Here's that story I'm working on again, slightly revised and with a bit more added. On the off chance anyone's actually reading it, hope you're enjoying it!

1.

I was halfway through ringing up the gentleman’s purchase- two packs of Marlboro Reds, a purple Bic lighter, and $25 on pump 6- when I realized that I was going to have to kill him. As the man was fishing his ID out of his wallet, I bent to grab the cigarettes, and when I came back up I saw him. I mean I really saw him.

Not the fat, slightly balding man with eyes that were too close together and bad acne scars marring his cheeks, but what he really was, underneath: corpse-grey skin pulled over a gaunt face… eyes set deep in the skull and gleaming with predatory attention… two curving holes where its nose should have been… lips pulled back in a Jack-O-Lantern smile to reveal huge, sharklike teeth.

Like always, there was an instant of horror and revulsion at the thing standing before me. I’ve gotten pretty good at suppressing that, when it comes. There was also a moment when that hideous face poking out of the collar of a plain, brown business suit struck me as so funny that I thought I might be going insane. I wasn’t as good at suppressing that… but I at least managed to turn it into a half-concealed snort.

For an instant, the thing’s yellow lizard-eyes flicked up to mine as I set the two packs of Marlboros on the counter, and suddenly it didn’t look so funny anymore. As it slid its driver’s license out of the wallet, it asked in a voice that sounded as normal as you please, even a little nasally:

“Are you alright?”

“Just thinking of a joke I heard earlier,” I said. It was all I could think to say.

“Really? What is it?” the thing asked, handing me its license. I took it, trying not to stare at its hands. They were more like talons now: long, curved claws that looked like they’d be at home hanging from a rack of knives in a butcher’s shop.

I don’t know very many jokes, but I gave him my best one.

“Do you know where the serial number on a condom is?”

“Where is it?”

I forced a crooked smile.

“Guess you’ve never rolled one down that far,” I said.

The thing stared at me for a moment. To me, it seemed like a very long moment. In my mind I saw those black talons describing a slow-motion arc through the air, towards my face. The thing could have torn my head off in a single blow, if it wanted to.

“Very funny,” it said at last. It didn’t laugh. That’s okay; they never laugh.

“That’s $34.60,” I said, offering the license back. The thing accepted it, slipped it back into its wallet, and slapped a handful of bills on the counter.

“Keep the change,” it said, already turning to go.

“No receipt, mister?” I called after.

It didn’t reply.

I slipped the money in the drawer (if the drawer came up short again, I was going to catch hell from my boss), activated pump 6. There was nobody else in the store then, so I went to the window and watched it walking back to its car. The thing looked like a man again- a pudgy, unattractive man so wholly bland that he reminded me of cardboard. It was like that, sometimes. Sometimes, I can only see them when I’m really close.

As I watched, the man-thing calmly leaned up against the side of its car, waiting for the tank to fill. It seemed to be staring at a spot on the ground a few feet in front of it. I knew it would just keep staring until the gas had pumped, unless something caught its attention. Then I noticed the SUV pulling up, nose-to-nose with the man’s red sedan, and watched as a young girl, no more than 7 or 8, opened the passenger-side door, jumped out, and started towards the store.

The thing’s eyes snapped to the girl the instant she’d jumped out of the car. For an instant, I wondered what I would do if it went for her then and there. Then the girl was pulling open the door and coming inside. I relaxed a little, turned to the girl, offered a slight smile. From her expression, I guessed it wasn’t a very convincing one.

“Bathroom?” the girl squeaked.

“That way,” I said, pointing past the magazine rack to the back of the store.

“Thanks.”

She slipped into the bathroom. I glanced out the window, and the man-thing was still there, staring at the door. He was giving me the creeps. I turned back to the register, grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper, jotted the name and address I’d memorized from the man’s license, and slipped the paper into my pocket.

After I’d finished, I looked up to see the young girl. She’d emerged from the bathroom, but when she’d gotten to the door, she hesitated. Her eyes were on the man, staring at him through the glass and the four or five sale stickers that half obscured it. Outside, the man still stood by his car. His eyes hadn’t left the door- he was looking right at her.

They were staring right at each other.

