Consciousness returned to Rocky not like the gentle break of dawn, but like a forced pull from the bottom of a dark ocean.
The first thing he felt was cold. Not the cold from the night air, but from the wet asphalt clinging to his left cheek. The second thing was the smell. The stench of rotting garbage fermented by rain, mixed with the metallic scent of gutter water.
"Am I alive?"
The question arose in his mind with thick doubt. His last memory was pain fangs tearing through his neck, blood gushing out, and that horrible wet chewing sound.
With a gasp of held breath, Rocky jolted awake. His hand reflexively clutched his own neck, fingers frantically feeling his skin, searching for the gaping hole that should have been there. He expected warm blood, torn flesh, or protruding bone.
But there was nothing.
His neck was intact. Wet from cold sweat and dirty rainwater, yes, but intact. No blood. No bite marks. His heart pounded beneath his palm, its rhythm chaotic like a bird trapped in a cage, but it was the beat of life.
Rocky gasped, his eyes wildly scanning the narrow alley.
The alley was empty.
There was no two meter tall monster with wire like fur. No security guard's corpse with a torn open belly. Just piles of wet cardboard, an overturned trash can, and black puddles reflecting the flickering streetlight at the end of the alley.
"Impossible. . ." he whispered. His voice was hoarse, as if he had just been screaming for hours.
He tried to stand, but his legs wobbled like jelly. A dull pain spread through his right shoulder the shoulder he thought had broken when he was thrown against the wall. He felt his shoulder. Painful, bruised, and sore when moved, but the bone felt intact.
Was it all just a hallucination? A psychotic caused by the exhaustion of college assignments?
Rocky's eyes fell on the asphalt near his feet. There, lying in the middle of a muddy puddle, was his grocery bag. The soda can he had thrown had burst, its contents spilled and mixed with dirty water. His potato chips were crushed underfoot, crumbs scattered like failed party confetti.
And there, on the brick wall where he had been thrown, there were fine cracks. And more terrifyingly. . . there were claw marks. Three long, deep lines, scoring the surface of the red brick as if the wall were made of soft butter.
Rocky's blood froze. It wasn't a dream. Those claw marks were too real. Too high to have been made by a dog, too deep to have been made by a human.
Something was here with him earlier. Something had attacked him, eaten someone in front of him, and then. . . disappeared? Or worse, had the monster let him live?
The feeling of being watched returned with a vengeance. This time not from one direction, but from all directions. The dark windows of the old building above him felt like hundreds of eyes staring silently. The shadows in the corner of the alley seemed to writhe, as if the darkness itself were a living creature holding its breath.
"I have to leave," Rocky muttered. "I have to get out of here."
He didn't care about his ruined groceries. He forced his trembling legs to move, dragging his body out of the alley as quickly as possible. Each step felt heavy, as if gravity in this place worked twice as hard.
When he finally reached the sidewalk at the end of the alley, he almost cried with relief at seeing the streetlights. But the relief was only temporary.
The world felt. . . different.
As he walked home toward his campus dormitory, the city felt foreign. The concrete buildings looked tilted at wrong angles. Homeless people sleeping on shop fronts looked like discarded lumps of flesh. The sound of police sirens in the distance sounded not like a warning, but like the howl of a dying animal.
Rocky walked with his head down, hugging himself. He avoided looking into the dark gaps between buildings. He was afraid that if he looked too long, he would see those yellow eyes again. Eyes that held ancient intelligence. Eyes that smiled at him.
The ten-minute walk to the dorm felt like hours. When he finally stood in front of room 304, his hands trembled so badly that he dropped his keys twice before managing to insert them into the lock.
Click.
The door opened. Warm light from a cheap neon lamp greeted him, along with the aroma of instant noodles and laundry detergent.
"For God's sake, Rock! Where have you been?"
The voice startled him. There, sitting on the carpet with an open laptop and scattered books, was his best friend. The thick-glasses-wearing guy with messy hair stared at Rocky with a mixture of annoyance and worry.
"I'm starving here waiting for you, and you. . ." His friend's sentence trailed off when he actually saw Rocky's condition.
Rocky stood in the doorway, soaking wet, pale as a freshly dug corpse, with mud staining his jeans and jacket. His eyes were wide, pupils constricted, staring blankly at his friend as if he were seeing a ghost.
"Hey," his friend's tone changed drastically, from annoyed to anxious. He stood, pushing aside his laptop. "Rock? What happened? You look like hell."
Rocky opened his mouth, but no sound came out. What should he say? 'Sorry I'm late, there was a werewolf monster eating a security guard in the alley next door'?
He would be thought insane. He would be sent to a psychiatric ward.
