The Faceless Angel - Chapter 2

It was nothing. Just some crazy guy who rolled around in a ditch. Or at least that was what I should have thought. Instead, my mind frantically searched for an explanation, and was unsatisfied when I offered it the logical explanation. I was still clenching the paper in my left hand, and I kept telling myself to discard it the next trashcan I found. The only reason I still had the thing was because, by the time I found a trashcan, the thought had already been overwhelmed by thoughts of the old man. The old man may have left, but the feeling of being watched didn’t.

I unwillingly pictured the guy’s creepy eyes burning a hole in my mind’s eye as I walked home from the bus station. The fog was thicker now, making my eyes strain to see ten feet ahead of me. I hadn’t seen a single soul since I left the station. I felt a bead of sweat run down my forehead, even though it was 33 degrees out. As soon as my apartment building emerged from the thick fog, I noticed it immediately. There was a page.

It was innocent enough to anyone else, just a piece of paper torn out from a notebook, but I knew that’s not what it was. It meant much more. I ran up to my front door, examining the paper. That man from the bus had done this. 'Who is this dude!? How the hell did he find my house!?'Questions ricocheted through my head, and fear joined in until my thoughts were a chaotic burst of impossibilities and fearful wonder. A voice somewhere inside me told me to calm down. I kindly disregarded this advice. 'Does he know who I am? Why is he following me? What if he is the one who killed April?'

I was so caught up with what could be and what might be that I hadn’t even read the page.I ripped it off the thumbtack that held it in place on the door. “He's already seen you. There is no escape.” it read. No escape? No escape from what? And why was he attaching notes to my door? Once again my mind took off, exploring possibilities both plausible and implausible. I turned to face the wall of gray fog. It was unbroken and unmoving, as if it was waiting for me to turn back around before it approached me.

My small apartment was all I really had. This was the only thing I have ever loved that hasn’t been ripped from my helpless grasp. Even my parents. I never knew my mother. She died in childbirth and left raising me up to my dad, but, like all good things in my life, that didn’t last long. When I was in first grade, he picked me up from school because I was having trouble on the bus with bullies. My dad, being the great guy he was, decided to take me to my favorite ice cream parlor, which also happened to be Aprils favorite place as well. When we were crossing the sidewalk after getting our fill of frozen sweetness, my dad was run over in the street by some drunk redneck in a pickup who couldn’t bother to wait another twenty seconds for the light to turn green . Lucky little bastard I was to be 2 feet away from my death.

After that fun little incident, I had to live with my aunt and uncle, who I never got close to. They were both obese, and never really talked to me. They let me do what I wanted, when I wanted. All they did was make dinner for me each night. They never really wronged me in a great way, they just weren’t much of a family.

I set my coat down on my kitchen table as I looked around and sighed. The place wasn’t much, but it did the job quite nicely. My dining room, kitchen, and living room were all stuffed into one large-ish room, with no real definition between the three. I flicked on my light to reveal the ratty old couch planted across from my tiny boob-tube of a television, the thing must have been from the 1970’s.

Nothing interesting happened that day. I did a little research on sex offenders in the area (call me paranoid) but came up short. I was thinking that the old man had something to do with April. I doubted it, however, because he was just some crazy old man who put a page on my front door. Nothing more. Throughout my day, the incident never left my mind. I realized it wasn’t the man that was causing this unease. I didn’t know what it was.

I decided to quit worrying about it at around eight-thirty and hit the hay. I didn’t fall asleep until three, though, because my mind was so distraught. I was wishing and wishing that I could just stop thinking about it so I could fall into a nocturnal relief. But when I crossed the border between reality and dreams, I regretted it.

Seconds after my mind hit unconsciousness, I was sitting on a cold steel chair. I couldn’t move. All my muscles were flexing as if they were too scared to move. Like they were urging me to stay still or else whatever I was hiding from would see me. My eyelids slid open, the only part of me I could risk moving. Dead ahead of me was a mirror, but before my eyes examined themselves I scanned the room. I was in a small shack, which had two sits of windows mounted on the concrete walls on either side of me that revealed that the shack was ringed by a thick forest. I could barely make out the dead trees greedily reaching at the dim sky. The entire wall in front of me was covered by a single mirror, which displayed myself sitting in a chair in the middle of a concrete shack. I examined my mirror self, and found that it was much more disturbing than I had previously believed.

It was me. It was me sitting in a chair, unmoving. My eyes were the first thing I noticed. They had a look to them that I could only describe as… insane. It looked like I hadn’t shaved in quite a few days, and my hair was greasy and rugged. It terrified me. Whatever it was in the mirror, it wasn’t me. That person was a savage, the type of person that wouldn’t think twice about killing your family while you begged for mercy. That was not me. His expression changed to an expression of fear as his jaw fell open to let out a bloodcurdling scream of dread. No sound came from his mouth, instead my minds ear was filled with the extreme sound of a high-pitched emptiness. White noise. The sound was so loud in my head, and it muted the sounds I was actually hearing. I looked back up to my mirror form for an answer, but he just stared back at me. BOOM BOOM BOOM. Three loud tremors cut through the silence. I looked myself in the eyes, holding on to the one thing I knew that still made sense. Then I remembered that the man in the mirror didn’t make any sense. But that's when I noticed the most disturbing detail of all. The man in the mirrors eyes. They weren’t looking at me, they looked straight past me at whatever was lurking behind me. BOOM BOOM. The silence grew more painful after it recovered from the interruption of the loud blows. I lifted up my eyes to see what was behind me in the mirror. At first all I saw was darkness, but then the inky black gave way to something I only began to identify when- BOOM- I awoke in the darkness of my room, covered in sweat.

I looked at my clock; 3:09 am. My heart was racing and my head was light. I felt like I might vomit from the sheer terror I had just experienced. The confusion hung about my room like dust in a catacomb. At the time, my mind was too excited and exhausted to comprehend what was going on. My surroundings spun around my bed in a tornado of early morning moonlit walls and darkened colors. As I stepped onto the ever-tilting carpet beside my bed, the floor flinched when I heard a thunderous BOOM, throwing me off the edge of balance and causing me to plummet to the shag floor.