Cinder

Friday night. The end of another week. Jill would rather be down the pub with her friends, but being a student often means taking the money whenever it's offered. That means the odd babysitting job every now and then.

The Comptons are going out and have asked Jill to babysit their young son, William. An easy night's work, if not exactly exciting. Even so, events soon suggest that not everything is quite right...

Perhaps it's just the season.

The short, autumnal, days often make the evenings feel darker, lonelier. The growing darkness awakens that instinctive hunger in all living things, to seek out warmth and comfort so as to better ward against the last, chill breaths of a dying year.

We are but moths in the long dark of existence.

And so too are the dead.