Stop Gap to Brighton
an excerpt

He kept his eyes fixed on the moon, hoping to see whatever the creature was again, but the movement teased in the corner of his eye to the right, and Auley had to peer in to the darkness. Straining his eyes, it occurred to him that it might be an owl flying over the gardens in search of mice, which had been attracted by the birdseed his mother and their neighbour put out all year round.
There it was again, the darting movement just on the edge of sight. And again, and another - this time crossing the face of the moon in plain sight! Were there two owls hunting over the garden? He had seen two or three bats catching moths over the trees and bushes before, but these shapes had been bigger than bats.
Then, quite suddenly, three or four distinct shapes flew across Auley’s line of sight, making him jump and call out.
His mother, hearing him call, came in to the room and over to the window, putting on the bedroom light as she passed through the doorway.
“What’s the matter, love?” she asked, placing a hand gently on his shoulder.
“I saw something,” Auley replied, still peering out of the window, trying to see past his own reflection in the glass. “Something was flying in the garden. More than one thing, and they were biggish. It looked weird.”
“Perhaps it was an owl,” his mother answered, looking out with him, her face a reflection in the bedroom window just above his. “Owls can look pretty strange in the moonlight, and they fly quite fast when they’re hunting, so you might have thought there was more than one. Anyway, I can’t see anything now.”
She had no sooner said this when a... something flew right in front of the window and hovered there, close, and in plain sight. It was a stick-thin, straggly, human-like creature no bigger than a cat. It had a small pinched face that immediately reminded Auley of the pictures he had seen of representations of Jack Frost - all angular and sharp. Twig-like arms and bony legs stuck out of tattered rags, and the feet were bare with toes like gnarled twigs. All the skin visible in the light was a nut brown in colour. The tatters of cloth it wore looked like they had once been parts of whole garments, but which had rotted and become threadbare, the colour bleached out by the sun, wind and weather. The creature appeared to be balanced in an awkward sort of crouch on a stick similar in length to a walking cane, and which somehow seemed to be flying.
As Auley stared at it, the creature looked straight at him and grinned, the tiny little needle-sharp teeth in its mouth glinting in the light from the bedroom that spewed out in to the garden.
“There, do you see that?!” Auley almost shouted in shock, pointing directly towards the creature hovering on the stick outside the window.
“See what?” his mother asked, her head bobbing this way and that to try and see whatever it was that Auley was looking at. But she seemed to look straight through it, as if it wasn’t there!
The creature looked briefly at his mother, then back at Auley. It gave him one last sneering grin and then shot off upwards, out of sight over the roof of the house. Auley was just about to babble something to his mother - to try and describe to her what he had seen right in front of them - when it came swooping back in to sight, chewing something, a headless bat clearly grasped in its small, claw-like hand. In a blink of an eye it was off out of sight once more, darting in to the darkness of the garden shadows before Auley had even had time to react in disgust at the sight of the half-chewed dead bat.