I had been watching Trailer Park Boys when my roommate Alex suddenly barged through the front door, stumbling over himself as his neck craned to look behind him. I almost dropped my plate of oven-hot chicken tendies; the Friday meal of kings.
“Jesus, Alex! What the fuck?” I yelled at him as I turned the TV off, pissed that he’d ruined the sublime couch-potato-meditation I’d been cultivating for the past couple of hours.
“Shit, shit SHIT!” he said, more to himself than to me. He kicked the door shut as he got up from the floor.
Now I was concerned. Alex wasn’t the type of person who feared things. I’d seen him throw hands at guys twice his size, and when the situation called for fight or flight, he always chose to fight. Dumb? Maybe. Scared? Never.
“Alex? You okay, buddy?” I asked him, placing my tendies down on the coffee table, trying to figure out if it was a ‘get the baseball bat’ or the ‘call the cops and pray’ type of situation.
He turned around and zoomed past me towards the kitchen. He grabbed a chair and dragged it to the front door, jamming it against the wood under the door knob.
“Who’d you piss off this time?” I asked him.
“Shh!” he snapped as he gave me a concerned look. “Turn… lights… off,” he whispered in ragged breaths.
I walked up to the switch, making sure not to make any loud noises, and flicked it. The apartment became completely dark.
“Are you gonna tell me what the fuck –”
“SHH!” he snapped again, his ear now turned towards the door.
We stood in awkward silence for a few minutes. Finally, his shoulders dropped down, and he walked to the couch and sat down, letting out a long sigh as his tense body started to release itself from its adrenaline armor. I joined him, but didn’t say anything - it was on him to explain whatever shit was going down. Once he’d calmed down a few more breaths worth, he began to explain.
“First. If it sees you, don’t flinch. It’s smart like that. It knows what’s prey, and it will come after you. Or that’s what I think, at least.”
“What the fuck are you on about? Who came after you? Did you go picking fights again?”
“What.”
“What?”
“What came after me. Not who.”
“Oh-kayyy, so what the fuck’s the what that’s coming after you?”
“I don’t fucking know! I saw it in the woods, just, like, sitting there. Looking at me. And then I looked back at the fucker, sure that it was some prank by some shitty neighborhood kids. Then its head turned, like, upside down, and I flinched, and then it came at me. I ran here as fast as I could.”
Sitting so close to him on the couch, I could smell the liquor coming off him, his scent intertwined into a shitty eau de toilette of man-sweat and cheap rum.
“You’re drunk.”
“I’m –” he said loudly, then glanced at the door and brought his voice down again. “I’m not seeing things. This is real. Zach, I’m not fucking joking.”
Alex was a hothead when sober, but booze basically made him a kiln that could melt steel beams. I needed to calm him down, approach the subject slowly. Even if the fucker did ruin my lazy night. That’s what friends do, right?
“Okay. I’m sorry,” I said, reeling myself back, distancing my emotions from the subject. “Where were you?”
“Just out by the trail, coming back from the bar.”
“Okay. And what should we do?”
“I don’t fucking know! At some point, I stopped looking back. It was so fast, like a fucking cheetah or something. It moved – it was like a circus freak or a dancer or something. It didn’t move like a human or an animal. I don’t even know how I outran it.”
He’d started to spiral. I’d seen this before. Whenever Alex got some idea in his head that he couldn’t wrap his brain around, he couldn’t just leave it. Instead, it swirled around in that thick head of his, scrambling up his mind, vignetting the world. Things of that nature would frustrate him to no end, and I still hadn’t figured out a surefire technique to get him to reposition his attention, but I was going to try anyway.
“Well, we got the door secured, and I don’t hear anything outside,” I told him, hoping to calm him down a bit.
“You sure you didn’t hear anything?”
“I’m sure, man.”
“Fuck, okay… yeah. Thanks. Fuck, I need a drink,” he said, hopping up from the couch and heading towards the kitchen.
After some clattering, he emerged with a frosted bottle of Mexican beer. He turned the lights back on, and then bent down and slammed the bottle’s neck on the edge of the coffee table, sending the metal cap flying across the room in an impressively clean arc; the work of a seasoned drunk. The bottle reached his lips just before the frothing bubbles began to spill over. He suckled on it like it was a pacifier, his throat making extraordinarily loud gulps as he finished nearly half of the beer in one fell swig. He groaned as he put the bottle down on the coffee table, and burped loudly as he sat down - and just like that, he was back to his old self.
“You wanna talk more about it?” I asked him pensively.
“Nah, man. I’m sure it was nothing. Sorry I got all stressed out, that fucking thing just looked so weird,” he replied, his face as blank as the TV.
“Yeah, must’ve been something fucked up. It’s alright,” I told him. No point in digging any deeper. Maybe tomorrow. “Wanna watch something?”
Alex didn’t say anything. He just stared at the reflection on the black TV screen, his head facing directly forward, his arms limp beside him.
“Alex? TV?” I pestered. No reply.
