---

A miasma of darkness festered in the seabed avenues of the Old City.

As the moon rose, low tide peeled away the sea and left behind rank brine and lichen slick asphalt. Soon the Lost New Yorkers, mole-pale, would scurry down from their dens inside the skyscraper graveyard to harvest barnacles from the steel bones of skeletonized cars.

Malcolm Dyer looked down from the 87th floor of his apartment building in The Heights. Only the quiet presence of the full moon told him the tide was out. Night summoned a river of shadow that rose up ten stories and flowed, without consideration for the past, through the grid like maze of The Old City, over Wall Street and Harlem alike.

Dyer could not sleep. Perhaps it was the terrible, cryptic news from the farm. Or perhaps, he thought, it was what the child had said to him before she left.

The apartment was dark, Malcolm sat in an armchair facing a floor to ceiling window and the black silhouette of the Old City skyline. A silence took hold. He reached for his tea, his fingers brushing softly against warm porcelain. He brought the mug up to his nose and took in the grassy odor, thankful he could afford the real thing.

Sleep overcame him suddenly, and with it came incoherent fever images in a staccato frenzy. They flashed, lingered, and flashed again: a great fire; cities in rubble; a one-eyed man; a crying child; melting skin.

Malcolm’s eyes opened. A figure now stood before him, tall and thin, framed by the window and blackened into shade by the light of the full moon. The figure became another dark precipice in the concrete forest of the Old City. The vacuum of noiselessness made it hard to breath.

It was Malcolm who spoke first.

“Who are you?”

Malcolm’s voice ellicited a small start from the dark visitor, as if torn from a revery.

Malcolm Dyer?

The voice came from inside of Malcolm’s head, a sensation as violative as it was painless. Malcolm responded with his physical voice. “Yes. I’m Malcolm Dyer.”

The posture of the dark figure seemed to shrink almost imperceptively downward – a subtle, unconscious gesture Malcolm found strangely familiar. Despite the aura of malevolence surrounding the spector, Malcolm felt an unbidden pity.

“Who are you?” Malcolm asked again.

The figure made a strange sound, actually audible by ear, but impossible to understand. It was hardly a word, more a wet, guttural whimper. The noise persisted, a bass ululation, for awhile longer. When it stopped the dark form turned it’s back to Malcolm and faced the window, out toward the broken cityscape.

It doesn’t matter.

The voice came again through Malcolm’s mind.

Soon it will be over.

Malcolm processed feverishly, trying to work out the various probabilities for this encounter. He considered that even his thoughts might not be secret. Nothing was clear except that delay was in order.

Malcolm attempted to think back at the creature. He visualized the words as he thought them.

Whatever you’ve come here to do, it doesn’t need to happen this way.

The figure turned back to Malcolm and raised its right hand.

It does.

Malcolm could not see any weapons, and had no rational cause to fear an outstretched hand. Yet the vision of those slender fingers lit by moonlight implanted a seed of irrational terror in his heart. “What do you want?”

Those delicate, elven digits floated in the cool light, gently caressing invisible tendrils, playing the strings of an unseen harp, searching for the right note.

I want it to end.

The voice bore a sadness.

It has to end. Goodbye Mr. Dyer.

The fingers stopped, held steady, and twisted.

Sharp spasms of agony raked over Malcolm’s body, emanating from his groin outward in radiating arcs. Malcolm crumpled over, beside himself in pain, and loosed an animal groan.

Standing above him, arm still outstretched, the dark figure did not move. It waited in silence as Malcolm writhed on the floor. But in time came a noise again, a guttural sound as before, but this time harder, more ferocious, and growing in its ferocity.

Malcolm watched as the figure, still obfuscated by shadow, cupped its face in its deadly hands and roared. It was a grotesque cacophony, moist and agonized. The room began to shake, the thick airtight windows to warp unnaturally. Malcolm tried to stand, but found himself weighed down by a force.

Then came the voice again, but what before had been painless now stabbed at Malcolm’s consciousness. The shards of the voice raked across Malcolm’s mind. He could feel his sanity tearing apart in its wake.

What year is it?

The voice was everything now. There was nothing but the voice.

Malcolm could not respond. The answer came by force of psychic harvest.

2043

The force of will increased.

What year is it?

Malcolm became a smallness in his own mind, relegated to observer, fading into oblivion piece by piece as the onslaught continued.

2043

In another world, far away, Malcolm felt the figure’s rage as a physical tearing. Hot wind buffeted a corporeal face that was no longer his own, as the giant window exploded outward.

The figure lunged from the shadows and thrust itself forward to glare into Malcolm’s lost eyes.

In the stark moonlight, the figure’s face was an accentuated heap of melted, hairless flesh, all folds and texture, deformed beyond recognition, dominated by two fierce, pained eyes. Where a mouth should have been there was only a crumpled, tongueless hole.

Where am I?

The question would have confused Malcolm Dyer. But Malcolm Dyer was gone, psychically vivisected. With speed born of experience, the figure scoured the warm remains of Malcolm’s mind for an answer.

---

READ MORE FLASH FICTION

ACTION	APOCALYPTIC	DARK	ESTABLISHED UNIVERSE	FANTASY
FUNNY MAYBE	HORROR	MISC	PULLIN’ THE HEARTSTRINGS	SAD MAYBE
SCIENCE FICTION	SCIENCE FANTASY	TWIST ENDING	WTF IS THIS?

READ LONGER STORIES

THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE