Midnight brought a fog. This crept in silence through the open window, covering their sleeping faces. Then it sank like dripping liquid to the floor below and behaved like a normal fog.

That is when the fog crept closer and closer to Cory. Cory gave one loud squawk. The fog had already woken me, by hurting that right hand, as any mist might. I simply blinked back at my talking crow. I looked back at the presence.

I recalled that I had seen the monkey destroyed. But it had scattered. It reminded me now of the way Folk had moved in the darkness. It was hard to think of them and not fear the treachery of the shadows all around us. When the monkey blew up: it left those sticks everywhere, and we kept them in a jar that had vanished. Had it died, or escaped? I had wondered that. I stared then at the nightmare presence in the darkness. The thing with the suffocating fog. I trembled in horror, knowing that it might attack if it became aware I was awake and watching it.

Then it left. I quickly went to Isidore and checked her to make sure she was alright. She was. She woke up in a sweat, shaking. She said:

"I had a bad dream." And her eyes were wide with terror.

"That is something that I cannot protect you from while you are with me." I told her. She looked at me and I could see the look of disbelief in my imagination, in the dark. I realized she had given me that look before and I liked it, I kinda loved her already. I changed my approach and said as reassuringly as I could: "I am here, holding your hand. You are awake now, you are safe. It cannot harm you or the baby. You are safe." I told her quietly and softly, over and over while I held her hand. She eventually fell back asleep after she relaxed.

I looked up nervously, wondering if it would return this very night to feed some more. I shuddered in despair, believing that this was only the first of its raids. It would come to feed again, untethered from the chiming monkey doll. Now it could come and go as it pleased.

I jumped, startled, as a loud ringing signaled from the phone of Detective Winters. He didn't wake up. I had to get up and go wake him. Isidore had woken back up.

"Come here, that was nice. Do it again." She asked nicely with a smile in the dark.

"It was just to calm you." I refused. I went to my bed and got some sleep.

"We need to get going. Your girlfriend can stay here and sleep. This one, yeah, let's go now." Detective Winters got me up.

I got up and went to the car, holding Cory. Cory kept clicking something in Corvin that translates roughly into:

"Hold me and keep me warm or else I will say there is a nighthawk, because it is night, and you will have to hold me, and keep me warm."

Which due to its idiomatic nature, was actually just a kind of empty whirring noise and a few clicks and the context of me holding him. We sat in the car while Detective Winters read something on his phone and smoked outside. When he got in he asked me:

"Ever hear of Dini Ghanat, a professor, a doctor, I am not sure which one it is, seems to be both. He's actually a doctor of more than one thing. Anyway, have you heard of him?" He sounded scared.

"No." I said.

"Alright, let's go." Detective Winters sighed apprehensively.

We arrived at Dellfriar Asylum as the sun was rising behind it. It stood like some kind of medieval castle rather than a mental health facility. The place always gave me the creeps. Detective Winters looked at me, noticing my facial hair was coming back already. He pointed to the white streak from the howl of the beast. I looked in the mirror and it matched my hair. That is when I realized that the white feather on Cory had appeared at the same time as the streak in my hair, and my beard too, apparently.

"Be careful." I told him.

"I will be right back. This guy is scary beyond any reconciliation. You think those creatures gave us nightmares. Man, after the trial: the judge was found overdosed and performing autoerotic asphyxiation. He was so shaken by what happened that the poor man's heart gave out a week later."

"Sounds scary. I will be glad to wait out here." I nodded.

"Alright, I am going in now. I am gonna go have an interview with Dini Ghanat. No reason to be alarmed or scared. Just a conversation, he can't hurt me. Going in there now." Detective Winters went into Dellfriar, crunching nervously across the gravel.

"He'll be fine." I told Cory.

"Will he?" Cory had listened to the whole thing, observed Detective Winters's fear. My bird also knew Detective Winters was a brave man, so seeing him afraid added context to the subject of his fears. "I said: 'will he' and you haven't answered. You might have answered." Cory chastised me for making his concerns grow.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"How should I know?" I asked and looked away so he wouldn't see my smirk. He squinted and saw my smirk in the reflection of the glass. He made an outraged noise by clearing his throat sharply.

"My Lord, you are mocking me by using the kind of phrase that I have used when I did not want to gamble with an answer." Cory accused me.

"Am not." I taught him. We chatted like that, alone at last, until Detective Winters came back. He looked pale and uncomfortable.

"Did you meet Dini Ghanat or get a flu shot?" I asked. Cory let out a very rapid series of clicks that were his second most hilarious laugh.

"It is funny because so many people are afraid of needles." Cory pecked at me ridiculously.

"No. Just one person is. It isn't that funny." I advised my bird.

"My Lord tells the best jokes." Cory hopped up onto my lap for the ride.

I noticed we were not going back to the hotel. I sighed and realized it was going to be a long day. I hastened to ask where we were going and the length of the drive was such that Detective Winters said nothing to me until our first stop for gas.

