The Stone

CHAPTER 1

It was an alleyway much like any number of other alleyways in the neighborhood. And that neighborhood was much like other neighborhoods in the environs that were part and parcel of the city of New York.

There were doors in the buildings along either side of this alley, the rear entrances of shops that graced the streets on the public side. Paper littered the pavement even though there were some dumpsters placed along the way. And boxes heaped up here and there tumbled here and there from where they had been set in nice stacks a couple of days before.

A stray cat howled from somewhere high above. Either it was stuck or it was calling for something it felt it was owed.

Or for company.

Cats.

But the life in that alleyway wasn’t only cats. Other things stirred within it, things that scurried along in the shadows cast on the ground, shadows cast even at night.

These creatures scuttled along the low byways of the alley heedless of anything but their hunger. They looked for anything that would satisfy it.

A stray dog appeared waddling its way past the dumpsters. It sniffed at something on the ground and nudged it with its nose. There was a thud down the way a bit and the dog scooted quickly away.

There were apartments that people lived in above it. Lines crisscrossed the air from the second floor up with clothes stretched out across them. The people who lived in this part of town were not those who made the money that would allow them to live uptown. These were the workers—or not—of the city. And they lived in this particular area pretty much as everyone else has lived in this area for a hundred years or more. Small rooms or apartments, hot in the summer and cold most winters, the inhabitants changing frequently, some of them skipping out when their hold on the apartment eventually ran out for whatever reason.

Another cat meowed and another dog barked somewhere. It might have been the same dog as before now frustrated at not being able to find something to eat. Or it might have been from some apartment above. Or it might have been a new arrival.

All of this activity was natural for this alleyway, much as it was natural for other alleyways like it. Life was in full evidence there though it was mostly animal after dark. It was of the same kind from night to night.

Except, that is, for tonight.

Right now.

There was a buzzing that suddenly sounded in the alleyway. It was like the sound of electricity arcing along some kind of short. It was an odd sound for the place, an unnatural sound, and it grew louder and louder and louder.

There was one section of the alley where the brick of a building was exposed. It was between two shop back entrances.

As the sound grew louder, the brick in that spot underwent a change. It began to shimmer and it looked as if the bricks themselves had become some kind of fluid. Soon they went from varying degrees of opaqueness to greater and greater transparency.

Finally, it became like glass and light flashed from it and out into the alley.

It looked like the screen of a large TV showing something in that alley.

Quickly, however, there was a loud tearing sound and the center of the screen bulged for a moment and then spit something out.

A large something.

A figure.

That figure landed on the ground splashing, as it hit, in a puddle of water that had gathered when someone threw a basin of it out from somewhere above.

The figure lay for a moment and then sat up shaking its head.

The head of a man.

The figure was a man—a young man, actually, of some seventeen or eighteen years of age.

He shook his head as he sat there as if trying to get some sense into it or some nonsense out of it.

Or to come to his senses.

Suddenly, he stopped and sprang to his feet. And, just as suddenly, a scream erupted from his throat beginning small but quickly getting louder and louder until it echoed down the alley.

There were words in the scream.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!”

Something must have cleared then because the young man suddenly took off running down the alley until he disappeared.

Another cat meowed and another dog barked and the alleyway became as it was again. But nothing stirred after that, nothing in the shadows or anywhere else for that matter. There had been too much disturbance in those few moments that these creatures wary now. They would be silent until they felt that their world had returned once more.

But the screams that had been heard in that alleyway, the screams of that young man, could still be heard in the distance.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!”

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