"I…" Rocky swallowed, his throat feeling dry and painful. "I. . . fell. There was. . . a big dog. I ran, then slipped in the alley."
The lie tasted bitter on his tongue, but it was the only rational thing that could be accepted by a normal human brain.
His friend approached, frowning behind his thick glasses. He examined Rocky's dirty shoulder. "A dog? Shit, were you bitten? We need to go to the campus clinic if you were bitten. Rabies is no joke."
"No," Rocky cut him off quickly, stepping back, avoiding his friend's touch. He didn't want to be touched. His skin felt sensitive, as if his nerves were right at the surface. "Not bitten. Just. . . fell. I'm fine."
"You don't look fine, man. You're shaking," his friend said, his tone full of doubt. "And where are the snacks?"
Rocky laughed. The laugh came out short, dry, and almost hysterical. "Fell. Everything's ruined."
His friend stared at him for a long time, trying to read what had really happened, but finally let out a long sigh. He knew Rocky was stubborn enough when he didn't want to talk.
"Alright then. Take a shower. You smell like a garbage dump," his friend said, sitting back down, though his eyes still watched Rocky warily. "I'll make some instant noodles from the cupboard. Don't die in the bathroom."
Rocky nodded stiffly, then immediately entered their cramped bathroom and locked the door.
Under the hot shower, Rocky stood still. He let the water pour over his head, hoping the heat could wash away the cold that had nested in his bones. He scrubbed his skin with a bar of soap, scrubbing again and again until his skin turned red and raw. He wanted to wash away the sensation of those yellow eyes staring at him. He wanted to wash away the smell of death that he was certain still clung to his pores.
But no matter how hard he scrubbed, the shadow remained. Every time he closed his eyes to rinse the shampoo, he saw that blood-soaked muzzle. He heard the crack of breaking bones.
That night, after eating instant noodles in silence where Rocky almost vomited because the noodles reminded him of the strands of intestines pulled by the monster earlier they prepared for bed.
"Are you sure you don't want to talk?" his friend asked from the next bed, his voice soft in the darkness of the room.
Rocky stared at the cracked ceiling, the blanket pulled up to his chin. "Just a stray dog. Go to sleep."
The light was turned off. Darkness enveloped the room.
Usually, darkness was Rocky's friend. A place where he rested from the world. But now, darkness was the enemy. Every corner of the room not reached by moonlight from the window looked suspicious. The pile of clothes on the chair looked like a crouching creature. The jacket hanging on the door looked like a claw ready to strike.
Physical exhaustion finally won over paranoia. Rocky drifted into restless sleep.
And there It waited.
The dream didn't start with visuals, but with sound. The sound of a low hum, like the sound of very loud static electricity, filled Rocky's entire dream world.
He was standing in the alley again. But this time, the alley was made of pulsing flesh, not bricks. The floor was a giant tongue, wet and slippery.
At the end of the alley, the monster stood. But this time, the monster wasn't eating the security guard's body. The monster was eating. . . Rocky.
Rocky saw himself lying on the ground, his belly torn wide open. But the Rocky being eaten wasn't screaming. He was laughing. He stared at the Rocky standing and watching with the same eyes as the monster yellow, pupils trembling, full of madness.
"You are me. . ." whispered the Rocky being eaten. His voice was the sound of scraping dry branches. "And I am you. . ."
The monster raised its head. This time, its face wasn't a wolf's face. It was Rocky's face, but distorted, melting, with jaws that could open all the way to his ears.
"Welcome," said the Rocky-faced monster.
Then, the monster lunged.
"AAAHHH!!"
Rocky woke with a suppressed scream in his throat. He sat upright in his bed, his breathing heavily labored, cold sweat soaking his entire back through his shirt.
He looked around in panic. Dorm room. Dawn had just broken, thin blue light entering through the gap in the curtains. His friend was still fast asleep in the next bed, snoring softly, unaware of the terror that had just occurred one meter away from him.
Rocky hugged his knees, burying his face between his hands. His heart ached from beating too hard.
It was just a dream. It was just a dream.
But when he lifted his face and looked at the wardrobe mirror across from the bed, his own reflection stared back. For a fraction of a second just a blink Rocky swore he saw his reflection in the mirror smile wider than he was.
A smile that split the cheeks. The monster's smile.
Rocky blinked, and the reflection returned to normal. Pale face, dark circles under eyes, an expression of fear.
He knew right then, his normal life had ended in the narrow alley last night. What he brought home with him wasn't just trauma. He had brought home a piece of that darkness, and the darkness now lived inside his head, waiting for the time to devour what remained of his sanity.
The first day in hell had just begun.