Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Monsters — Monster whose brain is full of noise. So much noise
You mistake it, at first glance, for someone walking around in the gloom, bent almost double. It slowly rounds a bend in the winding path between the trees, as you sit on the bench and reluctantly persuade yourself that going home is a good idea; bent head first. Your initial impulse is concern, to ask hey, are you okay?
But then it doesn't stop rounding the corner. Legs, but — more torso. Entirely too much. And more legs. The trenchcoat it wears at the front — to look more human, presumably; mimicry? A lure? — falls awkwardly to the sides of its...continued body, the soft bulbs of it, like a centipede's segments rendered in mammalian flesh, each with an all-too-human set of legs on the sides of it, angled forward from the hip like the hind legs on a dog, creeping on a sine-wave procession of tiptoes.
You freeze.
When it opens its mouth, it's not like a human one; it's like the orange-wedge opening of a Muppet. The lower jaw stays still, the top of the head hingeing up to show off — well, you shy away from looking too closely. You see the sheen of wetness, the gleam of teeth. And it—
It seems wrong to say it makes a noise. It seems, somehow, as though the noise was inside it all along, gated behind its closed lips, merely unleashed. A tide of white noise, the roar of an analogue television rendering the empty gulfs between the narrow-frequencied threads of human meaning.
It opens its mouth only a little, at first, and the noise rises around you from everywhere at once, a soft hiss. Then it opens up wider, wider; the scream-hiss of a volume knob turned up, ramped-up gain on the absence of signal, a cheese-grater of sound, driving everything out of your head, a revulsion-nirvana of destroyed thought.
It lasts — you don't know. A second? Forever, minus a second? When it closes its mouth and puts the noise away inside it, you are still on the bench, and it is still falling to night. You still haven't moved, or made any sound of your own.
You think, perhaps, it hasn't noticed you.
A pigeon crashes to the ground nearby, stunned and struck immobile mid-flight. It creeps over; kneels its forefront set of legs, leaning on its arms, and stretches its face down.
It lips at the stunned bird; and then disappears it with the characteristic snack-vanishing head-jerk of animals everywhere.
If it sees you at all; sees your flinch at the bird-fall, or the snap of its mouth around it and the brief bulge of its throat, it shows no sign. You're still sitting there after it tiptoes unconcernedly onward, winding its entire length away amid the darkening trees.