Spooktober 2024- writing Prompt #4

I'm Putting out a Halloween / Spooktober / horror / paranormal / creepy

FIRST LINE or PROMPT every week in October leading up to Halloween.

Feel free to give them a try and share the results if you're feeling it.

This is week 4

TIME: For this prompt I set a timer for 25 mins but then wanted to continue and finish the scene. It ended up being around 70 mins.

WARNING: Graphic Violence

PROMPT: ‘Hundreds of eyes peered at her through the darkness in the alley.  How many cats were there? Why were they all here together?...’’

She didn't know why but she was compelled to walk forward towards it trying to get her eyes to adjust. She'd been so certain it was a huge group of stray cats but the closer she got the more she realized that wasn’t possible. These eyes were nothing like cat eyes, they were larger and of varying sizes. There was a sound as she approached, a rushing squelching noise like breathing but not like the breath of anything she'd ever heard before. Then the smell hit her. Her stomach turned. Her mind snapped back to the time she and her brother had found a dead raccoon while she and her family had been camping as a child. This was that turned up a thousand percent and mixed with something akin to bile. 

There was movement with a scraping sound, its weight on the cement. Her eyes, her brain, processed all those eyes belonged to a singular thing. It had to be eight feet tall or more. The eyes that had been looking in all directions all turned to her at once, all of them now accuteley aware of her. The air in front of her turned warm and damp and she realized it had exhaled in her direction. She swallowed. 

In the movies the inevitable portrayal of response to primal instinctual terror is the classic soul rending scream. But there was no voice to be found, no air in her lungs. She was frozen. Her mind fell into primordial soup. Thousands of generations of instincts and reactions,  of hunters and prey, humanity thinking it has risen above; thinking its clever mind and all the walls and weapons it could build could possibly keep it safe. 

She was no better. She was not special. In the cold night air she felt a trickling almost burning sensation down the inside of her leg. She felt it but didn't perceive it, didn't really connect the sensation with a concrete thought. 

It breathed again. It took another step. Again the same heavy scraping noise. What was it moving on? Feet? Whatever it was, it didn't seem to be very fast. Her cognitive function clicked into gear again in that instant. Could she actually outrun it? In the deep pit of her brain she had somehow assumed its size meant there was no possible way she could be faster than it. 

She'd never been a runner but she rounded the corner of the alley at a speed she never considered her legs possible of reaching. 

She saw people at the crosswalk street lights and though she didn’t know a single one, just the sight of them brough a wave of comfort and relief. 

The relief was swept away as she felt a wrenching jolt as her foot was pulled out from under her and she went face first into the pavement. 

She felt and heard bones and teeth crack and tasted blood as she was being dragged along the ground back into the alley. 

Something had wrapped itself around her ankle. That was when she finally screamed, the sound garbled and wet through the blood running down her throat. She clawed at the pavement impotently, the force of it ripping nails from her fingers. More blood. 

She heard a rattling thrashing noise as it moved, shuffling closer in apparent excitement. Was the rattling something in the long grasping appendages? Was it reacting to the smell of blood, like sharks to chummed water?

She was hauled further into the darkness of the alley. Once more several of the long tentacles flailed and rattled. Tentacles was the wrong word, this was not like any octopus or squid she’d ever seen. They were exceedingly long, rubbery appendages with three sharp grasping fingers on the ends like the talons of a predatory bird. Who knew if you could put names or labels on the parts of a thing likely no one had ever seen before.

There was another scream. It took her a second to realize it wasn't hers. Her blurred vision took in man who’d stopped dead at the end of the alley looking beyond her to the thing pulling her towards it. It occurred to her, a strange thought in that moment, how few times she had heard a man scream before. Maybe she never had. 

She feebly reached her bloodied fingers out but he was already running away. She wimpered, her eyes filling with tears. She turned her head and understood why the man had run. The thing had moved forward just enough that she could make it out far better than before in the dim light that came from the main street. She couldn't tell if its skin was skin or scales or fur or something else entirely. Again perhaps trying to name things humans had no words for. It was round and massive, the top of it reaching above the second floor window of the brick building it was beside. Along with its multitude of different sized eyes it had a number of horn like protrusions from the top of  it. Its mouth opened, or at least the thing she assumed was a mouth. Its teeth were just smaller versions of the horns.

One more jerk of the appendage and these clamped to her ankle and she was in its mouth. Another jerk forward and her leg was rended above the knee. She smelled its breath more accutley. She heard it swallow her leg. It tilted up in an attempt to get her deeper into its mouth and as she slipped in its teeth sunk into her midsection. Her eyes saw the night sky for a few seconds for the last time before its teeth cracked through her skull and into the warm mushy interior.