Louis knew he was being watched.

	Frozen where he stood in the poorly lit, concrete stairwell, staring directly into the dark angular recesses of public school brutalism of budget that'd created this nook under the stairs, where the faculty had decided to store the extra, metal folding chairs. Chairs meant for assemblies and special occassions, for parents and their attending parties. Chairs meant for people to sit in and be comfortable, for whatever event this bastion of taxation subsidized learning saw fit to open to the community. But today, these weren't chairs neatly stacked in rows and leaned against the dark, dust and cobweb covered corners of the bottom of a stairwell.

	Today, this was something's home. 

	It stared back at Louis, as an ambiguous shape. Itself frozen, backed into a corner and with only the defense of contorting its uncanny body into the dark backgrounds of things behind the dozens (to hundreds) of metal chairs. Insisting upon itself that it was not there, could not be seen, and daring Louise to indicate to it otherwise. Some manner of camouflage, some manner of mimicry. Louis idly remembered reading, watching, hearing about all the misc. creatures he knew that did similar behaviors to avoid predators- Or, in some cases, keep the prey ignorant until the mimic could stroke. Spiders that pretended to be ants, birds that pretended to be reeds, and then there were geckos.. Just, everything gecko. And mimic octopi.

	Louis did not know how to continue. He did not know the general intelligence of this thing, which he did not get an exceptionally good look at. It had shoulders, but not especially broad ones. It had a head, but its shape was not immediately discernible. It could've been a student playing a prank, he supposed, or perhaps a homeless addict simply trying to exist. A hopeful thing, Louise realized, when his twitchy caprine snooter returned back to him there were no olfactory signs of urine. Whatever this thing was, it was far more clean than a homeless addict. It had no smell. It had little mass. But it had a profile, and was clearly coiled up to disguise its true dimensions, in some fashion or form.

	Louis was a little scared. His shadows, deformed as they were, stretched from where he stood into the light leading to where it abruptly cut off to the bottom of the stairwell, towards the recessed back. The taller metal of the extremely old fashioned metal guard rail terminating to that blindingly dark recess beneath the concrete and metal stairwell above it had made the perfect spooky spot in the school, where literally anything could be. And, he surmised, he was just lucky enough to have not overlooked it. 

	But he could not see its eyes. Not really. Merely the most vague hints of reflection in the pupils of the thing's eyes, granted by his keener than normal nightvision. Louise sometimes saw things other people missed. Be it broad daylight, or the deepest, longest of unlit hallways. Deliberately turning away his horizontally pupiled eyes from the explicit sin of making inadvertent eye contact with the creature, Louis instead reverted to acting. Acting, as if he was unaware the entity were there. Instead, adopting the countenance of a youth that was simply afraid of the dark, and hesitating going forwards from simple, childlike hesitation of the greater unknown. A ruse, he understood, that wouldn't fool a being intent on not being fooled. But perhaps, he thought, something with hope would prefer to hope.

	The entity tilted what passed for a head. At least, two things that almost resembled what Louis assumed were eyeballs, tilted in what passed for a head. It appeared to be unsure whether Louis was staring at it, or the uniform collection of tightly packed seats in its domain, as it huddled in the aligned, square gaps created by the cold, uncomfortable, budgetary being stacked back to back against the far wall, and every line to the right of that being sideways, creating a partition of brown color and chipped, grey metal beneath the paint, hiding the darkness behind it in rows. Louise realized, it seemed unsure enough about its future to do anything, either. 

	But something about this told Louise, one wrong move and it might attack. As brazen and foolish a move as that would be, the unmistakable vibe of hostility was there. Perhaps the illusion of anonymity and stealth were the only things keeping it in check, and weighing on the side of being able to resume whatever existence it had led, prior to Louis. It was unmistakably cornered. The response from such a creature could be anything, depending on if you were dealing with an orange cat or a honeybadger. Louis didn't know which result was more probable, but he knew which he'd prefer, and about Murphy's Law.

	"Hey, Lou!" Came a deep, male voice from up the eight concrete steps leading into this gateway to the void, where schools hid away their resources like refugees during a war. "Get the lead out! The parents'll be here in hours."

	Louis' tail shot straight up in surprise at the ping of verbal contact, turning his head for what he hoped would be the silhouette of his gym teacher to back him up down here, only to realize it was just the effects of penetrating, bassoon-like reverb of the bison's voice effortlessly shaking from the hallway above. His heart sank into a cold, slimy soup, the sort you get from leaving one out overnight and neglecting to eat it, leaving the vegetable and animal fats to congeal in defiance of warmth whatsoever at the top. He'd messed up, by taking his eyes off of it. Extending his perceptions to his fur and skin, he realized he wasn't eviscerated quite yet, so that was something.

