The Face.

I'm not scared. The lie kept me walking. The stench of mouldy wallpaper slapped me in the face. Creaks followed my steps, barely silenced by what was once a carpet.

Was I stumbling down the corridor, or did the floor move? Impossible to say. My breath scared me a few times. Its ragged sound like whispers in the night. I knew it was there. The tingling in my neck, down my back, was becoming painful. My entire being wanted to check. To turn around and peek over my shoulder. The face would be right where it always was. Lidless, with a smile plastered on its pasty skin. A smile that would be way too big.

It would be a little bit closer. It always was -- every time I gave in and watched. A few millimetres closer.

It started many years ago. I was just a child then. We had just moved into a new big house with many rooms and a gigantic chimney. It was painted white and had a slate roof. The curtains were green and the shutters too. My bedroom was on the first floor and I could see the wheat fields in the distance. I thought -- we all thought -- this house was a blessing. Living in the countryside, near farms and a forest, was the dream. We even had an old wishing well in the garden. My little sister loved the rose bushes and the lavender growing strong everywhere. I like climbing trees and catching butterflies. But that only lasted a moment.

I noticed the face one morning while playing in the forest behind the house. Not too far from home, of course. Just past the first oak tree. I’d had that feeling you have when someone's looking at you. That tickle on your neck, like a crawling insect. I had looked, and there it was. Far away enough that I couldn't quite make out its features. That face wasn't engraved in my brain yet.

I had tried to talk to it. I'd called out, asking who it was. What it wanted. Was it a neighbour? Did someone get lost? Was it a thief? Or maybe a pervert?

"Why are you yelling like that?" my mother had asked, worried. Her hands still covered in soap, her apron wet. She must’ve been doing the dishes. She stood on the porch, the red of her shirt like a blood splatter against the white walls.

"There's a person back there! They're staring, and they aren't moving. It's scary!" I said, pointing at that figure hidden deep in the bushes.

"A person?" Mum got down the steps, barefoot. She shivered a bit when dew coloured the legs of her jeans. "Sweety, I don't see anyone. Are you sure it's not just a shape on the bark?"

But it was still there. Far away. Despite the distance, I knew it was unblinking. I knew it was fixating on me. I knew it was waiting for something. "They're there. I swear!"

My mum never called me a liar. Even when I was clearly messing with reality. She held the belief that your feelings are never fake. So even if she couldn't see the "person", she took my apparent fear quite seriously. She didn't understand why I was scared, but something upset me enough that I saw a phantom face.

"Okay, well... you should come in, then. That way, they won't be peeping on you. You’ll be safe."

From that day on, for a reason I couldn't fathom, that face had followed me. I didn't notice it was getting closer at first. I just knew that wherever I was, whenever I checked, it was there. I could see it through my classroom window, through the glass-paned doors on the train, and far away in the crowd during festivals. Night or day, it was there.

I started dreaming about it. I stood in front of mirrors and it was right behind me. Smiling like a maniac and yelling things I didn’t hear. All I saw was my face and that face. It always ended with my reflection breaking down. I’d wake up covered in tears and sweat. I had to learn to fall back asleep quietly so I didn’t bother everyone in the house.

Days, weeks, and even months passed, and it dawned on me. The face would catch up one day. And I would die.

My mum and dad had spoken about it a lot, of course. My hallucinations. I kept telling them about that face, and they couldn't see it. They never saw it. But since my feelings were true, I needed help. They sent me to a few doctors. No one ever found anything physically wrong with me. My brain was healthy, and everything else with it. Despite the tiredness, obviously. So, I went to see a few therapists. They all had different theories. A few got a bit mad at me when I said the face wasn’t going away. My mother got even angrier and fired them.

I decided to stop talking about the face during a session. I was at a desk, and the kind psychiatrist was talking while I drew the face. Her red hair cascaded around, and she was named Dr Lola. I was still small. I'm not sure how old I was. She was asking me why I needed the face. Why did I have to keep seeing it? I looked over my shoulder, and there it was. We were on the sixth or seventh floor and it floated under the rainy sky. It had gotten close enough that I could see it clearly for the first time.

I knew -- there and then -- that that face was evil. The certainty plunged its roots inside my child body. Until then, I had thought it was scary and mean. But that moment cemented the depth of the face’s corruption. I didn't want anyone else to ever see it. Because it was too twisted. It would hurt them.

I think it had gotten worse with time, actually. The lidless eyeballs bulged more and more. The smile kept getting larger. And more teeth. The skin was so white, it'd become grey. And it cracked a bit. I'm not sure, though. I hadn't looked in a while.

