When Lightning Wakes the Beast

By day, Mitchell Felding is calm, ordinary, invisible. By night, when storms crack the sky, something inside him wakes, slips into the suburbs, and leaves behind another body—while he returns home unchanged.

Mitchell Felding looks like the kind of man neighbours trust without thinking. He keeps his lawn tidy. He listens more than he speaks. He waits patiently in queues, nods politely, and holds doors open. To Samantha, his wife, he is calm to the point of gentleness—a man who absorbs tension rather than creates it. He appears composed, reasonable, almost forgettable. And that is precisely the problem.

Because Mitchell is not empty. He is contained.

Storms change everything.

When thunder rolls low across the suburbs and lightning fractures the sky, something inside him stirs—ancient, electric, hungry. It does not arrive suddenly. It wakes slowly, stretching against the limits of flesh and restraint, pressing at the seams of the man Mitchell pretends to be. The Beast doesn’t scream. It doesn’t rage. It listens. It feeds on pressure. On charge. On the air thickening before the strike.

Lightning fuels it. Each flash sharpens its focus. Each crack of thunder loosens another moral anchor.

On those nights, Mitchell leaves the house quietly. No arguments. No visible fractures. Just a man stepping into rain-soaked streets while his wife sleeps, unaware that calm has shed its skin. The Beast moves through backyards, alleyways, poorly lit footpaths. It doesn’t hunt randomly. It selects. It observes. It acts with precision that feels practised, almost ritualistic.

By morning, Mitchell is home again. Showered. Reset. He makes coffee. Reads headlines. Listens to Samantha talk about her day. Somewhere in the city, police tape flutters in damp air. Another body is discovered. Another act of violence without a clear motive. The news reports it carefully, cautiously, as if language itself might provoke something worse.

There is no evidence linking Mitchell Felding to the crime. No witnesses. No gaps in his timeline that can’t be explained away by insomnia or late-night walks. He mourns with everyone else. He shakes his head at the cruelty of it all.

But storms keep coming.

And the pattern grows harder to ignore.

Is the Beast a separate entity, or merely Mitchell stripped of inhibition and consequence? Is the lightning a trigger, or an excuse? The story refuses easy answers. What it offers instead is discomfort—the suggestion that monsters don’t always hide in shadows or forests or myth. Sometimes they sleep beside you. Sometimes they share your surname.

And sometimes, they wait patiently for the sky to break.

–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)