its right hand corners, running the length of the narrow pathway. The crusted fabric crinkled and grinded with each step, crunched under the rubber soles of the man's dark leather boats.
Droplets collected like dew beads on the man's unblemished face. Even in the heat and humidity the man's complexion was smooth and even. It was a humid midsummer dusk and the sun was exhaling its last few moist huffs onto the Earth. It was a wet heat that turned this wooden hovel into a hot box, sapping dampness out of everything in the building, whilst it basted and broiled under the setting sun. Runs of watery sweat trickled down from under the man's large puffy brush of hair. It was a twining mini afro, four or five inches off his scalp, a week or so from another buzz to clean up stubble growing past his hairline.
He creped further down into the dilapidated house, second guessing each inch he made down the warped path. Pock divots and rips along the walls showed old gray sheet rock from under light red paint. Pigment struggling to retain its color at spots. A red paint which had long been victimized by the drain of time, the corrosive inching of growing black mold and the laundering of even more cancerous figures, lurking off in the house's dark corners. Figures that the man was searching for, looking for hunting tonight.
It wasn’t his first night out dredging the depths of poverty for vile things, or even his first time alone in a ugly dank place but tonight there was apprehension in the streets. He was on to something tonight, he felt it inching towards him as he left the bar for the corner, the corner for the pay phone and the pay phone to this street. Everyone and no one was talking about this house, the neighbors gave an uneasy pause when talking at it. He caught how their eyes darted towards it when asked if they had known anything about the missing children. How their mouths wanted to say the words and their callous hearts softened just for a second. It was here, he knew. Right here.
Here inside the red walls, which you could find at a once child friendly late 80's fast food restaurant, subconsciously urging it's diners to feverously consume, re-buy and devour more "salty grease on a flesh". Here was nothing child friendly or living friendly. Here the greasy odor that lingered just under the nose was the nauseating smell of smoldering crack cocaine like doughy chalk mixed with a watery diarrhea tinge from the junkies who had even been scared away from here.
It was an old student housing unit that was foreclosed on a decade ago. Now it sat in squalor, boarded up, suffocating in its own stale, dust clouted air. The community kitchen was now wrapped in inches thick cobbing and it was nervously avoided by the local druggies and squatters who used to keep up small portions of the house. They ignored the molding death which swallowed all the breathable air. They suffered the swampy thick gassy atmosphere for a place to escape the soaking southern rain, winter freezes and baking red hill heat of Atlanta. This was the forsaken place the middle aged man found himself minutes after sun down, tucked in anxiety. His palms balmy, his body puckering with salty adrenaline, that held to him only by the nervous chill that hummed under his skin.
A warm buzzing rolled over his ears from the center of his head. A tingling flush of nerve pulsed out of his skin, caught under his light green flak jacket, the heat coursed back into his chest and plumed back up to his head again. Adrenalin pumped through is body, down his arms, out to his pulsating finger tips. Each digit stretched tight around his four pound silver revolver. Its weight laid heavy into his shoulders, ten minutes in the den of squalor and he had yet to lower the weapon or rest his body from the two handed clinch. He held the fire arm ready to shoot for those ten minutes and in that time he had yet to taken a full breath. Each inhale was a thin and wispy pull. Each release would begin to leave his mouth naturally till it was abruptly constricted, halved by the fear.
A dread that pulled at his judgment and thoughts. The wind moaned out like tormented bodies locked in the walls. Bending frame beams and shifting sounds registered as lurking lunatics attempting to cloak their approach. Figures darted from the edge of his vision and white eyes in shadow, shut black when he focused his sight on them. Even his body was lost in the maze of brooding fret. Crawling beads clattered right under the surface of his dark skin. Their prong tipped feet pinched his arm hairs and forcing them to stand on end. Step by pain staking step, he sneaked in further. Deeper into the mouth of the house and further away from his window frame exit, which now stood etched in blackness by the drifting light from a set sun.
His imagination wondered off;
picturing himself finishing his sweep of each room. Clearing all the shambled cubicles, each polluted with driftwood tokens from an ocean of passing years. Moppy old cloths sprawled everywhere, decaying personal effects sunk into the floor and trash washed up in each room. Congealed nylon blankets stuck to cemented carpets laying feet from withered and warped text books. Bent and burned spoons littered the far corner of the second room, alongside mashed food canisters and a gutted mattress. He envisioned himself tentatively scanning each of the rooms in front of him, all but the last one. The room that stood forebodingly thirty feet in front of him, in his day dream and reality. A green tinted glow cascaded out into the hallway from the room, his mind said "go", his body .....
His imagination leapt to him standing in that entry way, his black skin covered in a sheen of emerald light. The gloss was seeping out from a strangely suspended bulb, hanging from a ceiling fan. Its color and tint was filtered out by cakey dead gunk. A malty green growth that crept all the way down from out the shadows of the slimy cracked ceiling. Wet and sticky the moldy moss, melded over the still arms of the fan. It oozed in lumps and voids from inside the fixture, slithering all the way down and around the light. Engulfing the entire bulb, it seemly consumed the all whiteness of the dangling bit of light, allowing only the murky green pigment shine from under its grime.
