The Faceless Monster of Hickory Hills

Matthew Panayos

Bergen County Academies Short Story

The soil wasn’t soft. It was as if the rock protruding from the ground nearby was part of a much larger unseen rock, a rock that was mostly buried underneath a shallow layer of dirt. All this rock had to experience the world was a small portion exposed to the air. It could feel a few drops of rain, a gust of wind here and there, and even an animal from time to time, but the thick canopy ensured it could never feel direct sunlight, so it sat in darkness, incapable of escaping its tie to the ever-present ground.

Rine was uncomfortable on the unseen rock, lying in a ball so close to the truth. He knew he should get up and run for the people, his only hope of survival, but he didn’t. Something he could almost feel, something he had never understood before, kept him pinned to the ground. He knew his suit should be ripped, and his hair should be a matted mess, and yet, minus the dirt from the forest floor and the blood, his suit was in-tact, and his hair was neat. Rine waited for silence that he knew would never come. He hoped to sleep, to forget his mistakes, but the sound, like a dog whistle in his head, kept him awake and thinking. Rine thought of his failure-ridden past and his grim future, but he did not think of the present. He could not think of the present without making his headache worse, without knowing that his life was over; everything he had worked so hard to build lay on a floor far too different from the one he lay on now.

20 years ago

Felm finally came back after being out of school for a week, something about his parents and a car crash. Rine thought that, after being out for so long, Felm might have to repeat fifth grade. Would they still eat lunch together if Felm was held back? And more importantly, would Felm still give Rine his extra popsicle at lunch? For now, Rine put these questions away in the back of his mind. He was really good at that. Rine figured he should go claim the five popsicles Felm owed him from the days he had been absent, so he went to their normal lunch spot in the woods. Well, Rine didn’t think it exactly fit the definition of “woods.” It was more of a patch of trees surrounded by open fields, but they called it “the woods” anyway. Rine strolled up to the pair of stumps seemingly made for them and found Felm next to his stump instead of on top of it. “Hey, Felm, what’re you doing on the floor?”

“Nothing,” his friend responded in an unreasonably shaky voice. When he turned to look at Rine, Felm’s face was wet, and his eyes were red like he had been peppersprayed. Rine had always thought of Felm as strong; he didn’t think even something as bad as pepper-spray couldget a reaction out of him, let alone knock him down. “Who pepper-sprayed you?” Rine asked as Felm pulled himself onto the stump. “No one,” Felm said as he wiped his face dry on his shirt. Rine didn’t understand why Felm would so clearly lie to him, but he didn’t particularly care to find out.

“You got my pops?” Rine inquired. Felm acted weird. It was as if his body and face weighed significantly more than they had before, and yet he didn’t look any fatter.

“Yeah, whatever. Here,” Felm responded as he pulled a single popsicle from his American-flag printed lunch box. “On second thought, take both today, I’m not hungry.” Even his voice sounds duller today, Rine thought. “Where are the other three?” “What are you talking about?” Felm asked as his face appeared to scrunch up. “Well, you didn’t give me any last week, so now you got to repay me.” Felm didn’t respond; he just stared at Rine with an odd look on his face. His eyebrows had slanted inward, and his mouth curled down. Why did people always make faces when Rine opened his mouth? He thought Felm was different. He thought Felm would never make faces at him. After a moment, Felm stood up and walked loudly away.

Rine opened a popsicle and began licking its mostly melted remains while trying to understand why Felm was acting so weird. Maybe Felm didn’t see any benefit in talking to him any more. Rine never really knew why Felm had kept giving him popsicles in the first place. Rine never gave anything back. Why should he?

6:00 AM

Rine snapped awake as his eyes darted around the room taking in the unfamiliar surroundings; his headache surged, and his brain slowly started to catch up with his eyes. He saw himself in a picture frame on the wall, and his headache subsided. Rine had lived here for almost a year now, and every morning, he went through the same process: wake up lost, headache, recognize his room. He had moved to Hickory Hills with his family because he thought it would give the children an opportunity to grow up in a better neighborhood; after all, he had designed

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most of it himself. It was organized into nice neat blocks with traffic directed through the center of the town, so the streets outside houses wouldn’t be too busy. Each house was outfitted with state-of-the-art sound-proofing, so sleeping during the intended expansion projects wouldn’t be a problem if his company could ever manage to purchase that nature reserve down the street.