	"Coming, at the speed of you-get-what-you-pay-for!" Louis sassed back, reaching towards the nearest stack of metal chairs and sticking one arm through the gap between the backrests and the folded up seats. Three of the big, heavy metal folding chairs on each arm, the showy pre-teen wrapped himself up in mundane normality like an armored coat and raced back up the stairs, silicon hoof caps of his ungulate shoes pitter patting on the concrete of the floor. He had to step passed the aluminum dividing space between the stairwell to the hallway before he could feel the indifferent but not soul sucking lack of warmth of linoleum, again. Like six weighty batons, the nonconformist kid set the heavy chairs down in front of the push doors to the gymnasium and set them down in front of another student. Louis was simply bringing them from the stairwell nook to the gymnasium; once they were up there, someone elses' job was to aggregate them into a proper arrangement.

	His gym teacher was too busy giggling about the pre-teen's world weary bluster and sass to even comment on the unsafe, biting off of more than he could chew with the chairs. Despite the fact Louis slacked off in gym, nobody would deny the boy was something of an athlete. With tireless endurance and almost clocklike precision, the kid's predictable tappa-tap of hoof caps against linoleum, to concrete and back again sounded like military hustle. Six chairs, three in each arm, as he went. The portly bison watched, stroking his mane back in amusement. 

	"Where's this hustle when I tell you to do some laps, Braintree?" The gym teacher joked as Louis' re-appeared in the maroon doorway of the gymnasium. The other students laughed as they dribbled basketballs and practiced passing them back to and from one another. It was like watching a little grey and cream picnic ant in a gauche, mall gothy T-shirt, just coming and going with tireless determination. 

	Louis' thought better of clapping back, 'That's what your wife said,' but he was sorely tempted. It only took one look back to the brown face of his teacher for him to know, absolutely, a newborn joke in the vein of, "Yo mama," had been conceived in secret and smothered like so much bastard nobility, in the interests of preserving peace. The sass radiated off Louis' like the ever so present hints of hircine scent on his fur and hide, under gothy hints of cloves, notes of wood smoke, herbal undertones and flowers. And that unavoidable unnatural, chemical smell of deodorants, no matter how scented. 

	Little by little, the gymnasium-now-auditorium filled up with the two hundred chairs that were located in the nook. Other kids that had been voluntold to help bring in the materials were panting, taking breathers, resting or pouting at Coach Gepella for DARING to assign them this duty. Some had caught hints that Louis was rushing, and so tried to keep pace as though it were a competition. All but a particularly efficient donkey lad were exhausted now- and the diligent donk didn't even seem to realize there was a race going on, or that if there was, he was technically beating Louis. Goat or donkey, the lions' share of the work of bringing in the seats was done by these two boys, with the rest scrambling just to take a chair each and arrange them before they got backlogged and shown up (according to the logic of, 'tough muscly boys', you see.)

	 But as Louis descended the steps for what he could only assume was the thirtyith time, gazing at the lonely remaining row of metal folding chairs and remembering the entity that, he assumed, hid within it, he was hit with a cold dread. More realization than anything that could be said to be eminating from the creature. The same sort of realization and horror one experiences when they realize the clear, tranquil horizon up above has a dividing line at a predictable spot in the future, estimated by the speed at which they're racing towards it. An inevitability brought on by the entropy of a diminishing resource, before the inevitable.

	Louis' was doing the equivalent of deforestation and rending the cryptid without a home. He was the closest fleshy thing to pulp for the crime of exposure, that a now homeless THING could take out its frustrations and insecurities on. This understandably made him hesitate, as he examined the proverbial island of flaking metal chairs and what remained of the anti-rust, shiny coating of beige to maroon paint on them. The light reflecting in from the well lit hallways behind him bounced off the far walls of the painted concrete, somehow falling short of illuminating where he needed to see but giving him the dimensions of the nook and their corner. He could see beneath and between the legs of the final row of chairs, pressed up against the far wall with the entrance to the partition made of steel chair legs accessible only by the gap to the far left. This was the danger zone.

	Louis' nostrils flared as he inhaled. Biting back his anxiety, dousing his rational sense of self-preservation with a gaslighter's denial, he embraced the idea he was just being a flippant, silly kid, afraid of the dark. Out, his right arm reached, into the gaps of the backrests meeting the folded metal of the chair seats, and three rolled onto his bicep and forearm. Exchanging arms, three more of those ungodly old, neglected, cold metal chairs found his left arm, and he turned on his hooves, pirouetting on a dime, racing his way back through the uncharacteristically dark depression of the bottom stairwell before back into the light and onto the grey flecked linoleum, racing into the gymnasium with a hard right turn.