The adventurer stood planted, mortified at what he saw. The naked back of a hulking beast, gorging itself on the decaying entrails of one of its many victims. It was hunched but feet from the man, in the room’s corner. Its back arched heavily near its shoulders, leaving the convincing impression the beast was headless for a second. Dirty matted gray hair, clumped and tangled run patterned across the length of the creature's body. The monster curled over itself, deceptively compact, its arms and legs tucked under the trunk of its torso, as it grasped the body of pale little body. The bloated remains of a seemingly beautiful little girl dangled ridgedly from the beast's claws. Her dead gaze peered over the creature’s bulbous right shoulder, as her head rocked back and forth, to the reeling thrash of the beast’s bite. Her face transfixed in horror, shaped with elegant rounded cheek bones, a narrow poised jaw line, ending at a softly dimpled chin. A model, a junior pageantry finalist, a damsel who never found fame in the news media, looked out to the man in the door frame. Her eyes, her eyes were gone like all the others. In their place were blackened sockets, hollowed out. Inside them were pits of emptiness, which passed on forever into each dark cavity. The man’s lungs seized, the air in them thinned out as he noted her small face were as beautiful and as they were dead.
His calves clutched and his hands tremored. His bodied shuttered for seconds trying to jump start his mind to comply. The oxygen in his chest had just about been spent as he took in her skin over her collar bone. It was a crusted slab from the deluge of blood that sprang and drained from the gaping tear the child’s neck. A terminal wound that nearly decapitated her. Within the gash; moist innards gelled and tarred by the oxidizing air. Sheering teeth makers lined from just under her porcelain jaw line, to the dry waxy skin covering her bare chest. The man’s ribs burned acidic, each portion of him tearing at his body for a breath but the wound. Full and possessing, his imagination clang to its size and savagery. No man only a monster could have done something this.
Chunks and bits of gristle skin, sinew and unknown splatter lay caked underneath the girl's carcass. The beast tattered and rent the remaining husk of decomposing flesh. It made a wet sloshing sound, like the sound of a dog eating canned dog food. It buried its face over and over again, biting, ripping and swallowing, all in continuous jutting yanks and pulls.
With a driving push, all the man’s organs break out and prying open the his mouth, quickening a flush of air. Sounding a quick gasp of a hiccup.
Alerted, the savage creature whips its snouted face around, lathered in greasy black blood, back towards the man in the door. Its head, its face was unconceivable. Its eyes were hollowed out puss crusted sockets which stared deep into at him.
Soaking the man in fear, his breath once again constricted.
With a mesmerizing gaze beaming heavy into his chest, a gripping dread squeezed the man’s heart. Sweat and courage milked from his brow, dripping over his eyes as he stuttered. The monster snarls its grated maw, lifting its tattered lips, revealing rows of gnarling blades. Some teeth like wedges thick and serrated sloshed with dank rust colored filth and fleshed tarter. The bottom jaw was a mangled field of sharp angles and juts, flooded with juices that drained out from its mouth. The man stands frozen, a washed in swarming blushes of brain farts, blips, deadening fear and terror. His mind dreamt him paralyzed as the murderous monster stalked forward, pouncing furiously onto him, instantly leaching to his face, bowling his eyes out with its purple barked tongue.
Tapping scratches sneaked out beside him, breaking the day dream, pulling the man back the real horror of the crack house and its long dreggy hallway, which he was nervously returned to. To that dank hallway he was inching his way down. On the exposed floor boards, between the carpet and wall, a brawny rat scurried to the only open doorway at the end of the hall. The vermin's dark brown body bubbled and deformed under a hazing green light that bled out from the room at the end of the hall. He composed himself under a few sharp half breaths and tightened his grip around the steal gun grip. The textured grip was now warm and slippery in his balmy nerves. His stomach wrenched slowly to the left as a strange silence took the house. The sound of his weary breath filled the space around him. Startling he thought, how loud his exhale seemed but he resisted the urge to hold it in. He slowed his next draw in to a whisper. He stood still, reaching out with his ears to picture everything, something, anything that was around him, hidden in the dark voids of the old house.
Moaning bends of the structure slowly groaned and stuttered out around him as the wind blew against the abandoned two story building. Struts popped as decade’s old wood leaned and bits tore from the sides of the structure. It was poorly constructed for its era and it was a marvel the building was only partially collapsed in.
The gritty light from the far end of the hall split the thick darkness around it. A green haze pierced through the slinking shadows that stood ready to ambush. The light reflected off specks of brown particles which swim out of the room, wafted on an unseen breeze of tension in an unnerving spin, aroused by something. Something in the room. The bearded man tightened his jaw, grinding his bottom molars against the base of his skull. Slowly, he swallowed down the chalky film that had covered the back of his tongue, smacking his lips a little. Taking a full deep breath, his chest expanded. His mind cooled as he eased out his exhale. His vision brightens and the shades in front of him seem to shrink. He repeated.
His thoughts settle on the one fact that all the S.W.A.T's talk brought him to this house. There was something murdering children in his hood. The police couldn't protect them or wouldn't. Something that was on this block and this was the one of the last two to be checked. And twenty min after dusk something needs that dim green light to see and someone that breathes. Someone, who he was going to find and shoot dead, tonight.
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