The power went out in the house, plunging it into darkness. The music stopped playing and everyone was still.
Sud walked over to the front door and tried to open it. “It’s jammed,” he said.
Everyone looked at one another and around the room cautiously.
“Hold on... hold on...” Grendel mumbled as he fumbled through a junk drawer. “Geez, a fuckin’ power out and all you guys turn to pansies.” He pulled out an old phone book, grabbing an aged flashlight under it. “Here we go.”
He turned it around for a moment before finding the switch, then turned it on. Nothing. There were a few disappointed moans from the crowd. Grendel frowned, tapping the flashlight against his palm twice. A beam of light cut through the dense darkness. “There.”
He swirled the light around. What the beam found made him feel sick.
Hanging by a rope from the ceiling fan was the body of Sara Johnson. Her once vibrant and beautiful face was caked with blood. Her clothes were in shreds, barely covering her. There was a gaping hole in her right side, some of her major organs were visible. Her hands were in twisted, deformed positions, like claws. Her hair (formerly soft and lovely), which had been put up into a bun for the party, had been let down. It was matted in blood, giving it an eerie, brittle look.
One girl screamed in the crowd. However for the most part, people just stared in a silent shock as the corpse swung slightly on its rope. The slight breeze in the room made her spin just a little. Grendel looked up into her eyes. They stared blankly back at him, fixed on nothing. They used to contain light and life, but now had a smoky, glossed over look to them. He felt his lower lip begin to tremble.
Suddenly pain ripped up and down his right side. The flashlight dropped to the floor with a clunk and he strained his neck to look behind him.
The dark spectre behind him twisted the knife in its wound before pulling it from Grendel’s entire body. He took the long knife to Grendel’s back, driving it through until it protruded from his chest cavity.
As Grendel dropped to the floor with a thump, people in the room began to scream and run hysterically. The man threw his knife, digging it into a young girl’s back. He looked down at the flashlight on the ground, stomping his foot down onto it and immersing the house in total darkness.
As darkness enveloped the crowded living room, many people kept running and screaming, but one young girl stayed statuesque and still. Frozen in the shock of seeing friends killed before her very eyes or just having absolutely no idea what to do. Or maybe it was that she had come to the conclusion that there was absolutely nothing she could do. Whatever the case, this one girl, no older then fifteen, just sat there curled into a little ball as others pushed past her in an attempt to find an exit. She looked up from her fetal position and stared blankly into the darkness around her. She let out a long breath, the first she had taken since the house had been plunged into blackness. The breath followed the darkness’ movements through the cold air before it eventually became one with it.
It’s funny what goes through your mind during intense situations. All of a sudden, she realized that she had missed the latest episode of Survivor last night. She remembered that the Toronto Maple Leafs and the New Jersey Devils were even now playing against one another. That she had an exam next week in World History, that she had forgotten to walk the dog before leaving her house and even that she had left her television on. All of these things and more wandered through the girl’s head as she stared into the total darkness surrounding her body.
Something flashed before her eyes.
She glanced about nervously, struggling to stop the sobbing that might give away her position. The moonlight shone in through the broken glass window, creating eerie silhouettes as her friends realized that there was nowhere to run and settled on hiding. There was a dead silence looming in the air.
-thunk -
The sound of a friend’s body dropping to the floor after a quick, silent death.
-thunk-
-thunk-
-thunk-
Over and over again. The girl turned her head to the floor, attempting to pretend that she was a piece of furniture. The hardwood near her reflected the moon’s light up into her face, as the wood was slowly enveloped by a different kind of darkness. A dark liquid rolled, and then streamed over the floor, eventually cascading lightly onto the girl’s sneaker. She continued staring down at it. As the moonlight reached it, the liquid took on a reddish tint.
Blood.
Suddenly, all the thoughts which had previously clouded the girls mind were erased, replaced by one word that continued to scream within the depths of her mind. Blood. Blood. Blood...
She looked up into the darkness again, and again she sensed movement within it. Abruptly, the moonlight caught hold of something else: a long, metal blade. Before she could react in defense or even scream, it was upon her.
She felt the blade slice clean across her throat.
She attempted to let out a cry but heard no sound despite all efforts. The killer’s strike had destroyed her vocal cords. She put a hand to her neck to try and halt the blood which now flowed freely. She knew this kind of blow rendered the victim dead within seconds, so she strained her neck so that she could look her destroyer in the eye. She fully expected him to finish her,
