It left footprints in the snow on the roof.
    They weren't actual human footprints because they weren't in the shape of a shoe or a boot, but they were three toe-like extensions pressed deep and firm into the snow.
    Mr. Mort--a seventy year-old retired bookkeeper and widow--had first come to realize something visited the skies at night when he heard a thunking somewhere up on his roof just weeks after his wife had died.
    At first he thought it was a mother raccoon settling her babies in the attic or squirrels nesting in the vents,or perhaps his wife's ghost dancing up there. Being alone, he had often scared himself. The friggin' kids in the town made it no better for the poor old man. They egged his house, busted mailbox after mailbox until there was nothing but shards of plastic and twisted metal, and decorated his front yard with toilet paper every now and then.
    Every week on his way to the grocery mart about eight blocks from his home, they would follow behind him in the shadows, the whole time whispering and laughing.
    "Looks like he shit his pants!". And then they'd get all serious. They would run up alongside of him and warn him of the night and what lived in it. He would never reply; he never even looked at the jerks, but his thoughts spun furiously.
    "They know my wife is dead, so they like to scare me, an old man," he thought. "It is they who I should fear. They rule the night..."
    One night, the kids had sailed up upon his roof and stuffed acorns and pine needles compacted with a snow laced with pebbles of ice down the chimney. In his boxer shorts, he had to go up there in that hungry wind and dislodge the smoking mess, trembling in fear of what might grab him from the leaves.
    Exhausted, he pressed his back to the ancient brick chimney and slid down it where he sat comfortably in mother nature's white padding--praying that he wouldn't have to call out to anyone in the town for help from atop his own roof--and watched the magnificent storm clouds of smoke billow from the choked chimney. The wind flipped his hair and his T-shirt flapped against his bony chest, making sounds like flags in the wind.
    Mort was just about to get up (after the December winds finally offered him back his breath) when he heard something amongst the treetops.
    A fast rustling.
    It was like someone had thrown a corpse through their tops.
    Mort stood and the gust picked up again. There it was. He could see a cloud of blackness, growling like mountain cats and cart wheeling his way. It roiled forth with storm-like velocity and went over the rooftop with shredded tendrils of what seemed to be a black material spinning wildly from an indecipherable frame. It sailed its shadow across December roofs and as it passed, it looked down at Mort and smiled, its eyes concealed in darkness.
    He balled himself against the chimney, his eyes on the beast until it landed about thirteen rooftops away from his. He watched--the whole time shaking with lines of saliva running from his mouth and being taken away by the wind--as it spun like a whirlwind of crows before it actually stood like a human on the peak of one of the houses and threw its black arms up to the sky, silhouetted against a perfectly round, full moon.
    ...and then he remembered beginning to shake so terribly that he had to lay his head down against the icy snow where he fell asleep. And there he slept.
    He woke up to a sky that threatened snow in the early hours of the morning.
    The creature was gone.
    Before dusk the next evening, Mort attempted sitting out on the front porch in hopes of catching the little bastards that had clogged his chimney the night before with last night's encounter fresh on his mind, but he never caught them. He saw not a soul out on the streets.
    In a town where children whispered secrets in the classroom about being monsters and wrote about them on walls and on the sidewalks were--surprisingly--empty, except for the paper mice that blew up into the trees and down the gutters and the stray sheets of newspaper--probably decades old!--sliding everywhere and, of course, the writing on the sidewalks that read: "Mr. Mort is an old bastard" or "An old shit lives here" with an arrow pointing to the steps of his porch or: "What lives at night can kill" written in sidewalk chalk or with broken white stones.
    Surely they knew what flies across the rooftops at night, he thought.
    The sun finally set in the horizon and he gave the deserted down one last
glaze before bed and then headed in.
    The house was dark. He'd forgotten to turn on the lights. He had no idea he'd be staying out front so late. Seconds after Mort closed the front door--even it just was the front door--he heard a giggle from above. In the attic...
    "Mae? Is that you?" he asked, talking to the ceiling. "Don't you be scarin' me..."
    Nothing.
    "Ridiculous..." he mumbled and walked into the kitchen where he cracked open a beer on the countertop and sat in his tired recliner in front of the TV. Soon, though, he remembered that he shouldn't get too comfortable. It was too quiet out; it was nighttime and trouble lurked among shadows when the sky was as black as coal. He knew it. God forbid he let himself fall asleep.
    There was another noise upstairs in the attic. Like something heavy being pulled across the floor; something dead. Mort got up, straightened himself out, and gathered enough courage to venture up the stairs.
    He walked slowly, looking at the brown, curling wallpaper in dismay, and then to his faded loafers. He had a question for his shoes that sat on the tip of his tongue: "Do you think I should go up there?" but they didn't reply.
    Ssssssssh-thunk. Ssssssh-thunk.
    The hackles on the back of his neck and along the tops of his arms were tickled and they stood all-erect and shivering, like a grasshopper's legs frictioned together. The stairway became darker as he ascended. His mind was a wonderful conglomerate of fear. He feared this--huddled children hiding in the shadows all innocent except for mouth's full of razors, or his wife's voice whispering too close to his ear, or what he'd do if he stumbled over a body.
