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Baying At The Moon
(© Biswapriya Purkayastha)

Page 2

Outside his window, close enough to see through the trees in the garden, was the moonlit road. Dimly, from the restaurant down the road, music drifted up. His aunt never ate out and did not approve of music.

On the table in front of him was an exercise book in which he was supposed to be working out algebra problems. Instead, all he had done was doodle. Ships belched smoke as they battled stormy seas on the page before him, and a steam engine chuffed out of a tunnel. Birds like carets joined together hung above mountains like jagged cones.

Almost unconsciously, he drew a parody of his aunt, with her fat, almost cylindrical figure in its usual dotted dress, and mass of curly hair. He made her mouth huge and shouting, so that it took up most of her face, her lips like those of a trumpet, her teeth like paving stones. It was cruel and brilliant and instantly recognisable.

Tonight his fault was that she had had to do his laundry for tomorrow and so had to forgo some TV programme or other (he wasn’t allowed to watch her TV). Yesterday it was that she’d had to go shopping because he was eating her out of hearth and home. Tomorrow, no doubt there would be another excellent reason.

He had got as far as this thought when the door to his room swung open.  His aunt entered, carrying a bundle of his clothes. She was so busy finding a place to put the clothes down that he managed to turn the page before she could see what he had been doing.  She glared at him and the formulae he was scribbling, was obviously about to begin lecturing him on the subject of his laundry, then remembered something undone, some task unfinished, and went muttering away again.

The boy returned to staring out through the window and watching the moonlit road, and wishing he were travelling along it, and going somewhere far, far away.


She paused below the lighted windows, looking up at the square of yellow light. The lights attracted and repelled her at once. The lights meant meat, but light meant fire too, and the ancient fear still slumbered somewhere deep in her subconscious. She narrowed her yellow eyes and hunched her heavily muscled shoulders, tensing for instant movement, but there was nothing. Not even a dog whined. All she could hear was the music coming from the place she had already passed, on the other side of the road

Many times, over the years, she had found herself in situations like this, where the meat was near enough for the taking but hidden behind walls and doors. Each time she had won through, somehow. She wrinkled her muzzle, exposing the huge canines. She would not fail now, not when the prey was so near.

She had some dim memories of the ways of the meat, knew how they acted in their everyday lives, and had, many times, made use of this knowledge when she hunted them down. Now she waited, smelling the air, ears twitching. There had to be a way in, a door left open, a window unfastened to catch the evening breeze. She would wait only so long. If no opportunity offered itself she would move on. There was meat for the taking, but it had to be taken with minimum risk. A meal was not worth her life.

Faintly, through the torrent of smell and sound which she was filtering for traces of her prey, she knew what she was, and knew where her knowledge of the ways of the meat came from. It did not matter; they were meat, no more. But they could be dangerous, so she crouched, waiting.

A sudden sound startled her: the opening of a window, followed by a rattle as a curtain was drawn back. The noise came from her right, round the side of the house, and she turned in that direction, staying as close to the wall as she could. The wall was dark, and if she stayed close to it she would also be safe from any light shining out of the windows.

She saw the woman almost at once; a short squat figure shaking out a mat or something out of the window. A cloud of dust shimmered in the yellow light as she shook. The woman’s attention was so focussed on what she was doing that she didn’t notice the dark shadow that drifted toward her through the night. She finished dusting the mat, dropped it on the floor behind her, and leaned out again to pull the window shut. And by then it was far too late to do anything but scream.

[ Continue to page 3 ]

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Information
Genre:General Horror
Type:Short story
Rating:7.61 / 10
Rated By:49 users
Comments: 4 users
Total Hits:31578

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