The Face of a Monster

Darkness settles over the earth, kisses treetops and leaves its ominous imprint of black peppered over the river waves. Tonight there is no moon, and its lightless warning whispers through the bitter air. It speaks of forests shivering naked in blankets of white, fingers purple with frostbite, quaking bones and chattering teeth.

Out in the cold, a lonely figure glides across an empty street, her sneakers as red as her hair dancing in the wind like flames. The girl glances behind her before descending into the green plume beneath an old abandoned pedestrian bridge, arching its aged skeleton in rigid fragility. Beneath the bridge, she whistles an oddly familiar tune she can’t quite figure out how she knows and squats on the metal ribs of the train tracks.

A sigh the color of night collapses from her mouth before she lights a cigarette and entices a wave of smoke into her lungs. The trees shapeshift, wolves howl behind her eardrums, and a voice that sounds like hers erupts in screeching waves, carried into the forest on the battering of the wind.

This voice she knows all too well. A voice that has followed her around since childhood, her own gallous ghost created somewhere in the crooks of her unkempt mind. She can also hear her heartbeat, feel it slapping against her ribcage, plummeting back and forth in its ongoing escape from oblivion, and she wonders what oblivion would be like, if nothingness could be something. Something soft and silent.

The voice on the wind grows louder, piercing the clouds and the wood and the stone. Its commands ripple across the river and scatter goosebumps over the hills of her flesh. Yet she sits like a sawed-off tree stump, takes another slow inhale of smoke, and pretends she cannot hear it.

Suddenly, something rustles in the shadows. The smoke freezes in her lungs. The screeching voice falls quiet. An earthquake seizes her fingers and the cigarette tumbles to the ground. Something burrows into the skin of her back, the burn of fixated eyes hidden somewhere in the dark.

Her heart turns into metal brick, the breath in her lungs feels like tar. She's grown accustomed to the screaming banshee, learned to accept it as a manifestation of broken chemical synapses in her brain. But this, this she's never felt before. She can sense a bloodthirsty grin only a few feet behind her, feel its hot, sticky breath crawling down the nape of her neck. Has her banshee finally taken physical form? Or is this something else? Something real?

She bites her lip hard. The taste of iron floods across her tongue. Her nerve endings scream at her to move, run, flee, GO HOME! But sinister roots seem to chain her to the cold hard ground and her legs have turned to blocks of ice. Since she can't move, she decides to face the monster, to look her demise in the eye. Her lungs feel like prison bars as she slowly turns around.

A scream bubbles over her quivering lips. But the scream is useless, for what she sees is... nothing. Nothing but trees swallowed by darkness and bushes hunched over like tortured orcs. She swivels her head this way and that, glares into the black, but she finds no monster, save for the fear howling in her heart. Yet the feeling does not leave her, that sadistic stare pooling into her pores and scooping out the secrets of her soul.

I have to get out of here. The thought ricochets against her skull as she lurches to her feet and takes off running.. Sprinting.. Faster than she ever has before. Too fast.

At the top of the bridge, she stumbles. The darkness summons her into its black abyss as her head plummets into stone.

Seconds, minutes, hours turn to dust.

Her toes twitch, sensation returns. Pins and needles prickle up her spinal cord, and her head begins to pound like a mallet against raw meat. Her cheek is pressed against cold concrete, and she tries to open her eyes, but they are heavy like marble. She tries again, using all the strength of her being to pry them open. Electric pain shoots over her temples, but she manages to peek through her eyelashes for the fraction of a moment.

She is no longer in the forest. The ground is too smooth, and the crisp smell of rotting leaves has been replaced by the wet stench of mold. Wherever she is appears dark and hollow, closed in by walls that magnify the echo of water drip drip dripping somewhere nearby. The blackness is heavy, but the room appears empty, so she closes her eyes to catch her breath.