I looked towards where his gaze sank to see if he was staring at something in particular. At first glance, there was nothing at all. Not even a fly buzzed on the wall. But then, movement, somewhere. For a second all I could process was that something flickered, changed shape in what I was seeing, but I was unable to piece together what it was.
Then it clicked. It was on the TV screen, which reflected us sitting on the couch. Alex’s head began to… twist. Like it was a clock, except that instead of hands it was his mouth and eyes and nose that shifted around, turning and turning, pulling the skin and flesh as bones cracked and tendons snapped inside his head. Then it stopped, and where his mouth used to be, were two bloodshot eyes, and where his eyes used to be, was his mouth, drooling spit and blood. I couldn’t say whether he was smiling or smirking or frowning or all of the above. Something happens in the brain when things are upside down, making it harder to process the details. One thing was for sure, though. It was looking at me.
I was completely frozen. I could barely feel my legs, and my throat became dry as desert, and all I wanted to do at that moment was finish off Alex’s beer. But I didn’t scream or run or throw punches. I just stared at it through the reflection, and it stared at me. After an eternity, the upside-down Alex got up from the couch, and limped in front of the TV, blocking it with his body. Its eyes locked on me.
And then… it started to dance? But not like a real dance, more like an awkward jig. It limped left and right, jumped up and down, its face jiggling as the skin tried to contain its mangled contents. I didn’t budge; Alex told me not to flinch. That’s all I could think about, and the thought kept me occupied, producing a mental barrier between me and whatever that wretched fucking thing was.
After a while, as a sort of last hurrah, I guess, the thing stopped its cursed jig, bent down and put its face just a few inches away from mine, forcefully breaking my trance. I had to look at it, although it no longer looked at me in a material sense, for its eyes were closed.
It opened its mouth, revealing two eyeballs, still attached by that fleshy cord to something inside. They were held in place by gums, void of teeth, as small puddles of blood filled up the holes where they used to be. The pupils darted around erratically, still functional, until they settled their gaze on my eyes. I swear I could see Alex in there, more scared than he ever had been. I felt so bad for him. My buddy. My roommate. My fucking friend. Turned into this… thing. Then the gums locked down, squeezing the eyeballs into oblongs, until they finally popped like water balloons, spewing thick liquid all over my face. The urge to move was unbearable, and my own eyes burned as the liquid oozed over them.
A moment later, the thing opened its mouth again. A muscular, fleshy globule began to slowly emerge from its mouth. It was round and wound up in fibrous tendons, and from all its sides protruded Alex’s yellowed teeth, pointing in all directions, indented directly onto the flesh. The fleshy blob was so large that the serrated, unkempt teeth scratched and pierced the edges of the mouth as it squeezed itself out, cutting open the lips, until gravity finally took hold and it fell to the ground, making a clunking splatter as it collided with the hardwood floor. The thing’s face was much smaller without it, anemic in tone.
The thing leaned closer, and opened one of its eyes. Out of it came the displaced tongue, still dirty and yellow from the rum Alex had drank. It inched closer and closer, until finally it started to lick the eyeball stew off of my face. The tongue was warm and slippery, and it twisted around my eyes and my mouth as it licked off every last bit of eyeball left on my face. From somewhere inside the head, where the vocal cords resided, I could hear pleasured groans, low and stuffy as they vibrated in between flesh and bone.
When the thing finally backed away, I could feel a sticky film begin to coat my face as the spit began to dry. It tickled and irritated my skin, bothering me unimaginably hard. I needed to do something; I had been stationary for too long, and all the nerves in my body were beginning to fight back at the stillness within.
The thing faced me, its tongue sticking out limply from the limp eye socket. I don’t know if it could still see me, as it no longer had eyes. I dared not flinch, but time was running out. A cramp, a twist, a punch - something was going to happen soon; something needed to break the incubating stagnation.
Promptly, the thing turned around, and limped its way towards the window. Slowly and awkwardly, like it was losing control of the muscles and nerves within, it opened it, and then jumped out. Our apartment is on the eighth floor, so it took a considerable amount of freefall until I heard a wet thud. Even though it was gone, it took me a while until I felt safe enough to move again.
When the cops and paramedics came, I tried to explain what had happened. I thought it must be at least somewhat believable, I mean, his face was proof! The way he looked… nothing natural could do that.
But they just blamed it on the fall. Twisted my story to seem like he’d gotten into a drunken psychosis, his state of mind exclusively fucked, and jumped out the window headfirst, the impact smashing his face to look like that. They brushed off my story completely, condescending me, saying that I was making a mockery of Alex’s death. That I was probably high or drunk or both.
But I know that that’s not what happened. But that’s all I really know, and it’s not enough for much else. I can’t fight this. I can’t reason with it. And Alex is gone forever. I’m grateful for being alive, sure, but I’m more scared than ever. I mean, the thing must’ve died with Alex, right? But what’s been chewing at the back of my mind ever since is the fact that I never found that flesh-tooth-globule that the thing vomited out. The paramedics and cops said that they found nothing, either, which they mostly used as evidence to disprove my story.