Page 2 of In Your Light

His long coat hung from the back of a chair, and there was a change of clothes folded on its seat. Those were his only possessions here.

He’d been so used to his high-tech life that this rudimentary cabin felt cathartic. It reminded him of a simpler time.

A time when he’d loved his job, his purpose. When monsters still hid in the dark. When every town had another creature scratching at the door after sunset. When every road led to fresh graves and frightened faces and desperate men pressing coins into his palm. “Kill this for us. Save us. Please,” they would beg.

And after enough years, gratitude began to sound the same as hunger.

They used to pray to him.

Not anymore, and not for a long time.

He swung his feet onto the floor and stared at the dying embers in the stove.

There had been a time when he believed the hunts mattered. That every creature dragged from the dark made the world lighter somehow. Safer.

But the monsters were different now.

They were human.

He rose and opened the door, letting in the cold air.

The river rolled past the cabin and through the forest, wide and grey beneath the morning mist. Tall trees crowded the banks like silent watchers, the wind and rustle of leaves swallowed by fog.

It was as if melancholy were a place and he was in it. It was beautiful, and it suited his mood perfectly. The kind of place humans imagined they could disappear into.

Hadeom had tried disappearing before, but eventually somebody always found him.

A farmer with claw marks on his barn. A priest whispering about missing children. Ashen-faced fishermen telling stories of giant sea things too horrific to describe. A village sheriff too frightened to say the word “demon” out loud.

And Hadeom, fool that he was, always saddled the horse again.

Because if he did not hunt them, innocent humans would die. Simple as that. And it was his job to hunt them.

His purpose.

He closed his eyes.

For the first time in far too many years, he realised he no longer feared dying. What frightened him most was continuing.

The endless roads. Endless killing. Endless nights waking with blood beneath his fingernails, screams in his ears, trying to remember whether the blood or the screams belonged to him or the thing he’d carved apart in the dark.

He filled the kettle and hung it on the metal tripod above the fire.

The cabin door groaned in the wind.

For one dangerous moment, Hadeom reached for a weapon he no longer had.

No more silver bullets. No more knives. No more shackles. No more screaming things in the woods.

He listened and heard nothing but the river and his own thumping heart.

Then the kettle began to whistle softly.

Hadeom stared out at the river as dawn finally broke across the mountain, pale gold bleeding through the mist.

He would need to get used to the silence. And this silence in particular. So profound, it was surely a precursor to madness...

Then from somewhere close by in the trees behind the cabin, there came the faint sound of something running...