The rain hit the window in globules, propelled by a strong Northeastern wind that had swooped down like a scythe across New England, the blustery breath of the Atlantic showing its might yet again. Shutters rattled, and so did old bones. Peter watched the nurses run in from the parking lot, watched them disturb the pools of water that shone like ebony in the near absolute darkness. He watched because that was all he could do.

He had the face of a boxer which was only partially accurate. His formal career ended abruptly with a car accident, but he demonstrated his skill in bars, bedrooms and alleys across three continents and four decades. He’d had a lifetime of laughter; women, song and drink, and eventually his body had betrayed him. He was the worst sort of rogue now – an old one.

His only son Nigel often said that his father couldn’t sleep unless he had done some devilment, and when he had accomplished some mischief he slept soundly with a slight smile on his face. Peter hadn’t been much of a father and consequently he wasn’t in much of a convalescent home.

He was fine with omniscient neglect of the staff, and with the eventuality of death. What one sows, one reaps. He simply limited his earthly pleasures to two things, the bounteous bosom of Nurse Rose, and his ten year old grandson, Kit. Kit was his best friend, completely and utterly a little boy, but with occasional flashes of wisdom far beyond his years. He was also immensely entertaining. Peter hadn’t been there when Nigel was little. Was this what he was like? Is this what he’d had missed out on?

“It’s a storm like to raise hell,” Rose had said as he set him up for the night. She was on the high side of forty, divorced, double chinned and one of the kinder night nurses.

“Thank you sister,” he said, and flashed her the best smile he could manage. “Now…could you be a dear and grant an old man’s wish?”

“You’re a dirty old degenerate,” she said softly.

“Just one button love,” he said. “One button for a geezer.”

She smiled at him slightly, and undid one button of her tunic, and for an instant her formidable bosom bulged just a little more. Then she left and the hours slowed again.

Time is strange. At times it moves like winged Mercury, but to anyone that has lived in an institution not of their choice, whether it be a marriage, a withered body, or a more traditional prison, time is the greatest of all enemies, and it lumbers.

The wind blew harder. Peter heard the flap of flags, the crackling of branches. The streetlight in the middle of the lot went dark, the bulb broken during its violent swaying.

Across the lot, out of the woods, a man began to slowly creep towards the building. More accurately, it was similar to a man, in the same way that some insects resemble a leaf or a branch. It was wearing tattered clothing, and it was dragging a leg that seemed very injured. Its back was hunched to a degree that would have rendered a mere human handicapped. What glimpse of limbs that he could see were emaciated and bone white. The hair on its head was long, and obscured its face, but the top of the irregular scalp was hairless.

It moved inexorably towards the building and then it was gone from his sight.

A man of the world usually has a nose for trouble. Had Peter his full strength he would have left immediately.

Kit squirmed in his chair. He had dark hair and a prominent jaw and chin both of which were bruised.

“Bit of a punchup,” he grunted.

“Some bullies. At school,” Kit said with his small, clear voice. “They were messing with a girl, and the teachers didn’t see it.”

“Defending a lady’s honor,” Peter said in a tone of approval. “Good lad. Did you win?”

“They were too big,” Kit said, disappointed.

“No shame in that. No shame in getting beat,” Peter said. “But you gave him what for, didn’t you?”

“I got one of them good,” Kit said brightly.

“Let them know they’ve been in a scrap,” Peter said repeating one of his mantras. “Even though they won, they’ll remember what you gave them. And they’ll be reluctant to face you again. You may have lost this fight, but you’ve won respect, real respect. Real respect is earned, never given. But every man has to have some of it, or his years are for naught.”

“Better it is to- better it is to go into,” Kit started, but his memory betrayed. “How does it go, Grandpa?”

“Better it is to go into that other world in the grip of some passion,” Peter said. “Than to wither and fade dismally with age. That was Joyce, he were Irish, but he knew what he was talking about. Now go see one of those birds in the hallway, and see if she’ll give you some ice. Your dad will have my bollocks for earrings, if you go home with a bruise and he thinks I put you up to fighting.”

Kit nodded and went off. He reappeared with a large pack of ice and a lollipop.

“Rose gave you that,” Peter said, and Kit nodded. “Lovely woman. If I could have met her earlier in life- maybe things would have been different for me. Not that I regret anything mind you.”

“There’s an awful smell on the other side of the building,” Kit said. “Down the far end of the hallway.”

“It’s a lazy sort that works here,” Peter snapped. “I’ve seen the night man mop the floor with sour bleach and he couldn’t be bothered to make it right. Stank up the whole wing it did.”

He was irritated with the memory that moment, but something made him ask additional questions. The floor was shaped like a letter ‘H’, with Peter at the lower half on the left side, and the nurse’s desk centrally located. But the smell was at the lower half on the right side- the side that led to the sub-basement where the trash and medical refuse was stored.

“Stay away from that part of the wing, lad, “Peter said. “I’ve got a bad feeling about it, and it’s usually best to pay attention to your instincts. Are you doing good in school?”

“Not so good,” Kit said.

