My name is Bruce Anders. I’m a patient being treated for psychosis.

My psychosis began two years ago. Two years, when I saw James die in front of me.

We heard a window breaking. I don’t know why he did it, but he told me to hide in the closet instead of himself. ‘Crazy bastard’, I couldn’t help but think to myself. It seemed to me, though, that despite his previous fear of the creepy shit he was seeing, he was trying to rationalize this as one giant prank that simply went much too far. Despite this, he grabs a nearby lamp and readies it, pulling the plug from the wall socket.

I remember that lamp. I think he told me he got it at some sort of antiques stores in the next town over because he watched a few too many detective movies, wanted something nice and classy. Too bad it looked pretty normal aside from the solid brass exterior.

Before either of us knows it, some psycho in a hoodie enters the bedroom, throwing the door open and lunging at him. He holds the bastard back with his off-hand and cracks him over the head with the desk lamp, which wasn’t exactly light(despite being a light). The bastard stumbles back, and then he growls like a feral animal, and it’s here I get to see that this fucker’s nails are practically claws. I ended up getting spine chills.

I barely have time to register James’s apparent mortification and panic(I saw him visibly recoil once he got a good look, though aside from the claws I had no idea why he reacted like that… yet.) before he makes another lunge, this time leading with one of his arms instead of his head, stifling the next lamp-stroke from my friend before it can reach full velocity. With his other hand he raked for James’s neck but is barely stopped by his forearm taking the hit, leaving far more blood in its wake than it honestly should’ve.

James grunts instead of screaming, acting like a tough guy as usual and trying to get his off-hand in the way while worming his main hand away from the freak’s arm for another shot of the lamp. The freak presses on the inside of James’s elbow to break its structure and then forces James to the ground while sinking his teeth into his neck like… like a goddamn vampire. I’m not even talking about the pretty-boy, sparkle-in-the-sun vampires that you see in stories that pander to the desires of teenage girls. I’m talking about the real vampires, the lords of the night, predators that roamed the streets jumping anyone they damn well pleased.

Oh, how I wish now that it were as simple as that.

He pulls his head up, his mouth overflowing with blood as I heard a gurgle from James, and caught just a glimmer of panic in his eyes before he bled to death. At this point my heart was racing, I was quaking in my boots, practically holding my breath to not be noticed, praying to any deity that would answer—even Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I wasn’t exactly picky in my current circumstances—that this was just a wicked nightmare pulled from the darkest depths of my subconscious mind.

Well, my doctor thinks it was a fiction produced by the darkness of my unconscious mind, but I’d wager that it was real.

Then, he looks in my direction, and I see something that would’ve given an old lady a heart attack. His face wasn’t even precisely human— his face was distorted, his chin too long, his eyes solid black and almost fishlike, his teeth an entire HIVE of needles now crimson-stained, forming a macabre smile with lips thin and bordering on nonexistence. He licks his teeth with an inhumanly shaped and equally inhumanly long tongue—it reminded me of a lizard snapping up a fly—licking his teeth, revealing their true color to be a pitted black with a gray undertone.

“It’ll be your turn soon enough, meat.” His voice speaks, distorted, bone-chilling, almost eldritch in quality. I still remember it perfectly, even to this day. He then cackles like he just told a killer joke at the bar, and picks up James’s corpse, slurping up some of the blood still running from his neck. “He died too soon… oh well.”, these were the last words I heard of him before he walked out of the room, and presumably out of the door.

My hands still shaking, I call 911, though it takes me four tries because I’m scared shitless.

“Hello, this is 911 emergency dispatch, what is your emergency?

“My best friend was killed by… by a monster!”

I realize now that it wasn’t the best way to start a call to 911, but it was the only way I knew how to describe it—a literal monster just murdered my best friend and dragged his corpse off, probably to turn it into a snack. Thinking about it now, I had to wonder if there were more out there like him.

Then the police came, not finding a body but a ton of blood and me hiding in the closet the entire time until police arrived, still trying to piece together what happened. I gave my testimony, as the truth as I saw it, and the police eventually found his mangled, half-eaten body and ruled it a homicide by wild dogs with rabies. I know it’s almost a stereotype that when a homicide is too difficult to explain as a potential murder but definitely isn’t a suicide it just gets ruled as suicide, but this was almost too much for me to bear, as much as it logically made sense when I don’t count what I saw with my own eyes.

In the aftermath, as I walked around town, I’d start… seeing things. Sometimes when I’m in public, I start getting spine chills, like something wicked is in my presence. This usually—but not always—happens alongside when I see someone’s face and they look horrifying, like the bastard that killed my friend. I think someone noticed my reactions, because before I know it I’m referred to a psychiatrist.

It was incredibly difficult to decide to tell him a damn word, but I told him everything and I got diagnosed with schizophrenia. Got handed drugs, and while they helped, they didn’t make those encounters completely go away. I did a little research on my own time about Clozapine. Took one look at the side effects and I decided to lie to the doctor and say that my current medications worked just fine. The truth, though, was that even with my current medications I wasn’t myself. Restless, twitchy even in public, yet somehow at the same time tired.