	Time after time, he did this, until he realized that there were just seven chairs left, total. No sign of the creature that, previously, he was almost positive would be desperately hiding behind the final legs. Like a sloth in a clearcut forest, now utterly exposed to the oppressive light of the sun, and every predator that lives or dies by its ability to see food now alerted to the location of a slow moving, succulent feast. But, there was no sign of the entity he thought he saw when he first exposed this nook to the light.

	Pensive, but relieved, Louis took a deep breath in of the air, musty with the hints of a war between chemical cleaner and the tiniest hint of mold contamination in the concrete, and let it out. It was poor form to lower ones' guard when they suspected danger was present, but he looked around himself. The concrete and metal were poor sources of light reflection, and yet he could make out every solid bit of mass down here now that the mystery of what lay behind the legs of the chairs went away. No steel fandancing that obscured the mysteries, no Gods in the Gaps, no lost creature making its room there. There weren't even any signs of insect or mouse drops. Just some cobwebs sized WAY too small for what he saw to lay in and dust bunnies. 

	Louis reached his arms into the final chairs to the row, filling up his tiring right arm. As he slid his left into the gap between the seats and backrests, he noticed that anomalous seventh and final chair. Glaring at it, then his own arm, he weighed his options. 'I'm not making another trip,' he told himself, and in a manner of pride and machismo, slid the three further back on his arm to pick up the last. A fourth weighty chair, which he turned his arm through and flexed his slender biceps to secure them in place. He was off balance by a little, but he'd make do. Turning around, focused and concentrating on his labor, he made his way towards the stairs.

	That's when he had the misfortune of gazing upwards, as light caught the refraction points of the shiny, more metallic gaps where the rustproof coating on the chairs had been eaten away by time and a lack of maintenance. Following the tiny, discordant points of light upwards, he had the misfortune of gazing at the concrete of the under stairwell, only to practically lose control of his bladder in the process.

	Pressed flat against the dark, shadowy blue painted color of the stairwell and concrete, was an inky black shape. It would otherwise have been indistinct from any other shape of blot or discolored paint, if not for the glare created by the metal surfaces poking through the chairs, acting as reflectors. Where normally one would only see round, formless shadows, Louis beheld a vague bodily shape. The way one recognizes the basking shape of a crocodile in a murky river by the way its keratinous, pointy bits extend precariously from the surface of the waters. Or just beneath the surface, where the sapient eye can see. 

	And then two round shapes of the flat, vaguely animal entity appeared, as flat lids gave way to eyes like flattened glass disks. At first it was hard to tell where they pointed, as their peripheries could have been taking in data from all around, especially if they were immobile. Wall eyes, you may say. But these hopes were dashed, when the pupils in the glassy disks tilted towards Louis and found his face.

	Time seemed to freeze between the two. This bizarre, Gigeresque bit of wall grafitti with eyes like a frog's on the bog at night, and himself. Blue, horizontally slitted pupils of goat met this unknown thing, in an exchange of awareness, and Louis knew oh so intimately that this thing was not some simple animal, programmed to find food, shelter, figure out where to shit and maybe mate once a season. By the way its brow furrowed, a dark silhouette in a darker backdrop, and it glared at Louis as though it were scolding a peeping Tom, Louis could tell it were sapient.

	Sapient, and angry. And at an advantageous high ground.

	No words exchanged between the youth and his, we'll call them, 'generous host.' Louis, for all his pre-teen masculine bravado, hesitated to walk underneath where it was perched. Because of the way light could now more freely bounce across the landscape around him, he could more easily make out this thing, if he but concentrated. To his chagrin, the more he did it, the less he wanted to do more of it. The creature bathed in the paint-like splotch of the stairwell concrete like it were a tarry, epidermal layer of flesh. It bore no rotten scent, but it hung on the shapes of bones the way decayed meat with skin congealed and liquified over a skeleton, offering just enough roundness and form to suggest it was supposed to look like that, even if it more resembled the shape of a corpse than anything living and organic.

	It had long forelimbs, like some sort of emaciated, mummified gibbon. The sheen of its body under the black stain that seemed antithetical to light was like a vantablack pudding skin. A substance that defied observation as anything but unknown space, until the shiny reflective surfaces put rays of light on it for the first time in what must've been weeks to months. Only under the stimulus of exposure to even the scantest flecks of light, did that limpid surface so much like dried tar, sprout bubbles and popcorn its texture like a sunburn. Whether a result of the light or it were the equivalent of a bird, fanning its crest in irritation. A sign of distress and damage, or an amorphous mess of a being burbling frustration and warning. Louis simply did not know. He could not know.

