Crunching sounds were coming from the family room.

No lights were
on, no voices could be heard. Victor’s wife, Jennifer, was not resting
peacefully on her side of the bed, and as Victor slid down the hallway toward
the source of the sound he could not shake the feeling that something bad
was waiting for him. Jennifer was not a sleep walker, and he had never
known her to be a late snacker. These crunching sounds were loud. They
were grotesque. He feared the worst.

The couple was quite isolated in their rural home. Perhaps a bear had
come upon Jennifer as she went to use the bathroom. Their master bath was
out of order, leaving the guest bathroom as the only working toilet in the
house. Victor worried that Jennifer was trapped in that bathroom as the bear
ransacked the family room. Worse than that, what if the bear had attacked
Jennifer?

No, thought Victor. He would have at least heard a scream, wouldn’t

he? It was possible the bear had taken her down without her making a
sound, but Victor didn’t think that was likely. But if she’d gotten into the
bathroom without drawing the ire of the bear, there would have been no
scream. She would not want to give away her position. Victor ruled out the
idea of burglars being in the house, as well, as these crunching sounds he
heard could not be made by a person. They were too loud, too animalistic
and savage.

Still, no prowlers and Jennifer’s probable safety didn’t address the fact
that Victor didn’t have the means with which he could handle the bear.
Victor was halfway to the family room now, the fifteen foot walk lasting a
virtual infinity in his head. He had not seen this bear, but he grew surer with
each step that a black, or maybe a brown, or maybe a grizzly-variety menace
was waging war on his living space. He didn’t own a gun or any other lethal
weapons.

His thoughts whirred at a million miles an hour, and Victor managed to

catch one word in his wind-blown brain: flashlight. In his bedroom closet was
a very large, very bright, and very heavy flashlight, the kind that police
officers use to crack malcontent skulls. Victor silently doubled back and
grabbed it from his bedroom closet. The flashlight had been a
housewarming from Jennifer’s father. He’d been quite dubious at their idea
of living so far out in the country and had made sure to provide adequate
survival supplies for his daughter and her suitor. Victor remembered his
words to them when he first came to visit: “Goddamn near anything could
happen out here, and nobody would know it. Damn near anything.”

With the light in his hand, Victor felt better. He hoped that the
flashlight would scare the animal, maybe blind it and send it running. And if,
God forbid, the bear came at him, he felt that he may be able to strike the
bear with the heavy flashlight and discourage it. Victor paused for a moment
in the hallway, listening. The sound had changed. Crunching had changed
to...slurping. A wet, gooey, sloppy suction sound. His stomach tightened at
the sound and his fear squeezed its way out of his guts and planted itself at
the forefront of his consciousness. He dared not even think about how in the
hell a bear could make that sound.

He walked the last, agonizing steps into the living room, and he
hesitated. His eyes had adjusted a little to the dark and he could see a
bulky, shadowy figure. What Victor assumed to be its head was bent to the
floor. The head worked in tandem with its forepaws to perhaps rip
something. He prayed to God that it was not Jennifer, and that she really
was in the bathroom, safely hidden away. He raised his flashlight. He clicked
the button. Light shone upon the room, and life as Victor had known it
promptly melted away.

There was no way he could have been prepared for this. Not with any
tool of man. Before him, in the light, stood neither a bear nor a burglar. It
was not an animal of any species. He saw the mouth first, a great gaping
maw, lined with long teeth, like bone needles. It was an awful thing to see,
all wet and slimy. The light reflected the red coating on its terrible teeth.
Chunks of…something were caught in that jagged abyss. Victor didn’t have
to guess anymore; he knew that Jennifer was dead. Something sinister and
otherworldly had destroyed her. The beast turned toward Victor. A deep,
bubbly croak came from its mouth.

Victor didn’t cry, and his knees didn’t buckle. His mind couldn’t move
beyond what he was seeing. There was a pool of dread in his stomach of
course, and his wife’s death saddened him terribly, but the shock of seeing
not a bear but a…a…monster, had caused his mind to seize. A monster from
no place Victor could imagine, here for no reason Victor could fathom. A
monster Victor couldn’t have even dreamed. He moved his flashlight down
the body of this being, trying to understand just what the hell had come for
him and his wife on this night.

