The cold of Boxing Day bit harder than the cold of Christmas; a miserable, bone-chilling damp that seeped into everything. For Jack, it was just the tail end of the same horrendous shift. He walked through a high street still littered with the ghost of the day's protest—overturned bins, dark stains on the pavement, and the faint, acrid smell of smoke hanging in the air. Ten hours of overtime on an NHS wage, stitching up zealots and riot police alike. All he'd wanted was one day off with his family. Instead, he got a city's worth of anger channelled through his A&E, and now, a 2 AM walk home where every shadow seemed to flicker with malice.
His terraced house was nothing fancy—just four walls and a roof—but tonight, its profound silence was a balm. He locked the front door, the solid thump of the deadbolt echoing with a reassuring finality. He kicked off his worn trainers, the simple act feeling like a monumental effort. He trudged upstairs, his body a dead weight, his mind absolutely knackered and aching for the oblivion of sleep. As he pulled his scrubs over his head, a sound from downstairs made his tired heart skip.
A faint, dragging scrape against the front door. Like a branch in the wind. Except there were no trees in his tiny front garden.
He stood perfectly still, listening. Silence. Just the low hum of the refrigerator. Shaking his head, he dismissed it. The wind. A stray fox. His own mind, frayed and worn thin from the day. He continued to his room, but paused at the top of the stairs as another sound broke the quiet. A single, sharp protest from a floorboard in the hallway below. The one that always groaned when you put weight on it.
This time, the silence that followed was different. It felt heavy, expectant. Jack's exhaustion was now locked in a battle with a primal, rising fear. The door is locked, he thought, the words a desperate mantra. The windows are shut. You are alone.
He forced himself into his bedroom and collapsed onto the mattress, pulling the duvet up to his chin like a child. Sleep, when it came, was a mercy—a dreamless, heavy void.
It didn't last.
He jolted awake, unsure what had pulled him from the depths. His body was rigid, his ears straining. A primal instinct, older than reason, screamed that he wasn't alone.
His phone on the bedside table read 4:27 AM.
His eyes, slow to adjust, scanned the oppressive darkness of the room. They were drawn instinctively to the thin, vertical line of grey that was the crack in his bedroom door. And to the shape that eclipsed it. A single, unblinking eye, suspended in the shadows. It wasn't looking at the room; it was looking at him. Below it, a smile stretched impossibly wide, a grotesque crescent of pure, predatory joy.
Jack slammed his eyes shut, a strangled gasp catching in his throat. When he dared to open them again, it was gone. But the afterimage was burned onto the backs of his eyelids. He couldn't move. It's the exhaustion, he told himself again, but the lie had lost all its power.
Reaching a trembling hand for the telly remote, he decided noise was his only defence. The moment he pressed the power button, a new sound from downstairs sliced through the quiet—the distinctive metallic rattle of the cutlery drawer being slid open, followed by the soft, considered clink of steel on steel. A selection was being made.
Then came the running. It wasn't a monstrous scrambling. It was the sound of bare human feet slapping against the downstairs floorboards, moving with a speed so ferocious, so impossibly fast, that Jack's mind couldn't even process it before the sound was already on the stairs, taking them two at a time.
The man who appeared in the frame wasn't a monster of claws and fangs. He was worse. He was human. Tall and gaunt, dressed in simple, dark clothes. His skin was pale, not waxy or unnatural, just the pallor of someone who never saw the sun. The horror was in his face. One side was a ruin of puckered, scarred flesh around an empty socket. The other was horribly, unnervingly normal. A single brown eye stared out from it, holding an intelligence that was utterly devoid of empathy. It wasn't the eye of an animal; it was the eye of a collector.
Terror, absolute and paralysing, seized him. The cricket bat slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor. The man's head tilted, his awful smile widening as he took in Jack's defenceless state. He took a step into the room, and another, his movements unnaturally silent and fluid.
With a surge of speed that defied his lanky frame, he closed the distance. The blade—long, serrated, and cruelly sharp—plunged deep into Jack's chest, grating between his ribs. It ripped sideways with a strength that tore muscle and shattered bone. As Jack's world dissolved into a supernova of pain, the man leaned in close, his one good eye filled with a terrifying, hungry focus.
He worked quickly, clinically. He carved out Jack's right eye with a surgeon's precision. He held the warm, wet sphere up to his face, examining it for a moment before pushing it deep into his own empty socket. The scarred flesh seemed to accept it, the edges darkening as they began to knit themselves around the new organ.
The man stood perfectly still over Jack's cooling body, his head tilted as his brain processed the new, stereoscopic input. He turned slowly towards the full-length mirror on Jack's wardrobe and stared at his own reflection. He saw a man who was finally whole. The awful smile returned, no longer just a predator's grin, but something worse: a look of profound, blissful satisfaction.
He saw the world with perfect clarity now. And he saw how many other perfect things there were, just waiting to be collected.