The creature’s been stalking you for a while now.

You’ve known it, too. It’s impossible not to hear the extra creak of the floor with each step you take, atop your own weight, synchronized. You’ve felt your shadow grow, slowly, as it takes its time shortening the distance between you two, inviting the dark cascades to become one. With care, you’ve been able to ignore the monster’s oncoming––simply, you just don’t look. But now you’re backed into a corner. The walls pulse around you, closing, like the tightening of your throat. You can hear it draw near as you stare at the wall of white subway tiles before you. This is as far as you go.

Its breathing is uneven, skipping in its lungs before exiting its teeth, audibly clenched. Each inhale becomes its own scratchy melody, echoing before completing the line of music with a quick and sure huff. The creature has been patient, trailing its prey at a distance through the passing days––and it’s been many of them––to this exact moment.

It’s time you look.

You steer your body with your shoulder, spinning sharply to face the being––but your eyes are squeezed into little raisins, brows furrowed and dipped into the dried fruit. You can feel the heat of the monster’s ragged breath fade in and out against your face, steadier now that the moment has arrived. The melodic puffs soothe you. You begin to count them until, eventually, you’re able to release the clutch of your eyebrows and, with one last deep inhale, open your eyes.

It smiles at you. It’s a mocking gesture, licking saggy, moist jowls. Thick saliva escapes the folds in its lips and oozes between cracked fangs. It towers over you, consuming you in its presence, yet you see eye-to-bloodshot-eye. Tears in its flesh, around its protruding collarbone and inside the dip of its ribcage, bleed. Some barely scratch the surface of dead, purpling skin, though cause pieces to crumple and peel from its body like tissue paper. Some are deep enough to expose strings of twitching muscle. Some look self-inflicted, wounds that sit scarring in clusters.

You can’t look away.

Jaggedly, you release your previous breath, just as the being before you does as well in its own treacherous cry. You stare at each other, blinking in unison, the rise and fall of both chests matching rhythm. You ball a fist, and although you’re staring into the yellowing eyes in front of you, you can see the monster’s fingers also close into its palm at its side. Its smile then deepens, stretching to the uncanny lengths of its cheekbones, and scrapes a clawed foot forwards. You don’t move, terrified by the creature mimicking your movements.

But what truly scares you is that you’re looking into your bathroom mirror.