The Fiend In The Night

Moon glinting through the shutters,

they sway softly in the midnight wind...

I gathered up my folders, sweeping them

into my case, my eyes droop, and through my half-closed

eyes, it looks like a cascade of color...

Shutting the lights, the only ones still

on in the entire station... Swiftly passing

through the hallways, the silence eerie and ghostly.

That was when the loud tapping and banging ensued...

Echoing, echoing in the silence, like the butcher's meat cleaver

on the block, shattering the eerie quiet...

I catiously edged around the corner, and at once grimaced and relaxed,

when I saw a wild-looking woman at the door. The look on her face, 

allowed me to surmise that the night just got longer.

I poured another cup of coffee and offered it to her,

she shook her head, so I took it for myself.

I gingerly held the steaming cup in

my cold hands, and drank the coffee,

the dark liquid pouring down like

the night coming in at dusk.

The heady scent of it, inflaming my senses,

keeping me awake... I once again endeavored to 

understand what this witness was saying,

but her abrasive nature was leaving a dusty and dehydrated taste in my mouth...

She had heard a noise, like a unearthly inhuman shriek, like Death's shriek of

victory as it caught another person... And then a shuffling and creaking sound, 

continuing even after she was leaving...

I succumbed to the women's wishes,

and ushered her out.  As I left the quiet and

the darkness was oppressing...

I decided that if this woman was right, 

it wouldn't do to show up in my

noisy old car, with it's gears clanking and engine groaning,

to the house of a man who was possibly a killer...

I made a quick inventory of my belongings,

deciding which I could afford to carry, and which could stay in the car.

In the end, I just took my firearm, and detective badge...

I tried simulating how I would go about confronting the 

suspect, as I set out toward the location the woman,

had told me... I knew the place, a few blocks down. More than enough

time for me to figure something out. I hoped this was actaully worth it, because

I was cold, hungry, and tired... 

I rubbed my hands, my breath frosting out in front of me, 

and walked off into the darkness.

The door was of a mahogany finish,

with a large brass knocker. The design: a lion

roaring, with the actual ring in it's gaping jaws.

The door was answered by a young man,

clad in only a dark bathrobe.

I took a tour of his abode, my search meticulous, and 

careful, far from cursory...

There was an odd manner about the chap.

and I derived something must be wrong...

However until I could corroborate my witness's story,

I couldn't allow my opinions to take root. That was when

he led me into the old man's chamber, who was supposedly away

on a trip whose existence I was starting to doubt.

He pulled up some chairs, and we chatted

about nonsense, and plesantries,

but we both felt the electrifying tension

in the room, both of us watching each other's 

reactions to the senseless words we uttered,

both of us staring at each other, the stare of a killer, meeting
my smiling face, the facial expression carefully crafted to conceal
the hardness beneath...

But gradually his careful countenance started to slip,

his grip on sanity started to slip... I could see the madness

and rage in his eyes, until with a cry, like the cry of a wounded cat,
he flung his chair across the room
and tore up the floarboards with his bare hands, 

and his dark deed was unveiled. The gruesome body of the old

man, frozen in it's death throes, rigid and cold...

I slammed him against the wall, and cuffed him, meanwhile

the blood from his savaged hands, the skin torn while ripping up the floorboards

drummed on the floor, with a slow relentless ticking...

This a story modeled after Edgar Allan Poe's "The Telltale Heart",

portrayed from the detective's point of view...