Part Three - I'm Guarded by Faces

The Room

“What’s Ebner’s Island?” Scott said. He tapped his pencil on the mahogany table slightly. The tapping echoed about the room in reverberating squeals, like it wanted to escape the metal chamber. Milo’s eyes followed the sound and watched the man’s perfect fingers balance the instrument. It looked toy-like against his paw. Everything about Scott’s body was tanned and manicured. It seemed strange to Milo that he wouldn’t be using a Dr. Touch pen, or something fancier considering Scott’s ruling vanity.

“Why do you use a pencil?” Milo said.

“What? My pencil?” Scott said. He held it up to Milo and looked at it slightly like it could give him an answer.

“Yeah, why do you use a pencil?”

“Oh, I see. Well, I like to be able to erase my mistakes.”

“Am I making mistakes?”

“No, no, I’m talking about punctuation and spelling. Stuff like that.”

“Won’t you be typing everything up and submitting in report form?”

“Let’s get back to this island, can you tell me more about it?”

Milo rubbed his hands together a little bit. He felt more scars etched into his skin. His body had been regrown multiple times, but the little marks from his escape attempts remained. Everything he used to do, at least in terms of physical movement, was directly tied into his environment, which was for the last 400 years a forest ruled by a monster. He’d been poked, prodded, and tortured inside the woods. Now, these doctors were doing the same exact thing to him, only they were well-groomed, charming, and too educated to understand the irony of the situation.   

“It was the island the phantom sort of operated out of. It was like this place it never wanted us to go, but wouldn’t make it a secret. It stood there countless times in this one form,” Milo said.

“This one form? You mean it changed around? How did it appear on the island?” Scott said.

Milo fidgeted around in his seat a little bit. He’d answered questions about the phantom in earlier interviews, but previous investigators hadn’t wanted to know about it like Scott.

“So it had multiple forms, or just the one? Was there more than one? You said it’d be a shadow, smoke, or even light before,” Scott said. He could feel himself getting a little desperate with his questions.

“No, just one, it wasn’t like when it’d be in the rest of the forest,” Milo said.

“But on Ebner’s Island, what shape was it?”

“It was this faceless thing, like a man, but not physically there. It was some sort of walking thing, but it never left the island in that form. It protected the island. The faces also helped with that.”

“Um, I see, you said it had no faces.”

“Not on its head, but elsewhere on the island.”

Scott had to stop. He started to write something down on his yellow memo pad. He wrote in long and hard presses with the quivering pencil, so Milo would think he’s writing something important. He didn’t know whether to laugh, scream, or a mixture of both. He stopped and looked back at Milo who was calm and plain-faced in the clammy light. A big, freshly written “What the hell” looked up at Scott from his writing pad.

“The faces weren’t on him Scott, but elsewhere on the island,” Milo said. He pushed out some angry air with his clenched teeth.

He didn’t like that Scott was making him repeat himself.

The Woods

“You think that man can help us?” Ron said. He pulled at the little scabs that had formed around his lips from the vines slashing at him while he tried to escape Snake Tooth Pass. It’d been about two hours since they finally gave in, and stopped running at the walls of trees. Mostly, it was Melissa who convinced them to stop with heavy bouts of crying and screaming. Even though they’d been inside the forest and its trembling branches of barely budded trees for nearly four hours, the sun hadn’t moved its leaf-cut silhouettes since they first walked in. The wind hadn’t changed either; it’d been a consistent breeze cutting between the trunks and dirt-pulled paths. It was like nothing had been dissected by time except their blood and skin.

“I don’t know if it was a man. It looked like something else,” Milo said. He was pacing in front of the black water. Something about it had changed recently since the cloaked figure had disappeared.

“Well, if he’s on the island still, then maybe we could swim over there and talk to him,” Melissa said. Her voice was contorted from crying and screaming. She sounded hoarse and strangled, like an old woman whispering.

“I don’t see him anymore, and you wouldn’t miss him. He was strange,” Milo said.

“Well, I’m going to try and get over there and see him,” Ron said. He staggered up and split a few more scabs from his lips.

“Plus, the water will clean off all this blood,” he said.

“Ron, don’t be stupid, stop trying to prove yourself,” Milo said.

“Shut up Milo, nobody wants to hear you talk right now,” Ron said.

“Both of you shut up, nobody should go anywhere till we get help,” Melissa said.

“Screw it, I’m jumping in. We’ve been here for hours and nobody’s come,” Ron said, wadding into the dark water.

“Just stop and think Ron, you’re making everything worse,” Milo said. He was standing on the weed-soft edge of the pond with black-rotted stick in his right hand. He was ready to swing it out over the water in case Ron had problems.

“Shut up Milo, and put that away, this water isn’t even that deep,” Ron said.

As if sensing his optimism and confidence, the mud beneath his feet, which felt slimy and sticky, sunk down like a hidden pit. Ron’s blond head bobbed below the weather like a feathered cork. He had suddenly, or maybe just provoked, a hidden drop-off. Ron started swimming immediately in panicked wiggles. Below the water level it looked like the night had reversed itself. It was completely black and hollow, like the long dormant eye of a skull. Even the sun barely penetrated the melted-shadow as Ron stared down at the pulling deep. Something was making the swim longer, more complex, like it wanted Ron to work on getting to the island.  After swimming through the water for what seemed like a small century, in a shivering doggy-paddle, Ron stopped and looked back at the shore. Logically, it should only be a few yards away from when he got in the water. Instead, it looked like the far side of the ocean. He could barely make on the battered forms of Melissa and Milo standing on the bank. Something hissed in the water around him, and he turned back towards the island. It wasn’t far, just about ten yards away. He could see a few flying beetles sticking to the sharp green reeds sprouting off the island.  Ron dived down into the water to give himself some more energy. He liked going down below the surface a little bit. It gave him some extra energy. The water was black, oily, and cold to him. The underwater shore started to appear as his hands parted the unending bubbles in front of his face.

He stopped and screamed at what the shore had waiting below its banks.

Faces, pearl and perfect, like masks out of some ghoulish play, had been fused into the dirt and grime of the island. They spread apart as Ron got close, like they were going to entrap him. They were smooth and flawless, and had slits for eyes for features. No mouth, nose, or ears stared back at him. The faces started to shift slight in his vision back and forth, like they were part of some unholy melody. A shadow in the water was below them floating. It was sharp, stretched, and shaped like a man. It was pulling on something mixed in the water and matter to make the masquerade dance.

Ron immediately soiled himself, and clawed to the surface.

“Faces!” He screamed to the shifting shores.

“There are faces in the water,” he said. He scrambled backwards in the water.  A hard point jutted into his shoulder. It was Milo's branch from before. Ron clawed onto it like a lost cat.
"You only went a few feet Ron," Melissa said. She couldn't hide her disappointment.