	A moment so pregnant passed that the octomom would have thought it excessive, high tension and significance. Eventually, Louis chose to take the initiative and march forwards, keeping his cold, blue eyes on those of the unknown thing that stared back at him. A dare for the thing, that so obviously wished to be undisturbed, to violate the uneasy ambiguity as to its existence and alert the world to it if it lashed out at him. He did not scream, he did not even act as though anything were out of sorts. The words exchanged between them were none, but the intention was clear. Doubly so, when Louis tilted his head back as he walked, navigating by rote memory alone as he ascended the steps from the nook beneath the school stairwell, rising to the level of the hallways. 

	Once in the light, Louis felt more secure. He'd never seen the thing before. He'd never heard it mentioned. He knew of no victims of any such creatures, or rumors of cryptids occupying the school. None that fit THAT description, at least. Another tenuous relief fell over his chest, his subconscious ready to accept the idea he'd just imagined the whole interlude and return to his boring, disappointing but safe normalcy again.

	A short lived security, before the stinging, punitive rake of a nail raced down his left shoulder blade. A very deliberate, rock solid action by a creature with unreal dexterity for whatever it had for a body. Shallow the rake may've been, it was no less painful.

	"OW!" Louis yelped, voice bleeding into a bleat as he fell forwards and dropped the seven folding chairs from his arms. Falling onto the linoleum of the hallway floor just passed the foyer of the poorly illuminated concrete and steel stairwell, Louis quickly brought his right hand up to feel around his left shoulder and neck, just to see what sort of damage had been done to his fur and skin. Students from the gymnasium poured out to see what the problem was, as Louis knelt there, rubbing the fresh, shallow dig into his shoulder and back. Hissing and rocking out from the discomfort, a hint of blood started to soak and glisten the blackness of his T-shirt. 

	"What's wrong? What's up?" Called his classmates, the same inquisitive notes in their collective voices. Coach Gepella roamed out and poured into the hallway to see what the matter was, looming over Louis within a minute of his outburst. "You fall over, bud?"

	Louis lifted his head and gazed upwards, gritting his teeth and laying his ears back. Pulling his collar enough to expose the space he felt raked by the nail, he showed his gym teacher the tiny streak of blood. "I think I cut myself on something." 

	Coach Gepella moved his fat fingers down and adjusted the neck to better see the red line in the fur and skin. It was a minor cut, but there was a little blood. Nothing too terribly serious, save for the inevitable concerns about tetanus and infection. "Seems you did." He stoically assessed, gripping the boy's arm and lifting him to his feet. "I'll have some other stragglers get the rest of these chairs. You get yourself to the nurse, sport. Good hustle today. This is the most effort I've seen you put into anything, all year." And that was all the permission Louis needed, before he raced down the hallway towards the school nurse. 
----------------------------------------

	After dealing with an apoplectic nurse, roused to irritation and anger by the idea some snag of metal both tore the shirt and the skin of one of HER students and having to be talked down from blowing out Gepella's eardrums for what she classified as negligence on behalf of the school, Louis was tired. Doing a marathon run of picking cumbersome objects up and dropping them off, plus the fear of what unsavory bacterial or fungal infection one could get from dirty metal in a public school, left him drained. 

	He was home, now. Bandaged up with that small area shaved just enough for the gauze and bandage to cover, his "school clothes" tossed into a heap on his bedroom floor, he collapsed onto his bed and gazed up at the ceiling, naked as a jay bird and vibing. So far, so good. No signs of being poisoned, no necrotic effects, no lockjaw. It'd only been a scant few hours, he realized, but given the relative shallowness of the cut, he doubted he was in any real danger. More than anything else, he was just glad to be home, in the relative dark of his moodily decorated bedroom. 

	But now he was bored. Tired, and bored. A most frustrating of combinations to be, as the more one tried to relax, the more one had to contend with their desire to do somethig. And the more one tried to do something, the more they realized just how much they also did not want to do much of anything. The inertia of his ambitions this evening was real, and his bed was very comfortable. So he just looked around at his bedroom, and all the things he'd managed to acquire over the last five years of his life.

	He had multicolored plastic bins that stacked on themselves like toybox sized prison cells, filled with archaic gaming consoles and misc. electronics. A hobby he'd picked up out of interest and dad's blessings, with a bit of instruction and warnings on how not to burn down their home and a somewhat unreasonable amount of faith in his son playing with devices with capacitors and electricity. He had a dresser, filled with clothes he no longer wanted to wear after his more recent aesthetic developments to the dark and the brooding. A family heirloom, of lacquered and handsome wood with distinguishing markings from past generations using it for everything from bluejeans, to hiding weed. 

