Arrival

  The room seemed to grow darker, and the candles sputtered out. The sudden pain in my head was nearly unbearable, and I dropped to my knees. I could hear something that sounded like wet, ragged breathing, and it was there standing in front of us. It was barely human, something out of a nightmare. Hunched and crooked, it had massive, bloodstained claws that dragged along the ground as it moved toward us, like an ape dragging its knuckles.

  But it was the eyes that were the worst. Empty pits in its head, though a malicious light could be seen in them as it studied us, like it was waiting for us to make the first move. The rest of the group just sort of stood there, paralyzed, wondering what to do next. Pete, of course, was the first to speak.

  "We...we called you here," he sputtered, trying to sound as brave as he could manage in the face of this unimaginable horror, "The ritual worked, that means you're bound. You have to do as we command."

  I stared at him, my jaw agape, and the silence dragged on. I thought this was a trap to destroy the creature, not try to enslave it. I didn't get a chance to voice my objections, however, because that is the moment the creature did it for me. It laughed.

  The sound it made was wet, almost a gargling sound like a man drowning on his own blood, and it made my skin crawl. What happened next was a blur, but some things remain carved into my memory and will never, ever be forgotten.

  It loped forward, almost leaping towards us, and Gary was the first to break his paralysis. He slammed himself into it, trying to tackle the beast while he yelled for the rest of us to run. Pete bolted, taking Sam and Eli with him, but I couldn't move. I tried, but I just couldn't move. I watched what it did to Gary, I saw everything, I heard everything and I couldn't stop it.

  And the others just left me there to die.

Insanity

  Pete didn’t know any more about this stuff than the rest of us, but he was God damned good at faking it. He even had a plan to lure the monsters in a trap and try to destroy them once and for all. 

  At least that’s what he told us. In reality his plan was little better than chanting Bloody Mary into a mirror in a darkened bathroom. He had candles and incense and a fancy book. All very professional looking.

  He set up a circle with pigs blood and “the dust from a ruin”, lit the candles and said some words in a couple of languages that I’m pretty sure included some made up words and phrases that he came up with on the spot.

  The bastard was so full of shit that it was leaking out of his ears, and I’m pretty sure that was the point that I started to smell it. There was only one problem with the whole situation.

  It worked.

Plans

  So there we sat, the group of us, utterly convinced of our own importance in the grand scheme, as if we had been chosen by some higher power to face down the Forces of Darkness and save the world. Pete, Sam, Gary, Eli, and myself.

  I'll admit, at the beginning I bought into the whole thing. Who wouldn't with a guy like Pete in charge, so full of confidence and zeal, reading to head off the dark forces at every pass. The way he talked about it, it felt like some grand adventure, like a mission from God.

  The others followed him with almost religious reverence, but it was Sam who had it the worst. She practically worshipped him, hanging on his every word like nothing mattered in the world except what Pete thought and felt.

  None of us knew at the time that Pete was already dangerously insane.

Learning

  It was while talking to these people that I learned that my monsters aren’t the only ones. There is seemingly a whole pantheon of these bastards playing their games with humanity. Each person in the group had a different story to tell, but there was enough overlap between them all for them to realize that they were hunting the same things.

  They said that they hadn’t started out hunting them. Most of them got started just trying to hide from them, stay out of their way and off of the radar, but each of them had a reason why they decided to fight back. They said they needed my help, because I was special, because I was different from them.

  See, these self-styled monster hunters could see their “prey” just fine, but I was the only one who could -feel- them. Who could sense them coming before they arrived, before they could strike. They also thought I was the only one who could see them that hadn’t attracted their attention in the past. Pete and his group of death-seeking retards wanted me to act as a sort of radar or early warning system.

  And like an idiot, I agreed.

Digging

  I'm not crazy. I know this, and I don't have to defend myself to anyone.

  Anyway, like I said I started doing some digging. Looking around online for more reports like mine, or similar. Checking my peripheral vision whenever they appeared to see if anyone else noticed. I knew I wasn't alone, but I wasn't sure where or how to find others who could see them. Turns out, it didn't take me long.

  I met a group of people. I'll try to avoid their names, though anyone who has read this probably already knows of one of them. They told me a lot of things about what I'd been seeing. They told me that there were things that lived in the dark, things that preyed on us and used us like pieces on a chessboard.

 I couldn't write them off as crazy, or I'd invalidate my own experience, and a lot of what they said made sense, until they got to the really important part. They didn't just see these things, they said, but the went looking for them. They were trying to stop them.

 They were hunting them.

Not There

  That was it. Just like that, he disappeared. There was no light, no sound, he was just simply not there. That look in his eyes, though, is something I'll never forget.

  I see it every day, every time I close my eyes, and I see it in my dreams. When I dream of him, he speaks to me, accusing me for not saving him, for standing there and watching as he was taken. In my dreams, he is not longer simply not there. In my dreams, they take him slowly.

  They peel his flesh away, they tear at his bones and pull at his muscles. They take their time, ripping him apart, peeling him like a grape and I can do nothing to stop them. The last things to go are always his eyes, watching me, accusing me, pleading for my help. And still I do nothing.

  But I learned something that day, in addition to the fact that the things I see are real. I learned that I was not the only one who could see them. If this man could see them and I could see them, then there must be others.

  So I started digging.

Gone

  I don't know who he was. I didn't speak to him. I try not to think about it too much, who this man was and what he may have left behind. The wondering would drive me mad if I did.

  I was on lunch from from my shitty IT job, wandering the area by my office trying to tune out the pain and ignore the things around me. I saw him standing there, across the street from me. He was filthy, covered in sweat, a look of maddened terror in his eyes. I thought he was homeless from the way he dressed, his disheveled hair, his broken open shoes.

  I tried to ignore him like I did everything going on around me but I just couldn't do it. They were swarming him, formless black shapes swirling in the air all around him, and I couldn't bring myself to look away. The pain in my head increased tenfold and I screamed.

  That's when he noticed me, when the old homeless man looked at me. Dead at me. Ithink, in the moment before they took him away that he knew. He knew I could see them. I saw the fear in his eyes grow as they closed on him, mixing with regret and possibly pity, and he seemed to be silently begging me to help him. Pleading for my help.

  And then he was gone.