Kids can’t see them, not like me, otherwise they’d spend a lot of their time pointing and screaming. But kids seem to know when they’re around just the same. The girl could see the man staring at her, and something about it had stopped her cold. She couldn’t have understood why she suddenly felt like the sickly zebra, standing alone on the savannah as the lions are closing in, but she knew she didn’t want to go outside.

A form stepped suddenly into view, breaking the girl’s gaze with the man-thing, and it was like she was waking up from hypnosis. She blinked and shook her head as the door opened, and her mother looked down at her impatiently.

“What’s taking so long, Elizabeth?” she asked. Her eyes flicked up to me, and I didn’t like what they seemed to be implying. Luckily, Elizabeth bailed me out before I could say anything about it.

“Sorry, mom,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

The mother shot one last annoyed look at me before taking her daughter’s hand and leading her back out to the car. I quickly looked out the window, towards pump number 6, but the man-thing and its car had gone.

I decided I’d stake the place out tonight after I got off work, and if everything went well, I’d kill him tomorrow night. That’s what I do.

My name is Wade Foster, and I kill monsters.

2.

Bob, the 58-year old man who worked the graveyard shift, was fifteen minutes late. By then, I was getting pretty restless. I was going to have to run home right after I got off, so that I could Google the address I’d taken from the thing’s driver’s license, and I didn’t like the idea of losing time on this one. Something about the way it had stared at that girl had shaken me, even more than usual.

Bob finally showed up, muttering something about car trouble, but I barely heard him. A few minutes later, I was pulling on my jacket as I rushed out the door into the frosty night air. My battered brown van sat where I’d parked it earlier that day. I opened the door (the locks hadn’t worked since I bought the damn thing) and jumped inside. It started on the third try, and I pulled quickly out of the parking lot, the flickering Speedy Mart sign slowly disappearing in my rearview mirror.

The van had no locks, no seatbelt on the passenger side, and no heater or A/C. It did, however, have a tape deck and an AM/FM radio, and I gratefully turned the volume up as I rounded the corner and cruised down the street towards my apartment. My complex, Palm Grove, had a name that always struck me as especially stupid during the winter months. I parked my car, pulled my jacket tight around myself, and hopped out. A moment later, I was sliding my key into the deadbolt-lock with shaking hands and pushing the door to my apartment open.

The studio apartment I called home was sparsely furnished. A worn, brown couch sat up against one wall, doing double-duty as a place to sit and a place to sleep. The small kitchen had a microwave and toaster, and a small fridge that looked like somebody had stolen it from the set of a 1950’s sitcom. A square card-table and two folding chairs served as my dining room, and dirty laundry was draped over the both of the folding chairs, as well as hanging from a clothesline that bisected the space, the hanging towels, shirts, and pants serving as a kind of makeshift wall that separated my “living room” from my “kitchen”. The only electronics I had were a small laptop, sitting on the coffee-table in front of my couch, and an old TV, the kind with tuners on the front so that you had to get up if you wanted to change the channel. I didn’t have cable, and the only internet I could afford came to me via a dial-up modem. Shangri-La, it was not, but I kept it pretty clean. The small space meant I didn’t have the luxury of letting garbage pile up.

I sat down on the couch and opened the laptop. I opened my internet browser- waiting for the Google webpage to load on a 56k modem always gave me plenty of time to imagine how wonderful the internet must be when it’s poured into your house through a thick bit of fiber-optic cable- and typed the address in.

The thing was living only 15 minutes away by car, still more or less in my neighborhood. It made sense- hadn’t I heard something on the news about a missing child earlier in the week?- but the idea of that thing walking the same streets as I did, shopping at the same stores, standing in the same checkout aisles, gave me the creeps all over again.

On a whim, I typed the thing’s name- Morton Wersh- into the search bar as well. I brought up half-a-dozen pages, most of them having nothing to do with the man-thing that had visited my store earlier in the day. One page, though, brought up an article from a local newspaper for a town I’d never heard of up in Oregon, honoring small-business owner Morton Wersh, who’s small-town hardware store had lately gotten so successful that it was opening a second location in a town only a few miles up the road. The article was dated eight months ago, and accompanied with a full-size, color photo of Morton Wersh’s smiling face. It was the same face the man-thing wore now, more or less: bad skin, the eyes pushed too close together, the receding brown hairline, and the deep jowls were all familiar. The wide smile, though- that was new. It was a real smile, a genuinely happy one, not the fake, painted-on smile they usually wear. I thought that this picture must have been taken back when Morton Wersh had been a real person, instead of just camouflage, a façade meant to conceal something terrible from the rest of the world.