	A book shelf, exclusively for books. His own personal library, at his parents' insistence. All manner of tabletop games bought second hand, as well as some history books, both dry analytical and the whimsical revisionist (for laughs.) A few quack books on modern magicians tricks he'd erroneously bought, expecting them to be more like the magic performed in his favorite horror thrillers. Dad had commented that the rabbits magicians pulled out of hats were seldom the kind that exchanged favors for bits of the magician's soul, and maybe Louis was looking in the wrong place. To the right of that, Pseudomonarchia Daemonum: The False Monarchy of Demons. It was a thick bit of reading Louis hadn't perused too much, but dad seemed confident his son would get through it, just fine.

	Beyond the growing interest in funny occult things and the works of moldy old poets, philosophers and macabre writers, Louis' shelf had hand-me-down or yard sale copies of old technical manuals and computer science books. Not yet under his belt, and he'd yet to really dig into them, but his father assured, had he the need, they'd be there. Fascinating as the subject matter was, he wondered sometimes if maybe the old man wasn't more hopeful than he was sure. 'The best way to teach a kitten to drink, is sometimes just to stick their nose in the water, son.' Sure, dad. Whatever that means. Beyond that, his personal battlestation of a computer in front of the bed, some plastic crates of old toys from earlier childhood he never played with anymore, and a large, sliding closet with offset rollers he didn't like struggling with. A ceiling utterly caked with glow-in-the-dark star, planet and moon stickers, their green-yellow glow contrasting to the christmas lights he strung around his bedroom, hooked where the ceiling met the walls. 

	It was the sporadic and nonspecific perusal of that demonology tome that saw the young kid try and make his own funny Goetian symbol on that shirt. The shirt that now lay on the floor, with a distinctive tear cut in in the left shoulder, a whole three inches down the back. His one good shirt that he put so much effort into decorating to his aesthetic tastes, and now it needed to be sewn back together. Remembering and realizing this drew Louis' ire again, as he stared up at the ceiling and thought about that ordeal today. 

	He was almost positive that he'd been assaulted by something dark and wrong. Something he hadn't known was there, until today. Something he didn't know how long it had been there, and had never heard anyone even quietly whisper about. As he rolled onto his right side and hugged his pillow, he peered down at the floor beside his bed. Seeing his old, smelly black lamb plush, he lifted the ancient, uncanny toy and wrapped his arms around it, hugging it to his chest while he thought about the events of the day. It had been so normal, until just before it was time to go home. And then, no matter how hard he tried to ignore it, something very much not normal had emerged to all but smack him in the face. How long had it been there? Did it have any victims? Were there any bodies buried on the school grounds? His mind was a slow boiling soup of curiosity, with questions that had no reasonably forthcoming answer.

	What was it? Why was it there, of all places? And why hadn't it just let him go, instead of being a petty bitch about being found? That last bit hurt most of all. Getting in trouble for minding his own business, just because someone else wanted to be a violent prick. The longer he thought about it, the more indignant he got about it. 'That motherfucker doesn't pay taxes to live there.. probably. My parents do! There's not a square meter of that fucking school where it's okay to squat.' Frowning, he just hugged the smelly lamb plush tighter. Fuck that stairwell stain, whatever it was. 'Stupid stair-monster.'

	Louis lay there in his bed. Embers of angrew kept him conscious and thinking, but the soft nest of hisenvironment and the cozy, warm comfort of his childhood plush argued for him to sleep. Soon indignance and resentment gave way to drowsiness and sleep, and he fell unconscious at six PM. It was a restful snooze, a welcome snooze. 

	It was a short lived snooze. A dreamless but deep, dark and restful sleep, interrupted by the sudden, excruciatingly painful rake of a nail down his shoulder and back. Louis woke with a start and a bleat! Tumbling off his bed in his naked state with a thump. His right shoulder hurt, feeling like a paper cut spritzed with lemon juice. Sitting there on the floor on his naked ass, he clutched his right shoulder and squeezed, gritting his teeth and smothering the pain that resonated in his skin and fur. Wiggling his legs at the knees as he sat lotus style, rocking the pain away with caught breath.

	And then he heard the dry, phlemgy snicker from above.

	Louis' ears twitched, and the hairs on his neck and back prickled like goosebumps as his gaze crept upwards, gradually rising to the ceiling. Exactly what his imagination had hoped not be there, was there. His ceiling had become a dark blot, like a charred stain on the tarmac from a rocket booster burning the earth. Only due to the twin, glassy disks of eyes, so reminiscent of a flatfaced frog's eyes, could he determine exactly what he was looking at. This strange, mummified, lanky THING that wore this dark, ephemeral substance the way a skeleton left in plastic wears its own decayed, liquified mass as clothing. Plastered against his ceiling like an ancient heiroglyph, two dimensional and flat. But this time, jeering down at him with tiny, wicked teeth, only a hue lighter than the black, settled slop of its flesh, if one were to graciously call it that. If not for the more shiny, near obsidian reflection on the surface of those teeth, those nails, then they'd be near indistinguishable from the sloughed meat that refused to leave the lanky bones. Like wearing a thousand century eggs as a leotard and cloak.

