Sucker - FREE FICTION
Here's a grim tale. I had this idea for a film that would be like the Babadook only not metaphorical and just simply horrific.
SUCKER
Jonah heard a wet crack and the thin rush of air in to the exposed cavity one more time. That was two people it had sucked the brain out of now, accompanied but a low guttural wheeze interrupted by the sound of something pulpy being drawn through clenched teeth.
It had come from nowhere, this thing, this monster, this impossible lurching creature. It stood half as tall as Jonah, but its long legs that terminated high on its compressed body made it appear spindly, like an awkward gangly teenager. From the brief glimpse Jonah had seen, an image burned into his mind’s eye and now irrevocably at the front of his thoughts at all times, the creature appeared to be human, or at least simian. Except that there was no humanity, or even the sign of intelligence that a monkey holds. The bald almost spherical head lay squat between two hunched shoulders, two large white eyes peering from the deep black skin that glistened with a sheen of moisture. It’s body was broad but unsettlingly short, as if there were no important bits inside for the tightly ridged ribcage to protect. Those long thin legs like something from an over-sized stick insect protruded from almost directly from under its ribs, emerging as if pushed through from the inside and placed so far apart that it gave the impression that the body was practically square. Between those broom-handle legs there was nothing. It was not male, nor female as far as Jonah could tell. Perhaps its sex was hidden beneath the taut stretch of skin that was there instead. But Jonah didn’t think so because this thing hadn’t been born. It was not the product of conventional creation. The only explanation was that it had been dreamed of in a nightmare and made real.
The creature didn’t know Jonah was hiding just round the corner from where it dined on Mrs Fallon’s brain. It hadn’t seen him scramble away when it had appeared through the dark slit that had rent the air apart. The gash in reality was no longer there, only the interloper that had emerged from it. Tentatively Jonah peered round into the hallway. There was only one way out and that was at the other end, past the black goblin-thing, with it’s arms that easily stretched from one wall to the other. It was hunched to one side over Mrs Fallon’s twitchy body however, leaving enough room for Jonah to slip past should he ever gain the courage.
He looked to his father, skull opened up like a can of soup. The grey-haird man's eyes were crossed almost comically. He’d been the first victim. Jonah was not going to be the next. He dashed from his hiding spot and bolted past the heaving spindly jumble of limbs and slick gore. It rose to its feet and let out a spluttering stream of excremental waste as Jonah passed. Mrs Fallon dropped from its jaws allowing it’s broad fine-toothed mouth to utter a single garbled noise.
As Jonah ran to the fire exit the world split open infront of him. A dark tear cracked his vision and his momentum sent him tumbling through it.
He landed in darkness on a surface that was tacky with half dried liquid. The slit behind him, revealing a sliver of the hotel hallway, sealed up and now there was nothing but night and a deep throaty wheeze approaching him. One from behind, another from his side. Then more and more and more from every direction.
A low guttural, hungry, wheeze.
