2AM: The Smiling Man - Alicia Gaines

 When I was in college, my roommate and I used to go to Rossi’s—a bar about ten minutes from our dorm—every Friday night. A kind of “congrats, you got through the week” celebration. We were both engineering majors, and not to exaggerate, but sometimes that tradition was the only thing keeping me going.

It was one of those “bar nights,” as we liked to call it, when my roommate had to go back early to finish a project he’d been holding off. He asked if I wanted to go back too, but I just laughed and waved him off. This area was always quiet at night—something of a blessing at times—and was especially so after midnight. 

He left half after one, leaving me to finish my drink. I left just before two as the bar shut down with an ambiguous—for lack of a better word—parting word from the bartender. She looked at me funny, almost scared, for no reason I could imagine. Said something about the streets always being quieter and darker at night, in that tone of voice that screamed a bigger picture that I was clearly missing. Just like with my friend, I waved her off too with a smile. Some people were just paranoid and especially in a town like this, where even the drug dealers were polite, there was no reason to be.

I was walking back on the sidewalks, five minutes from the dorms, when I first heard it. It started off as a faint shuffling noise, so soft and brief that I almost thought it was an animal. I paused briefly, then continued, convinced it was nothing.

I was passing under one of the dimmer street lights when I heard it again—that same scuffle—coming from the shadowed sidewalk right in front of me. I paused again, waiting—though I wasn’t sure what for—and then I saw it. 

A man in a tan suit and brown dress shoes emerged from the shadows to match the shuffling, moving in a mixture of a waltz and a drunken stumble. He was smiling, though it was hard to tell with his head tilted back and body swaying to some unheard rhythm.

I moved to the other side of the sidewalk, faintly relieved that this strange man was probably like me, coming home from another bar, if slightly more inebriated and possibly with more bad decisions under his crooked belt.

But his head followed me. Not his eyes, because his head was still tilted back, but his whole head shifted to follow my movements.

I tried again to convince myself that this was just another drunk, but maybe, he was the violent kind. I wasn’t going to stick around to find out, so I moved across the street to give him more space to pass.

And then the strange shuffling stopped. I couldn’t help but glance over, and my heart nearly stopped when he wasn’t there anymore. It was stupid, but my mind couldn’t help but jump first to a mugger, then to a serial killer, and then, even though I’d deny it, to a ghost.

I shivered at the thought, or maybe because of the cold chill of the air that hadn’t been there when I left the bar. 

The air suddenly felt stale. 

I shook my head lightly, like it would do anything, took a deep breath, and was about to start walking again when I heard that same scuffle coming from behind me. 

I spun around with my heart in my throat to see the man standing not ten feet away from me, half shrouded in shadows. My chest felt like it was led, and it weighed down the gasping breath I tried to take. 

Just a drunkard. A faster-than-normal drunkard with light steps. 

I wasn’t as convinced as I was before, because drunkards stagger. They don’t stumble as they take a step forward like they’re used to longer legs—don’t twitch like they hear something and then smile wider, disjointed, and clunky, with movements just a bit too stiff yet too loose to look like anything but a mimic; anything but some terrible thing hiding under malleable flesh.

For a moment—one stretching, terrifying moment—both of us were still. My heart beat like a drum in my ears as the smiling thing—almost a human, but not quite there—kept looking—no—facing me, all the while its smile never faltering. 

One dance-step forward, another tilt-sway-waltz, and then it straightened, although the neck stayed bent. I stood there before it, frozen—rooted. I felt at once too hot and too cold, and I was faintly aware of a ringing in my ears that replaced the pounding drumming of my heartbeat. In that second, I saw everything. The unnaturally pale skin, the too-white too-sharp teeth, a small scuff on the otherwise polished dress shoes; I was floating, suspended in the moment. 

The world snapped back into place with the first step.

The thing, almost amused, paused for half a second at my flinch, and then started running. 

For some strange reason, a vision of a predator playing with food flickered through my mind as I turned and started to sprint.

Sneakers on cement, the light scraping of gravel, harsh breaths from fear and exertion, dim street lights fading to black and then back, doing nothing to help my sudden dizziness. 

I felt like I was on a roller coaster, or maybe, as I briefly considered some bar horror stories, hallucinating. Being drugged would explain the dizziness, the tilting world, the chill and fever, the way I could almost see myself in a third-person. 

Sneakers on cement. Quiet but heavy. Heavy breathing. Louder clicking sounds of dress shoes. 

Gravel, heavy and scaping. 

The world flipped, the lights swirled, and the shadows moved to the in-and-out blurring of my vision. 

I realized with a detached sort of amusement that I had tripped. Fallen.

I laid there on the pavement. I felt heavy. I felt light. I felt like I was not quite there.

It was quiet, save for the ringing, save for the breathing, and I realized I was not even two minutes from home.

I started to smile, choking out a bark-laugh-grunt, and tried to roll. I was stopped by brown shoes to the left of my head. 

My head tilted up, and it was finally quiet. No ringing, no breathing, no shoes on cement. 

Just me, those brown dress shoes, that tan suit, and that damning smile.

Its head tilted down until it was staring directly at me with wide, crazed eyes.

As it stared at me, I noticed two things.

First, it had no pupils. 

I felt oddly triumphant at noticing that, in my delirious state.

Then, as it leaned closer, smelling of burning flesh and rot, for a second I could almost swear that it looked disappointed. 

The smile stretched, and something moved.

The last thing I heard was the sound of a soft, grating chuckle before my eyes slipped closed and I passed out on the cold sidewalk. 

I woke up with the sunrise to the lingering smell of rot and a crippling sense of relief that I could only later explain as the feeling of escaping, or rather, being passed over by the greedy hands of death.