I think they all used to be people, real people. Somewhere along the line, though, something happens, and then they… change. They stop being human. Maybe these things invade their bodies, riding around inside their hosts and committing unspeakable acts. Or maybe something happens in their life, something awful, and whatever it is that keeps the rest of us human just sort of goes away, and they become… well, they become what Mort was now. Not a man, but a thing.

I closed the laptop. A moment later, I was locking the door behind me and jogging back towards the van. It started on the fifth try. “Bad Moon Rising” was playing on the radio as I pulled out of the parking lot. I tried not to think of it as an omen.

They move around a lot. They have to; doing what they do, staying in one place for too long means running the risk of being discovered. And since I’m one of only two people I’ve ever known to really be aware of these things, I’m guessing they’re pretty good at not being discovered.

Morton Wersh- or rather, the thing that was now running around using his name and his likeness- had originally been from Oregon. It was a long way from home now, but somehow I doubted think my town had been its first stop. No, on a journey that long the thing was bound to get hungry… I wondered how many towns it had been to along the way. How many houses had it rented, using Morton’s face and Morton’s name and Morton’s smile to pass for human as it sign all the necessary paperwork? How many times had it gone out a night, only to come back with a sweet-treat wrapped up and stuffed into the trunk of it’s red sedan? How many fliers bearing the smiling pictures of missing children now hung mostly overlooked on countless telephone poles and bulletin boards all across this good ol’ US of A?

It didn’t matter how many, in the end, just as long as there wouldn’t be any more.

I parked across the street from its house and waited. The red sedan sat in the carport, but all the lights in the house were dark. I pulled my jacket around me a little tighter and sat back, leaning my head up against the glass of the driver’s side window and watching the house. The front door had a metal screen-door over it, and the front windows were barred. That would make getting inside difficult; I hoped the backyard was less protected.

I’d only been there 20 minutes when the front door suddenly opened. Morton Wersh stood there, buttoned up in a long brown overcoat, and started towards the red sedan. It got in, pulled out, and disappeared up the street, the sedan’s taillights winking away in the distance behind me. I knew where it was going: to find Elizabeth. When they fix on prey, nothing shakes them off. Thankfully, it had found her earlier that day, which meant that tonight it was going to do what I was doing now: scout out the area, find out when and where was the right time to strike. Elizabeth would be safe for tonight, I decided.

I waited five minutes after it had left, then opened the car door. I walked across the street towards the house as nonchalantly as I could manage. The front door was locked, and there would be no getting in through the windows with those bars in place, so I circled around the side of the house to the gate that led to the backyard. There was no lock on the gate, so I pushed it open and entered the thing’s backyard.

The backyard was wickedly overgrown. Thick, ugly weeds poked up from the ground everywhere, and the two or three bushes and trees to be found looked like they hadn’t been trimmed in more than two years. I made my way carefully through the scrub and up to the thing’s backdoor. I tried the knob; it was unlocked. The backdoor opened with a loud creak that split the night so suddenly I briefly worried that the neighbors might call the police. I froze in place, certain that I’d see lights click on in one of the houses next door, but they never did. After a moment, I remembered that the thing wouldn’t be gone for long. If I was going to have a look around, I’d better get to it.

The house was dark, but I’d brought my flashlight, and clicked it on to get a better look. The interior of the thing’s house was, more or less, familiar: it had all the furnishings needed to pass for a real home, but it didn’t look lived in. All the furniture was in the right place, of course, but a layer of dust had started building over everything. There was nothing there that could be described as a personal touch; no pictures on the walls, no dog-eared copy of TV Guide resting on the end table, nothing. It reminded me of a neglected furniture showroom.

I moved through the house and into the kitchen. The stove was immaculate, but this was hardly surprising. They don’t cook their food before eating it. I went to the fridge, and pulled it open. No food, not even any condiments, but I was treated to the sight of a half-eaten rat resting on the middle rack. A midnight snack, I guessed.

I went from room to room. A bathroom that had never been used- no toothpaste stains in the sink, no watermarks in the shower, not even any toilet-paper on the roll. Then into the bedroom, to see a bed that hadn’t been slept in, an empty closet with only a few wire hangers dangling there like bones that have been picked clean by scavengers. The house was full of an oppressive emptiness that was so thick it was like wading through a fog. The air in the house was stale and dead, with the faintest hint of rot.

