I think I'm going to die today.
I can feel it in my bones. Some sort of great recollection of previous events, or perhaps the knowledge of the future really does reside in all of us and we just choose to forget to save our sanity. I can hear the words of the chemicals in my brain saying 'He is coming...he is coming...he is coming'. The thoughts frighten me because they are not my own.
Something large and dark is coming to kill me. Perhaps even take feast of my humble flesh, crack open my skull and partake of my brain, as a cannibal might to gain the knowledge of their fallen ancestor. It knows who I am, what I am, and I've begun to feel the tremors, not only of the earth and the air, but of the spirit as it comes closer and closer.
Even nature, whatever can be considered nature in an urban jungle such as New York City, is conspiring to drive what little grasp I have on sanity away from me. There are shadows dancing across the buildings like little goblins, harbingers of things to come. There are no stars in the sky that I can see, but there are no clouds to obscure them, simply a black sheet of canvas come to drape over me when the hunter comes to capture its prey. The moon stands in the sky though, like a spotlight, pointing its direction to me. But it's not the usual bright yellow moon, the happy moon seen by travellers to illuminate their journeys; it's the blood moon, the red moon of death. Smells of carrion and waste leap up the buildings toward me, even this I cannot simply attribute to the wasteful nature of the human inhabitants of the city, because of the sheer repugnance of the odours. It's not a smell of human waste, but more of faecal waste of things not human or the decaying flesh of some night creature. With this I realise that I've not been running away from the creature as I had planned, it had been quarrelling me to its lair.
The sounds below picked up, the honking of the horns of the cars below, distorted, elongated into a dirge procession march heralding the coming of the hunter. He was here. My life would be taken back shortly.
He stood in all his glory, a black matter of decaying flesh and teeth. The demon behind the face and ghost. This was my god, come to take me back.
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This short story has actually seen a few different incarnations. I originally wrote it back in either '97 or '98 after being inspired by Clice Barker's Books of Blood, but ended up rewriting part of it in February and again in September of 2000, when I incorporated it into part of an i bent my wookie! column at Comic Book Galaxy. I don't consider it to be particularly good, and it's incredibly short, but it's something that was readily available when I set out to put up this site and the "appearance" of content is better than no content.
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