	Louis stared up at the flat creature, clinging to his ceiling. It stared down at him. Louis knew its limbs were long and large enough to reach him with little trouble, just by the looks. It didn't matter whether he leapt to one corner or side of the room, or the other. This thing had him dead to rights, and there was nothing he could do about it. It made little noise, it barely moved even to blink as it just stared down at him. The tip of the right index nail, however, glinted with a red color. The only hint of color on the entire creature, seemingly saturated into the nail like polish. 

	"Louis?" Called his mother from downstairs. 

	Louis didn't answer. He froze. Staring up at the creature with pensive fear, he pursed his lips and squeezed his wound. Of course.. mom would interfere NOW.

	"Louis, sweetie? You alright in there?" Called his mother, as she started up the stairs. Exactly as he feared she would do. The creature so adhered to the ceiling finally turned its wall eyes towards the door, hands flat to the ceiling with only the tips of its nails peeking out from the flat surface, as if someone pounded ten nails through the roof into his ceiling. The fucking freak was planning on attacking again!

	"I'm alright! Don't come in!" Louis spoke up, loud enough that she could've heard him in the hallway. Keeping his eyes on the otherworldly freak, he thought fast, tossing himself in front of his door and sitting in front of it. Just in time, as the metal of the doorknob jiggled and she tried to push the door inwards, just to find it unable to budge her pre-teen kid's weight in front of it.

	"What th-. Louis, what the hell, baby?" 

	"I'm naaaaa-keeeeeeed." He sing-songed, as if that explained everything. There was silence, and then a sigh by his mother. The mature goat leaned against the door frame, but did not fight it further. 

	"Lou, you alright?" She pressed again, acknowledging that she wasn't going to get in there. Out of courtesy. If she wanted, she could've pushed her way through there, and they both knew it. Her tone more stern now, demanding an explanation of some kind.

	"I'm alright. Just had a bad dream." Louis said, heart beating in his chest as he pressed his fluffy back against his bedroom door. Resting the back of his head against it, he stared upwards at the amused, yet furious looking interloped that was patiently glaring down at him from whatever dimension his ceiling was attached to. He staring at the entity. The entity staring back down at him. Breathing the surface tension of the ceiling as though reaching out from the surface of very still, tranquil water. Those long, curved nails. Each one of them, dull and translucent to the color of that dead, putrescent flesh. All but two of them. Two nails bore the red of sapient, mortal blood. His blood.  

	"Come on out soon and let me look at that cut." Mrs. Braintree asked, under the guise of a demand. "If you start getting sick, we're going to the emergency room, alright? There are no heroes when it comes to staph or tetanus infections, you understand me?" 

	"It's not even swollen, mom. It's not infected." He assured, with an annoyed, dismissive tone. He wished he was as confident as he sounded, as he gazed overhead at the now leering figure, increasingly more confident about poking into multiple worlds. 'Please, please please please, mom; go away.' 

	"Get some clothes on that naked butt and come out soon. I'm getting supper started." Mrs. Braintree said, with a drawing note in her voice. Her will so laid out, Louis heard the sounds of her chubby legs strolling down the hallway towards the stairs to get back to the kitchen. Louis' nostrils flared with a sigh of relief that gave way to the realization of fear again, as he gazed up at the monster.

	With his ear to the door, he waited until he heard her hooves tapping downstairs, on the linoleum. Finally free, he addressed his unwanted house guest with his voice dialed down to a volume that no one else could hear him. "What do you want?" Louis wrly growled upwards, trying to be brave. 

	The entity stared down at him with the kind of indifference and superiority one expected from a particularly snide housecat, choosing not to respond or even acknowledge Louis had said anything. The anticipation was maddening, as the minutes wore on. No words exchanged from the thing, nor even attempts to communicate. Just lurking. Ominous, glowering, stalking, stationary lurking. The knowledge that at any time, the long limbed monster could just lash out and harm him. And rest assured, Louis had sized up those big hands, long fingers. If this thing wanted to, it could swipe like any creature with claws. He was in incredible danger. Perhaps the most danger he'd ever been in, in his life. 

	And yet, surprising even himself, he was more furious by this uncalled for trespas on his property, and the threat it posed to himself and family, than he was terrified of this otherworldly monster. Terrified? Yes. But something else, too. Had he tried to deconstruct it, get introspective, maybe he'd call it other things. Indignity. Maybe even courage. But Louis is not altogether smart. At least, not all the time.

	So they stared one another down. The initial shock of having an uninvited interloper in his bedroom subsiding, after the first half hour. The occassional attempt to communicate with the thing, time and again, simply bore no fruit. Small talk, inflammatory statements to get engagement.. nothing worked. The thing was unflappable in its reason for being there, seemingly just for the purposes of tormenting the little kid and doing him harm, when his guard was down. 

