For how terrifying the experience is, I find it strange that this is the first time I’ve given it thought in almost a decade. I’m looking for answers, so anything you guys can give me, I’ll appreciate greatly.
As I said, this was like a decade ago. I was 13 at the time, and it was late July, just weeks before 8th grade started for me. My family lived in the dead center of the U.S. so my sister, Emily, and I hadn’t ever seen the ocean. Emily was 3.5 years older than me, and we were almost exact opposites. She was an introvert, and I was a social butterfly. Where she was analytical, I went with my instinct and emotion on everything. But maybe part of that was just being 13.
Anyway, late July, weeks before summer came to an end, and we were heading to the Gulf since it was the closest coastline. My mom was, well, a mom, and made us pack a few days before we headed, even though my sister complained about all her clothes being wrinkled. I just shoved mine in the suitcase and forgot all about it until the night before, when my mom sent me to pack toiletries from her bathroom.
She told me that she’d already left a list of stuff in there, and since her bathroom was en suite, I turned on the bedroom lights, pen in hand. My sister was downstairs, had gone down a bit earlier, and I’d watched her go down the stairs from where I sat in the office. The office was right next to said set of stairs, so you could see anything going on in the area, and I knew I was alone on the second story.
There was a stirring on her bed, and though I startled a bit, I reassured myself that it was just Daniel, my stepdad, to bed early after working a ridiculous morning shift. But, no. His car hadn’t been home, I’d seen the driveway vacant from the window above, and I should’ve heard the car pulling up and the front door opening. There was no way he was home. That’s when I saw it.
Bending like a contortionist - no, more like a spider, delicate and sharp and graceful and deliberate - it unraveled itself from its slumber and sat and rolled its shoulders with a hideous hollow cracking sound. Still, it didn’t face me, short black pixie cut against olive skin stretched across long, thin bones, and I realized what it was.
For a split second, a heartbeat, it was laughable how I’d been, well, horrified. It was just my sister. She’d just fallen asleep in Mom’s bed. It was just - oh god, that was not my sister.
It turned to face me and I felt my bones freeze up, bones hardening to concrete and ligaments turning to rope and skin to stone. I would’ve vomited if everything in my stomach hadn’t vanished into thin air, replaced by a gaping void. My lungs were dry as paper in my chest, diaphragm beef jerky, and the rest of me similarly poetically still. The pen weighed a thousand pounds in my stiff, unmoving fingers.
Its face was wrong, so horribly wrong, the features flipped but the bones structure the same so its eyes were pressed, bulging, together at its chin and lips filling its whole forehead and nose a hunk of cartilage stuck to the middle of its face like clay. Its tongue lolled, upside down, from its mouth, jaw and teeth crunching and clicking and air hissing through throat and it was so wrong. A strand of hair tangled in its white, spittle-covered lips, and I tried so hard to scream my eyes watered.
Something was in its hand, but the hand too was wrong, fingers all the same lengths and spaced evenly around a chunk of palm, grasping the something like a starfish folded around its prey. The something glinted in the flashing light of the ceiling fan, probably no longer than my longest finger, and filled with an oil-dark rubescent fluid.
All the grace and poise was gone, the hand moving to the mouth drunkenly, like the thing was unused to its own body, and tilting what I now saw as a vial over the stained lips. Smoke came pouring out.
Not smoke, not exactly, but vapor, red, opaque ribbons spiraling from the opening into its gaping forehead, the same way smoke from dry ice would. Thick and heavy and falling into its mouth, which, due to the placement, made its neck kink awfully outwards as the whole head bent backward to accommodate. I was gagging, but nothing came up, stomach heaving and empty.
It turned its attention fully towards me, bug eyes nearly falling from their shallow sockets as they opened wider than I’d have thought possible, revealing a sclera marred with squiggles of blood. I snapped from my horrified reverie and felt the pen in my hand and threw and sprinted, all in the same moment and movement.
The following shriek gave me headaches for the next week, so agonized and rage-filled as it was, vocal cords snapping and throat bleeding with the effort. If my mouth hadn’t been ancient-desert-bone dry, I would’ve screamed in response, but my very breath pained me and I could muster no more as I sprinted down the hallway as quickly as I humanly could. I’d never been athletic, but I ran like hell that day because, at that very second, the literal antichrist bounded inches behind me.
My sister and stepbrother and I shared a bathroom right next to my bedroom, so I flung the door open and slammed it shut behind me and, since the lock didn’t work, cast open the vanity drawer to makeshift-barricade it. Lights still off, tiled floor bitingly cold on bare skin, I slumped against the wall and cried quietly as something threw its weight against the door, human nails screeching across paint.
After a few minutes, I wondered vaguely why nobody had come to help me. They’d surely heard the scream, right? They had to have heard it. They couldn’t just leave me there alone.
A worse thought struck me: What if it had gotten them? What if I was the only one left alive in the house? My imagination raced and I asked myself, what if I was the only one left alive in the world?
I quickly made myself ignore both of those questions as I stood shakily. The scraping and pounding had stopped and the whole house felt eerily and entirely silent. The light was off, so I reached for the switch and screamed as it came on.
Behind me, clearer than either crystals or day, tall and stooped, was it. Its starfish hands settled on my shoulders and fastened on my neck and I remember nothing more than that.
When I woke up, I was in a hospital, covered in casts. My mom quickly filled me in: apparently, they’d found me in the bathroom, screaming about the wrong-faced one and banging my head on the mirror until a spider web of cracks covered it. I’d fought with them even as they tried to calm me down, and ended up with a broken nose, concussions, a trio of fractured ribs, a sprained ankle, and a dislocated shoulder. I never did tell them what I saw, but I’m sure my ramblings told them enough: some hallucination that I desperately needed to be medicated for.
I was on antipsychotics until I turned 18 and flushed them down the toilet. By then, I’d honestly forgotten even what they were for, but, in my mind, I was sure I didn’t need them.
I’ve only recently rediscovered the reason, though, in a dream where it waited for me. I am certain, deathly so, that it was not a hallucination, and that it is real and hates me so, so much. Please, give me any and all ideas you can think of for what it is and what I can do about it, because I have the feeling it is getting closer.