The Smiling Man

In the stygian abyss of night, when the world lay shrouded in sepulchral silence, Liam would find himself ripped violently from slumber's gossamer embrace and plunged into a chthonian realm of unrelenting terror.

He would surface, quaking and disoriented, atop the narrow bunk bed he shared with his brother in that dank, brooding basement room–fragile bark adrift on a roiling sea of nightmares.

And always, without fail, those baleful, crimson eyes would be waiting, twin embers smoldering in the cloying darkness, searing his very soul with their malevolent gaze.

The feeble, guttering glow of the night-light, a pathetic ward against the encroaching shadows, illuminated a silhouette that was at once mundane and unspeakably grotesque.

It was a man, hairless and preternaturally pale, his skin having the waxy, translucent pallor of a bloated corpse.

He crouched, gargoyle-like, at the foot of the bed, his elongated limbs bent at unnatural angles, his head cocked in a hideous parody of childlike curiosity. The features of his face were slack, lifeless, like a crude waxen effigy left too long in the sun.

But then, as Liam watched in mute, paralyzed horror, those bloodless lips would peel back in a grin of such malevolent glee it seemed to cleave the face in twain. Rows of jagged, needlelike teeth gleamed in that yawning maw, too many and too sharp, like shards of broken glass in a rictus of insatiable hunger.

Liam's heart jackhammered against his ribs, each frenzied beat counting out an eternity as the thing observed him with a palpable, predatory relish, savoring his terror like a gourmand sampling a rare vintage.

The boy lay rigid, scarcely daring to breathe, his night clothes plastered to his skin with a cold sweat that reeked of fear and despair. A scream clawed at his throat, desperate for release, but emerged only as a strangled, whimpering mewl.

And then, when the chalice of Liam's dread brimmed over, the pale man would melt away, dissolving into the stygian murk of the basement hall like a nightmare dispelled by the first light of dawn, leaving only the fading Cheshire echo of that terrible, leering grin.

But the true horror was only beginning.

Without warning, without even the vaguest semblance of transition, Liam would find himself wrenched violently from the sweat-soaked tangle of sheets, hurtling up through the ceiling as if hauled by the invisible hand of some wrathful, eldritch god.

The world would blur and run like watercolors in the rain, reality itself smearing into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. And then, with a sickening lurch, he would be standing in the living room, that once comforting space now perverted into a place of dread and looming menace.

In the dream, the living room was a vast, echoing cavern, its dimensions stretched to the breaking point of sanity. The walls bowed outward, the ceiling soared into a starless void, the very floorboards seemed to heave and undulate beneath Liam's bare feet like the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

On either side of the monstrous, gaping fireplace, windows yawned like portals to some hellish otherworld, their heavy drapes drawn tight against the impinging night.

The air was thick, suffocating, laden with a greasy, prickling sense of wrongness that crawled across Liam's skin like a thousand skittering insect legs. And there, in the center of that nightmare vista, hovering like some obscene demigod, was the smiling man.

He was clad now in billowing robes of deepest, funereal black that fluttered and writhed as if stirred by the breath of unseen, infernal winds. In one skeletal hand, he clutched an apple, an orb of such a deep, arterial crimson it seemed to pulse and throb with a grotesque semblance of life, like some freshly-harvested organ torn from a still-shrieking victim.

The specter's eyes, twin pits of hellish flame, bored into Liam's with an intensity that seared his mind and flayed his soul.

In those malevolent, abyssal depths lurked the promise of unfathomable depravities, of secrets so dark and terrible their mere whisper would shatter sanity like a crystal goblet.

"Come,"

the thing crooned, its voice a serpentine hiss that echoed in the labyrinthine warrens of Liam's skull.

"One taste of my offering, one small bite, and all the wonders and terrors of midnight shall be yours to explore.

Foreverrrrr."

That sibilant, honeyed purr wormed its way into Liam's ears, coiling around his thrashing thoughts like a seductive, strangling snake.

He felt his resistance eroding, his will crumbling like sand before the crashing tides of oneiric temptation. The apple filled his vision, a glistening lure, a poisoned prize pulsing with the promise of dark raptures and forbidden revelations...

With a last convulsive effort, Liam wrenched himself awake, that unvoiced scream finally escaping in a raw, animal howl. He jackknifed upright, bedclothes falling away, his body sheened in icy sweat.

For a long, disoriented moment, he sat hunched and shaking, struggling to reconcile the lingering phantoms of nightmare with the banal confines of his bedroom, so deceptively normal in the pale light of dawn filtering through the high, narrow windows.

But even awake, scrubbed raw by the gritty, scouring jaws of reality, Liam could still feel the residue of the dream clinging to him like a psychic tar, a corrosive slick of self-loathing and despair.

The smiling man's final, parting giftᅳa minuscule, glittering seed of madnessᅳhad been planted deep in the fertile loam of his subconscious, and he could feel it taking root, spreading its fibrous tendrils through the shadowed, secretly festering corners of his mind.

By day, Liam drifted through the motions of a life drained of meaning and color, a fragile husk forever teetering on the crumbling precipice of dissolution.

He shunned the touch of sunlight as if it were an accusation, flinched from the laughter of his peers like the damned shying from the taunting choirs of paradise.

The once reliable landmarks of school, home, family, blurred into grey, featureless ruins, a smeared and fading backdrop against which his personal apocalypse played itself out with the inexorable, recursive logic of delirium.

And always, waiting in the wings with the avid, unwavering patience of a born predator, was the smiling man.

Night after night, with sadistic precision, he returned to feast on the banquet of Liam's dread, to sup on the welling vintages of the boy's despair. Like a black hole voraciously consuming the guttering light of collapsing stars, the pale specter devoured all that was vital and sacred in Liam, all that had once constituted his innermost self.

Piece by jagged piece, memory by cherished memory, the tattered scrapbook of his identity was shredded, its pages scattered like confetti before a screaming void wind.

Until, at last, the blackest of all possible dawns crept upon one final, shattering night of revelation.

Liam's eyes fluttered open to a world forever transmuted, a world where the very atoms sang with the cold, clear frequencies of lunacy. His bedroom, the house, the last remaining tethers to the forsaken and unreal waking world, had fallen away like rotted garments, like deluded veils of dream pierced at last by the cruel sword of enlightenment.

There was only the black, crooked angles, the leprous, bleeding colors of a new and terrible renaissance.

And in this inverted cathedral, this mausoleum of the grotesquely reborn, there waited the smiling man, his arms open in a cruel travesty of benediction.

"Come, boy,"

he whispered as Liam drifted inexorably into that final, infinite embrace.

"Come, and be mine, forever and always.

We have such sights to show you..."

And as the last motes of lucidity winked out, as the gates of bedlam swung wide, Liam felt his torn and tattered lips stretch into a mirror of that terrible, rictus grin.

A consummation, a long-sought release into the misshapen arms of the only truth, the only god he had ever known or would ever worship.

As he sank into that pitiless, ecstatic void, Liam's last cogent thought fled, a single rimed feather of reason lost in a roaring Antarctic gale of chaos:

Mother of God, I am well and truly mad at last...

And God help me, there is freedom in this damnation, the most perfect liberty in this fall...

Then even that frail spark guttered, smothered beneath black and crushing night.

And in the depthless dark behind his shriveling eyes, Liam began, finally... to smile.