    It was completely dark and he blinked his eyes to make sure that they were really still open. His feet moved slowly. He felt his way through the dark and made his way to the middle of the hallway. There was scarce light being thrown from the plug-in night-light in his bathroom down at the end of the hall and it was just enough so that he was able to locate the pull string to the attic stairs.
     He faltered at first, regained his balance and then groped for the string again. With shaking hands, he pulled the attic stairs down and unfolded them onto the floor, gave them one good push to lock them in place (and to see if they don't break into dust motes), and began to climb them, slightly hesitant at first, and then confident again that it was nothing.
    Jesus...what am I doing, he thought.
    The noise was gone and had been for about eight minutes. He almost started to climb back down the stairs when soon enough he heard it again, only this time it was closer...maybe a few feet into the darkness.
   ...and then it stopped.
    He had already climbed the stairs and was standing among dust. It was very hot and musty considering that it was about thirty degrees out. His knees finally buckled with terrible fear and he crawled, dying to lean his aching and frightened back against an encrusted wall for a minute, to wait for his heart to stop pounding and his hands to stop shaking. He had already forgotten that something was up there with him.
    "I'm too old for this, goddammit," he heaved, closing his eyes to the blackness that already was.
    Leaning against a wall with what felt like exposed beams, he continued to try and calm himself. He took in deep breathes through his nose and released them from out his mouth. The attic felt alive and sounded like it was breathing. The beams were damp and moist and the air was thick and muggy. For support, Mort used the wall he was leaning on to get up. His fingers pressed into something warm like a mouth--it was wet, slippery, and he felt the fleshy mass of a tongue.
    He hoisted himself up onto his feet, his heart beating until his chest ached.
    A heart attack...
    There was a thin ray of light coming up from the hallway (the bathroom night-light) and that was his target. Behind him, there was scrambling like someone or something getting up onto its feet and then thunking. Something was moving and it was behind him. Running. Claws tapped the floorboards.
    His brow furrowed. "My God!" And began to bend as he approached the stairs, ready to climb down them as fast as his old legs would allow him. Whatever was coming came quickly. The nails on the hard wood became louder. Mort's hands shook and he began to cry.
    As he hurried down the stairs backwards he stuttered, "Mae? Is that you, Mae?"
    It wasn't.
    He looked up before he stepped onto the last step and silhouetted against the shadows was something horribly inhuman. Something with thorny knees, thick claws, and webbed appendages.
    The mocking voices of the children sang to him: "Old Mr. Mort, the crazy old bastard" like a mantra. And then he began to sing the words out loud like rhyming verse only scared little children would sing about what lurked in the shadows at night down by the sewers or what lives behind bathroom mirror's.
    What lives at night can kill...
    With tears running down his face and crying for his wife, Mr. Mort attempted to push the attic stairs back up, but the form--writhing in the darkness--wouldn't allow it. It bent down and shoved them back with hands that dripped Ichor from pores on its leathery skin that gasped and opened like tiny mouths.
    Mort crab-walked backwards to the bathroom door and pushed it open wide with his back, salty piss warming his boxer shorts. The stairs were neither touching the floor nor totally closed, but hanging suspended in mid-air until they were kicked to the ground. The two bottom steps splintered and dust was summoned from the floorboards.
    In the bathroom light, Mr. Mort--whose heart was slowly being seized--watched the beast come forth with a gaunt frame, clothed in shreds of blackness like that of an ancient street peasant with a mane of splinters and three claws that grew yellow and thick like tree bark from deep within itsbody. And as it came closer, closer into the better of the light, he noticed that its eyes were not in comparison with its hideous body. They were sky-blue and glassy; it had the eyes of a mischievous child, of something
that ate cotton candy and giggled a lot.
    Disturbing eyes, but not evil.
    Wafts of delicious winds swirled around the hallway. It smelled neither of rot nor of piss or even the dank smells of Hell, but of dying ghosts and memories, of bubble gum and confection.
    Almost-cute giggles echoed from the recesses of the attic-reverberated from the beast's skin--and bounced off the cobwebs in the corners of the hall. The inhuman being stood there, breathing heavily. Its chest cavity flexed in and out and its throat muscles looked like a thousand earthworms swallowing and digesting rot.
    Voices came from the demon yet it's mouth did not move. "Mr. Mort, the night is alive and it is dangerous...you stupid old bastard."
    "Fucking...kids," Mort whispered. He grasped the throat of his T-shirt and split it open, holding the area under which his heart beat a slow red.
   And then he smiled with rivulet's of tears reflecting the abomination before him--the source of his mockery, his demise. Everything became quiet and then bathroom light began to fade.
    The beast bent down, its claws flexing, the mouths on its body chirping. With one last heavy breath, Mort took in a gasp of air, held it in and stared back at himself from the creatures' watery eyes...and then exhaled. His chest felt no better, only worse.
    Fire licked up from behind its baby blue's before a silver film encased them for protection before the attack.
    A thousand giggles echoed throughout the house, along the beautifully empty roads, and from among the skies...
    ...And then a black, swirling figure busted through the chimney and took flight, pin wheeling across the bold and happy moon. It launched itself with sinuous hind legs off of every other rooftop, it's belly warm with old blood.
    The children of the town gathered and watched what it was that ruled the night sky, all smiling with water-jewel eyes.
    And then they tore off their faces.
 
 
 

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