I was about to leave when I noticed the door to the basement. That’s where it was staying, I knew. They seem to prefer to be underground, when they can. I didn’t think Mort had been in town for long, but the news report on a missing boy came back to me as I stared at the closed door to the basement. Had he already taken one, I wondered? Were the boy’s remains through that door, down those stairs, piled in a bloody heap in the corner like leftovers?

I was halfway through ringing up the man’s purchase- two packs of Marlboro Reds, a purple Bic lighter, and $25 on pump 6- when I realized that I was going to have to kill him. As the man was fishing his ID out of his wallet, I bent to grab the cigarettes, and when I came back up I saw him. I mean I really saw him.

Not the fat, slightly balding man with eyes that were too close together and bad acne scars marring his cheeks, but what he really was, underneath: corpse-grey skin pulled over a gaunt face… eyes set deep in the skull and gleaming with predatory attention… two curving holes where its nose should have been… lips pulled back in a Jack-O-Lantern smile to reveal huge, sharklike teeth.

Like always, there was an instant of horror and revulsion at the thing standing before me. I’ve gotten pretty good at suppressing that, when it comes. There was also a moment when that hideous face poking out of the plain, brown business suit and fumbling somewhat clumsily with a leather wallet struck me as so funny that I thought I might be going insane. I wasn’t as good at suppressing that… but I managed to turn it into a half-amused snort.

For an instant, the thing’s yellow lizard-eyes flicked up to mine as I set the two packs of Marlboros on the counter. As it slid its driver’s license out of the wallet, it asked in a tone that sounded as normal as you please:

“Something funny?”

“Just thought of a joke I heard earlier,” I said.

“Really? What is it?” the thing asked, handing me its license. I took it, trying not to stare at its hands. They were like talons; long, curved claws that looked like they’d be at home hanging from a rack of knives in a butcher’s shop.

I don’t know very many jokes, but I gave him my best one.

“Do you know where the serial number on a condom is?”

“Where is it?”

I gave it a crooked smile.

“Guess you’ve never rolled one down that far.”

The thing stared at me for a moment. To me, it seemed like a very long moment.

“Very funny,” it said at last. It didn’t laugh. That’s okay; they never laugh.

“That’s $34.60,” I said, offering the license back. The thing accepted it, slipped it back into its wallet, and slapped a handful of bills on the counter.

“Keep the change,” it said, already turning to go.

“No receipt, mister?” I called after.

It didn’t reply.

***************************************************************************

I slipped the money in the drawer (I didn’t want it coming up short again), activated pump 6. There was nobody else in the store then, so I went to the window at watched. The thing looked like a man again- a pudgy, unattractive man so wholly bland that he reminded me of cardboard. It was like that, sometimes. Sometimes, I can only see them when I’m really close.

As I watched, the man-thing calmly leaned up against the side of its car, waiting for the tank to fill. It seemed to be staring at a spot on the ground a few feet in front of it. I knew it would just keep staring until the gas had pumped, unless something caught its attention. Then I noticed the SUV pulling up, nose-to-nose with the man’s red sedan, and watched as a young girl, no more than 6 or 7, opened the passenger-side door, jumped out, and started towards the store.

The thing’s eyes snapped to the girl the instant she’d jumped out of the car. For an instant, I wondered what I would do if it went for her then and there. I could fight it, maybe even kill it, but a lot of innocent people might get hurt. Then the girl was pulling open the door and coming inside, and the thing’s eyes slowly drifted back to the invisible spot on the pavement it had been staring at before. I relaxed, turned to the girl, offered a slight smile. From her expression, I guessed it wasn’t a very convincing one.

“Bathroom?” the girl squeaked.

“That way,” I said, pointing past the magazine rack to the back of the store.

“Thanks.”

She slipped into the bathroom. I turned to look out the window again, but the man-thing and his car were gone. I turned back to the register, grabbed a pen and a scrap of paper, jotted the address I’d memorized from the man’s license, and slipped the paper into my pocket. I decided I’d stake the place out tonight after I got off work, and if everything went well, I’d kill him tomorrow night. That’s what I do.

My name is Wade Foster, and I kill monsters.