"We are going to go visit Ghanat's cabin, at Lake Raiden." He told me.

We arrived at dusk and with flashlights we got out. Nightbirds were calling in the forests. The full moon danced upon the still and black waters that quietly lapped at the pebble beach. There were extensive swamps on the other side of the hill, that is what I remembered.

I took the moment that Detective Winters had broken in and gone inside to look. I switched off my flashlight, as a thick cloud darkened the moon, and stared that direction out of the corner of my eye. Sure enough I could see foxfire in the mists over the swamp. I shuddered in dread.

I went inside the cabin and looked around, switching my flashlight back on. Detective Winters had descended into the cellar, accessed from a small alcove and trap door. There were stairs leading down and I followed them. The cellar was very small, too small for such an effort to make it. I could see Detective Winters's flashlight behind one of the shelves of canned preserves.

I went to the end of the shelf and found a narrow passage started from behind it. The rest of the cellar was laid out, filled with cardboard boxes and old parts of heavy machinery of some kind. He lifted tarps until he found a hole leading down further. There was a short staircase and then we were in a reinforced tunnel. This led to a series of chambers that were made from buried shipping crates.

It was Ghanat's secret laboratory. The sad mummy of a monkey and the blown remains of a pig sat forgotten in cages. The air was nauseating, almost unbreathable. We went into the next chamber and found it was filled with tables and equipment. Glass bottles, microscopes, a centrifuge, and other equipment I had no recognition of. We entered the next chamber and found more shelves with jars filled with preserved things.

These were not pears and jam and mushrooms though. These jars held mutated body parts, deformed and unborn creatures I did not recognize and in some were eyeballs and other organs. They just sat in jars, filled with what I was guessing was formaldehyde. I was disgusted and horrified by what I saw and the revulsion was a kind of primal fear. A fear of such an affront to Nature.

The last chamber was Ghanat's secret office. Stacks of notebooks, a very large computer, a safe with the door open, and his desk all sat in dustless silence. Detective Winters went to the safe and took up three large syringes with rubber caps on them filled with green phosphorescent liquid.

"I have to give him one of these. That's the deal." He told me.

"You can't." I protested. I was very shocked and horrified that Detective Winters would honor such an arrangement. I followed him back out, thinking about how I did not really know this man very well. I couldn't believe that he would do such a thing. Fear surged in my heart, realizing I was at his mercy and I still had no idea what he was finally capable of. Knowing he would give one of those syringes to Ghanat made me fear and despise Detective Winters.

We drove all night back to civilization. Our next stop was the State Hospital. Detective Winters took me to a room where our victim was in a coma, alive on life support.

"She isn't going to make it." Dr. Arefu told us. She was waiting for the victim to expire, then she would declare her dead.

"Then we got here just in time." Detective Winters produced one of the syringes from his jacket.

The girl in the coma flatlined. Dr. Arefu went over to her and heard Detective Winters ask her to wait a moment. She stepped back, unhappy with the situation. I wasn't happy either, afraid of what I was about to witness. I'd brought Cory into the hospital and Dr. Arefu noticed him and frowned about that as well.

Detective Winters put the needle into her IV and injected the green stuff. The serum flowed into her arm through the tube as he adjusted the flow. Her eyes opened, entirely black like shark's eyes. Startled, I took a step back.

"You're alive." Cory told her. "Speak."

"Killed me. Did this to me. The three of them, from the last house I walked by. All eyes of blue, under the statue of Mot." Her voice spoke from her dried lips from beyond death. She was certainly dead, yet the green stuff had revived her. After a few moments she stiffened and her eyes rolled back and her jaws clamped down, severing her tongue.

"Eleven Fifty." I heard the trembling Dr. Arefu state as we left.

"I want you to get the arrest warrants. It's the same ones you wanted. She gave a clear enough statement to me before she died." Detective Winters called his boss. His boss was saying something. "Nevermind that, she went on record, already sent you the video."

"Are we leaving?" I stopped when he stepped outside. I shuddered at what he had done, afraid of the sinister engagement.

"Yeah, just got to catch my breath. I don't know what to think. I feel crazy." Detective Winters confessed.

"Ghanat's serum reanimated her for a few minutes and she gave you a description of her attackers." I tried to make it sound okay. My head was spinning, fear of what I had seen gripping my thoughts, reversing them. Then I staggered away and threw up.

I don't recall the drive back to the hotel. I just woke with my head near Isidore and she was eating something and watching television. For a moment the fear rose back up and I worried she might be eating one of the aborted monsters in Ghanat's lab or maybe even our baby. It was just ice cream, though. I politely declined a spoonful.

"Not hungry?" She asked with a mouthful of rocky road. I noticed there were pizza boxes stacked on the fridge.

"No. I love you." I told her, looking Isidore in the eye. I meant it, I didn't want to be anywhere else. It was all death and horror out there.

"So sweet." Isidore smiled and turned off the T.V.

As she lay down beside me, licking the spoon, I tried not to think about where Detective Winters had gone after he dropped me off.