The Depot

Night. No cars anywhere. Street lights changing without any cars to wait their turn. A little boy, all dressed up in his little suit. Pressed nicely. Shorts. Dress shoes with mud visible on the sides. This kid, he stands there, under a street lamp, and he looks out into the road. There's a chill in the air. A dog is barking somewhere. A woman's voice screaming bloody murder. This little kid is just standing there.

This is the scene the man sees from his motel window. He smokes crap, drinks cheap, can't sleep, and just sits at the window and watches this kid.

The bus depot is around the corner. Perhaps the kid just stepped off of one. Either way, there he is now, at the curb. Briefcase in hand. Looking pathetic.

Wait.

Is he smiling? Is the little boy, can't be more than six, smiling?

Trick of the light.

But now, drunk, tired, not feeling quite so safe inside his shithole of a room, the man is getting uneasy. The boy is smiling.

Why wasn't I bothered to see the kid in the first place, alone out there, clearly needing help, thought the guy, and worse, why am feeling unhinged to watch the little fucker smile?

And there, in the periphery, a slight... what is it? Wavering?

Yeah, a slight, uh, wavering of the light. I swear I saw that, he tells himself, as if somehow saying it out loud will shake off the reek of fear he is feeling up the back of his neck.

Fuck this, he thinks, it's a kid, a fucking kid. Suit or not, it's a kid.

And then, again, the ever-so-subtle shift in the light, almost imperceptible, a trick, it has to be, a trick played out in the hands of too much cheap liquor and late-night exhaustion.

No, no, no, something is happening there, the guy notices, now sweating, now shaking, now being watched from the boy on the curb.

The air around the kid, it is rippling, shimmering in a way that can't actually be happening but is happening anyway. They guy is glued to the window. And there now the kid is looking at the man and, fuck it all, the kid is laughing.

The man is paralyzed, gripped in horror, unable to move, unable to literally move a single muscle, and there now, a scratching at the door, and he is utterly unable to turn and look in that direction. The boy is laughing crazily, pointing now at the man's window, laughing and pointing.

The scratching is building up, the man is stuck at the window looking down, and then in a moment a rush of air, the stench of death, and the realization that something is directly behind him. He is unable to turn and look at whatever is breathing on the back of his neck.

In the street, the boy is hysterical, tears on his cheeks, laughing like something inhuman, like a beast, and pointing with a finger that is impossibly long...

Funny, thinks the man, how queer it is, that long finger, hair on the knuckles, funny, and there it is, a hand around his neck, impossibly strong, and in a moment the boy stops laughing...

And the man's head, now on the floor, looks up to see its previous home, still upright in the chair, and that thing, so familiar and still so alien...

And as the light fades, as his life fades into death and madness, the man catches, in his last seconds, the voice of a woman, not far off, screaming bloody murder.