The shadows dissipated around him to reveal a monster. His body was blackened like it was burned, decayed, and the skin looked like it was flaking off. His limbs, neck, and stomach looked like they were twisted all the way around like springs. The bones poking at his joints. His veins were bulging, stressed by the body shape and poking up nearly out of the skin. His feet were blackened stumps, missing some toes. The remaining ones had talon-like nails that lifted up off of the toes themselves when he walked. When they pressed against the floor, they revealed the gnarled skin under the nail and showed where they were barely hanging on. His entire frame was lanky, crushed looking, and yet agile. He had no visible muscles, but looked like he could destroy anything.

His skin stretched, threatening to tear open and burst at any second, like a rubber band being pulled apart to the brink of splitting. His skin was coarse and raw like weathered old leather. It was pulled across his cheek bones, the sides of his mouth looking hollowed out. His right ear was missing with just a hole in his head surrounded by dry, cracking blood and ripped looking skin that never healed. His left had a rip in it from who knows what. His nose was bent out of shape, in a jagged twist to the right.

His knees were busted in, providing him goat-like legs where the bones on his calves poked out. They looked as if they were almost separate from his thighs. His right thigh had a section where you could see the muscle being torn, like parts of the rest of his body. He bore scars of previous fights all over his body. If you looked close enough you could see the pink where the skin was trying to heal itself only to be split apart again. The only things I noticed I liked were the cuts from the knife cookie Abe used.

He looked at me, leaning in, his breath more rancid than the smell of death itself. In his mouth he didn't possess the razor-sharp, clean teeth that would glow a ghostly white in the darkness. Instead, his teeth were disgusting. They were yellow, broken, and cracked. One of them was almost completely gone, and his bloody gums were starting to grow over it. He had a large overbite due to the jaw line of his bird-like face, his upper teeth digging bloody holes into his lower gums. It looked excruciating, but I could see in his eyes that he enjoyed the pain he received, thrived off of it. He cracked a smile at me, like greeting an old friend. We made eye contact while he stared down at me, his hollowed out eyes like soul-sucking pits dragging me in deeper until I disappear. A pit formed in my stomach as a chill ran down my spine. I couldn't help but picture him digging into a human excitedly, his teeth cracking on the bones of his meal as he enjoyed each, single part. My throat became dry; my tongue felt like sandpaper scraping against the top of my mouth. My mind became fuzzy. I had no chance of survival against this, this thing, and It was toying with me. It seemed to see the fear in my eyes and laughed, the metal sounding voice screeching like nails on a chalkboard.

"Who are you, what are you?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. My heart felt it was going to stop any second. It leaned in, our foreheads nearly touching.

"I am Amir," It said.