“I left school as a young man, and became a sailor,” Peter said. “I would like to have finished school, I think. You need to do better.”

Eventually, Kit left. If only he could live longer, so he could teach the boy everything-

That night, “Dirty” Dylan Byrd died in his sleep. In the end he was a bag of bones. He was in the lower half of the wing, by the sub-basement door. His skin laid flat against his pallid ribs and cheekbones. When they pulled the IV out of his arm, the blood was nearly black.

Peter lay in his bed. In his mind he remembered the magazines of his youth. He remembered the dynamic tension exercises of Charles Atlas. One hand clasped against another with firmness strengthened the arms, the shoulders and the chest. There were other things he remembered as well, that could theoretically work on other muscle groups. Could he summon at least some physical strength in this time of dire need? Had this mortal shell suffered too much abuse?

Something was wrong, but the changes were subtle. Stored food began to spoil sooner. The spring water that was brought in developed a bitter taste. Some of the more sensitive residents began to complain of nightmares peppered with a faceless horror. And the smell near the subbasement grew even stronger.

On the far side of the wing, Oscar Caesar DeFelice died, his last convulsions pulling the sheets off the mattress with his claw-like hands. They saw him before he died, the night nurses did. He reached towards them to speak, and then the last of his dark blood ran out of his arms, and he fell back, never to move again. He had a roommate, but she was too terrified to speak, and she never did again. She went quite mad in fact.

It was dark again, too soon, too soon. It was raining again, although the news still said there was a drought. There was a flash of brown, and then the lights went out. There was a crackle and the emergency generator started its ragged hum, and the barest of green incandescent lights began to gleam along the bottom of the walls and exit signs in the hallway. He remembered nights like this. Nights on the balking boat, with balmy wind carrying pea sized rain, and the termagant siren ending the sailor’s slumber. Dark nights, many of them he had spent feeling this way, feeling that something was very wrong and soon it would be too late to avoid calamity.

Rose walked in the room.

“There you are,” Peter said warmly. “I was worried about you. You’re off your usual schedule.”

“We’ve been understaffed,” Rose said. Her clothes were more wrinkled than usual, and she didn’t look like she’d slept the night previous. “They’re going to close us, I know they are. They just haven’t told us. One more incident and they’ll close us down.”

“And you could get another job, but you’d lose your seniority,” Peter said. “I’m sorry Rose.”

She looked at him.

“We’re supposed to check out everyone now that the power is out,” she said.

“You’re not going near the back wing are you,” Peter said, mildly alarmed. “Not in the dark-“

“Why,” she said.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ll tell you, cause you’re one of the ones what cares. There’s something rather queer going on down there. I’ve been hearing stories about that wing. More people have died there than anywhere else in the bloody building, and when they’ve come for them, they’ve little blood and what they have is black. Its unnatural, that’s what that is. And you may think I’m batty, but I saw something in the dark, something out there in the woods and it’s preying on us. We’re pinned in here like cattle, and its picking us off one by one.”

Rose crossed her arms.

“That’s quite a story,” she said. “Especially the parts with the black blood. People die here all the time, there’s no pattern to it.”

“Yes there is. You have but to look, love. They’re all in that damned wing”

Rose sighed in agitation.

“How many other people believe this rot,” she said.

“Its just whispers,” he said. “Whispers never have a face, that’s why they don’t go away. But it’s dark now. And bad things happen in the dark. You’re a nice girl, not like those others, not that I’m slagging them off, mind you. I’d just hate to see something happen to you and I’ve got a bad feeling.”

Rose reached in her pocket. There was a well wrapped syringe, and she had a pocket full of them.

“The doctors wanted us to give this to you all while the power was out,” she said. “It’s to help you sleep.”

“The doctors are all fucking prats,” Peter said. “I don’t need it. Don’t want it either.”

“They need everyone calm while we work on things,” Rose said, coming closer.

“I can’t get out of my bed without help, I spend my day flat as a flapjack. You don’t get any calmer than that. How do you think I feel when my grandson comes and I remember that he’s never seen me standing up in his whole bloody life? “

She smiled slightly then, remembering Kit.

“Oh hell,” he said. “Do what you have to. If you’ve got to stick me go ahead. Just be careful in that damned wing.”

She put the cover on the needle.

“Well,” she said with a pause. “I suppose you’re right. No one will know what happened in this room, will they? It’s not like you holler or fuss or anything. What does it matter anyway? We’ll all get sacked soon enough and no one will remember what we’ve done here.”

He nodded his appreciation and looked back at the window. She stopped at the threshold of the door and laid her head there for a moment.

“You’re not like the others,” she said and then she was gone.

It wasn’t until next week that he found out that Rose had been poisoning the people on her shift. The policeman came to his room when Kit was there telling him about a wicked hand ball game they’d had that morning.

“All men,” the policeman said. “She hated men, ever since her husband divorced her. We don’t know how many people she’s killed so far, but it was poison, every last one of them.”

“Hard to believe,” Peter said.

