The cellar was a crawl space, barely four feet high. They pressed themselves against the dirt wall, holding their breath. The floorboards above groaned. The creature was inside the church. It wasn’t walking. It was… sniffing. A wet, rhythmic snuffling, like a dog tracking a scent.
“…Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those eyes?”
A body. Or what was left of one. A man in a tattered postal worker’s uniform, his back arched at an unnatural angle. His eyes were gone—two wet, hollow sockets staring at the stars. And from his open mouth, the song continued, a recording stitched into his vocal cords. Jeepers Creepers
“Jeepers creepers, where’d ya get those peepers…”
The last thing they heard, fading into the static of the radio, was a single, scratchy line: The cellar was a crawl space, barely four feet high
“Found you,” it purred.
“Nowhere, apparently.” Riley grabbed her phone. No signal. The map on her lap showed a dashed line—an old county road decommissioned in the 1980s. “We walk. There was a church back about a mile.” The creature was inside the church
They ran. The song followed them, not from the corpse, but from above—a rhythmic flap, flap, flap of leathery wings. Riley looked up once. Mistake.