	A fact Louis reconciled, keeping his eyes on the beast as he scooched towards his dresser to acquire some clothes. Staying low to the ground, for all the good it would do him. Eyeing those sharp nails at the ends of those near prehensile digits, he warily eyed his clothing. How was he going to do this with a hostile monster breathing down his neck? It was then he realized.. the monster only seemed to attack when he wasn't looking. Whether this was some sort of supernatural rule, or perhaps a neurosis, or conservative protective survival strategy, he couldn't say. It was a good hypothesis, at least.

	Fresh underwear was no problem for Louis. Good coordination, and it was just one leg in front of the other, staring at the ceiling. And just like that, there was a thin bit of fabric between his fur and his interloper. His pants were more complicated, but nothing he couldn't handle. And near as immediately, he was decent from the waist down. The trouble came to when Louis realized there was no way to put on his shirt without taking his eyes off of his stalking, extra-dimensional guest. Using his peripheral vision, he inspected his shirt, his ceiling bound stalker, then his shirt again. His ears lilted, as he realized this part posed quite the risk.

	And the beast on the ceiling knew it, too. That flat, graffiti-bound monster leering from the depths of that charred abyssal blot was grinning wickedly, wide round glassy eyes wide as those palm filling jawbreakers. Flat as lenses on the surface, but implying such depths as to make them spherical beyond the surface tension of the ceiling. Louis lifted his shirt up over his head, staring at the creature. Lifting his arms up over his head, he paused IMMEDIATELY upon seeing the beast shift in the corner of his eye.

	The beast was preparing for him. Pre-emptively adjusting where those long, gibbon-likearms stretch, to be where his eyes weren't looking, should he pull that shirt over his head. Louis glowered at the thing, lowering his arms inside either side of his purple shirt. The beast retracted his limbs from the dark lines and streaks they made on the ceiling, elbows bent and the palms of its hands resting on the inner side of the ceiling, as if leering through a glass barrier.

	Louis stuck his arms further inside of his shirt, bunching it up and trying to make the distance between the neckline and the bottoms as short as possible, hands out through the neckhole to make it stretched as wide as possible. His intention was to prevent the beast from making too great of a move in the gap between when he could see and not. A mistake, he found. Taking his eyes off of it for but a fraction of a second, just to find a horrifying sight.

	In the extremely scant amount of time between blinking and the fabric obscuring his vision of the beast, the large hand had emerged from the ceiling and come close enough the tips of those nails were mere inches from his arms. But they had stopped. Large as the hand was, it was remarkably flat, with fingers that could be described more like strips of paper. They inflated enough to be three dimensional towards the very phalangeal tips, but otherwise seemed to enjoy this unnatural two dimensionality. The nails also seemed translucent, save the two that'd raked his flesh. Those were the color of blood under glass slides. And wouldn't you know it, the dominant digit that the creature seemed intent on scraping another shallow line across his fur and skin was one of the 'hollow' nails.

	Louis wondered what would happen if he made it to ten. Briefly. In short order, he resolved not to find out. Maybe the thing would be satisfied and go home. Maybe his soul would be forfeit. At this point, he wasn't too keen on giving a home invader the benefit of the doubt. 

	With a dour expression on his face, Louis stared up at the creature, making sure to only blink one eye at a time. This was the most tedious and dangerous form of red-light, green-light he'd ever played. Thankfully, he came prepared. Working under good spatial awareness and a little feeling around, Louis found his way to his desk and groped around his pencil box. When he felt his fingers make contact with what he was searching for, his ears raised and his eyes lit up in delight. Slowly, he withdrew a swiss army knife and lifted the blade out from the mass, all while he studied the creature's reaction. 

	The creature's round, wide eyes just got wider. Realization crossed the glassy, inhuman eyes as it stared at Louis. If not indifferently, then stoically. Louis, by contrast, cracked a wry grin. Looking towards the outstretched hand, trailing down from the ceiling like some sort of piece of dingy, stained paper art, Louis hefted the knife up in his fist and walked the sharp tip of the blade about the back of the outstretched, reaching hand, letting the narrow metal edge slide over otherworldly exterior. Exterior, he noticed, that was not pocking up like an allergic reaction under the unnatural lights of his bedroom. 

	And then it occurred to Louis; the difference between before, and now. A wicked realization crossed his face, and he stared at the entity on his ceiling with an expression that glowered with intention. 'I KNOW your secret.' Without even communicating what, the creature on his ceiling began to look a little more fluid about the head and what passed for a stumpy neck, connecting its frog-like head to its body. As if the shadows themselves were conveying sweat by going from more viscus and congealed, to oily drops and oozing. 