After exactly a minute of staying in bed toachieve full consciousness, Rine slowly escaped the grip of his blanket, careful not to wake his wife. Maria got quite annoyed if she was woken up even a minute too early which was what originally motivated him to include the soundproofing. Rine grabbed his socks and suit from the closet and headed towards the bathroom. As he did every day, he donned his formal attire after glancing at the calendar. Monday, May 10th, 1965. He never understood why people thought having a calendar in the bathroom was weird; it seemed like the perfect place for it. The bathroom was the first place he went in the morning and the last place he went before bed. Rine grabbed his toothbrush from the cup next to the sink and his toothpaste from the cabinet behind the mirror. He squeezed out what he considered the perfect amount of toothpaste and began to brush. Using his watch on the counter as a timer, he brushed his teeth for exactly two minutes. After returning his teeth- cleansing supplies to their proper locations, Rine looked at himself in the mirror and scooped some water from the tap to wet his hair. Rine took the comb from the countertop, and he ran the comb back through his hair twice and then, to the side once. Satisfied with his appearance, he placed his watch on his wrist and fastened the buckle. Rine opened the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway on his way to the kitchen.

Rine’s routine was always exactly the same; he had perfected it years ago. Deviation would only bring unpredictability, so as much as he could, Rine repeated the same actions each morning. Next on his schedule was breakfast. Rine opened the refrigerator and gathered two pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs from where a pile of ten sat in a box on the third shelf. He shut the refrigerator and filled a glass with water from the kitchen sink. Without sitting down, Rine popped an egg into his mouth and began chewing. The taste wasn’t anything spectacular, but Rine never minded. He ate eggs because they were concentrated nutrient pouches designed by mother nature herself and hard-boiled seemed the most convenient way to eat them. Rine washed the remaining egg particles down his throat with water. He only ever drank water. Every other beverage struck him as too full of unnatural chemicals or too sugary to possibly promote an extended lifespan. Rine inserted the second egg into his mouth. Maria emerged from the hallway appearing to have just gotten out of bed. She walked over to the counter, started the coffee maker, and sat down at the kitchen table to wait. After washing down the second egg, Rine grabbed his briefcase from his study down the hall and returned to the kitchen. Preparing to leave, Rine made his way over to the front door off in a short hall to the side of the kitchen and started to pull on his shoes.

“Rine, you should really say goodbye to the kids before you go,” called Maria from the kitchen table, interrupting Rine from tying his shoe.

“You know I don’t have time for that,” called Rine back. “They’re not even awake yet.” “Maybe you should make some time for it. They would really benefit from seeing their father each morning.”

Rine began thinking of a response that would get him out the door the quickest, but he knew Maria was generally right with this type of thing. It had never occurred to him that something as simple as saying goodbye could improve the children’s development. “All right, I’ll make time for it but not today. It’s already too late.”

“Fine. I’m going to wake the kids up for school,” she said followed by the sound of a chair sliding on the floor. “Have a nice day at work.”

While Rine tied his other shoe, he considered the possibility that he had made yet another irreversible mistake. Gabe would probably be fine anyway. He was strong and smart for his five short years alive, but Zara was the opposite. She always seemed too weak and developmentally behind even considering she was only three. Rine didn’t have a favorite; he couldn’t have a favorite, but Gabe was fundamentally the better child. Rine knew he wasn’t the best parent and thought it right that the children had Maria to make sure they don’t get messed up like him. Why did she even like him?

Rine stood up, twisted the doorknob, and finally exited his house. Rine glanced at his watch: 6:21 A.M. He was one minute late.

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15 years ago

Rine hadn’t specifically wanted to court Maria, but everyone else pushed him into it. All the kids in his grade knew Maria liked Rine, and, since Maria was universally adored, it only made sense for all their peers to urge Rine to make a move. Rine thought you needed to love someone before you went out with them, and Rine didn’t think he loved anyone. In the end, that didn’t even matter; Rine’s classmates had essentially asked Maria out for him. Rine went along with it at first only because he thought he could learn some valuable information about relationships. ✿ ✿ ✿

“Why don’t you ever smile?” Maria asked as they walked through a nearby park on their fifth date.

“I don’t know,” Rine responded.

“Well, what makes you happy?”

Rine hesitated. No one had ever taken enough notice of his actions to ask these questions, not even himself. “I don’t know,” Rine answered after a short pause. “I don’t know if anything does.”

“Not even your birthday or Christmas? What about warm socks on a cold night? Or Summer?”

“Headaches, all of them.”

“Gee. How do you even live?”

“I don’t know.”

“That was rhetorical, Rine. You didn’t need to answer.”

“Oh.”

They walked in silence for a time down the winding path between a thousand trees. It was mid-afternoon, but the trees’ shade devoured the harshest rays of August sun. Rine glanced up towards Maria at his side and smiled.

