The Face

He always said his blood was full of stars.

Maybe it would explain the cold. Maybe it would explain what happened after he died, because he’d always been curious, and he’d always been mildly terrified of the vast, endless void of sheer, unadulterated uncertainty. When his brain stopped firing off those synapses, those sparks of biological electricity that had never made much sense to him, what would become of his soul? When his blood spilled out onto the ground and seeped deep into the earth’s flesh, where particles of his DNA would forever remain and inevitably immortalize him, would he become the stars inside his veins? Or would he just... stop..?

Whatever became of him (and whatever was inside him, always stirring beneath the skin) in the end would incessantly be a mystery because he would never remember it, would he? The fact of the situation was that he wasn’t dying; maybe he wouldn’t ever die, or maybe he was already dead and he always had been. It didn’t matter, and it wouldn’t. So what if his hands were tingling with the cold, and so what if he could almost sense his blood – too thick, it felt too thick – sliding through his veins and capillaries? He was all too aware of his heartbeat but at the same time it might as well have been totally absent, and his chest was aching an ache that rendered him breathless. But maybe that was just the fear. No, wait, not fear, that wasn’t right...

Terror. Terror seemed like a more suitable word. The emotion that had taken him by the throat and had its gritty, freezing fingers wrapped tightly around his spinal cord, the one that was scraping his insides clean with a blade, could’ve been described as ‘terror’.

How long had he been frozen by it? How long had he been staring ahead with wide, unblinking eyes, too afraid to move or to even breathe too much? The face ahead of him, partially shrouded in shadows (the moon hadn’t made an appearance that night) hadn’t moved anymore than he had. The eyes – empty, so empty, nothing more than two pits of a colour somehow darker than black – continued to stare him head-on, shaving away at his very sanity bit by little bit. The mouth gaped just as widely, rigid and stiff in an endless, silent scream. It hadn’t done anything since he’d caught sight of it but it was there, and it was watching him, and every once in a while he swore he’d spot a quick glint in the eye-holes, like the minimal lighting was catching on retinas.

The most horrific part of the entire thing wasn’t that it was the face of a monster, because it wasn’t, and when he’d realized what it actually was he was overcome with an overwhelming sense of nausea, complete and utter wrongness settling over his organs like a thick black sludge.

It was a human face.

No, really. He could see the jagged edges around the cheeks and forehead, a piece of bloody fat dangling precariously from the bottom of the chin, a tear on the upper lip. The skin was stretched taut but it seemed like it was still retaining some elasticity. It was fresh.

Something moved, below and to the right of the face. Claws, a hand, gangly fingers, something – it twitched, it floated up through the air, almost completely indistinguishable in the dark. Reaching, yearning, grabbing, clawing, doing whatever it was doing but doing it towards him, and the way it moved was so wrong, so unnatural, he didn’t like it he did NOT like it AT ALL.

He gasped. A small noise, his lungs taking in the air he’d been depriving them of, and then everything burst into motion. He saw those eyes, two hungry spheres of silver behind something he should have never seen, and he saw the claws or fingers or whatever tense in a predatory act of anticipation. He meant to run, he meant to whirl around and bolt and just run as fast as he’d ever gone, faster, he’d felt his muscles flex in preparation and he’d felt the unalloyed adrenaline coursing throughout his entire being but –

Something large, and cold, grabbed him by the scalp before he could even process what was happening. It was sharp, and slimy, but also dry and just freezing, it was so cold; it was teeth, a tongue, a soft palm, nails, flexing tendons and writhing muscles and ice and fire and everything he’d ever been afraid of, and everything he hadn’t.

It took him by the scalp and it slammed his head down, and for a moment he thought maybe he’d figured out what he would become when he died.

But that didn’t matter.

The next time he awoke, he got up, and he walked away. He walked, and he kept walking, and maybe he wouldn’t ever stop because he wasn’t ever going to be warm again, his hands were always going to be ice and his shoulders would always be wracked with shivers.

He looks into the shadows, into the abysmal darkness of a moonless night, and he sees a face.