The Orphan by Christopher Ransom

dripping red blood, this one was disturbing for its simple, haunting intensity and terrible lack of distinguishing features.
    Overall the face was pale white with small, glossy black eyes, the head shape somewhat long or oval, with a wide lipless mouth and a flat nose with two small holes in it. It had no hair, only the smallest ears, and a sharp chin. It wasn’t snarling or growling or sticking out its tongue, and in many ways had no personality at all. To Adam, it looked like a pitiful, lost, utterly dead thing. Almost alien, but not an actual alien like the other alien masks with tentacles and multiple sets of eyes. There was something human yet unidentifiably evil in it. It had no feelings, no goal or clear role in the world, and he doubted it had ever appeared in a movie or comic book. Staring at it, he was sure it had no purpose but to inflict pain and cause death.
    How it might take life, he did not know. Probably through some deceptively powerful psychic act, like sucking the life force out of you by sheer willpower alone.
    Like all the other creatures, this one had a name. It was printed right there above the product number, and its name was as unsettlingly plain as its looks. Adam didn’t even know what it meant, but it didn’t sound cool, like Wolfman, Creature From the Black Lagoon, Scarecrow or Frankenstein. Difficult to remember, a strange name whose meaning he could not quite grasp.
    The Nocturnal.
    Adam thought it had something do with sleeping, or the darkness. Late-night fear. The kind he had been living with for days, weeks, maybe years.
    Whatever The Nocturnal meant, he didn’t like it.
    Adam put the magazine away, the crackers he had eaten now a dry sour mash stuck somewhere between his stomach and his throat.
    He remembered his pocket knife. There was nothing else at the bottom of the pack, but his fingers hit upon a zipper, opening to a small inside pocket. Inside the pocket was a knife, but it wasn’t his pocket knife. The knife Adam remembered owning was small, maybe three inches long, with a wood-grain handle and brass ends. Inside there were only two blades, and while they weren’t very sharp, he trusted it, the knife had felt at home in his pocket, as if it possessed some special powers or had come to him as a gift from a benevolent source.
    This wasn’t a pocketknife at all. It had black steel handles with holes in them, and when he raised it, one handle fell open on a hinge, revealing a five-inch, smoke-steel blade with a tip so fine it might have been a needle. Etched into the base of the blade was a butterfly. Adam didn’t like holding it. It looked like a knife made for nothing besides stabbing people. Viciously. He liked it even less when he rubbed the base of the blade with his thumb and felt something grainy and dry stuck to it, like flakes of rust. Some of it came off like powder on his fingers and when he looked closer, he knew it was dried blood.
    Whose knife was this? Adam didn’t think it belonged to him, but it must. Why else would he have it? But if so, whose blood was this? He didn’t remember stabbing anyone, and how could you forget something like that? Maybe he had cut himself playing with it. But that felt like a lie of the sort you tell yourself to keep from freaking out. Someone had used this knife to hurt someone else and, along with the picture of The Nocturnal mask, it made him feel sick and afraid.
    He put the knife back, careful to fold the blade up and latch the handles together so that he wouldn’t stab himself running with it in the pack. He was done scavenging for the night, but his fingers brushed against something in the pocket, smaller, also metal. They felt like keys and made the same clinking sound.
    He took them out. They were rings, three of them hooped together. Gold-colored, but probably not real gold, because they looked like ordinary hardware, something you would use to hang something on the wall, or lock something together. Each ring was about an