Their appearance was horrifying. Their heads looked like human faces forcibly transplanted onto bat skulls. Pale and bloodless like a corpse, their skin was stretched tight, with blue veins visible like thin threads over their faces.

When they opened their mouths, their cheeks split apart, revealing hundreds of razor-sharp teeth. Their tongues, forked like a snake’s, dripped with black saliva that fell incessantly from their tips.

Instead of hair, they had writhing tendrils sprouting from their heads, moving as if alive. Their torsos were grotesquely elongated, a fusion of a human upper body with the lower half of a bat. …