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THE KILLER PUSHED open the cabinet doors and slinked down from the kitchen cupboard where he slept, then let himself out of his empty apartment into the night.

The girl was in her mid-teens, young and pretty, blue-eyed, and worried because her friends had gone on and left her behind in the dark. That’s how the killer found her, and caught her: separated, and alone. In the dark.

“Hey—” she said, raising her face up from her lighted phone screen.

He grabbed her cinnamon hair and yanked her off the bike she was seated on, wrenching one of her arms right from its socket. When she began to scream in abrupt terror, twisting and struggling wildly, an initialed handkerchief emerged and was stuffed into her mouth. He crushed the smartphone underfoot. Pummeled her face until she sank back, dazed and bloodied from the blows.

“ . . . the sun knows it’s time for setting,” he chanted softly to some unseen presence. “Thou makest darkness, and it is night . . . ”

Mr. Vespers (as he’d so inappropriately been dubbed) dragged the girl off the roadway by the wrist of her dislocated arm and moved toward an eroding drainage ditch nearby. She came to long enough to start struggling again, her shrieks of pain muffled from the gag as she tried to get free.

He kicked her once in the skull and suddenly she didn’t look young or pretty anymore.

“ . . . hear me, O nameless King. Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense. And let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice . . . ”

Far from any streetlights, he flung the girl headlong into the ditch and saw her tumble away into low dark water. Ignoring the feeble squeals, he took out a wickedly curved filleting knife and raised his arms. He circled around, descending upon her slowly, dribbling whispered chants, inhaling the thick night air. Inhaling her, battered and mewling in the dirty runoff and muck. Whimpering. Soiling herself in the shadows.

Someone’s daughter, someone’s little girl.

But she was foul—one of the foul spirits corrupting this place. Haunting, infesting it, bringing such ruin and disdain upon it. So the old, bitter rage surged in him again, rising up, frothing over, and his transfiguration commenced.

His flesh began changing its shape, mutating, function and form, adapting to the task at hand; glowing with a phosphorescent aura one minute, becoming midnight-black and crawling over his frame the next. Tendons and ligaments visibly stretched, cartilage tore. Bones were splintering.

The killer metamorphosed until he no longer even appeared human, just some monstrous chaotic figure looming in unstable flux above the terrified girl in the darkness, shifting, defying all reason . . . defying life.

He slashed her bare thigh open with the knife and capered in glee as the fresh slice steamed. She begged for him to stop, babbling mutedly, her eyes squeezed shut. But he would not stop. Ever. He was doing this, what he’d been brought into the world to do.

Ridding. Killing. Misbred mistakes. Deviate from us. Kill the innocents.

Were they, though? Innocent? No. Oh no-no.

A sound came to him, interrupting his reverie: an obscure howling noise, not unlike a dog, or wolf baying far off somewhere. Except . . .

He became stock-still. His eyes glittered with mild irritation. The unearthly howl rose again, floating across Blackwater Valley and filling the night. A shudder rippled through his misshapen body.

Then the bestial sound faded, and was gone. Quiet once more.

He grinned, leaning over her. Hideous lips peeled back and the sickly grin began to spread, kept on spreading, until the corners of his mouth threatened to meet behind his head. Lower jaw unhinging and falling away, face split virtually in half, his maw gaped nightmarishly open so that the wanderers could come—

Spiders spilled from him, pouring from the grotesque orifice as though being forced out from deep within. The cinnamon-haired girl’s eyes flew open in mortal dread, her whimpers rising into high, jerking stifled screams which caught in the back of her throat. The long-legged things scurried over the doomed teenager, swaying back and forth upon her before striking with frothy fangs.

The killer bent and convulsed and retched them forth, gibbering with delight when at last finished. He pulled the handkerchief out of the girl’s mouth and watched, wanting to enjoy her screams now. She thrashed and she shrieked, her cornflower-blue eyes bulging impossibly huge with the utter horror of what was happening to her. The killer shrieked along with her, screamed into her stark raving face.

He straddled the bucking body, pinned her flailing limbs, and he put those round beautiful eyes to the blade.

After a bit, the girl’s cries began to die away, fading into incoherence as she began asphyxiating from the neurotoxins in the spider venom—her writhing moans dying out as her flesh body failed, vitals shutting down in her final anguishes. She spasmed, kicked weakly, some part of her brain yet aware.

Vespers cut her shirt open, tearing it from her, exposing the smallish, seashell nubs of breasts. Removed her shorts. His long, tapered blade began to crisscross over her skin then, and around the mouth; unintelligible noises bubbled from her moving lips.

“Go on, witch,” he croaked through a rippling larynx, readjusting his form as she dimmed and extinguished beneath him, “be with the others.” The girl went silent, became still in the blood-tinged runoff. “Go, and deviate.”Soon, the chanting resumed low.

Some of the wandering spiders managed to find their way inside her as he worked on her in the secluded drainage ditch, seeking warmth and refuge, and moist dark secret places.

Nighttime bloomed full and ripe and scarlet around them.