PART FOUR: They Hide In the Alleys

I WATCHED HIM FROM THE CORNER. This world, strange, so unlike my world during daylight. The night had never been for me. I grew up with night dwellers all around them, and I hated them. Why should I be bound to real world problems while they walk around all night and have the time of their lives. For some reason I failed to see most of the "magic" that others had described to me. Why would that be?

The old man around the corner, I couldn't see his face, but I FELT that it was him. I looked down and looked at the inside of my coat pocket. A small silver gun lay there, the power it gave off vibrating through my body.

What exactly had this man done to me? He had stolen the love of my life. My Jessica, gone forever. Stolen by this old excuse of a man. All to live as a night dweller. I cursed the man under my breath. The gun seemed to breathe in and out within my pocket, as if it had a life of it's own.

The man around the corner had never suspected anything. I came around quickly, hand in my pocket.

"Hello," I said to him darkly.
"Do I know you?" the man asked me. I laughed.
"All too well." I pulled the gun out, stuck my arm straight out so that the gun was inches from his forehead. I pulled the trigger.

I heard the gunshot, but only for a fraction of a second for a loud ringing engulfed my ears and they burned horribly, as if they were bleeding.

The old man's body shook in response to the bullet that had been fired through his skull. He fell backwards into a cloud of red blood that had come from his own skull and hit the ground. Within a second he was lieing in a puddle of his own blood. I walked down the street quickly.

There was a boy there. I worried that he had seen everything. Obviously he had for there was a terrified look across his scrawny face. I wanted to kill him but I had no right to. So I brought the pistol quickly across his face, I felt the gun shake in my hand as I smashed it into his skull like a baseball being hit by a bat. It sent the shakes throughout my whole body.

It was a real challenge to keep walking after that. I hid the gun back in the pocket of my dark coat. My head felt like it was going to explode and I'm going to sound crazy but their was something fairly ominous about the universe around me.

Building lights were flashing and going out. People were giving me strange look. This was nothing like the night paradise world others had described to me. I had been deceived.

The worse feeling was that of being loomed over by something I couldn't see. I looked at the ground only to see a shadow of what looked like something impossibly tall standing behind me. But there was nothing there. Almost like an invisible tower.

"Watch us," a voice called from the shadows.

I turned quickly, scared. I looked in every direction for the voice that seemed to come out of nowhere. There seemed to be shadows walking all around me, but no one real.

"Watch us," the voice said again and this time it seemed to be coming from above me.

A shadow ran by in the corner of my eye. I turned.

"Hello?" I called out.
"The man was innocent. The one you seek is elsewhere."

I shook my head.
"No!" I screamed. "How would you know that?"
"In our towers," the voice said. "We see all."

I ran, quickly as I could back to the body. Now the body was just lieing there, surrounded by markets and malls and restaraunts but no lights and no people. The dead man seemed to radiate death that had caused the others to leave. I flipped his body over.

"No!" I said. "NO!"

It wasn't the man. I killed an innocent person. How had he not been able to tell the difference between these two. Now, looking at the man closer, these two looked nothing a like. The lights had tricked him. THE NIGHT had tricked him.

"In our towers," the voice said again. "We see." He paused as if to emphasize the last word. "All."

The shadows of the towers disappeared but I continued to see things following me. These things weren't normal. Was the night hunting me? Was I being punished by some otherworldly force? So many questions but yet so few answers. I knew so little. I ran back to my house, blood on my hands.


to be continued...