Nocturne

By Attila Zønn

Midnight descends like the blade of a guillotine.

Once those lethargic arms reach the pinnacle and administered the twelve tolls, the night mutates into instant deformity.

Walk the streets at night, ready to play the game, and ready to kill. Kill I must, and it doesn’t matter who, nor does it matter where, but the moment must be right, and it will always be at night. Easily concealed by the shadows, I skulk in lonely corners or dark alleys filled with the stink of piss and yesterday’s festering refuse.

The streets glisten with anxious sweat. The air hangs stale and thick; the panting respirations of fleeing souls—those that know of me, the smart ones who sense my proximity and find safety behind the locked door of a well-lit place.

From below these streets, the sewers exhale like the foul breath from the simmering underside of a damned society. They make it so easy for me because despite the demons that cavort in men’s minds, nothing can prepare them for me—a creature so starved and so void of the virtues of godliness that I live solely to suckle the breast of murderous opportunity, and devour the body of innocence.

I appear from nothing; from above you or below you, from beside you or—from behind you!

And my shape is inoffensive….at first. I could be anyone. I could be a man, a woman, a child, your loving grandma or dear old granddad, and I reveal myself from the fog, or the raining night, or the blinding sting of wind hurled snow.

The seasons don’t stay my lust for cutting, nor impede my hunger for the hunt.

I’m smiling when you first see me, and I put you at ease because that’s my way. I may ask you for the time of day, or the location of some silly place, or cry like a lost child, but when you are least suspect, when your good sam overpowers your instinctive distrust…I bite!

My blade is clean and sharp, and it gleams a flashing silver as I raise it above me, and with one quick, graceful stroke I sink it deep into the warm tense flesh of my game. I feel it travel unobstructed into the body; through lung, through heart, through liver. The body wants to repell it, and the mouth wants to scream, but my hand holds back the cry.

My blade pulls free and glides across the convulsing throat, opening it and freeing the gasp, and the red of shortened years and unfulfilled dreams, running through my fingers with warmth and substance; thick and sticky, down clothes to splatter on shoes and lay waste among the cracks of a dirty street.

The body succumbs to the relaxing hand of death, and I feel renewed, and my dominance is not questioned, and my frustration is soothed. The killing is effortless, and the game plentiful, and the threat of discovery is extinct because no one cares—out here there is no mercy.