Elijah stood in his shower, the water scalding hot. He'd scrubbed until his skin was pink, trying to wash away the lingering feeling of being watched. The bathroom was full of steam, but it was a clean, hot steam, nothing like the cold, oily mist outside.
He turned off the water. The silence of the house rushed in, but it was a different silence now. It was a listening silence.
Click. Click. Scrape.
His head snapped up. Water dripped from his hair into his eyes. It was coming from the backyard. From the kitchen door.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and moved silently to the bathroom door, easing it open. The hallway was dark. The sound came again. A deliberate, probing scrape against the back door. Then a sniff. A wet, mucous-heavy sniffing at the crack under the door.
It wasn't his imagination. It wasn't the fog.
It was on his porch.
Elijah Jones, the man who had faced firefights in the dust of a foreign desert, felt a fear so pure and cold it paralyzed him. He stood in the dark hallway, dripping onto the floor, and listened as the thing outside his door tested the strength of the lock.
Click. Scrape. Pause.
It was methodical. Curious.
Another sound joined it. A low, guttural vibration that seemed to travel through the floorboards. A growl, but not from any animal he knew. It was the sound of rocks grinding together deep underground.
His training, buried under years of forced normalcy, reasserted itself. Assess. Adapt. He was a soldier in a towel, unarmed, in a dark hallway. The back door was solid, but the lock was standard. The window next to it was double-paned, but it was glass.
He had to get to his bedroom. In the nightstand. There was a pistol. A nine-millimeter Beretta. He'd bought it when he first came home, when the world felt too loud and too sharp and the only thing that made him feel safe was the cold weight of it in his hand. He hadn't touched it in over a year.
Scrape. THUMP.
The thing outside hit the door. It wasn't a frantic pounding. It was a single, testing impact. The solid oak door shuddered in its frame.
Elijah moved. He padded down the hallway, his bare feet silent on the rug. His heart was a trip-hammer in his chest. The hallway seemed to stretch for miles. Every creak of the floorboards sounded like a gunshot.
He reached his bedroom door, slipped inside, and closed it softly behind him. The darkness in here was absolute. He didn't dare turn on a light. He fumbled for the nightstand, his fingers finding the cool, familiar shape of the key he kept taped underneath. His hands were shaking. The tremors were back, worse than ever.
SCRAPE. CRACK.
The sound from the kitchen was louder. Wood splintering.
He jammed the key into the lock of the nightstand drawer, twisted it, and yanked it open. His hand closed around the cold, checkered grip of the Beretta. He pulled it out, released the magazine to check it was full, slammed it back home, and racked the slide, chambering a round. The series of clicks and clacks were the most comforting sounds he had ever heard.
A symphony of control.
He turned, raising the pistol in a two-handed grip, aiming at the closed bedroom door. He took a deep, steadying breath. The shakes were gone, burned away by adrenaline and purpose.
Silence from the kitchen.
Had it given up? Had it gotten in?
He waited, barely breathing, his finger resting alongside the trigger guard. The seconds stretched into minutes. The only sound was the frantic beating of his own heart.
Then he heard it. A new sound. From the roof.
Click. Click. Taptaptap.
It was on the shingles right above his head. Moving. Light, skittering steps. Then a heavier drag. Something was up there. Something big.
It stopped directly over his bedroom.
A single, thick droplet of something dark and oily fell from the ceiling and hit the rug between his feet. It sizzled faintly, eating a tiny hole in the fabric and releasing a coppery, rotten smell.
Elijah stared at the tiny wisp of smoke rising from his floor. He slowly, carefully, looked up.
A network of hairline cracks was spreading across his bedroom ceiling plaster, right above his head. Dust sifted down. The thing wasn't just on the roof.
It was trying to get in.