Haunted Skies by Adedayo Oluwaseyi Emmanuel
Katherine was driving through a deserted road.
It was late at night.
The full moon overhead shone with a faint silvery blue light. The road ahead was illuminated by the car’s headlamp.
The air smelled of wet soil, but was heavy with silence.
Unnerving silence.
Feeling the silence around her, she grew scared.
Spontaneously, the exhaust pipe coughed and the car slewed sideways and jerked to a stop.
A sudden unease took her by surprise. Her heart began thumping.
This is ridiculous, she thought. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I am just going to check what went wrong underneath the bonnet and the car should come back to life.
She grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and got out, confident at how calm she was, until she glimpsed something on the field of her vision. It whooshed across the road ahead and disappeared from sight.
Stiff with fear, she didn’t move. A heavy sense of dread slipped into the back of her mind but she tried to stay calm.
She wasn’t hallucinating, was she? Her eyes had captured a large flying body.
Gosh, it was completely ridiculous. There was nothing to be afraid of.
She knew her imagination had started to birth something scarier. She might give her heart an attack if she doesn’t trash it.
She was still gathering her thoughts when a lifeless, mutilated body, with a thud, crashed on the car top.
She screamed, piercing the silence and broke into a headlong flight, her chest rising and falling rapidly.
High up in the night sky, A creature folded it wings against its body and took a deep dive, dozens of feet towards the running girl, striking her right flank with it claws once it got close and vanished into thin air.
Katherine found herself lying face down on the road, disoriented.
Sharp pain lanced through her as blood oozed from her slashed flank. The feeling that the thing was nearby, coming back for her suddenly struck and she shivered. She glanced around but was barely able make out the form of anything in the darkness.
She had to get away. It will return, she was certain.
She had just unsteadily gotten to her feet when her ears picked up a faint shriek and the creature materialized in front of her, arms’ length away.
Her breath caught in her throat.
It lingered there, a foot off the ground, wings flapping in the light breeze, glowing crimson red eyes glaring at her and playing across rows of incisors was a long forked tongue.
For a moment or two, they stared at each other. Its lips snarled back—a growl of triumph—and with a quick motion, it lunged at her, claiming her heart and allowing her lifeless body slump to the Asphalt.
It examined the red lump, cradled in it hands, musing at how small it was before feasting on it.
“I trashed my story, ‘Haunted Skies’, because I thought that since it was rejected by two horror publications, it wasn’t good enough.”
Adedayo Oluwaseyi Emmanuel (he/him) is a creative writer from Lagos, Nigeria. His writing includes fiction, poems, essays and reviews. For him, writing is an expression; a written transcription of his wild imaginations, feelings and thoughts. He runs a blog where he writes short stories, essays and books/movies reviews.