By the time the first lantern went out, the lorry had already slipped into the pass and there was nowhere sensible to turn around.
Mara saw it happen from the passenger seat. One moment the amber bulbs strung along the rock-cut barrier were burning in a tidy row, a little ribbon of civilisation clamped to the mountainside. Then the light nearest the bend gave a thin, offended flicker and died. The next one followed. Within seconds the darkness ahead seemed to lean in, eager and heavy, as if it had been waiting for a door to open.
“Bloody thing,” said Dev, gripping the wheel. “Again.”
He was not talking about the lights. He was talking about the lorry’s braking system, which had sounded unhappy ever since they’d left the valley town of Talgat three hours earlier. Mara had already told him twice that the dashboard warning was not a suggestion. He had answered by doing what men who grew up in mountain countries often did when frightened: pretending to be annoyed instead.
“We should stop,” she said.
“We stop here, we don’t climb out again.”
A gust came through the open ventilation flap and brought with it the smell of wet stone and old iron. The pass was called Blackglass because the rock on the upper slopes had been seared by some ancient volcanic fury into a sheen like dark bottle glass. In daylight it was ugly but striking, the cliffs shining in ragged strips, the road cut narrow and white beneath. At night it became something else entirely. The local drivers said it was a place where the mountain watched.
Mara had laughed at that the first time she heard it. She was not laughing now.
The lorry was carrying bottled gas cylinders, stacked and netted in the back. Dev had taken the job because the pay was good and because no one else wanted to drive the route after dark. Mara had come along because his sister was ill in Talgat and needed medicines from the capital, and because the last bus up the valley had been cancelled for a landslide inspection. Also because she had begun to understand, after six months of living with Dev, that his version of a request often became a command if she waited too long to answer it.
The second time the lights failed, they failed all at once.
The road ahead dropped into blackness so complete that the lorry seemed to float in it. Dev cursed and killed the engine out of instinct or despair. For a few beats there was no sound except the ticking of cooling metal and the faint ping of the cargo net as the cylinders settled. Then Mara heard something on the rock above them.
Not a fall. Not a scrape.
A careful, liquid movement, as if something large and soft were dragging itself across stone without wanting to be heard.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
Dev did not answer. He was staring at the side mirror. Mara followed his gaze. The mirror reflected only darkness and the pale wash of the cab’s internal light, until something moved in the edge of it.
A shape crossed behind them on the road, too fast to properly see, but long enough for her brain to insist on impossible details. It had the outline of a deer’s body stretched too far, and limbs folded wrong at the joints. Its head was low and narrow. Where antlers might have been, something like a fan of glassy filaments arced back from the skull and caught what little light there was, making a brief, cold glitter.
Then it was gone.
Dev exhaled through his teeth. “Probably a feral dog.”
“In the middle of the pass?”
“People dump them everywhere.”
“Dogs don’t do that.”
“What, go on roads?”
“They don’t move like that.”
He said nothing. The lorry rocked slightly, as though someone had brushed against its side.
Mara turned, straining through the rear window into the black box of the cargo bay. The faint emergency bulb mounted near the roof cast a dim red circle over the nearest cylinder tops and the netting. For a moment she saw nothing else. Then something was there, pressed close against the window, near enough that the glass was filmed with a condensation of breath.
Not breath, she realised. Wetness.
A face unfolded from the dark, inches beyond the pane.
It was not deer, not dog, not any animal she had ever seen. The muzzle was long and soft as a seal’s, split by a mouth that opened too wide and too quietly. No eyes that she could make sense of at first, only wet hollows reflecting the red bulb in two dim beadlike points. The skin was the colour of old river stones and slick as if constantly sugared in rain. Around the crown rose a tangle of thin translucent spines, like the ribbed frames of lanterns without paper in them. They chimed faintly when it tilted its head.
Mara made a noise she had no language for.
