Of the monsters in the night,
there's one that chills on sight.
The rain fell over the shanty town, a miserable sort of mist, running off the rusted tin roofs and cascading into the muddy creek which had formed in what was the main thoroughfare. Somewhere, chickens bok’d, and laced throughout the whole soft din of the petulant, whimpering weather were the whispered grumblings of man and his many beasts.
It was, on the other hand, the cleanest the shanty town ever smelled. One good tempest might blow all these huts and their people away, one flood wash it all down the river, and in the mud that was left, one could start again.
That was the only thing for it, to start again. Build again; build it right. Good foundations. People would call it a tragedy if it were to happen, but the real tragedy was this, this germinating filth, this cancerous growth of ill-formed humanity that struggled to live even when it would be best for it to die.
I put my ear to the door, and tried to hear over the rain. Snores. I put my eye to one of the many unstopped cracks the hovel offered and found within the darkness my man sleeping in his clothes.
A kick, and the door was freed of the twine that answered for its hinges; the shaken wall, too, now leaned dangerously inward. Ham snorted awake, his attention all on the rusted sheet of corrugated metal which had fallen on him. He kicked it off and froze, gaping at me with widening eyes.
Ham was one of the worst types of undead. Executed May 19th last year, he just wouldn’t stay dead. He’d managed to claw his way out of the quicklime one night and make a break for it. Since then, he hadn’t gained any sense. He cheated and was shot dead at a poker table, was beaten to death by a pimp after he’d fed on a whore, had his guts blown out by a jeweler he’d tried to rob, and had taken to preying on unattended children in the last few months.
The three little corpses at the morgue were hardly more than shriveled mummies, all of them found in or around this shanty town.
I’d voted to burn the whole thing down, but the better angels in our department suggested a more surgical approach.
I stomped into the shanty, grabbed Ham, and made my exit, marching forward through the thin wall he had been sleeping against. With another kick, the whole structure came falling down around us.
We stood in the rain, me holding him by his collar, him staring up at me with his black blood spilling from the cuts in his face.
“Go ahead,” he groaned. A weak smile played on his lips. “I’ll come back. I always come back. I’m getting to know my way in and out of Hell pretty well by now.”
Then I opened my mouth. It took him a few minutes to realize what he saw. Then he began to scream. I suppose the sound of a shanty being knocked over wasn’t much news to the denizens of this place, but the horrible yell, part human, part demonic, which issued from the struggling wraith I held brought a few men out into the rain. I had to be quick before too many saw.
I snuffed his desperate cries with one gulp, swallowing his boney carcass without so much as chewing. It would have tasted better cooked.
The soft drizzle of rain washed me clean as I stomped away into the night.
Tale Told 