Recently, when I have looked into the mirror, it has been his eyes that have stared back at me. His eyes rest in my body, but my body is not as it was, not in the mirror. It may come from any angle, but no matter how it approaches, it approaches all the same, with an ugliness it had not once possessed. There is a hint of rot in it’s complexion, as if it is withering away before my eyes while I still live inside. Perhaps it is only in the mirror. I speak of it to my beloved, and my beloved says to me:

“My dear, you are just as handsome as when I first laid eyes upon you.”

But I was hardly handsome then, and now, well now I do not know. I do not know what is becoming of me. I feel things moving under my flesh, and I think I see them there, slithering just beneath the surface, wriggling away from sight. My skin crawls atop my bones, and sometimes I catch my fingers quivering in fright, and sometimes I feel my eyelids twitch in disgust. It was ever since I saw his face.

It was heavy and humid in the city when I saw his face. It always is, but the heat was different to what it once had been. It was a queer kind of heat, not of a blistering summer heatwave, but a heat that seems to come from within, like the aftermath of a fierce exercise, where the hairs on your flesh begin to itch against your garments. It was as if the air was never hot at all, but that there was rather something lingering in the static city haze that made the lungs inflate quicker and the heart pound harder against the chest. There was a hidden dread in the city, and I do not think anyone could say what it was, but I think we all felt it. It made our insides burn. People were leaving this place by the droves. But then, I never saw anyone leave, not really.   

The fog was thick when I saw his face. It peeled off the walls and slobbered over the cracked crevices of concrete like a sickly goo - you could almost find yourself physically trapped in the fog, as if you were once again a newborn babe, enveloped in an aura of smegma. This was the kind of climate where it seemed healthier to me to sit inside and do nothing at all, than to go for any leisurely stroll. It is impossible to clear one’s head when the air around it is so cluttered. All the same, I would have to venture outside, and did so that night. My wife is dreadfully sick, and I must regularly procure more medication to keep the agony of her affliction at bay. I do not know what her sickness is. The doctors say it is a virus, but they always say that when they have no clue what it is. She is bed-ridden, and only half-lucid. Her bedsheets stick to her like flesh, for in her paralysed state her endless sweat becomes a sort of glue. I would take her to a hospital, but I see how they treat the ill and weak in this city. 

It was upon leaving the pharmacy when I saw his face. The place was truly desperate in its condition, the automatic door would lurch back and forth like a lobotomised ape, perpetually trapped in a limbo between open and shut. Most of the lights were not working, and if they were they only flickered. The paint on the walls was chipped away as if by claws, and panels from the ceiling were drooping down with frayed, snakelike wires dangling from some dark upper abyss. Most of the shelves were empty and it was possible that they were never to be stocked again, and the one solitary clerk had the kind of pale cloudy eyes, squalid complexion, and slack, saliva-slathered jaw of exactly the kind of person who used what they sold in exactly the kind of way you are not supposed to. At this time, my own head was growing weary in the foul miasma of the reeking city. There were hidden bin-bags of discarded garbage that slept in alleyways and sidewalks all across the city, and they baked hideously in the eternal heat and conjured up all sorts of sinister suggestions of their obscured contents, and it made my brain throb and my balance misaligned. It was so thick with fog once I left the pharmacy that looking across the road for traffic was a farce, and so when I stepped onto the road and a sudden kaleidoscope of screaming light struck me right in my retinas and a veering, jittering black bus came screeching around the corner and ploughing through the fog, it knocked me almost off my feet. My hands were gloved - they always were, for I feared the contagiousness of my wife’s sickness - and so in my impaired grip I dropped a jar of pills and watched pitifully as they rolled along the crumbling concrete and into a mixture of mist and smog before my feet. 

