As he opens his eyes, Canta finds himself laying on top of some damp grass. He notices that he can’t feel his legs. They're numb. He listens to the wet, squelching sound coming from down below his waist.
His mind, still drunk, already assumes that it knows what’s going on as he lifts his head to tell Alleluia to settle down and let him sleep off the drink before she starts mimicking the rabbits that the two of them had seen back when they were in the forest.
The first thought that comes to him after that is that they’re still outside in public too.
The silhouette that he sees hunched over his lower body isn’t Alleluia, however. Canta screams as he looks at the long, gangly shadow-entity that has dug its face into his knees, its long tongue scraping around the inside of his knee-caps, as it drinks from his legs. He tries to pull himself back, noticing that his body has close to no feeling at all from the waist down. Seeing that he's trying to get away, the tall, lanky creature, which looks like it’s wearing a brimmed hat, places a firm hand onto his chest, pushing him back down into the grass as it continues slurping away. He can feel its tongue digging around inside his meat, tickling the inside of the bits of his knee that still have feeling in them.
In panic, Canta looks around the area, seeing that the garden-courtyard is covered in bodies. Dozens, hundreds of people lay on the grass, as if they had all fallen over in their drunken stupors and now are all no longer able to move. There is not even a heaving of their chests to signal that they’re still able to breathe. No creatures hover over them. There only seems to be one entity that moves, which is busy eating him.
Alleluia is nowhere to be seen.
However, there is something else amiss that Canta notices in his frantic struggle. The bodies of the people aren’t the only things not moving. Nothing else in the world is moving either. Not the swaying grass, not the waving trees, not the fluffy clouds in the night-sky. It is as if everything in the entire world has been frozen in time, except for himself and the thing that eats him. The thing that drinks his marrow has a long tongue that wriggles around inside of the top of his femur, which he has poked a tiny hole into – the man with the hat.
Screaming, Canta grabs the hand on top of his chest and bites into it as hard as he can, tearing out a chunk of fouled, blackened meat. As it rips out, the strands of moldy sinew that hold it together pop noisily apart as his teeth rip through them. A thick, viscous goo that tastes like salted pus flows into his mouth.
The man with the hat disappears in an instant, vanishing, as if he never existed.
Canta crawls backwards with his arms over the grass. Panting, heaving as he leaks a trail of blood out of his legs. Looking upward, he gazes around the courtyard. Time seems to have returned to itself again. The grass sways once again, the clouds flow, the trees shake in the midnight breeze.
His heart thrashes in his chest. His mind is already convinced that he was just having a nightmare. This illusion is instantly dispelled, however, as he sees the red-glistening grass beneath himself as his legs slowly start to pull themselves back together again, as he tastes the salt lingering on his tongue.
“– Alleluia!” calls Canta out into the quiet night, his voice echoing as it travels over the many bodies that lay on the grass all around him. Priests, soldiers, common people — everyone has simply dropped to the ground, as if they had all died on the spot. “ALLELUIA!” he cries out again, feeling his knee crack as the dislocated cap is pushed back into place by the regenerative forces of his body.
No response comes.
Still panting, his body covered in sweat, and with the smell of liquor, Canta rises to his feet.
As he stands up, the grass stops moving, the clouds stop flowing, and the bodies stop breathing. The hair on his arms stands up straight. Canta’s eyes rise up towards the distance; there across the field from himself, he sees the black silhouette of the man with the hat.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
His heart beats; his chest pushes itself outward from the strike of its frantic hammering.
In the instant that follows, Canta is sure that he doesn’t blink. He is sure that the man with the hat doesn’t move. But as his heart strikes so violently in that single midnight second, he is sure that the entity has moved across the field, coming several bounds closer. It didn’t walk. It didn’t run. It was simply there — there where it wasn’t before.
It doesn’t seem to care about any of the people laying there, frozen in time. It only seems to care about him.
Canta’s heart beats.
The man with the hat comes closer.
Canta runs, turning tail and stumbling on his freshly healed legs, catching himself with a hand on the grass as he sprints the other direction, towards the cathedral, the doors of which are still wide open. The air is rank and foul.
Sin fills the air. The smell of it permeates the frozen night, staining the white stones of these consecrated grounds with its foul putrescence. But it isn’t a normal sin. It isn't a sin that makes him hungry; rather, it does the opposite. It’s disgusting. Vile. It causes his stomach to twist into knots as the reek encases him. It’s like tainted meat.
