Tiny Horror

The strobing red and blue lights of the Antioch cruisers cut through the thick fog and painted the clean white siding of the Garrett home in violent, rhythmic slashes. Julian threw the front door open before the officers could step onto the gravel.

Two of them stood in the headlight glare. Officer Vance, the older one, had the weathered face of a Lake County veteran who had spent decades tending to the midnight breakdowns of suburban life. Officer Cruz looked visibly tense, his eyes scanning the dark, shifting canopy of the silver maples with the careful attention of a man who has learned to trust the body's early warnings.

"Mr. Garrett? We received a dispatch regarding a trespasser. Is your wife okay?"

"She's safe. She's upstairs." Julian's voice was thin and raw. "She saw it too. It came out of the water. It was sitting in the middle of the lawn."

Vance exchanged a brief quiet look with Cruz. "Alright, sir. Stay behind us."

They drew their flashlights and followed Julian through the cold, vibrating rooms. The house reeked. An intolerable, rotting stench of lake-bed sludge, sulfur, and fresh copper that seemed to have bonded with the paint on the walls, to have been breathed into the structure itself. Cruz pulled his collar up over his nose. Vance's expression hardened into something that was not skepticism but was trying to pass for it.

They stepped out onto the main deck. Vance swept his beam across the grass.

The lawn was empty. The pale mass had gone.

"There's nothing here, sir," Cruz said.

"Look at the ground!" Julian pointed toward the shadows near the shore. "Look at the trail!"

Vance lowered his beam, and both officers went completely rigid.

A wide, glittering swath of black, foul-smelling pond muck cut a jagged trench straight through the lawn. It began at the twisted, bent remains of the iron archway, which was now bowed outward like fractured black ribs, and ran directly up the grass toward the deck. The thick, oily silt had pooled against the wooden steps, mere inches from the sliding glass door where Julian had stood. The mud seemed to possess its own sluggish pulse, tiny bubbles of stagnant gas popping lazily on its glossy surface, as if what had left it was still breathing through it.

"What the hell is that?" Cruz whispered, taking a slow step back. "That's not normal pond runoff. It smells like a tomb."

The tale continues...