Faces

Fact: You never forget a face. No matter how long it's been.

Every single one of those faces is... saved... up there, you know, in your brain. Your memory. It gets used later on. Remember that dream yesterday, yeah that one with the cute girl or boy in, you've seen them before. Maybe at the store last week, but you have seen them.

Now, eyes closed. You're sleeping...

...

A nightmare? Strange...

What's that in the dark?

Teeth? No! Fangs? Bloody elongated fangs!

Eyes open now. You stare at the ceiling.

The room is dark, you are alone. You look around and see nothing, hear nothing. You look at your clock it's gone midnight.

You drift off to sleep once again.

You encounter the same nightmare. That thing... that... demon? Monster? The one in the corner of your room. While you're sleeping soundly. Remember, you looked around the pitch blackness of your room, you saw it, right? You don't remember? Did you try to forget?

Well, you can never forget a face you know.

Fact: Your brain is incapable of making a face up. Right now you probably wish that wasn't true.

Let's look back to your demon. What did it look like? Try to remember.

You saw the fangs, but there was something else there, right?

Eyes, too many looking right at you, staring at your sleeping body. The bits of limbs that could be seen were too long and some are too short. The stance, does it even have bones? Yes you see them in what looks like or more what would form a rib cage. A torso as disfigured and mutated in such a way it was hard to make out where it began and where it ended. It's fingers, dismantled and crippled, bent into strange shapes but the nails belonging to them are as sharp as knives. The legs it owned shrouded in black. Did it have a face? Oh God that face... That face... Mouth slack, it's jaw unhinged. There was no tongue in that mouth just eyes and thousands of teeth. It’s getting closer, nearer to your bed. You can’t move, you can’t run. Oh shit. It’s the end.

Fact: You’ve seen all the faces you are dreaming of. Sometimes you would rather not remember them, but unfortunately you do. Those are the faces of nightmares.

They are the faces that are stuck in “The Realm”. “The Realm” is the place where your demons hide until you’re alone.

You’re awake again. It’s still dark. Three o’clock in the morning. You look to the corner, it’s just empty space now. You force yourself from the safety of your covers and go to switch on the light. When your hand meets the switch you feel something. Cold, wet and sticky. You look up. It’s there. The nightmare is real. You almost feel your breath stop, it’s stuck in your chest. The adrenaline is pumping through your veins. Your heart almost beating out of your chest.

You blink. The lights are on. The room is bright. No part of the room is left in shadows where the monster can hide. A sigh of relief leaves you and you feel almost happy for a few moments.

You turn to the mirror and look at yourself, really look at yourself.

It takes you a moment…

…

What is that?

Your face. What’s happening?

You scrub at a tiny little dot. A dot that is scarlet red. Scrub. Scrub harder.

You then realise the more you scrub the bigger the dot gets. More scrubbing. Is that flesh?

Your flesh, it’s… it’s peeling away. The more it peels the more it reveals that what you feared. An eye lay beneath that layer.

A monster? A demon?. That’s what you said it was. No… All along it was you. You’re your own monster. That’s how you see yourself.

You smile at the contorted and disfigured body now staring back at you as layers of flesh fall to the ground around you. Your last words that you can manage before you’d repeat the daily routine is, “Go to Hell.”