“She liked you,” the policeman said. “There was a pattern at work here, and it skipped over you. You’ve dodged a bullet, sir, you really did.”

“There going to shut this place down, aren’t they,” Peter said.

“I think this really will be the end,” the policeman said. “I think they’ll start letting some of the staff go, and they’ll stop accepting people and they’ll move the rest of you around.”

Peter gave him a grim smile.

“They’ll wait for us all to die you mean,” Peter said.

The atmosphere at the convalescent home grew worse, if that was possible. The staff developed an antipathy towards the patients, who responding by dying at an increased and alarming rate. The building grew more and more silent and power outages occurred more and more often.

Eventually, as he knew they would, they moved him near the subbasement door. He found himself unable to keep his eye from the door. Across the hall was the only other person between the subbasement and the nurse’s death. He had tried to speak to her once, but she was mostly senile.

The blanket of night descended yet again. This time the night was clear, and the glint of the moon illuminated the building. Not enough light to see, but enough to disturb. The smell of must and mold grew stronger. He heard something coming up the stairwell, something with an unsteady gait, like a drunken man stumbling his way along a dark alley. He nearly vomited as the door slowly opened and the oppressive stench filled the air.

Something moved, dragging a dead leg it seemed. It ran its claw like hands along the wall softly. And for the first time, he saw it.

It seemed obscene, but as it looked at him through thin, wild hair, it had brilliant eyes, larger than a man’s but Maxfield Parrish blue in color. The iris was just a dark pinpoint. It opened its mouth slightly, exposing multiple rows of yellow, uneven teeth, and jet black gums and tongue. It looked right and then left with infinite patience.

It was deciding, he thought.

It chose the woman. Before she could move, it put its hand over her mouth, pinning her to the cot with surprising strength. With the other hand, it yanked the IV out of her arm, and put its mouth to the ugly wound.

Peter tried to rise. He saw things move in its neck as it began to silently suck her blood at an alarming rate while she thrashed in the bed as much as it would allow her to move. And then the lights grew dim, and failed completely. Another power outage. It didn’t matter. In the dark, in the still night, he saw that unblinking blue eye looking at him, as it sucked her nearly dry, and then retreated to the subbasement.

All around the world, he had heard of those who drink blood. Their origins differed, but the selfsame creature he had just seen existed in legend everywhere he had ever been.

Was this to be the end for him then? Withered and preyed upon by this unholy creature?

He thought of Kit. There was so much to tell him, and no more time. There were regrets he didn’t know he’d had, and experiences he couldn’t explain. He tried to find a single idea to give the boy, but he couldn’t. There was no moral to his life.

He couldn’t say ‘I love you.’ He did love the boy, but as he searched his memory, he couldn’t recall ever saying it to his own son, and his own inner sense of justice wouldn’t let him do it to his grandson.

So what now?

Kit came and Peter had an idea.

“I need something, lad,” Peter said. “Your dad will have a fit. But tell him it’s the last thing I’ll ever need from him.”

“Why is that Granddad,” Kit said.

“I know how many days I have left,” Peter said. “When you get my age, you just know. It’s nothing to be sad or upset about. All things end. When you’re in the depths of your misery, know that bad things have to end too.

“You’re a good boy. Be a good man, Kit. Now give granddad a hug.”

He rubbed the boy’s head and he looked at him and smiled.

There were a couple of uncomfortable nights, but he got the item he asked for. He slept more now. He was aware that his body was winding down. There was just one last thing to do.

He awoke when the smell hit him. He listened to it shuffle down the hallway until it reached his door, merely a silhouette now, with dull light at its back.

“It’s about time you ugly bastard,” Peter said. His face was flushed, and his heart was pounding like it hadn’t in some time. “You have a great deal of fun finding the weak and the near dead to pick on, don’t you? But I know the truth. You’re one of us. You’re just as old and weak as the rest of us. You’re an old lion, too toothless and slow get his own prey anymore. You have to settle for the wounded, or the sick. Well, I’ve got a surprise for you.

“Notice anything different about the room? Like my new lamp? My new, ultraviolet lamp-“

With one quick motion, he turned the lamp and knocked the shade off. The thing snapped its head back in horror, and its body leaned away. It started to limp away.

At that moment, in the grip of passion, Peter got out of bed. He extended one leathery hand and grabbed a handful of hair, turned it around, and delivered one perfect punch right between its eyes.

It fell against the wall, stunned. Peter’s legs quivered and he took two more unsteady steps, and then slowly went to the floor.

It began to squirm, to weak to rise now. Its pale skin began to bubble and blister.

“Not hot as the sun I’d bet,” Peter said, ignoring a sudden pain, “But warm enough to slow cook you I’d think.”

He laughed, but the exertion had taken its toll and he leaned his back to rest.

In the morning the nurses came in and had quite a shock. Against the far corner of the room, was a humanoid corpse, with its skin and outer layers of flesh now viscous liquids that spread across the floor. Two massive white eyes like cooked eggs stood out among a mass of hair and gore.

On the other side of the room was Peter, quite dead, with a slight smile on his face.