The Face and The Girl: Part One
By SW Carter
Edited by EnvyMachinery
Dearest distinguished family and friends, I have kept great truths from you. At first, I thought keeping such truths to be for your betterment. Alas, I have put you all in grave danger. By the mere act of reading, this you too now join me in my personal revelations of great terror, but it is a necessary journey you must take. This horror began innocently enough outside the mall by a quaint little bus stop.
Trying to force my boredom to pass, since I have lived in this boring little town of Colorado Springs all my life, I tend to visit the mall. I gauge the prices on expensive pieces of workout equipment I will never purchase or use. I gaze hungrily at the food at the mall’s center I do not wish to afford myself. The thought that such a place would test my sanity had not occurred to me. No, even then, I humored that maybe I was already losing my mind. In my arrogance I knew nothing of the true loss of reality.
Those that know me are aware of my bitter isolation. I keep to myself, a man of few words and subtle action. If I had only kept to that creed, I would still be in that warm silence. Silence is not afforded to the bold, and upon occasion I drank the wines of bravery; it ruined the very world I exist in.
Yes, let me stop doting on. You want to know of The Ruiner. Let me tell you, I met this entity when I abandoned the mall for the warmth of the sun outside. In my usual slouch, I made my slow trot up the long hill in the direction of my apartment. There I saw a very normal sight, t'was a girl at a bus stop.
This woman presented herself as a crude sort. Somewhere in her twenties, with little regard to her makeup, she draped herself in grays and blacks on a hot, sunny day. Women of darker taste have never been my fancy, but boredom gave way to bravery. I descended upon the bus stop, eyeing the target of the conversation that I hoped to be the death of the daily tedium. It wasn’t long until I noticed something of a peculiar nature.
Normally, when you approach a human being, there is a certain comfort to be found. Such a thing usually comes from identifying their face and making out their expressions. However, the closer I got to arriving at my destination, the stranger her face became. It’s as if her face was melting in the hot sun, like every fiber of her being was made of clay-like substance. I tell you this, but I think the truth may simply be my mind doesn’t wish to remember. Mayhap, it protects itself from learning more than necessary. Either way, what I saw gave me an instant feeling of panic and great disgust. The emotions not usually associated with a gentle, sunny day back and forth caused my feet to stop in place about 20 paces from the bus stop.
Suddenly, she turned away, and I heard a gentle sob. By the direction I had approached, I assumed she failed to notice me. Now, snapped out of my disgust, a great guilt washed over me. I feared the girl had noticed me, and now I had caused her great discomfort. I went to apologize, closing the gap of 15 paces and opening up with a gentle “Excuse me, are you okay?” As I spoke and reached out my hand, every fiber of my being began to scream in a foreign sort of way.
I want you, dear friends and family, to picture something with me for a moment. Do you recall as a child seeing a small, disgusting creature, like an insect or a rodent? The sudden terror that rose up inside of you, telling you that you must leave? I can best describe the feeling as something like that, but I recall it being so intense the blood rushed to my head and I froze in place. Every limb had seized as if suddenly dropped into the freezing waters of the South Pole. That wasn’t the worst of it, for I remember the silence. The innocent silence I have spent most of my life in, now surrounded me and began crushing my very soul. She had stopped sobbing, and my friends, never had I wished more to hear someone cry.
Then it happened, the great ruining of my mind. Do you recall seeing frames missing from old movies, the quick and unsettling movements of actors? That’s the best way I can describe the movement of her head slowly snapping back towards me, every vertebrae in her neck cracking as I choked back a long, gasping sob. The sloppy makeup wasn’t there, and the melting face became mysteriously absent. There wasn’t anything there; it was a black hole of nothing. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I swear to you no one can be insane enough to imagine what I very vividly remember now.
Out of that deep, abyssal pit of her face, a pale hand reached from the black portal. The flaky, dead texture of her skin reached out towards me and her long finger nails scratched my face. I shut my eyes in a whimper as hot blood ran down my chin, and when I opened my eyes the creature now stood before me. Except now it was the girl I saw at a distance, with her first face now twisted in a horrible smile, lips curling far too high and far too wide.
I don’t recall screaming, but according to the people that found me my screeching was quite hysterical. My memory cut from that moment and I don’t recall anything till several hours after the incident. Police arrived and I let them know I just left a horror movie, scraping my face after a tumble in the dark. I know what I saw. For now, every night when I sleep, I feel something very lightly stroking my cheek and giving a dark cackle from the abyssal corners of my room. If you see the girl at the bus stop, please walk the other way. Let it end with me.
Unfortunately, that’s not the last curse I suffer. I plan to reveal much more, but I have to rest. She tells me so
