Day 387

It lives in bark, right in the creases, in plain sight all the time.
Each night it peels itself from around the tree's form and slips silently to the floor.
When it moves it looks like veins, pulsating black veins that seek out your warmth.
If you don't know what to look for you'd never see it sliding underneath the leaf strewn ground.
Gradually it works its way towards you, striking as you stand unaware and pulling you down.
It leaves no trace, your body would be found cold, bloated and covered in wet leaves.

There's no real way to tell if there is one nearby.
With no eyes to be felt staring at you and no scent or sound to give away its hiding place.
Fortunately their appearance leaves them few places to stay in our bustling concrete cities.
They have been seen around particularly dense gardens, waiting among the thick foliage.
Some have even been seen trying to blend in with brickwork but they never stay there.
Perhaps they feed on the trees as well as warm blooded beings?

They have never been caught alive before, which confirms this hypothesis at least.
The last specimen (#174) managed to survive a record five weeks in a reptile-styled terrarium.
We'd taken a snipping from one we caught feeding on a stray dog in the city park.
When given a decent supply of water and heat it seemed to pose no threat to humans.
Though we've since guessed it could be due to age rather than contentment.
After it caught Doctor Thornby while he was misting it our approach quickly changed.

We measures the length of its needle-like spines that drew out the air from the body.
With the largest at almost twelve inches we knew that would be our minimum distance.
Not that it helped, in the end we lost most of our team one way or another.
Jakarta tripped and fell into the specimen tank, Rivero got too close, Wilson went the same way.
In the end with just myself and my assistant LaSelle we decided to close the lab down.
While we were closing the doors for the final time, we heard the sound of a window shatter.

Reports of it have come from miles around, too many to be just one.
Are they coming to get the other specimens or is this an invasion?
Despite our attempts at a lengthy study we barely scraped the surface of these creature's potential.
Their adaptability can make them practically impossible to find when they want.
Damn them and damn us for keeping so many clippings.
And thrice damn their growth, they'll outgrow us all soon enough.