‘Why? So we can keep on believing in the creeper or Count Dracula or whoever else you think is out there. Chloe, listen to me. None of it’s real.’

This was for all those believers, the gullible and the deceived, and every scared little kid crying into their pillow. But most of all, though Ben would never admit it in a thousand lifetimes, this was for himself. This was proof that he had been right all along.

‘Ben, please. Don’t…’

He gripped the curtain in a balled-up fist and ripped it back; so swift and simple an action.

The horror nearly brought Ben to his knees. He staggered back into the room, staring in terrified disbelief at the face that stared back at him.

Its smile was unflinching; stretched impossibly wide as though the cheekbones had been shattered and reformed. Teeth were rooted in black gums, each one pared and veined with decay. The skin was ghostly white. Eyes, like the malformed mouth, were sickeningly caricatured; bloated like pus-filled sores bulging out from their sockets. The head was hairless, crooked and cracked, with a chinbone split beneath the skin, torn apart by the sheer force of that smile. Ears were absent, with only flays of skin remaining. The nose looked to have been smashed and pulled as putty into a point; like the face’s every aspect – mutilated and hideous to behold.

Ben’s body pressed against the back of the couch. The room around him dissolved into a fog, leaving nothing, just those soulless, shivering eyes.

It wasn’t a man. What now stood with its face practically pressed against the glass wasn’t human, if ever it could have been.

‘Make it go away!’ Chloe screamed. ‘Make it stop staring at us!’

Ben snapped back to the moment like a dog whose collar just got wrenched. He couldn’t catch his breath. That feeling of helplessness, of confusion, and the suffocating terror of that moment had left him weak. He faltered forward, willing himself to approach that which eyed him with all the fiery darkness of a devil. Every alarm in his head called for him to scream, but his voice had abandoned him. He kept his footing, though he couldn’t feel the ground. Ben reached for the curtain and suffered those eyes one last time before snapping it closed. His legs gave way immediately. And he dragged his body away, across the carpet.

He pressed his shoulders into the couch and sat, stupefied. That face was burned into his brain. It was all he could see. There was nothing else. He listened to Chloe weeping behind him on the couch, the only sound save for the terror that screamed from within them both.

‘It can’t be,’ he tried to say, but the words were just a feeling in his throat. ‘It’s not possible.’

The creeper was real. All that Alec Sparling had told them was true.

21

What have I done?