Chapter 4: The Midnight Feast

Chapter 4: The Midnight Feast

The world had shrunk to the dimensions of the window frame. Hours bled into one another, marked only by the slow, clockwise sweep of the moon across the sky. Lily’s body ached with a profound, bone-deep weariness, but her mind was a raw, exposed nerve, jolted into a state of hyper-awareness by cheap instant coffee and pure, unadulterated dread. Every rustle of leaves was a footstep. Every hoot of a distant owl was a scream.

The clock on her bedside table clicked over. 3:00 a.m. The dead hour. The time when the world held its breath, and the veil between realities felt at its thinnest. The air in the room was stale and suffocating. Doubt, a cold and insidious serpent, began to coil in her gut. She was a grieving daughter, alone in an empty house, chasing the ghost of her mother’s madness. She was torturing herself, waiting for a monster that existed only on a frantic, ink-smeared page.

Just as she was about to surrender to the exhaustion, to the crushing weight of her own foolishness, a sliver of darkness detached itself from the deeper darkness of Mr. Bell’s front porch.

Lily’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart, which had been a dull, tired thud, kicked into a frantic, panicked rhythm. It was him.

He moved from his porch into the street, and the sight was just as her mother had described, and a thousand times more horrifying to witness. He didn't walk. There was no rise and fall of shoulders, no bend of the knee. He simply… moved. A smooth, silent, frictionless glide, as if the ground beneath him were a sheet of black ice. His feet, shrouded in the darkness of his coat, were inches above the asphalt. He floated.

The impossible truth of it struck Lily with the force of a physical blow, stealing the air from her lungs. Her mother hadn't been mad. She had been a witness.

Mr. Bell glided to the center of the cul-de-sac, directly under the flickering streetlamp, and stopped. He turned his head, a slow, predatory survey of the sleeping houses. His face, washed in the pale, sickly orange light, was an emotionless mask of white. He was waiting.

Then, Lily saw it. Further down the street, the front door of the Miller house—a family with two young kids who were away at camp—creaked open. A figure emerged, bathed in the faint moonlight. It was a young woman, perhaps Lily’s age, whom she’d never seen before. She wore a simple white nightgown, and her feet were bare on the cold, rough pavement. Her long blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders. She moved with the same uncanny smoothness as Mr. Bell, her eyes open but utterly vacant, fixed on some point in the far distance. She was sleepwalking, but it was not a natural sleep. It was a trance. A summons.

Mr. Bell didn't speak. He didn't gesture. He simply turned and began to float towards the edge of the property line, towards the dark maw of the woods that separated their backyards. The woman followed, her bare feet making no sound. She was a moth drawn to a black, silent flame, and Lily was the sole, paralyzed witness.

The woods, once the magical kingdom of her childhood adventures, now looked like a jagged black wound torn in the fabric of the night. It was a place to hide things. A place to hunt.

He led the woman past the chain-link fence, the same fence he had stood behind in that photograph seventeen years ago. He didn't climb it or open a gate; he simply rose, effortlessly, and floated over it. The woman followed, her movements clumsy by comparison, pushing through a gap in the overgrown hedge. They disappeared into the impenetrable darkness of the trees.

Lily’s mind screamed. Call the police! Scream! Do something! But her body was locked in a prison of terror. Her muscles were rigid, her throat constricted. A thin, whining sound was the only thing that escaped her lips. She was nailed to her chair, her eyes straining to see into the blackness.

She scrambled from the armchair, pressing her face against the cold glass of the window, trying to get a better angle. The moon had risen higher now, casting down a pale, skeletal light that filtered through the canopy, illuminating a small, secluded clearing not fifty feet from her own backyard.

And in that clearing, she saw them.

Mr. Bell stood before the woman, his back partially to Lily. The woman was still, her head lolling to one side, completely placid. He raised a hand, not to touch her, but to gently tilt her chin up, exposing her throat to the moonlight. For a moment, Lily thought he was going to kiss her, a monstrous, gothic parody of romance.

The reality was infinitely worse.

A low, wet, clicking sound carried on the still night air. It was the sound of something dislocating. Lily watched, her sanity fraying like old thread, as Mr. Bell’s jaw didn’t just open. It unhinged. It detached from its natural place, his lower mandible dropping impossibly far, stretching the pale skin of his cheeks into translucent, paper-thin sheets. His mouth gaped open wider, and wider still, becoming a black, cavernous hole, a horrifying, unnatural void in the center of his face.

And then she saw the teeth.

They weren’t human teeth. They weren’t the fangs of a vampire from a storybook. Inside that gaping maw were rows of them. Not two, but four or five rows of long, thin, silver needles that glinted in the moonlight like a surgeon’s tools, like a clutch of hypodermic syringes. They weren't meant for chewing. They were meant for draining.

Paralyzed by a horror so absolute it felt like a religious experience, Lily watched as the monster that lived next door leaned in. He did not bite the woman. He did not tear at her flesh. He placed his entire unhinged, needle-filled mouth over the woman’s nose and mouth, covering the lower half of her face in a grotesque, suffocating seal.

The woman’s body went rigid. A single, convulsive shudder ran through her, a silent, electric scream. Her hands, which had been limp at her sides, clenched into fists. Her bare feet dug into the soft earth. But she made no sound. Not a whimper. Not a gasp.

He was feeding.

He was drinking her. Not her blood. Lily knew, with a certainty that transcended logic, that he was consuming what he had a "taste for." He was draining the life from her. The consciousness. The very essence of her beautiful mind.

A crack spiderwebbed through the foundation of her reality. The world she knew—of quiet streets and nosy neighbors, of grief and memory and the mundane struggle of daily life—shattered into a million pieces. In its place was this single, unbearable image: the floating man with the needle-toothed maw, feasting in the pale moonlight.

The scream that had been trapped in her throat finally tore itself free, but it was soundless, a jagged hole ripped open inside her, swallowing everything. The monster was real. The monster was her neighbor. And it was hunting in her backyard.