Several minutes before my own untimely demise, I was sitting in my apartment smoking a cigarette. The window behind my chair was propped open a few inches to let some of the smoke escape into the rainy night. The sound and smell of the rain was so calming, I was on the verge of falling asleep when I heard a noise just outside the window. I glanced over my shoulder, and saw a pair of yellow eyes watching me from the darkness. Assuming it was my cat, I turned back around, only to see her standing across the room, her big yellow eyes fixed on something behind me. As I looked at her, trying to process this through my sleepy brain, there came through the window the same noise I had heard before. It was followed by the sound of something dragging harshly along the side of the house. My heart gave a leap at the same instant I did, bolting out of the chair and wheeling around to face the whatever-it-was. The yellow eyes still watched me, and I stood transfixed.

What the hell is that? my instantly terrorized mind screamed, realizing that the eyes outside were too large to be a housecat, or any other animal one could expect to find standing outside their house in the middle of town.

Abruptly, a dark shape, vaguely hand-like, appeared in the open space of the window and curled itself over the sill, like a strip of the night itself. Then there was a second, and I realized as the eyes floated closer to the window that the thing was trying to pull itself inside. The first hand shape moved forward to grip the edge of the chair I had just been sitting in, and the second hand followed to other side, each trailing a long tar-black arm. While my mind screamed incoherent thoughts about the open space in the window being too small for this thing to climb through, its eyes closed and a third, larger shape began to enter. The three shapes merged into one as its body began to pass through the impossibly small opening, scraping disturbingly against the windowsill. Its hands were now walking across the carpet toward me, while its body kept coming and coming through the window.

What was I supposed to do? It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I could feel its presence pulling the warmth out of the air, its unforgiving blackness seeming to suck the light right out of the room. The only part of my body that was able to move were my teeth as they began to chatter. My breath was wheezing out of me in clouds.

Finally, the creature was fully inside. Its eyes reopened and fixed me to the wall like some exotic insect in an entomologist’s display case. It began to creep closer, rising and expanding in every direction as it did so until all I could see was the bottomless black of its body, and two huge yellow eyes. . .