She bared her teeth, let out a fierce growl, and charged with her stake leading the way.
# # #
Ricky ran for the light. They were holding the flashlight low, near the floor. A couple of running strides from the stairwell, Ricky remembered that he wasn’t supposed to run towards the light. That was the distraction that Nick and Aaron were using. The light meant that they had seen something else in the lobby, and now Ricky was probably on a collision course with it.
It was too late.
He hoped they would throw open the door to let him run through and he cursed them when they didn’t. Opening it, stumbled into the stairwell and realized that Nick and Aaron were gone. The flashlight spun on the floor. Ricky shut the stairwell door, put his back against it, and bent to grab the light. He clicked it off and listened to the sound of his own panting in the dark.
Any second, he knew he would hear the sound of something on the other side of the door.
“Nick?” he whispered. The emergency lights were almost out. Ricky could barely make out the first flight of stairs in front of him.
“Aaron?”
A new idea occurred to him. They had turned on the light to distract whatever was in the lobby. What if that thing had gotten them already? Maybe something or multiple things had attacked Nick and Aaron silently and dragged them under the flight of stairs to that black shadow.
Ricky clicked his light back on.
Even reaching the light out to the side, he couldn’t probe all the blackness under there. Ricky took a deep breath to settle his nerves and pushed away from the door. He slid his feet silently over the tile as he orbited to his right, trying to get a look. Every horrible thing he could imagine passed through his head. Ricky became certain he would find their mangled bodies stuffed in the corner under the stairs. He ducked down and pointed his light.
There was nothing there.
At the same moment, he heard something above him.
It could have been a shout, cut off before it could form words. The clarity of the sound was lost to a million echoes in the stairwell.
“Nick? Aaron?” he called upwards.
Ricky climbed.
It was impossible to make a rapid ascent quietly, so he gave up on stealth. Breathing hard, Ricky rounded the second-floor landing. His flashlight hit Nick’s wide eyes and open mouth. Nick was on the floor, against the wall in the corner of the stairwell. A thick scarf was wrapped around Nick’s neck.
His eyes were filled with terror, but Nick didn’t make a sound as Ricky moved a step closer.
“Nick?”
Ricky whipped around, thinking that Nick’s unblinking eyes must be looking at something that was just behind Ricky, ready to attack. There was nothing there. When Ricky turned back to Nick, he saw the scarf tighten around Nick’s neck.
It wasn’t a scarf. It looked like black wool, but the pattern on the scarf wasn’t from any fiber. It was scaly. Nick raised a trembling hand to his own neck. When he did, the scarf tightened even more.
It was a snake—that was the only explanation that Ricky could think of. He didn’t know where the snake could have come from, or even where the thing’s head was, but there was a snake tightening its grip around Nick’s neck, cutting off his oxygen.
Ricky set the light down, crouched down, and grabbed Nick’s ankle. When he had a good grip, he jerked Nick away from the wall.
Nick gagged and his hand flailed against the thing wrapped around his neck. Ricky rolled him over and saw that Nick’s other hand was pinned behind his back. For a moment, he thought that he saw the snake’s head gripping the hand. Then, the snake was lost in the shadow behind Nick.
Ricky swallowed his fear and reached for the snake where it was clamped on Nick’s hand, meaning to tear it off of Nick and knowing that he was risking that the thing would attack him too.
It shifted, sliding away from his hand as he reached for it.
Ricky stepped over Nick and grabbed at the coil that was wrapped around Nick’s throat. It immediately tightened, forcing a strangled croak from Nick. Balling his fist Ricky pounded on the snake’s warm scales, once and then again. His third strike missed as Nick flipped over and the snake recoiled. Then, everything changed. The shape behind Nick grew and twisted. It didn’t look like a snake anymore. It was some kind of four-legged thing that sprang away from Nick and then bounded up the stairs. Ricky’s hand fumbled for the flashlight as he staggered backwards against the wall. Shock took his strength. He pointed the light up the stairs to the place where he had last seen the monster.
When Nick gagged and wheezed, Ricky remembered his friend.
Ricky slid over to Nick, still keeping an eye on the stairs.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Nick started coughing and spitting.
“No,” Nick said, dragging in a tortured breath before he started coughing again. “He almost killed me.”
“He?”
Nick gagged and clawed at his throat as he tried to breathe.
“Come on,” Ricky said, grabbing Nick’s arm and trying to help him up. “We have to get out of here.”
He pulled Nick towards the door to the second floor.
# # #
“I don’t know what happened,” Liz said. “We were sitting on the bed and then everything went wrong.”
Amber was peering under the bed from one side while Alan lit up the space with the flashlight. Liz was holding a battery-powered candle. She had gotten it working again by jiggling the base.
“I think it’s safe,” Alan said. “I don’t see where anything could be hiding.”
“That’s the point,” Amber said. “We don’t see them. They have a way of blending in. I don’t think they actually change their shape, but they make you think that they do.”
“But how did they get in?” Liz asked.