The creature touched the glass with a paw, and she saw that the paw was almost human in structure, four long fingers ending in black hooked nails, the pads white and tender-looking. It pressed there with a kind of curious patience. Then, with deliberate elegance, it opened its mouth and took a bite out of the red light.
The emergency bulb vanished in a clean, terrible gulp. The dark that followed seemed to rush in to occupy the place where light had been.
Dev swore and fumbled for the torch in the glove compartment. Mara grabbed his wrist.
“Don’t. If it’s outside the cab, don’t open anything.”
“Let go of me.”
The lorry shuddered again. Something had climbed onto the roof.
There was a soft series of taps overhead. Not claws. Fingertips. Or something imitating them.
Dev was breathing too quickly now, anger thinning into panic. “It’s a person. Someone’s playing games.”
“People don’t eat bulbs,” Mara said.
“Then what is it?”
From above came a scrape and a drag, and the roof bowed fractionally under weight. The sound of several little glass chimes rang out, close and intimate. Mara remembered, absurdly, the roadside shrine at the lower valley, with its offerings of batteries and tea candles tucked beneath a painted blue wolf. The old woman who tended it had told her, in a voice half made of spittle and tobacco, never to shine a naked light in Blackglass Pass after rain. It draws the lantern-eater, she had said. It mistakes light for meat. She had laughed then, too.
Dev reached for the door handle.
“No,” Mara said.
But he was already out.
He swung the driver’s door open and the night folded round him. The beam of his torch stuttered over wet road and black rock and the shiny flank of the lorry. For one breath she saw him standing in the frame, one arm raised, his face flattened by fear and disbelief. Then something dropped from above him with a hiss of displaced air and struck his shoulder.
He screamed, high and brutally human.
Mara fumbled the passenger door, threw herself out, and found the torch beam skidding wildly across the road. Dev was on his knees, slamming at his own shoulder, where something pale and slick had attached itself like a leech the size of a child. It had no face she could see, only the round, gaping mouth fixed to him. Every time he struck it, the creature’s body rippled and tightened, sucking harder. He was bleeding from where its mouth had torn at the leather jacket and into flesh beneath.
“Mara,” he gasped. “Help.”
She grabbed the first thing her hand found, which was a reflective warning triangle mounted in a plastic case, and smashed the case against the thing’s side. It recoiled at the sudden flash of the triangle’s mirrored foil, hissing with a noise like steam through cracks. Dev dragged free with a strangled cry, falling backwards on the road. The creature sprang away at once, not into the darkness but towards the lorry roof, where the chimes rang again and another shape answered from the slope above.
There were more of them.
Not a swarm. Not yet. But shapes moved along the cliff road and over the guard wall with eerie confidence, each carrying the same strange tangle of lantern-spines, each pale in the torchlight as if made of river slime and moon milk. They did not rush. They were curious. That was the worst of it. They approached with the measured caution of cats, their long muzzles dipping as they sniffed the air, and all at once Mara understood the folklore better than she wanted to. They were not hunting as wolves hunted. They were coming to see what the light had brought them.
Dev was trying to stand. His shoulder was a torn, wet ruin and his right hand shook so badly he could barely keep hold of the torch.
“The cab,” he said. “Get back in.”
“There are more.”
“Get back in!”
One of the creatures reached the edge of the road, lifted its head, and opened its mouth towards the torch. The beam flickered and thinned as if the light itself were being pulled. Mara felt it in her own eyes, a tugging dizziness, the sensation of being watched from inside.
Then the lorry’s headlights burst on.
A blast of white tore through the pass, startling all of them, including Mara. The cab had come alive at some accidental bump of the ignition key. The creatures froze. Every one of them turned at once towards the burning lamps, bodies taut as if strung. Their spines shivered with a dry glass music.
And then they came all at once.
