Fright Night -2011- -

She wasn’t wrong.

“One year. Hide well.”

Charley picked up his phone. It was fully charged now. 6:02 AM. He scrolled to a contact he’d never thought he’d use again.

A soft thump came from the living room. Then another. Rhythmic. Like someone dropping a heavy suitcase on carpet. fright night -2011-

Jerry’s apartment.

The shared wall was gone. Not broken— gone . As if erased. Beyond it stretched not the neighbor’s living room but a vast, circular chamber of black marble veined with red. Torches flickered along curved walls. And in the center, on a throne made of shattered headstones, sat a woman.

“I’m going to need an army.”

When the sun rose over North Gate Terrace, there was no scorch mark. No collapsed wall. Just his living room, undisturbed, and a single drop of black oil on his coffee table.

Outside, a crow landed on the railing of Jerry’s old balcony. It had mirror-bright eyes.

Charley jolted awake not from a dream, but from the absence of sound. The Vegas suburbs were never this quiet. No sprinklers. No distant freeway hum. Even the refrigerator’s groan had died. He reached for his phone: 3:33 AM. Dead battery. She wasn’t wrong

“I’m not a real vampire killer, Charley. I told you. I just play one on stage.”

Tonight, the silence broke.

“Charles Brewster,” she said. Her voice was the scrape of a coffin lid. “You killed my fledgling. My son .” It was fully charged now

Charley Brewster had been a coward for three weeks.

He knew this because every night since he’d driven a sharpened broom handle through Jerry the vampire’s heart, he’d woken up at 3:33 AM drenched in a cold sweat that smelled faintly of copper. The nightmares weren’t of Jerry—the suave, grinning monster who’d posed as his neighbor. They were of the silence after. The way Jerry’s skin had flaked away like burnt paper, the way his ashes had spelled out a single, winding word on the carpet: Soon.