Grinning, Part 2

The next morning, after Steve left for school and Sarah was eating cereal in her high chair, Evelyn walked around the house, checking all the windows and doors for any signs of…what, exactly? Signs of forced entry? Don’t be ridiculous, she kept thinking to herself. You won’t find anything. And she was right. 

She checked that all the locks throughout her house worked. All good here. The lack of signs of anybody in her house put her mind at ease, lifted the weight that was sitting on her shoulders, and she went upstairs to take a nap. She had gotten very little sleep last night. 

Later that evening, after Steve came home from school, she offered to watch a movie with him after dinner. It was Friday, after all, and she assumed he had had a long week at school.

“You can pick which one, Stevie,” she told him. 

They watched together after the kitchen was cleaned up from dinner and Sarah was fast asleep, laughing together under a shared blanket on the couch. After it was done, and all her laughter was exhausted (Though Steve was still giggling) she told him to go brush his teeth and wash his face, and when that was done, she kissed him good 

(bye)

night as he lay in his bed.

________

He awoke quickly as if doused in cold water. He felt like he was falling out of his dream, which was being purged from his memory before he could remember why he woke up so suddenly.

His room was pitch-black. His eyes adjusted, but only enough so he could make out vague shapes and make a guess as to where they were relative to his bed.  He wracked his brain for why he awakened so abruptly, but the only thing he could remember from his dream was a feeling of mortal terror, a feeling like someone special was being torn away from him while he watched and could do nothing about it. He realized after a few seconds that it was just a dream, and his heart started to slow down. His arms and back were slick with sweat. He threw off his blanket and readjusted himself. He rolled over onto his side, facing away from his closed door. 

Lying there, the memory of something terrible still fresh in his mind, his mind refused to calm down, even though his body regained its drowsiness. His thoughts kept his eyes open. He forced them shut, but to no avail, because his feelings of doubt and nervousness made it difficult

(too scary)

to keep them closed for long.

So he lay there in the dark, his mind racing while his body already started to fall asleep, and his eyes began to make out shapes in the dark. He saw a dark blob on the ground that might have been a toy airplane, another one that was probably a Schleich dinosaur toy, and was that a car, or a Lego piece? 

He distracted his mind with these ponderings. He moved his eyes in their sockets, trying to keep his body still, looking for more things to discern in the dark. Unfortunately for Stevie, he didn’t have to try very hard to keep still, because he was all at once overcome by a tight paralyzing sensation. His muscles tightened unnaturally and he tried to move, but it was like his limbs were being held in place by a horrible, gripping hand, a hand with talons like a bird of prey, a hand attached to some Lovecraftian thing that would rip him apart without a second thought. His eyes still moved around in their sockets, but now with the rapidity of one who was being forced into an electric chair, one who was about to die a horrible death and could do nothing to stop it. He tried desperately to see something, anything, even if it was the face of the awful thing restraining him, but please, please, don’t let me die in the dark, let me see one thing before I go-

Without warning, his eyes were forced still as well, forced to stare straight ahead towards the floor where his toys roamed. After a few seconds they started to burn with the accumulation of dust that he couldn’t blink away. It was a horrible feeling, because his mind still raced with fear, but his entire body was stuck, and he still had no idea how it was possible. He thought why God, if He was real, would let this happen to a little second-grader, an innocent little kid who did nothing wrong in his entire life except forget to wash his face and cheat in a game of cards with his unassuming little sister. Stevie tried, tried oh-so-hard to cry, but his face was rigid, as if he were already dead, and his muscles couldn’t force his tear ducts to leak, his throat couldn’t hitch a sob, his lip couldn’t tremble. 

As he lay there frozen, his field of view, already limited by the paralysis and the dark dimension of night, began to shrink, as if his eyes were closing sideways, but they weren’t, they couldn’t, but oh how he wished they could, oh how he wished he would have some sign, any sign, that he was being freed from this horrible state, freed from this abnormal position. His sight was like a boat, trapped in a dark ocean with no escape, that was being shrunken down until it didn’t exist anymore, and when it was gone, he would fall into the water and drown. 

