Wind cooed through trees in the delectable blackness of the night. Not a single star dared show its shine this night. The moon was muted by a flock of grey clouds, its foggy light the only brightness to be found in the night.
The whispers of crickets were nonexistent tonight. They even seemed frightened by the evil prowling the earth.
The air was humid and smelled of long-shed blood.
The scene was set for a perfect slaughter. All that was needed was an equally perfect antagonist.
Leanne strolled down the street, her hands buried in her shorts pockets. Her eyes traced the ground, brown-tinted reflections of the sidewalk beneath her glinting on her irises. She passed under a streetlight, its flickering luminescence causing a slight glow to rise off her white t-shirt. She adjusted her earbuds and turned up her music, trying to drown out the unsettling silence of the evening with some bluesy Bonamossa.
She kept her eyes to the ground, incidentally looking the victim. Her shoulders slumped in exhaustion, eyelids growing heavy. She'd spent the day doing charity work at the post office, helping pack up canned goods to give to the less fortunate.
The cans of stolen goods were really weighing down her backpack.
Leanne turned a corner and glanced up to see her house. It was roughly a block away. Her yellow home stood out impressively from the plain brick houses around it. It always made it easier to find, though, which she always counted as the upside to having a grotesquely colored abode.
She dug in her pocket for her keys and yawned as she unlocked her door with them. She pushed it open and found the empty shell of a home. The interior of her house was bathed in shadows, the black outlines of her furniture peeking out from the darkness. She flicked the lights on and walked in, shutting the door behind her and picking up her tabby cat.
In the bushes in front of her windows, something moved.
Leanne went to her kitchen and stored the stolen food she'd acquired that day in her cabinets, turning up her music as she did so.
Her cat strolled into the living room.
Suddenly and for no logical reason, the electricity went out. Leanne dropped a can of preserved pineapple on her foot and grunted in both pain and annoyance.
She heard her cat screech from the other room and scrambled to its aid. She found it dead on the floor, its fur marinating in a puddle of its blood. It was gutted and had a Glasgow smile carved into its face. Its eyelids were burnt.
Leanne gasped and tried to scramble away from the body. She scooted into a corner and looked fearfully around in the dark of the room. She didn't dare make a sound, presuming her cat's killer was still nearby, and slowly began inching towards the stairs. She stumbled up them and looked down from her banister. The downstairs was silent, not a single thing moving except the pulsing of blood from the cat's body.
She breathed in quick, short intervals and searched her pocket for her cell phone. As she was dialing 911, the demented croon of laughter twisted up the stairs to her. She held in a scream and began rushing to the bathroom. It was the room closest to her and the one with the most hiding places, so she decided it'd be safe. Upon opening the door, a corpse fell out. It toppled on top of her, crimson flowing from its laceration smile. Its eyes were wide and staring, its stomach sliced down the middle.
Leanne knew this person. He had been her boyfriend, John. She began to cry and squeal, struggling under the body's dead weight. By her ear, her cell phone reported a busy signal and allowed its call to ring through the silence. She forced the body off her as the sound of nimble footsteps began to rush on the first floor. They were coming her way. She contained her emotions and ran to her room, hiding under the bed and crying softly into her hands.
Someone came to her door. She could only see them from the shins down. Black pants, she thought she saw, with something like blood on them. She covered her mouth and squeezed further into a corner.
The figure moved closer, its feet shuffling on the ground at an agonizingly slow pace. Out of nowhere, she felt her ankle being grabbed. She screamed and struggled against her attacker, his strength overpowering her easily. He picked her up and threw her onto the bed, his head down. A sparkle of silver danced in his hand, a cold glimmer of inanimate deviousness dancing on the knife's blade.
She struggled viciously, but found she was overpowered. The man looked up at her then. His dead, soulless eyes were barely seen through unkempt tresses of the black hair that hung in his face. On his mouth was an artificial smile, created by the very weapon he held now. The carved grin in his cheeks stretched from the corners of his lips to the end of his jaw, dried blood caking the edges of his smile.
He spoke, his voice gravelly from disuse and raspy from insanity. "Shh, shh, shh," he said as he looked her in the eye, his lidless eyes digging into her face. He chortled as he buried the knife in her chest and said, "Go to sleep."