Ripley's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Ripley slept two hours against the door and woke to the sound of claws on his window frame. He got up, drank warm tap water, and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. His jacket was gray. His pants were gray. His face was pale under the bulb. On the open streets between his room and the fish dock, he was a moving smudge anyone could track. The creature did not need to hide. He did. He thought about the walk home tonight, the long block where the streetlights ran unbroken, and knew he would not survive another crossing without cover. He needed to disappear into the dark before the dark came for him again. He spent his lunch break at a thrift bin behind a shuttered dye shop and came back with a black canvas coat, a black watch cap, and a can of flat black spray paint meant for engines. In the alley behind the dock, he laid the coat on cardboard and misted the shoulders and back until the canvas drank the paint dull. He blacked the toes of his boots. He rubbed soot from the burn barrel into the pale skin of his hands and neck. When he stepped out at dusk, he tested it against a brick wall in the alley and saw his own outline vanish below the shoulders. Only his face floated. He pulled the cap low and started for home. Two blocks in, he heard the leather flap above him and dropped flat against a recessed doorway. The rat-faced thing swept past, red eyes scanning the sidewalk where he should have been. It circled the block twice. It hissed once, low and confused, and climbed back into the roofline to hunt a shape that was no longer there. Ripley waited until his own breath slowed, then moved from doorway to doorway the rest of the way home. He reached his door untouched for the first time in five nights. He had bought himself the street. He had not bought himself the answer to who kept sending the thing, and the scratching at his window started again before he had the bolt across.