Metalmouth chuckled softly to himself as he watched the two frightened teenagers flee from the woods. He hadn't been able to catch them, unfortunately, but he often enjoyed scaring the hell out of them just as much as he enjoyed tearing the flesh from their bones with his vicious teeth.
And besides, there were always new victims coming his way. It didn't seem to matter how many he killed or frightened off, there was always a new batch of idiots of all ages ready to try and prove his existence or non-existence. He figured he would get another chance to gnaw on a human corpse or two within a week or so.
In the meantime, he made his way back to his cave. Morning was coming already, and so it was time for the blessed release of sleep. He checked a few of his traps along the way to find that a single rabbit had been caught within a metal pincher that closely resembled his own steel grill. He gave the helpless animal a shark's-tooth grin before snapping its neck and pulling its leg from between the trap's teeth.
Back at his home, a cave set deep in the woods where no one ever went, Metalmouth rubbed his full belly in contentment. Why he had ever thought cooked food was the way to go, he couldn't rightly understand, and as he idly pondered the situation, he felt his eyes slowly begin to droop.
If he had taken the time to think about it, this would have seemed a bit odd. Normally it took a frustrating amount of time for him to get to sleep, since the piercing strains of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" that constantly quivered through his metal teeth and drove him mad always kept him twisting and turning for hours before slumber overtook him. But this morning, the wailing tone of Cyndi Lauper's voice seemed almost . . . soothing.
Just before he drifted off into dreams of rending the skin of teenagers and 80's pop bands, Metalmouth reached over to the rock where he kept his precious few personal possessions, picked up the paintball mask sitting there, and slipped it on. His eyes closed completely and darkness overtook him moments later.
With a vigor unusual for a man who had just fallen asleep, Metalmouth stood up and stretched out his muscles. He looked down at his hands, curling the fingers into claws, then reached up and grabbed his mask at the top and bottom. With virtually no effort whatsoever, he snapped off the lower half of the mask.
A malicious grin spread across his face as the first rays of morning light filtered in through the mouth of the cave to reflect on his tinted goggle eyes and his glistening metal fangs. Neither killer had ever taken anyone out during the day before.
It sounded . . . fun.
I do not dream.
Or, to be more precise, I do not remember my dreams, if I do in fact dream. It is a minor curiosity to me, and as such I have looked into it from time to time. There are others, it seems, who are much the same, but even they will remember a dream every once in a while. I remember none at all, and the very concept of dreaming seems strange and alien to me.
I have formulated several different hypotheses concerning this state of affairs. Perhaps my brain truly is set up differently from those of other people, and part of that is that I do not require dreams as part of my natural sleep cycle. Perhaps I truly am part of that segment of humanity that only remembers their dreams rarely, and my one or two remembered dreams have simply not yet made their appearance.
The hypothesis that I find most probable, however, is that I do not need to remember my dreams because my waking life is already strange, abnormal, and bordering on the surreal as it is. This is only to be expected, I am sure, when one is a serial killer who only kills other killers.
How appropriate it is, then, that the dream I had last night was about a killer other than myself.
Yes, a dream, and I am just as surprised as anyone might be, if they knew of my true nature. And yet it did not feel like I have been told dreams feel like. Description of the phenomenon eludes even my considerable vocabulary, and because of this, I am unsure of which hypothesis I hold that it supports. Indeed, I question whether or not it was in fact a dream at all.
The killer was a tall man, thin but wiry, much like myself. His muscles, where I could see them through the holes in his ragged clothing, were knotted in a way that belied their size, showing the barely restrained strength that they contained. His hair was an unruly shock of grey with thin streaks of black still running through it, and his face . . .
This is where the surreality typical of dreams seems to take over. His face contained the normal implements - ears, nose, eyebrows, and such - but two of the features were strange, distended from the usual form. The eyes appeared to be flat and glassy, almost like the lenses of a pair of goggles. And underneath them, his mouth was a wide slash of jagged metal, stained with blood.
I cannot recall the exact actions taken by myself or this man during the dream, but I do remember hearing the faint strains of a song that ran through the background of the entire experience. I am not familiar with many songs overall and so did not recognize it or the artist, but the lyrics revolved around girls and how they wanted to have fun.
Lost in my own thoughts, it takes me a few moments to realize that Jennifer has settled down beside me on the commons bench. We make the standard pleasantries, then she begins to tell me of the latest in murdering news.
I had already heard of the nearly-legendary and almost-certainly-mythical killer known as Metalmouth, a once-human monster that hunts teenagers in the forest just outside of Lawndale proper, but after only a short bit of research, thinking that he might be worth hunting down for my own nighttime activities, I had quickly given up upon learning that all the evidence concerning him pointed toward it simply being an urban legend.
Jennifer's news forces me to reconsider my initial assumptions, however, as she tells me that two teenagers were found dead in their rooms, their bodies covered in evenly spaced bite marks. Unusual for those deaths sometimes attributed to Metalmouth, the murders had taken place in the afternoon and outside the forest, within Lawndale itself.
Still, it may not be the urban legend in the flesh. I highly doubt that it is, and it seems likely that it is simply a copycat killer getting off on making people think he might be Metalmouth, taking his rampage out of the woods. It hardly matters. All I know is that the darkness is rising within me, and I can feel the leading edge of the hunger start to sink its own steely fangs into my heart.
Whoever this new killer is, I will find him. And when I do, he will wish he was still just a myth.