And then she feels it. The raspy exhale that makes her skin crawl attached to a gaze that makes her insides burn. Panic gnashes piercing teeth against the pit of her stomach. A single tear escapes her eyelid and slithers sullenly down her cheek. For the first time in her life, she misses her screaming banshee. This silence is torment, this lingering in empty anticipation of real, living horror, a torture more menacing than being diagnosed as schizophrenic.

She's been dreaming of oblivion, of the sweet silence of death, and now, as it looms above her, she begs for a second chance.

A sob erupts from her chest, but comes to a choking halt in her throat. The feeling is gone, the burning gaze dissipates. In its place lingers the ghostly, hushed whistle of a strange, but familiar tune. She's heard it before, but where?

Under the bridge!

Her eyes snap open. Shock numbs the pounding in her head and bursts her cold legs into flame. She herself has whistled those same icy notes under the abandoned bridge, only minutes, hours, days? - before.

She pries herself off the ground, limb by limb and rises to her shaky feet. The soft whistle becomes a roar, but she sees no one. What she does see is far more frightening.

Her vision, still blurry from the fall, slowly reveals the four walls of her parents' basement, with its corners of cluttered boxes and a lopsided staircase overtaken by cobwebs. At the top of the staircase, a heavy metal door clings to rusty hinges, and a sickly green light tumbles through its cracks. The whistle, interwoven with the light, billows down the staircase and thrums against her eardrums like glass. She swallows. A boulder clunks in the pit of her stomach. She takes a step towards the staircase.

"M-m-mom? D-dad?" terror clutches her vocal chords, turning her cry for help into a pitiful whisper. No one can possibly hear anything over the roaring serenade of sorrow luring her, tantalizing her, clawing at her insides. And yet something must have heard her. The green light shimmers and the floorboards creak above her head.

For a second, hope flickers through her blood, warming her fingers and toes, and she dashes up the staircase in wild anticipation of... what, she's not quite sure. At the top, she clings to the banister and closes her eyes to catch her breath. Her head pounds, and the room pulsates with every thrum, but she keeps a white knuckle grip on her consciousness and opens her eyes.

She is plunged into ferocious darkness. The green light is gone, along with the screaming whistle.

When did it stop? How did I not notice it?

The blackness constricts around her arm like a snake as she reaches for the door handle. Her fingertips ravage three sticky webs before she feels the cold metal in her palm. She turns the knob and jumps in her skin as the door swings open with a thud. She steps into the hallway. The walls breathe around her, and the sound of her heartbeat seems to shake the foundation of the whole house.

To her right, another set of stairs leads to her parents bedroom.

She stumbles toward it, then freezes, fingernails scraping against the wall for support. At the top of the stairs, a shadow moves. Shapeless and fluid, it slithers down the first step, then the second, then the third.

A scream gurgles from the lump in her throat, and she staggers backward. The whistle begins to roar once more, mocking her scream, and fire quivers up her spine. The red hot gaze of hell returns and freezes the blood in her veins.

Bursting through the back door, she tumbles down the wooden porch and unravels in a heap of wails on the dying grass. Afraid to surrender, a fleeting thought lurches her forward. The police department is only two blocks away. A burning pain shoots up her leg from the fall, but she manages to rise to her feet and limp across the yard to the gate. And then she stops. A silence fills her body and suffocates the air around her. Not even the sound of wind interrupts this violent sound of oblivion. She can feel the piercing eyes of the shadow behind her, but this time, the gaze feels omnipotent. It falls from the sky like black snow and pools around her feet like shackles.

Through blurry tears, she peers across the alley. A townhouse enshrouded in darkness suddenly comes to life. Green smoke plumes above the chimney. In every window, red candles flicker like ghosts.

And holding every candle is the same hideous shadow.

This sadistic evil, she cannot escape. All feeling crumbles to the earth, save for the wet drooling sigh of the monster's breath against her neck joined by two slender white fingers around her throat.

She turns her head to look at her captor. The fingers rise to remove a black hood that appears one with the night.

As the hood falls against crooked shoulders, the piercing scream of her banshee returns, and she gasps before falling limply to the ground.

The face of the shadow is her own.