Ray Colter didn’t look like trouble, but that was his game. At forty-two, with a wiry build and a face that could melt into any crowd, he was the kind of mugger who didn’t scare you until it was too late.

Tonight, his mark was an easy one, a stooped, solitary old man shuffling along a deserted side street, his overcoat flapping in the cold wind.

Ray slipped out of the shadows.

“Evening, grandpa. Hand over the wallet.” His tone was friendly enough, but the knife in his hand made the words matter.

The old man stopped and regarded him with eyes that were too calm for the situation, calm in the way a cat’s eyes are when it knows the mouse can’t escape.

“Why would I give you my wallet,” he asked softly, “when you’ve just given me exactly what I’ve been searching for?”

Ray frowned.

“Buddy, this is how it works, you give me the money, I don’t cut you.”

The man stepped closer. He smelled faintly of ozone, like air after a lightning strike.

“You’re aggressive. Desperate. Alone. Ideal.”

Ray raised the knife higher. “Last warning.”

The old man’s pupils dilated until they filled his eyes entirely. The street seemed to fold in on itself. The cold air vanished. Ray’s knees buckled, but when he hit the ground it wasn’t asphalt beneath him, it was something warm and faintly pulsing.

He was inside a room without walls, lit by shifting, iridescent light.

The old man, no, thing, stood over him, its skin rippling like liquid metal, bones rearranging with wet clicks until there was no trace of humanity left.

“I have lived among your kind for two years,” the creature said, its voice now inside Ray’s head. “Waiting. Watching. I required a subject, one no one would miss, whose disappearance would be dismissed as the result of his own poor choices. You, Raymond Colter, are… perfect.”

Ray tried to scramble backward, but invisible pressure held him in place.

“Hey, I’m sorry, alright? I’ll change. You don’t need me.”

“Oh, I do. I wish to know why your species destroys itself while insisting it values survival. I wish to test the tolerances of your mind and the redundancies of your body. And when you break, because you will break, I will start again with another.”

The alien extended a limb that split into dozens of hair-fine tendrils. They slid into Ray’s skin without resistance. Cold fire raced through his veins as memories, fears, and thoughts were pulled apart like a child dismantling a clock.

Ray screamed, but there was no sound.

Only the creature’s final words echoed through the shifting void:

“Retribution is not always about revenge, human. Sometimes it is simply curiosity… but the results are guaranteed.”

Copyright © Tom Kane 2017

For my other worldly frights, read my Science Fiction Novel The Ragged Edge of Time, which is on Amazon Kindle and Kindle Unlimited, by clicking here.