They did not charge like beasts. They flowed. They dropped from walls, skimmed across the road, hauled themselves beneath the lorry in low, boneless bursts. One struck the left headlamp and the beam winked out with a bright pop of shattered glass. Another leapt onto the bonnet and wrapped itself around the remaining light, jaws working. Mara saw the lamp dim as though the thing were drinking it down. Dev shouted and crawled towards the cab. She hauled him by the collar while the headlights failed one by one, the creatures covering them, swallowing the road in stages.
“Inside,” she said.
He tried. His legs gave under him.
Something landed behind her with a thump. She turned and found one crouched on the road a metre away, head tilted, as if judging her. Up close it was worse. The skin was translucent in places, the colour of glassware left in rainwater. Beneath it, dark branching veins pulsed with a faint pearly luminescence. Its mouth was ringed with tiny grinding plates rather than teeth, designed not for tearing but rasping, as if it fed by scraping away whatever it touched. On its back, the lantern-spines were not decorative but functional. Each filament held a bead of trapped glow, tiny dim suns glimmering along it. It seemed to be carrying stolen light in its body.
Mara did the only thing she could think of. She ripped the torch from Dev’s hand and shone it straight into the creature’s face.
It jerked back, then lunged.
The beam vanished in an instant as the thing snapped its mouth over the torch head. The plastic crackled. Heat flashed over Mara’s fingers. She dropped it and the beast chewed once, twice, swallowing the dark with evident satisfaction.
Dev made a choking sound. “Run.”
There was nowhere to run. The road had become a corridor of black stone and moving pale bodies. The only nearby structure was the maintenance hut embedded in the rock face, its door chained shut with a weathered padlock. Mara remembered seeing it half a mile back, a concrete box used by the road crews in summer. Now it was a hope more than a place.
She half dragged, half shoved Dev towards it. The creatures followed, not hurriedly, but with a dreadful certainty, as if they knew the pass better than any driver. One came close enough to brush the back of Mara’s ankle. Its skin was freezing. The contact left a numb sting, and when she looked down she saw a pale welt shaped like a mouth.
The hut was locked, but the chain ran through rusted brackets. Dev, sobbing now in short angry breaths, jammed his bleeding shoulder against the door while Mara yanked at the padlock. It held. A creature leapt onto the roof and the whole structure gave a sharp metallic crack.
“There’s a bolt,” Dev gasped. “Inside. I saw it through the crack. Move.”
He was not strong enough. Mara braced herself, found the rhythm of panic, and slammed her heel into the padlock again and again until the metal split with a shriek. The chain dropped. They stumbled inside and she hurled the door closed behind them just as something struck it from outside.
The hut was little more than a cupboard with a bench, a dead heater, and old warning posters peeling from the damp walls. There was a narrow window facing the road. Mara shoved the bench under the handle, then turned to Dev.
His face had gone grey. Blood seeped through his jacket and dripped onto the concrete floor. He looked at her as if she had done this to him.
“You said stop,” he muttered.
“Yes. And you wouldn’t.”
He barked a laugh that became a cough. “What do we do now?”
Outside, the lantern-eaters were moving about the hut in a ring of scratching, tapping sound. Every so often one of them would press against the window and peer in, its wet nostrils flaring. The window was covered by a corrugated plastic shield, but the thing’s silhouette showed through as a milky blur, its spines casting fine shadows. Then it opened its mouth towards the pane and the faint emergency bulb above the hut door dimmed to half-brightness before going out completely.
The darkness inside became absolute.
Mara forced herself to breathe. The creatures had no need of ordinary sight. Light was not merely attraction to them. It was food, perhaps, or a sign of prey. But there was a pattern in their movements. They gathered where illumination was strongest and grew sluggish where it failed.
“Dev,” she whispered. “Give me the keys.”
“What for?”
“I need the fuel from the auxiliary lamp kit. There should be flares in the cab. Road crews keep them.”
He stared at her as though she had gone mad.
“We can’t go out there.”
“We can’t stay here. They’re already eating through the power. If they get the emergency radio, we’ve had it.”