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It was in shadow when I first saw his face. His face… was it even a he, under there, was it even a human at all?… I had sought to retrieve my jar of pills, and walking along the street I noticed in the corner of my eye a deep, dark silhouette standing in the middle-distance. It loomed motionless like a statue, facing towards me. It appeared to be adorning a thick trench-coat of some sort, and a fedora. It gave me an inexplicable chill despite the humidity of the air. I was always an anxious type, especially once the disease had spread across the city and infected my beloved, but this was different. Something about that ominous shape far in front of me did not just produce nervousness, but a form of unplaceable disgust, the kind of knee-jerk repulsion that screamed in my ears for me to turn and run. But the figure was in the direction of where my pills had rolled, and so ignoring my other impulses I crept closer. I dismissed my disgust as irrational fear, amplified by my hypersensitivity. I called out to the shape in the fog, hearing my voice rumble and echo and lose itself in the shrouded alleyways that splintered away from the high-street wherein we both stood. It still did not appear to move, and did not speak in reply, but as I came ever closer, I saw that its arm was outstretched towards me. I was now in touching distance of the figure, and I began to sense why I had felt so repulsed. A heavy, putrid stench began to strangle my nostrils and I could not help but cough in the face of the man, who even now as he stood right before me was still shrouded in darkness. But during my fit of coughing the figure took one step forwards into the light of the street-lamp above us both that beamed and buzzed mightily above him now like an unholy halo. His arm was still outstretched, and in his shivering, gloved palm were the pills I had sought after. Tentatively, without saying a word, I reached out for them. And it was just as I had the jar in my grasp that something sharp and cold lashed out at me, wrapping itself eagerly around my wrist and I yelped and I squirmed and I shuddered in revulsion and my blood turned cold as it rummaged beneath my layers to clutch at the flesh of my wrist, and I tried to pull away but I could not move, for my arm was trapped and my feet would not budge and I began to shake uncontrollably. Latched onto my wrist was a shrivelled, pale, rotting hand with fingers like coils and nails like daggers, with bulging purple veins shuffling in some grotesque march across the putrefying flesh. Horrified, I sought to shout at the man for his assault and his condition but as I glared up at the face I saw two glowing, glazed over, dilating eyes that twitched in the light but did not blink and held an unwavering, paralyzing gaze upon me. They were bloodshot, and there were droplets of puss crying from the eyelids and trickling down his face, which was covered in dried, crinkled bandages that resembled skin, but I could see beneath that there were layers or wriggling, writhing, reddened flesh, as if the man’s real face was flayed or burned or simply peeled away. And still I could not move, even as I felt the frail, icy hand relinquish its staggering grip. And then the hand raised to the face. And the eyes did not look away from mine. And they did not blink. And the hand fiercely penetrated the innards of the bandages as my gag reflex began to kick in, and the hand began to pull across the face, dragging tendrils of bandage with it, where flakes of skin and patches of blood were revealed. But no, there was more. With the bandages there came all of the flesh I had saw beneath them, as if it too was part of a mask. And oh… behind that godless mask, there was no face at all…

 More even than disgust or terror, what overwhelmed me the most was simply how utterly impossible it was. Before my eyes was not a face of any living man, but a blood-stained, withering skull, with two bulging green, bloodshot spheres and an agape jaw with sharp jagged teeth laid out menacingly in a mouth that seemed to smirk at me. And from that mouth - or was it from another orifice of decomposition? - some glistening, muddy, pus-coated worm slithered across the decaying bone, and for all it slithered it never left sight, suggesting a size far greater than could be conceived. But soon disgust dominated my senses once more, for as it wriggled I could feel my own tongue wriggling heavy inside my mouth and the synchronicity with the creature made me want to vomit and sever my own tongue. It was as if I could taste what I saw before me, that the worm lived inside me, too. And it seemed to me in this moment that this wretched parasitic worm was the real life-form that possessed the corpse that stood before me. And then just as I pondered this, the thing took another step towards me. I heard the jar in my hand begin to crack, and the face’s smile widened as pus - or was it even pus at all, but some sickly alien ectoplasm? - began to ooze from inside the skull itself. But as it continued staggering towards me I could feel my feet once more. Without another thought I sprang and leapt and flailed and galloped like a demented maniac through the thickening fog, many times losing my way, only once looking back at where it had stood. It was gone. But its departure did not relieve me, for in my terror a thought possessed me more unnerving than any of what I had already saw. I feared that it would wish to find me. I feared that it would wish to show me its face again.