	"You," Louis whispered, just loud enough to hear by the creature, and not enough to carry downstairs. Pointing his knife by the blade into the palm of the monster, making a literal point by prodding the meat between the middle and index fingers, "Don't care for sunlight, do you?" An accusatory tone. Cockily, Louis lifted up his ungulate hooved feets and propped them up on his computer desk, like a boss. The creature's nape started to sweat those weightless, ephemeral droplets of darkness, that fell into the air, only to be reduced to less than vapor by the unnatural lights all around it. It said a lot by saying very little.

	At this, Louis' cocky grin just got wider. It was back to blinking asyoncronistically, while he eyed the palm of the decaying aesthetic beast. "We appear to have gotten off on the wrong foot, but I'm not sure you can be reasoned with." He said, tracing the tip of the knife around the bulbous fingertips of the beast. "After all, if a bobcat broke into my house, I couldn't verywell talk to it, could I?" Ever so slightly, he applied just a little pressure to the knife. The creature's expression never changed as the first layer of whatever passed for skin began to break. Like pinpricks of tar slowly beading up from under the dirt, pearls of pure darkness welled up where it split. It bore no smell. It reflected nothing. Just vanta black dots in space.

	"So unless you start getting chatty, I'm just going to have to assume you're here to kill me. Maybe, me and mine." One cream colored brow raising, as his attention once more came to the beast's round, glistening, flat eyes. Too organic looking to be doll's eyes. Too shiny and flat to be a true animal. "So here's what's going to happen, my..... guy?" He inquired, just for posterity, studying the entity's expression. "Girl? Just want you to know, I'd use the right one if you told me. Anyway, what's going to happen is, I'm going to have dinner with my family. If you're still here when I get back," Louis said, emphasizing one of those red nails. Jamming the point of the blade beneath, he applied a bit of pressure. Just like if you jammed a knife tip beneath a cuticle, flesh separated from nail. To his surprise, the trapped color of his blood started to run free along with the dark dollops of the creature's own fluids, mixing and beading and running like chocolate syrup until it fell, vanishing from view once it finally grew too heavy and the bridge between the body and the dark droplet broke. 

	"I've got nothing better to do with my night. I'm going to stare at you." He threatened, while studying the creature's face. The creature, as always, bore no sign of sapience or expression. But Louis had his suspicions- the beast tipped its hand a little bit, when it frowned at him in its lair. ".. Until the morning sun." 

	That provoked a fearful reaction. Teeth appeared, and contrasting colors on the face as a mouth too large for the anatomy appeared, still two dimensional. Louis had them by the huevos, and the creature knew it. To add injury to insult, Louis again experimented with causing pain- once more jamming his swiss army knife's blade under the other red colored nail of the creature, unsealing the strange, containing nature of the only slightly pointed thing. Once more, the mix of his stolen blood and the creature's own ichorous fluids escaping.

	"I will fucking keep you pinned, to my ceiling, like the fucking glow-in-the-dark stickers, until I watch you either melt away or burst into flames, or whatever it is you blotted bastards do when God can see you. It might be fun just to find out. Understand?" It was from the heart. Louis was tempted to try and alter his speech, emulate the tough guys from any given mob movie he enjoyed, but opted instead just to vent his spleen. He was angry, but relatively put together throughout. The creature was beginning to sweat copiously, now. Clearly, it wasn't planning on being deconstructed by a seventh grader. This was a mistake. 

	"Say something." Louis demanded. To no response.

	Whether the creature was obligated to not commune with him, or just chose not to, he did not know. But, he wasn't going to worry about it. Taking in a deep breath, Louis stood up and kept his eyes on the creature. Walking up to his bugscreened window, he lifted it and let in the cool night air. Still holding his purple shirt in one hand, he made his way to his bedroom door, still facing the frozen in space beast of shadow as its eyes followed him. 

	"Alrighty. I'm going to have dinner." Louis patronized the creature, as he stepped outside of the door, walking backwards to keep his eyes on the creature. "Feel free to leave. If you're still here when I get back, we're watching the sunrise together." Keeping his eyes on the creature until he could instead stare at his open doorway, walking backwards and down the hallway towards the stairwell. Waiting, for any sign of cascading darkness at all. 

	None arrived. None moved from outside his bedroom. Louis flicked his swiss army knife back into his pocket, as he skillfully walked backwards down the stairs. Surprisingly, the creature did not follow. 

	And when Louis returned to his room, the creature was gone. That entire weekend, Louis stayed awake until the sunrise, and did not see one whit of the creature. It'd be another few days until insecurity thawed enough to sleep in the dark, again. Another fucking weird entry in the journal of unbelievable shit. 

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