I'd trained myself to ignore it. It hurt to do it but I had to. To keep it at bay. When I spent too long without checking though, my neck got strained. My head tended to move on its own. It bent and twisted, so I couldn't look away. If I tried to resist, I pulled a muscle or two.

Life became easier with Dr Lola. I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and given some medicine. My parents saw my therapist as some kind of Messiah. I didn’t mind. I knew how worried they were because of me. And Dr Lola was kind, even if she was wrong.

The pills weren’t too bad. They helped ease the anguish of it all. I was barely awake half of the time. It was peaceful.

I turned out to be a pretty good liar, too. Not about anything important. It’s just I’d never been honest about how I was doing ever since.

I did my best to focus on school. I didn’t play much, but I managed to make a few mates. I read a lot -- to think about something else. Anything else but my impending doom.

Understanding I was mortal at such a young age didn’t help much with grief, sadly.

My mum passed at 47. My dad died at 51. My little sister perished at 32, along with her entire family. Three of my closest friends died in high school or as freshmen in college. I'd kept to myself for some time after that.

The last death was the most gruesome, I thought. My best friend had called out to me. We were both walking to our class. He was a few paces behind me. I had looked. The face was right beside him, smiling. I had seen his expression change. Horror had distorted his features as he'd looked at me. Someone had run into him and he'd fallen. His skull had fractured against the wooden rail on the wall. It had just popped, blood flooding the wall and floor, brains cascading like jelly. The face had stood still. Almost peaceful amongst that chaos of pain and anguish.

I still wondered what my friend saw that horrified him when he had looked at me.

I couldn't keep a job. People didn't like working with me, and accidents happened when I was alone.

Like that one time, I worked in an office. I was keeping to myself in my cubicle, typing letters and stuff. I'm not sure anyone even knew my name. I hadn’t put any pictures on the low walls around me. I didn’t listen to music. All I wanted was to be invisible, cold, and distant. To protect the people around me and their families. To keep the face away from them.

It was a Thursday. A colleague behind me had asked me about something. Why? What was it he asked? I couldn’t remember. But I'd had no choice but to turn around. The ceiling had caved in. He was still in the hospital as far as I knew.

How come people knew it was all because of me, I couldn’t fathom. The only explanation would’ve been survival instinct. As if they could feel it in their bones. Feel that something about me was wrong. I couldn’t fault them if they did. They weren’t wrong after all.

I'd never had enough money to buy, and landlords never wanted me to stay. They always had a good reason to ask me to leave. One of them was the amount of time people called the cops on me. They never gave a precise reason except that I looked “shady”, as far as I know. The police were doing their job checking on me, I guessed. What was it that tipped people about me? Was it my loneliness? Was it the silence inhabiting my flats? Was it the look in my eyes?

The last place I didn’t lose because of the police though. The landlady just said I had two weeks to leave because her daughter needed the flat. I wasn’t sure it was quite legal but I didn’t have the strength to argue.

So I had come back to the old house a week before. It was the only thing I hadn't lost in all these years. I’d tried to sell it. No one wanted it. I’d tried to burn it down. It didn’t work. So I let it rot where it stood. The only thing that'd be mine until I died.

The place we met.

The walls weren’t that white anymore. The paint was all but gone, the wood underneath like a ribcage. A lot of the roof tiles were missing. It looked like I felt, to be honest. Worn down, abandoned, and unwanted.

It was home.

Here I was, walking to my bedroom. Everything was in disrepair, the inside matching the outside. I couldn't have maintained the place even if I’d wanted to. The face wouldn't let me. The cast on my arm was so itchy I wanted to bite it off. A few bruises on my legs made me limp. Every time I’d tried to repair something, I’d hurt myself and it had all gone to shit. I thought I was going to die soon.

The face was almost done, gnawing away at everything inside me. Chewing the world around me shouldn't be long. If I closed my eyes and focused, I'd hear its skin stretching, its eyes drying.

I stumbled and grabbed a curtain. It ripped apart, and I hit the floor. All the air fled my lungs, and my face slammed the carpet. Blood filled my mouth. I stayed like that for a while. Laying, face down, on the dust and rot. I couldn't remember the last time I ate.

Why do I keep going? I didn't know the answer to that. Dying would've been easy. I'd had rested, for once. I wouldn't have ached anymore. The fear would've evaporated into nothingness.

But where would the face have gone? Wouldn't it have haunted another soul? Did I care?