Canta’s eyes dart around over the shadows, looking at everything around him. Nothing stirs. He and the man with the hat are the only things that move in the darkness. “Alleluia!” shouts Canta again, seeing a shadowy silhouette to his side, just behind a stone pillar. The man with the hat is watching him, as if it had been standing there all along.
His chest heaves. Canta runs through the open doors of the cathedral. No light burns inside of it. The many colorful ribbons and decorations that had filled the air with such cheer before now feel like grim spectacles in and of themselves, the red-banners streaking across the great-hall like deep cuts into its body. None of them flow anymore, as the night-wind has fallen silent. Here too, people line the floor on all sides. Their drinks and food scattered all over the ground, as if everyone had fallen down all at the same time in the middle of the party. Canta runs towards the bishop, who hangs there from his piston.
He doesn’t move, no matter how much Canta shakes him.
Canta feels his heart beat with unusually strong pressure. He turns around, looking back to the great, open doors of the hall that he had run through just a few seconds before. There, on the precipice, stands the silhouette of the thing, bathed in sickly moonlight. The man tips his hat.
Canta runs, breaking off into a hallway down to his left.
He doesn’t know why he’s afraid of the creature, more so than he was of the wendigo, or of the thing that Nina became. Perhaps because it is night? Perhaps because this is supposed to be a safe place that has now been befouled? Perhaps because he has gotten soft in only a single month of pampering, or perhaps because now he has someone who he is worried about and can’t find? But more aptly, he thinks that it's because of the smell. There is something repulsive about it, something wrong.
“Alleluia!” shouts Canta, his voice echoing down the hall along with his steps as he rushes down it. He again receives no response, save for the violent beating of his heart. Canta runs down the window-lined corridor. Images of forgotten saints and holy patrons of all manner stare down at him through their prisons of stained glass, and behind each and every one, with every flick of his eyes and with every beat of his heart, he sees the silhouette of the man with the hat, watching him through the windows.
Canta closes his eyes, running as he tries to remember what happened last night. There was the party; he got drunk; Alleluia had carried him off into the night, and then… Everything after that is a blur. She wouldn’t just leave him there by himself, as clingy as she is. He’s sure of it. Or maybe he’s the one being clingy, since he assumes to know that as a fact?
He feels his heart thrashing in his chest. The hallway reeks of sin. He’s hungry. But this isn’t something that even he wants to eat. It’s a rancid smell. It turns his stomach to even be inside of its odor.
“Leave me alone!” yells Canta, running down a familiar corridor. He sprints, turning to the right as he heads up the stairs, sparing a glance down through the banisters to see the man with the hat standing down below, never having taken a single step to get there. Hurrying up the staircase, he runs down the hallway and into their room, slamming the door shut behind himself. “Alleluia!” shouts Canta, seeing her here, frozen in time by the window, as she seems to be holding a rag and wiping her dress off.
– Oh.
He remembers now. He ended up drinking too much, even for himself, and he threw up on her dress. She had tossed him down to the grass, scolding him and sternly warning him to stay there until she got back from cleaning herself off. The fact that she stands by the window means something to him. It means that even here, even while she was angry at him, she was watching him, keeping an eye on him. The two of them really are clingy to each other.
He feels the hairs on his arms rise up again, and the hairs on his neck stand on end. Canta doesn’t turn around, feeling his heart beating in his chest. He lifts his gaze, looking into the mirror at the reflection of the man in the hat, who stands behind him, across the room.
“– What do you want?!” yells Canta, not turning around to look at the man with the hat. His smell, his stench stains the room, it stains the walls and the window and their bedsheets, it stains him; it stains the person he cares about most after that. Canta realizes that this is his own fault. He had made a critical mistake. He had given into his emotions again without thinking. In his desperate search, he had led the creature right to his own most cherished place. In his frantic desire, he had unwittingly opened the door for it.
The man with the hat doesn’t want him.
Canta feels his heart beat as he suddenly realizes that he was only a tool, a thing for it to use to find what it was unable to detect. A fake person, the thing that it really wanted for reasons unknown. Canta spins around and lunges at the man with the hat, who is standing behind Alleluia, reaching for her.
The two of them fall to the ground as Canta bites into his throat, filling his mouth with fetid rot. A hat falls off into the air and flies to the stones next to them, as the two of them roll around over each other. Canta feels his heart beat again, shaking through his teeth and into the body of the entity, as he clamps down tighter, tearing off a piece of the man with the hat.
[Sin Level 9: Shadow Person{Hat-man}]