The Horror Megapack_ 25 Classic and Modern Horror Stories ( PDFDrive )

sensed my aliveness behind him. As I was about to jump forward, he suddenly
rose and whirled, and I gazed into a face from a madman’s nightmare.
He had eyes that glowed like a cat’s, only red, and fangs like a snake’s. Blood
covered his face and hands. As I watched, a long thin white tongue licked it from
his lips and chin.
Slowly he smiled. It was the most terrifying expression I had ever seen, and it
sent a cold jolt through me, worse than anything I could ever have imagined. I
felt my bladder let go. An icy sweat began to pour from my skin. I trembled. I
shook all over. No matter how I tried, I could not look away from those horrible
red eyes.
“Zo,” it whispered, for I realized that it was not a man. “Was makst du hier,
Mann?” It drifted forward like a cloud of smoke, enveloping me, and I blinked
and found myself on my back. A numbness came over me. I heard the lapping
sound again, but closer, at my throat. My mind drifted like a leaf in a stream.
Air raid sirens suddenly blew outside. I blinked and sat up, suddenly alone. My
neck ached. My hands felt icy. My legs shook like gelatin.
With effort, I turned to look for the creature, but it seemed to have vanished.
The boxcar’s door still stood open. I crawled to it, then half fell out onto the train
tracks. I huddled there for a moment, afraid I’d been seen or heard. Across from
the boxcar I saw running men, and one by one windows in the station went dark.
The air raid siren blared. Far overhead, I heard the throaty rumble of bombers.
Somehow, I climbed to my feet and stumbled off toward the forest. My only
thought was of escape from the creature. If a German guard had found me, I
think I would have embraced him with joy.
I must have been dazed by the attack, driven half crazy from fear and pain and
bloodloss. As I think back over the months that followed, only fractured images
come to mind: stalking small animals in the dark, ripping open their throats,
drinking their blood to warm my cold insides. Hiding in a fox burrow against the
painful brightness of day. Sobbing uncontrollably at the sight of towns, of distant
men and women, of the kind of warm happy life I felt I had lost forever.
Whatever that creature was, whatever it had done to me, I realized that I, too,
was no longer a man. I hunted and lived as an animal. And, like an animal, I
began to rely on my senses—senses which now seemed inexplicably altered. As
I moved silently through the forest, I could somehow feel every warm living
body around me…could paralyze small animals with the force of my gaze…
could hunt as the fiercest predators must have done in the dawn of history.
The first true memory I have is of taking a human life: a boy who wandered