The creature crept through the night. It was nothing more than a shapeless mass of flesh, bone, and fat. A gray eyeball bulged from the top. Pores the size of nickels puffed out bursts of foul-smelling gas. The creature was satisfied.
The last house it had visited held a small, tender family of good people. The father and mother worked until late afternoon, while the child went to school in the morning and spent the afternoons with a woman who handled the household chores and looked after him.
In the end, when the creature finished what it had come to do inside that home, the cleaning lady would return the following week to find only streaks of blood everywhere, with no trace of the family. The police, however, discovered the remains of a foot gnawed down like a corn cob.
As the rotting mound of full stomach oozed through the city's dark streets, like a deformed slug the size of a poodle, the monster left behind putrid scraps, and soon hunger would strike again.
It needed new food.
For two weeks, the creature lay dormant, plastered beneath a garbage can. Anyone who saw it—and didn't have the misfortune of trying to touch it—would simply think it was waste fused to the metal of the bin. When it awoke, the monster was ravenous once more.