He swallowed. “You think flares will help?”
“No. I think they’ll hate them.”
The first strike at the door came hard enough to splinter one panel. Pale fingers, almost human and almost not, slid through the crack and withdrew before Mara could hit them. Dev fumbled in his pocket, wetting his lips with blood. Finally he held out the keys. His hand shook so much she had to take them from his palm.
“I’m coming.”
“You can barely stand.”
“I’m not staying to be eaten in the dark.”
He was right. She hated him for that, and herself for needing him.
They moved together to the back of the hut, where a hatch led to the service recess on the road side. Mara knew the maintenance layout from the route map. The cabinet for flares should be in a steel locker outside the hut, bolted into the wall. They had two choices. Go out through the front into the swarm, or try the hatch and hope the creatures had not thought to check the back.
The hatch stuck. Dev put his good shoulder to it and groaned. Mara heard a sound from the other side, a delicate sniffing. Then a heavy body settled over the hatch, as if the creature above had decided to wait.
“We need noise,” she said.
“What?”
“Something bright and loud. Now.”
He looked around wildly, then seized the dead heater, ripped its casing loose, and exposed the filthy old wiring inside. There was a tiny storage battery still attached. Mara tore the wiring free, sparked it against the metal frame, and for one brief second a spray of blue-white light jumped out.
The creatures outside shrieked.
It was not a roar. It was the sound of glass being struck underwater. The body over the hatch thudded off the roof, and the tapping at the front door began again in agitation, faster now, almost frantic. Mara felt the hut shake as several of them recoiled from the pulse of the spark.
She and Dev hauled the hatch open and spilled into the narrow service recess, a shallow channel between hut and cliff. The night hit them like cold water. The flare locker was exactly where it should have been, three metres away, though one side had already been dented by claws. Mara wrenched it open and grabbed a bundle of road flares and a magnesium emergency torch. Dev took a lighter from the cab keys and hands that did not want to obey.
A creature dropped from the roof and landed on the concrete between them.
It was larger than the others, broad-shouldered and nearly a metre at the withers, its spines long and clear as blown crystal, each one filled with trembling points of stolen light. Its skin bore scars, pale lines along the flank, as if this one had been driven away from fires before. It stared at them with its wet bead eyes and then, very slowly, fixed its mouth on the magnesium torch in Mara’s fist.
She understood, in one sickening instant, that it did not just eat light. It could tell the difference between weak and strong, between ordinary fire and the compact fierce brightness of a flare. It wanted that more than flesh.
Mara struck the first flare.
The line of fire snapped into the dark with a violence that made all three of them flinch. Red sparks spat over the concrete and the creature screamed, a high chattering note of pain and hunger. It lunged not at Mara but at the flare itself, jaws opening wide enough to show ridged plates and a throat that glimmered like wet opal. She thrust it towards the monster’s face. It seized the burning stick in its mouth and bit down.
The reaction was explosive. The flare burst into a shower of sparks and molten red fragments. The creature jerked back, mouth smoking, spines flashing with trapped flame. It reared on its hind limbs and struck Mara full in the chest. She went down hard, the breath blown out of her, and saw its paw descending.
Dev slammed the magnesium torch across its face with both hands.
The white blaze that erupted was blinding. The creature convulsed, spasming as though electrocuted. Its lantern-spines flared all at once, and for an instant the whole recess filled with a ghastly, beautiful light. Every shadow fled. Every wet stone shone. Then the spines burst, each one cracking like thin ice. The thing shrieked again, a sound so full of rage and surprise that Mara thought of a child catching fire. It backed away, blinded, its mouth open and smoking.
The smaller creatures came then, drawn by the flare and the death of their larger kin. They poured over the wall, across the road, into the recess in a blur of pale limbs and chiming spines. Mara scrambled up, seized the remaining flares, and struck them one by one until the space was a corridor of red stars. Dev threw the open locker door against the nearest beast, crushing its head with a wet crunch. Another leapt at him and took the burning flare straight into its throat. It erupted in a flare of oily smoke and dropped, thrashing.
