I can see them out on the lawn, and it’s late at night. They move like shadows, but they are more than that. They wear long capes, tattered and raggedy, and run across the moonlight and into the shadows, back and forth, their hands in front of them–bent–like Nosferatu; but they aren’t after blood. They are after meat. Sustenance. They move through the moonlit yard, the railway station far off on the horizon and the woods a lot closer, giving them a backdrop as the horn of a locomotive blares, so that when they wail out their terrible wails, only I can hear them.
I’m in an upstairs bedroom and I’m ten years old. I’m terrified. They act as though they are trying to scare me. Moving quickly and jumping and dodging, only getting closer and closer to the house. My greatest fear is that I will hear them coming up the stairs as fast as a bullet and I will only have turned my head toward the door before it bursts open. My brother used to tell me to turn on the light when I got scared but now I don’t want to risk setting a light for the monsters on the yard. They have the moonlight. They don’t need my light.
I’m not a coward. I’m just a child. And I feel like a child in that moment with the world against me and the night so dark and horrible.
Go away. I think. Go away. Go away. Go away.
They are closer to the house now, but before they can get close to the porch, my brother sets the flare up high into the sky, and the creatures all stop what they are doing and watch the ball of flame shoot skyward. They are scared. My brother fires an arrow and its flaming tip hits a pile of bramble near three of them and they jump back, in fear of what might happen if they are caught in the flames. As if in response to the thought, one is caught in a great gust of flame and runs in a circle until it falls to the ground dead. Its burning cape a remnant of its existence.
“Be gone!” my brother shouts. “Go back to the mutated hell you crawled out of!”
They flee and then it’s just my brother and I watching the flames flicker in the yard. They will come back before the dawn earlier than the night before, because that’s what they did last night. My brother will keep setting the flames and firing the flares until we run out. We think maybe there is somebody out there to save us, but our parents are dead and the night seems quiet. We wait for the creatures to come back. Next to me, my brother shivers as wind blows in from the open window, and I shiver next to him.
