Last Light on a White Night
That's no bear...
This short story was written for the NYC Midnight short story challenge of 2025.
Rules: Create a 400 word story with the scare, using the character and the action.
Morning comes and Dorian wakes with the urge to draw. These dreams have been getting increasingly intrusive, yet he can’t escape the nagging feeling of the truth within them.
Dorian doodles on a scrap of receipt from the day before on his nightstand. The image forms to the best of his memory, each stroke of the pen bringing the surreal cloud into greater focus.
The moon.
A spatter of ink sprays from the last stroke. Picking up the receipt closer to see the lines cast through the yellow lamp glow, he pauses—a notification chirps, requesting he report to the abandoned quarry.
Flashes of dream come in pieces when Dorian surveys the scene. Other reporters arrive, but only he has seen this before.
“That was no bear,” a colleague utters nearby.
Dorian kneels next to the body, jotting notes on his tablet, near a scan of his doodle of the moon. “Bears don’t typically remove heads,” he says.
Nearly a month passes after Dorian’s flimsy report of a “bear attack” at the old quarry.
Lies.
Each dream becomes increasingly foreboding, dripping in scarlet, and framed in the glow of night. A grim prophecy. He wants the truth… he needs the truth. If his instinct is right, catalogued evidence of cryptid activity would etch Dorian’s name in history.
Any reporter worth his salt would put boots on the ground.
Nightfall comes and Dorian’s boots scratch over loose rock in the quarry’s lot. The full moon looms overhead, bathing the site in shades of blue. A can of bear mace is clipped to his belt, just in case his dreams had steered him wrong.
In the quiet, every small sound thumps his nerves like a jackhammer, and his hand hovers over the can of mace. A low growl ululates in the tree line, and the can’s cold steel presses against his palm.
The trees bend, birthing the thing that found him: a creature in a bone mask. Thin, pallid flesh slides over gangly limbs as it crawls forward, dressed in motley fur patches. It stands on sinewy haunches, seven feet… no, eight. Dorian swipes the mace.
“Definitely no bear.” A man points at Dorian’s loose head among white stone dust. Red wires leak from the neck stump, and a mace can foams near the body.
“Did you know him?” a woman asks.
“Yeah. Reporter for Black River Times.”
~END
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