Stupid.
That’s all I can think.
Stupid.
Swallowing my anger, I close my eyes and try to breathe a moment. In the distance, I can hear the religious chanting from the university’s chapel. I let the music, soft and calming, enter my soul as I busy myself with the slow filling and emptying of my lungs. I shiver as a sudden chill overtakes me, and I open my eyes to find the courtyard, once warm with in the golden glow of the end of a summer’s day, turned grey and dull under the shadow of a sudden cloud.
Stupid, I repeat to myself.
You can taste the storm in the air now, the tangy readiness and the dusty scent of distant rain. Unexpected Downpour, I can see the headline now, and if I live, I’m sure I’ll hear the chatter of my fellow students half complaining and half laughing at themselves telling each other how they got drenched.
Vapid tales, and ignorant. I could tell them the meaning of the storm, if they would listen, if they would hear. Who would believe me? Not Professor Hart. I check my watch, and prepare what seems to me an impressive trick as I count the seconds down. At the precise moment, I snap my fingers in time with the first bolt of lightning. The storm is overhead, the thunder instantaneous, and if anyone had been there to pay attention to my performance, it might have looked like I myself had caused it.
A stupid trick, anyway.
I rose from my seat and adjusted my raincoat as the strange figures sauntered out from the nowhere they had come. Unreal, shadowy and distorted, every step they took brought them solidity.
Pale, lifeless skin covered them. Human, or as like to human as any other animal I knew, they seemed dead, like something from a bad old black and white monster movie. One of them, I noticed, had formed into a sort of skinless hound; slobbering jaw with razor teeth and, I admit the sight made me shiver, no eyes.
I sighed. This was all so very stupid. Could no one take Chesterton’s fence seriously?
“Alright,” I said, surveying the newcomers. Only three, though even one was dangerous.
A sort of silence settled among us, the only sounds those of the storm and the wheezing of the dog thing. None of them had eyes, I realized. They had made clothes for themselves, sunglasses. There were no eyes behind those shades, only the pale, lifeless skin. The taller one smiled, showing fangs like that of the brut.
Some sort of consonant escaped his throat, and the beast leapt at me.
All so very tiresome.
I whisper a prayer, and duck.
As the monster soars overhead, I draw my gun and fire at the two, grinning figures. Somehow, I do not know enough of the lore to explain why, but the storm and I act as one, and with each shot fresh bolts of lightning flash, the thunder swallowing every report.
Still squatting, I spin around toward the snarling animal and finish the last of them off. Darkness bleeds from the wounds instead of blood, and the dead flesh dissolves like melting plastic in a fire. Three blackened heaps, and the terrible scent of Hell.
The storm clears as instantly as it began, and as a final little touch, perhaps cliché, but I’ll not gainsay it, a rainbow glistens in the sky.
Tale Told 