Ripley had not slept in four nights, and the thing behind him was getting braver. He walked the wet streets of Nola with his key already in his fist, counting the sounds that were his and the ones that were not. His boots. The drip from the gutters. A soft leather flap that kept pace two steps behind, then paused when he paused. He was learning the city's shadow craft the hard way, one sleepless block at a time, because whatever followed him home each night had started scratching at his door before dawn. Tonight he would name it or he would not last another shift at the fish dock. He carried a folding knife in one pocket and a small camp mirror in the other. The mirror was the plan. He would turn a corner, crouch low against a planter, and angle the glass back the way he came. He would see it once. Then he would decide whether to run or swing. He took the corner near a shuttered laundromat and dropped to one knee. The mirror shook in his hand until he pinned his wrist to the brick. In the smeared glass he saw the street he had just walked, the puddles, the sagging power lines, and a shape clinging to the wall about six feet up. It was the size of a small dog. Wet fur, orange teeth, a rat's face, and folded wings like a bat's, ribbed and leathery. Its eyes caught the streetlight and threw it back red. It was watching the corner he had just turned, waiting for him to keep moving. Ripley's breath stopped. He had grown up hearing dock workers joke about swamp things with wings. He had never believed them. He closed the mirror slow and set it on the pavement. Then he stood, stepped back around the corner, and clapped his hands once, hard. The creature startled and dropped from the wall. It hit the street on all fours, hissed, and lifted into the air with two heavy beats of its wings. It did not fly away. It circled once above him, low enough that he felt the wind off it, and then landed on the fire escape across the street and stared. Not hungry. Not confused. Waiting. Someone had sent it. Ripley walked the last three blocks home with his knife open in his hand and the thing gliding roof to roof above him. At his door he turned and looked up. It was perched on the gutter, patient as a clerk. He went inside, locked the bolt, and sat on the floor with his back to the wood. He knew what was following him now. He did not know who owned it, or why it had chosen him, and until he did, sleep was still a thing other people got to have.

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.