He was overcome by a frightening, familiar feeling of awareness, awareness of another, of that, and Stevie knew what it was, somehow he knew, like he was waiting for it. A feeling like when you are alone in a room with your back turned to the door, and then someone comes in silently, and somehow, you can see them, see their eyes training on your back, like a sixth sense. And then, Stevie saw it, but it was just another shape in the dark, please let it be just another meaningless thing that haunts you at night but disappears in the morning, please. But it wasn’t, and he knew it, and the terrible knowledge of it only made it worse, because he was trying to deny it, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t deny its presence, the undeniable thereness of it. He needed to distract himself, to look away from his fate, to maybe, just maybe, look in the other direction, away from the thing that was about to come-

But then, he couldn’t, he was forced out of his fantasies, he was forced to accept it, forced to see, to visualize, the thing before him, the thing rising beside his bed, like the monsters he once thought lived beneath him while he slept. His fears were supposed to be dispelled, and now he knew the truth, he knew the comforting words of his parents were lies, he knew that they were denying it, like how he tried to now. He saw the thing rising beside him with terrible clarity, even though it was as dark as the bottom of the deepest oceans.

It started as just a shape, a vaguely familiar shape, of another human being, and he could feel it inside him, inside his head, planting a seed that forced him to see, and the seed grew with terrible rapidity, and as it grew into a massive tree, its roots infected his brain, making him focus on what he saw.

The humanoid shape was as dark as the night-filled room, but somehow he could see it more clearly, like it was under a spotlight, wearing a neon sign that read LOOK AT ME, I’M HERE, CAN’T YOU SEE ME? He could see its skin with horrible detail, he could see the texture of its naked scalp, and he knew that if he could move, if he could reach out and touch it, he would feel a ribbed texture, like he was running his hand across a dead thing’s skeleton, across its rotting spine, across the sliminess that was the decaying flesh, and then he would have to wash his hands because he would get infected by the things that ate its decomposing corpse- 

Again, he was forced back into seeing it, like he was trying to escape but it grabbed him and brought him back. He could see, he had to see, the shallow, empty sockets where eyes should be, he had to see its deformed, putrefying nose, he had to see it cracked, dry lips, lips that will open to expose yellowing teeth, shark’s teeth, teeth that will clamp on his face, he had to see a well defined, muscular neck, a neck that, after it had his face in his mouth, will flex backwards, and rip.

But no, that wasn’t the case. The thing slowly opened its mouth into a smile, and its teeth weren’t yellowing, he saw,

(he HAD to see)

they weren’t sharp at all, they were like his teeth, in fact, they were better than his teeth, they were perfectly square, manicured, shining white, as if this thing just went to the dentist last week. The image of this thing leaning back in a dentist’s chair 

(-I’ll fix up those teeth for you, maybe get some of that rotting flesh out from in between your gums,)

suddenly filled his mind with glee, and he wanted to giggle shrilly, giggle like a little girl, like how Ellie and her friend giggled when they walked into the classroom during that far away era of two mornings ago-

And then, boom, he was back (he couldn’t get away for long), and he concentrated again on that mouth, that radiant mouth, a mouth that could be on the dentist’s wall along with a phrase along the lines of A Healthy Smile Starts With Proper Dental Care! or maybe Clean Your Teeth, Or I’ll Come And Take Them, Along With The Rest Of Your Head. He stared attentively at those teeth, at those lips, at the muscles around the mouth that forced it into a ear-to-ear grin, a cheerful, inviting grin, a grin that in any other circumstance would say, come here, I want to get to know you better. At one point Stevie felt it open inside his head, running its tongue over his brain, forcing him, corrupting him, shaping him into something he wasn’t. It wasn’t terrible, not compared to the paralysis. In fact, it felt kind of nice, and Stevie found a little pleasure in it. As more time passed, as more and more of the tongue ran itself over his brain (there may have been more than one at this point), Stevie found himself liking it more and more. At one point it got so enjoyable that Stevie wouldn’t have wanted it to stop even if something could make it stop.

Eventually Stevie decided that all he ever wanted to see again was that grin, that wide, happy grin, and after staring unblinkingly for God knows how long, the little boy who was once known as Stevie Carter began to grin back.