“You smiled!” Maria declared, returning his smile.

“It’s your fault,” said Rine.

Maria hugged him, and Rine knew instantly he had made a mistake. Maria would never let him go now. Maybe if he could keep pretending to be normal everything would be all right.

6:21 AM

Rine looked up from his watch and immediately got a headache. People were running down the center of the street. Rine would have known if this was some sort of planned event, so he knew for certain something was wrong. As he looked closer, he noticed the people seemed to be running too fast, and their faces were contorted.

“This is not good,” Rine said to himself. They were running from something. The people, his neighbors, kept glancing back with expressions that could only mean one thing: Fear.

Then he saw it. A naked man, wait no, a woman. What was that thing? It didn’t have any hair. The thing seemed to be chasing his neighbors. Rine squinted his eyes and felt his head pound as he realized it had no face.

The creature had the appearance of a person who had put on a tight costume made of skin covering his or her entire body. Rine’s head screamed as another realization hit him. A whole town wouldn’t run from a single monster. They had the numerical advantage. Rine watched as thirty or so more faceless monsters ran down the street after the mob of people.

Chaos seemed to engulf his perfect little town in a matter of seconds. This was not part of his routine. How could he have planned for this? How could he have predicted this?

The leading faceless caught up to the group of people at the back of the mob and attacked. It didn’t seem it was trying to kill, but when it touched someone, Rine saw a part of its flesh split off and grow to cover the person whohad been touched. The new faceless just stood there, but the other one kept chasing people in the group, attempting to get close enough to touch them. A man in the group shot it with his pistol, and the monster fell giving everyone else enough time to start running again. The skin of the felled monster grew slack and split open as it fell. The being inside the skin was not recognizable as a human any longer.

The new faceless stopped standing still. It launched into a run much faster than the person it had absorbed. It chased after the humans as well. It caught up and spread to a woman running away with a man by her side brandishing a large steak knife. The man immediately stabbed the pursuer in the stomach with his knife and it slunk to the ground, no longer a threat. Rine watched the man turn to his now faceless companion and stab it in a glowing spot on its chest. Rine knew the monster would fall and reveal a mangled pile of meat within, so rather than watching it happen again, he turned back to his door and swung it open. He strolled inside, quickly shut the door behind him, and threw its deadbolt.

“Maria!” Rine called as he briskly walked through the kitchen and into his children’s room across the hall from

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the bathroom. He was too late. If he had one more minute he could have saved them. He was sure of it. The window facing the street was broken, and he caught the blur of a faceless jumping back out to join the horde of faceless rampaging down the street. It hadn’t seen him.

Maria, Gabe, and even little Zara, recognizable only by their heights, stood still in the center of the room completely covered in skin. They all had an odd circular lump about the size of a fist over where their hearts should be. The lumps glowed red as if they contained a small fire. Rine had no time to ponder the meaning of this; he had mere seconds before they came after his body. He ran to the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. His head was pounding harder than it ever had. Rine grabbed the axe that hid there among the cleaning chemicals.

As he stepped back into the room, Rine thought he could almost feel the soft beige carpet through his shoes. He knew his heart should be beating fast, but Rine was perfectly calm. In a hasty, yet purely logical decision, Rine cut down the faceless monsters that had once been his family. He thought his own head might explode right there, and he would die, falling to the welcoming floor next to the corpses of his family on the blood-stained carpet.

The floor seemed to call to him. It wanted him to lie down and give up, to let what might come come. At least if he gave up now, his resting place would be warm and comfortable. He could stay here forever just curled up on the floor embracing the consequences of what he had done.

Rine leapt out the back door and ran.

10 years ago

Rine wasn’t good at dealing with death, not because he couldn’t bear it but because he could bear it too well, so he improvised. A feeble looking podium stood near one of the pale walls facing towards the center of the warmly lit room. It made sense to him that he had a headache at this moment. Showtime, Rine thought as he strolled over behind the podium and took in a breath ready to speak. “We are gathered here today,” started Rine, “to mourn the loss of Rina Brumal, my mother.”

Rine forced himself not to blink as he twisted his face into an expression he knew would convey sadness. He intentionally made his voice quiver as he spoke, “My mother was an incredible person. She always helped when she was able and even sometimes when she shouldn’t have been able. She was a great mother, and an even better person.” With this last sentence, Rine’s unblinking eyes finally welled up with tears, and Rine blinked hard so they would run down his face. Making a show of trying to contain his tears, Rine paused, and after a moment, he quickly left the podium, fleeing past the solemn audience. Rine navigated to a private room for Rina’s closest family members, a room solely for Rine. His escape plan had worked, but he had forgotten one thing. Maria followed Rine into the private room and shut the door behind them. “Are you all right?” Maria asked, hoping to console Rine. Rine had already wiped away the tears and restored his expression to its normal stoic state, “I’m fine. Just have a headache.”