Eyes shut, I rolled on my back. I didn't care. All my life, I had told myself I needed to keep the face to myself to protect others. And it had murdered everyone around me. Because of me. Because I didn't let it devour me.

I had been selfish. I had been so scared of Death, that I had caused all this.

Are those my thoughts? I wondered that a lot. It was still unclear whether the face could think in my stead. I saw it talk in my ear. It was there when I looked in mirrors, mumbling in its teeth.

I sat before opening my eyes. My bedroom door was so close. Getting up, I ignored its breath in my dirty hair. Why did it breathe? It didn't even have a body. It was a flat face, like a drawing on a piece of paper. It only existed at eye level. I stood and grabbed the handle.

My bedroom was small, dark, and damp. If the face didn't kill me, it would be mildew. I drew the pitiful curtains. The rusty rings screeched.

The small bed had crumbled. It wouldn't have changed much to sleep on the floor. Its wooden frame had rotten away. In a corner, the dresser half-vomited its content on the peeling carpeted floor. The shadows drew eyes everywhere.

"I hate you, you know," I said. "Why don't you just leave? What good would it do you to consume my soul? There isn't much of it left. You saw to that."

I knew it just kept floating there. The hair on my back stood up. It was right next to my ear. I could kiss it on the cheek if I wanted. Just a peck. The thought drew a laugh out of me. It was the most painful thing to have happened that day. Laughter. A pike eviscerating me.

I hesitated for a heartbeat. I raised my hand to touch it.

Ash and ice. And bone. It was dry. It was real. The realisation that I had always had a part of me believing it wasn't real dawned on me. Tears of relief streaked my cheeks. I was touching it. Its flat surface. The eyes were the weirdest part. They would've crumbled if I had dug my nails in them. They flaked a bit.

I still wasn't looking, my fingers brushing its sick skin. Was it skin? I reached its edges. What was behind it? What was on the part I had never seen?

My heart pounded my ribcage, almost shattering my bones. I swallowed what was left of the blood in my mouth. Shivers covered my skin. I contorted my wrist over the forehead and touched the back. Thick, ice-cold goo stuck to my fingers. It stuck to my skin and whiffs of rotted meat attacked my nose. Shaking, I lowered my hand to look. It was blood, maybe? Kind-of-congealed blood. Dead blood.

The face hadn't done anything. No sound, no movement. It hadn't tried to bite my fingers off. I couldn't think straight. Terror travelled through my muscles. But something else was there. Ideas didn't form properly. I was exhausted, famished, dehydrated. I reached again. The face was still there. It was still real. And a bit closer. That was my cue.

I grabbed the edge with all my might. I dug my fingers deep in the goo and pulled. Pivoting a bit, I also used my left hand and yanked, howling.

The face was in my hands. It didn't float anymore. It was in front of me. I was grabbing it. It didn't fight back. I held it. It was heavy. My left arm -- still in a cast, I remembered now -- throbbed with burning pain. I looked at the gooey side. Ripped flesh oozed, marred with decay. The white side kept smiling when I examined it. Unphased.

"What are you?" I asked. "What are you?" I ignored my wounded arm and shook it. "What are you?" I shrieked.

So I started breaking it -- if it felt anything. I rammed it against the wall and finished the dresser with it. I used my nails to ravage its eyeballs. As I expected, they were so dry that they exploded like confetti. I ploughed in, ignoring the disgusting bits getting under my nails. No more eyes.

I didn't care about the pain, so I used my cast to hammer its nose and mouth. Was the sound of breaking bones coming from it or from me? Putrid blood and acrid sweat covered me. My clothes stuck to my skin. My thinning hair was matted above my head. If child-me had seen me... I'd have looked like a monster.

It couldn't follow me anymore. It couldn't stare. I didn't have to look at it in its empty irises. I turned it around to peek through the rough, empty, eye sockets. Another burst of laughter destroyed me.

Still grinning, I wobbled my way to the washroom. There was a mirror there, with stains of dirt and rust peppered all over. I held the face before mine like a morbid mask. It was bruised a bit. Blues and purples tainted its grey surface. Its smile was broken with teeth missing and flesh ripped off.

"I'm behind you now! I beat you! Me! ME!" I yelled, staring in the mirror. "And if I ever find your home, I'll destroy everything you've ever loved."

I'm not sure why, but I put the face on mine. It’s my mask now. I ignore the stench. I don't think about the wet, cold, and breaking-down flesh. I heave. Breathing is almost impossible with the smell and goo getting in my nose. Smiling like never before, I stare in the mirror and say "I own you. I own you. I own you."