It didn’t have much shape to its body. It was corpulent and putrid, a
macabre mound of greasy flesh. It stood perhaps six feet tall, but it was
almost just as big around. Its arms were much slimmer than its body, but
were at least as long as a man’s. It didn’t appear to have legs; if it did, its
body was so immense that it hung over them all the way down to the floor.
The beam from the flashlight drifted back up the body, up to the top. There
was no face, no eyes. Just the hideous open mouth at the top of its body.
The mouth seemed fixated on Victor, and Victor’s light didn’t leave the
mouth.

Without any warning, the creature vomited at Victor. A projectile belch

of his wife’s blood and internal mucous splattered against the front of Victor.
He squeezed his eyes shut and screamed as the wave hit him; the liquid
landed in his mouth. His mind released its grip on his body just in time to
allow Victor’s gorge to clench up and, in turn, vomit himself inside out. His
regurgitation paled in comparison to the creature’s, but it was impressive by
human standards. So forceful was it that it lasted only a few brief seconds
before Victor was completely empty. He wiped his eyes and refocused his
flashlight. The monster’s throat emitted a low, reedy moan. Its body began
churning and moving towards Victor. It moved with speed that belied its
horrible shape.

Victor spun himself around and ran back to the bedroom. He turned to
slam the door and in the darkness behind him he glimpsed those long arms
and ugly, malformed hands reaching out for him. They wanted to pull him
into the maw. He closed the door, locked it, and ran into the closet just in
time to see the monster burst through the door. It tore away much of the
wall as it did. Wood and plaster burst into the air as the monster stopped at
the foot of the bed. Victor watched it bend over and place its mouth on the
bed. Its arms reached down as well, and it began consuming the bed. The
arms tore through the mattress with apparent ease. They ripped foam, and
sheets, and pillows, and when they ripped these things they pulled
everything towards the mouth. The body undulated and gyrated as the
mouth worked, the teeth reducing everything to nothing. Victor thought of
Jennifer, and what her final moments with this thing had been like.

Victor was shaking in the closet, watching the bed disappear at a

steady rate. The monster gulped huge pieces of it, and the endless rows of
teeth shredded it in seconds. Victor didn’t want to find out where the
monster would turn after the bed was gone. He bolted from the closet and
ran through the huge opening the monster had created when it entered the
room. He didn’t bother to look back to see if the monster had turned after
him. He was still wet with vomit, but he counted that among the least of his
current problems.

He ran to the front of the house, trying to get to the door as fast as he
could. He was going to grab his car keys off the peg hook by the door, run
outside, and drive himself away from the house as fast as he could. That
was his plan, until he ran into the body of what he only guessed was another
of the same monster. His face slammed into the oily skin of the creature,
and he fell backwards. He could feel the heat from its mouth as it bent to
consume him. The arms seized him roughly, crushing his ribs as they held
him in place. Victor struggled against their grip as saliva dripped onto his
face. It was in vain; the creature was much too powerful. It put its huge
mouth around him, Victor fighting it all the way. He knew that this was it,
and he was dead…then the floor beneath them gave out and they went
crashing down into the cellar.

It let him go. The impact jarred the creature. It had taken the brunt of
the seven foot fall onto the bare concrete. Victor had survived, uninjured.
He quickly stood up and found the light switch, praying that it would still
work in spite of the fall. It did.

In the light, he saw everything. There lay the creature, this one quite a
bit larger than the other, still alive but struggling to free itself from the
debris. It was on its back. Its massive girth had betrayed it, and now it was
trapped under its own weight. Victor felt triumphant. He ran to the
bulkhead and pushed open the heavy door, throwing himself out into the
night. He was expecting darkness when he got out, but his outside light was
already on. It was motion activated.

Victor never figured out where they all came from. He didn’t know if
Hell itself had opened up in the woods around him. He never saw Satan
marching an army through the woods toward his house, but it wouldn’t have
surprised him. He saw dozens of them milling around outside his house,
consuming whatever they happened upon. Now his knees did buckle, and
now he began to cry. There was no escape from these creatures and their
ravenous mouths. One of them ran into him from behind, knocking him
down. The long arms reached out for him, and they found his head. Victor
felt them close around his skull, blocking out the noise from the outside.
There was a loud rip and a loud pop as the creature tore the head from his
body and grunted in satisfaction. It noisily consumed him, and the monsters
descended on the rest of the house. They left nothing behind, and two
people were forever erased from existence.