Maria’s somber expression was replaced with one of confusion, “Were you,” her face shifted expressions once more, “faking?” “Maybe.” “How could you do that?” Maria said, clearly getting angry. “How could I not? It’s what’s expected of me. To be distraught I mean.” “And you don’t feel distraught?” “No.” “But she was your mother.” “And now she is dead.” “You’re callous, Rine,” Maria disappointedly noted as she walked out of the room. “You have no idea, darling,” Rine whispered without a hint of emotion.

6:25 AM

A high-pitched whistle slowly overtook the pain of Rine’s headache. He paused his run to look around for the source of the noise, so he could quiet it. In a vain attempt to block it out, Rine held his hands to his ears, dropping the axe from his bloody hands. Covering his ears only made

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the whistle louder. Rine picked the axe back up and started running again. Something in his head urged him to run to the nature reserve. Of course, the trees will provide cover, Rine thought. He couldn’t hide here in the abandoned yards of his neighborhood, he needed to get to the trees.

Rine’s heart beat fast now, but not out of fear. It beat fast to accommodate his active body’s need for oxygen. In a continual loop, his blood hurtled through his veins, a luxury lost to the dead. Rine could barely think over the sounds playing in his head, and yet he still managed to form a plan.

He would run to the forested portion of the reserve. There he would search for others and make sure they were of no danger to him. Then, he would approach and help them all survive these monsters.

The minutes he spent running felt like days and seconds. The pain of his mind made every second a year of torture, and yet it also impaired his ability to comprehend the passing of time, so it happened in the blink of an eye. Forcing thoughts into the cramped remains of his sanity, Rine spotted a group of people near the edge of the forest. He silently rushed in and found a rock just large enough to hide behind. Peering over the top of the rock, Rine found that the people were occupied with a trio of faceless. He watched as one of their number, a large red-headed man wielding a fire poker, was touched by one of the monsters. Rine now recognized this man as his neighbor three doors up the street. A shot rang out as the faceless who had transformed the man fell. Another faceless was struck to the ground with a shovel. The final faceless jumped inhumanly far towards an unarmed young woman standing close to where the new faceless stood unmoving. She swiftly scooped up the fire poker from where it had dropped out of the man’s hand and held it up towards the arcing faceless. It landed on the poker going motionless. The young woman, whom Rine recognized now as his neighbor’s daughter, pulled the poker free from the faceless. Rine watched as she did something peculiar. Rather than kill the new faceless, who was no doubt about to attack, she used the poker to stab it lightly in the chest. Rine realized only now that the faceless bore the same red glowing lump over its heart that his family had exhibited. She popped the lump, and the faceless’ skin grew limp and fell off, revealing the man completely unharmed underneath. The last thing Rine saw before he turned away was the father embracing his daughter.

6:33 AM

Rine was uncomfortable on the unseen rock, lying in a ball so close to the truth. He knew he should get up and run for the people, his only hope of survival, but he didn’t. Something he could almost feel, something he had never understood before, kept him pinned to the ground. He knew his suit should be ripped, and his hair should be a matted mess, and yet, minus the dirt from the forest floor and the blood, his suit was in-tact, and his hair was neat. Rine waited for silence that he knew would never come. He hoped to sleep, to forget his mistakes, but the sound, like a dog whistle in his head, kept him awake and thinking. Rine thought of his failure-ridden past and his grim future, but he did not think of the present. He could not think of the present without making his headache worse, without knowing that his life was over; everything he had worked so hard to build lay on a floor far too different from the one he lay on now.

The whistle screamed, and his head pounded as if he had trapped a feral bear inside his brain, and it was clawing against his skull, trying to escape. What had he done to deserve this damaged mind? He knew there was no answer, that he was born with it for no reason beyond the unchangeable fact that his parents’ DNA blended in such a way to give life to a defective human. His attempt to answer such an irrational question was ludicrous, especially in a time like this, but he wondered anyway. Perhaps an illogical thought now and then is exactly what he needed to shine light on the inherent absurdities of reality. The world he lived in did not conform to his understanding of it, and with the weight of this truth piled atop his mistakes, Rine finally broke. He clamped his eyes shut in a futile attempt to replace the world with the image he had in his head. He plastered a smile on his face resulting in a twisted concoction of several expressions as a single tear rolled down his cheek and into the dirt.

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