The pass became chaos of light and injury. Every flare bought a few seconds, no more. The creatures screamed and retreated, only to circle back from the edges, their bodies smoking, their hunger plainly greater than their pain. Mara understood that if the flares ran out they would not be able to outlast them. The mountains would keep the dark. The dark would keep the beasts.
“Cylinders,” she gasped, seeing suddenly the lorry parked above the bend. “The gas. If we can get them moving, maybe the noise will clear the road.”
Dev stared at her as though she had lost her senses, but there was no other plan. She dragged him up the slope to the lorry while behind them the lantern-eaters gathered again, cautious now, burning at the edges. One of them darted in and ripped the flare from Mara’s grip, and she had only time to see its face split into a grimace of ecstasy before the light consumed it from within.
At the lorry, Dev fumbled the keys into the ignition. The engine coughed once, twice, then caught. The headlights flared back to life, one remaining lamp glaring into the pass. The nearest creatures screamed and fell back, but the larger one, the scarred leader perhaps, was waiting on the road ahead. Its spines had begun to regrow at the tips, weak little threads of glassy light.
It was not fleeing now. It was guarding the pass.
Mara climbed into the passenger seat and slammed the door. “Drive.”
“We can’t see ahead.”
“Then don’t stop.”
The lorry lurched forward. The beast sprang for the bonnet and landed on it with claws scraping paint. Dev swore and wrenched the wheel. Mara struck the horn, a raw blast that echoed off the cliffs. The creature flinched, but not enough. It lowered its head and bit into the remaining headlamp. Glass burst. Darkness shifted. More creatures raced alongside, their pale bodies flashing in and out of visibility.
The road curved hard at the summit. The lorry took it too fast.
For a moment they were weightless, suspended over the drop beyond the guard wall. Then the tyres regained the road with a howl. The beast on the bonnet lost its balance and slid, hanging by one forelimb. Mara saw its face upside-down, mouth stretched in silent fury, spines catching the last red flare of the emergency torch in her hand. She leaned out through the window and jammed the torch against its throat.
It let go.
The creature fell beneath the wheels with a sound like wet sacks thrown onto stone.
The lorry kept moving, damaged but alive, down the far side of the pass. Behind them the lights of Blackglass shrank to nothing. No pursuit followed. The lantern-eaters did not chase into open country, Mara realised. They belonged to the pass itself, to the black glass cliffs and the pockets of weather and shadow where road lamps broke the night into edible pieces.
Only when they reached the first service station did Dev pull over. He parked beneath a bright sodium canopy that made the whole forecourt look raw and exhausted. Mara sat with her hands on her knees and stared at the vending machine across from her until the shapes in her head settled into ordinary things again.
Dev was bleeding from three places. His face was swollen on one side. He looked older by ten years.
“We need hospital,” she said.
He nodded.
Neither of them got out at first. Around them came the ordinary night of a roadside station. A bored attendant in a fleece jacket smoked beneath the eaves. A family in a hatchback argued over crisps. A trucker hosed mud off his boots. None of them knew what had crossed the pass behind Mara and Dev, what had eaten the light from the road and the courage from their lungs. Or perhaps they did know, and simply kept it to themselves the way mountain people keep weather stories.
Mara looked at the lorry windscreen. It was spattered with pale smears where the beast had pressed and slid. Stuck in one corner of the glass was a shard of something clear and curved, like a broken fingernail or a sliver from a lantern spine.
She reached towards it, then stopped.
“Don’t touch that,” Dev said quietly.
His voice was hardly his own now. “We’ll bin it.”
Mara watched the shard glimmer under the forecourt lights.
For a second, just one, it seemed to answer back. A tiny, hungry glint, no bigger than a fingernail moon, but unmistakably alive.
Then it went dark.
Monsters & Creatures
