Demon-Faced Girl

People always ask me about my gait. Whenever someone asks why I limp, I come up with some story breaking my leg. Sometimes the stories are mundane, other times, they are straight-up crazy inventions of mine I don't even expect people to believe. I once told someone I had a friend run over my leg with his truck to get my hands on a supply of painkillers. I know that’s not how it works, but that lady believed me.

The real reason I am a limping man now is definitely a strange one. It’s a strange story. I didn’t really share it with anyone for years because I’m not entirely sure if I even remember it correctly.

When I was younger, I used to drink a lot. By a lot, I mean I used to get piss drunk and pass out wherever and whenever. I had little regard for my health or image, so I spent my free time drinking myself away. On one such occasion, I found myself barely able to stand upright with an empty bottle of Jack in hand. Somehow, I had gotten myself into this run-down little cabin out of town. It was late. I was completely drunk out of my mind. There was no one there that I could see. Assuming it was an abandoned building, I just let myself pass out on a pile of cardboard.

I passed out. Although I woke up before sunrise when I felt something watching me. Half asleep, probably still drunk. Definitely not of a sound mind. I saw a girl sitting beside me. She was staring in my direction. Her bright blue eyes were tearing through the darkness of the night. Beyond the piercing stare, she seemed pretty normal. My mind didn’t have the time to digest what was happening before I saw the lower part of her face. Exposed jaw muscles and large bloody teeth greeted me as if the lover part of her face had been degloved.

My heart rate immediately rose, and I could feel ants crawling all over my skin. The adrenaline rush cleared the alcohol out of my system. Everything became painfully clear. I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to piss my pants to be blunt. A whirlwind spun inside my mind, dreadful thoughts and unimaginable horrors plagued my brain in those few awful moments. She didn’t seem to notice I had woken up, as she just kept staring at the wall. Seeing her lack of attention, I decided it must’ve been an alcohol-induced nightmare. Perhaps my body was starting to tell me it’s time to give up on the bottle. I closed my eyes and hoped to fall asleep again. Sleep wouldn’t come for a while as the mental monsters of fear kept on running circles inside of my brain and the adrenaline in my system kept me tense and vigilant. Eventually, my body finally collapsed under its own pressure and I passed out again.

Waking up in the morning, I realized I was once again alone. There was no strange monster-mouthed girl, there was nobody. Just the hangover and me. I woke feeling like someone had stuffed sand into my throat. Coughing up, I got up, realizing a thick layer of dust was everywhere. I cleared my throat as best as I could and got up groggily, walking around aimlessly, trying to adjust to the pounding of demon drums in my head. I stumbled around until I came across a tiny room filled with a sea of these hanging car air fresheners. The ones that look like tiny trees. There must’ve been hundreds, if not thousands, of them. That sight piqued my curiosity and so I swayed my body into that tiny room.

In the room, there was only a bed. On the bed was a person, for a lack of a better term. They were deathly pale, deathly thin. The sight of their skin painfully pulled against their visible skeleton made my stomach twist into a knot and hair on the back of my neck stand. The countless pressure ulcers decorating their ghastly skin. With each passing moment, I felt myself breathing heavier. Goosebumps ran across my skin over and over again, like an icy breeze caressing my arms and neck. I was trembling. The fear almost made me forget my headache replacing it with palatable heartburn.

The body suddenly moved, it bolted upward unexpectedly. That memory is burned into my psyche. It let out this awful, ear-piercing shrill cry. I thought I might die. My body seized up and everything spun for about half a second. I felt myself losing balance and then everything faded away. Everything but the feeling of a pounding ache in the back of my neck and this bone-breaking, burning sensation in my left leg.

After that, I remember little. To this day, I don’t know what had happened after that for sure. I know the girl was there, although now her face seems to be entirely normal in my memories. I know there was blood. There was the butchering of something. I know she took care of me. I don’t remember what had happened in the cabin. All I know is that one day I woke up in a hospital, not knowing my name, not knowing how I got there, and not knowing how my leg got messed up. I don’t know for how long I’ve been “disconnected” from the rest of the world, either. I couldn’t keep up with dates for the longest time.

Some days, I still can’t keep proper track of time.

Eventually, l regained my memories from before the incident in the cabin. Not much during that time, though. Sometimes in which I see faces and I hear voices. Usually, they’re hers. The face of a young woman with piercing blue eyes, sometimes normal, sometimes half demonic. Her voice was calm and charming mezzo-soprano. She used to sing to me, I remember bits of beautiful melodies I can't fully recall. This loss of recollection is sometimes so frustrating it makes me want to scratch at my own brain. It's scary sometime. She had this charming North European sort of accent to her speech, replacing her Zs with Ss and G and Js with the occasional Y sound. Sometimes, a mental photograph of a man’s face pops up in my mind, usually contorted in pain, rarely, when I am alone, I can hear the voices of men moaning in agony or the girl’s semi-incoherent words about her father. In these moments, I feel almost as if cold hands are wrapping themselves around me and I shudder in discomfort.

Sometimes these memories make me cry. They eat away at me. What if I had hurt someone? What if I had done something awful? I am not this kind of person... I refuse to be that kind of human being... I just... God... It's so hard, it's so hard to be this powerless. I feel almost like a zombie under the pernicious control of a despotic witch. I hate it but I can't do anything about it.

Simply put, whenever people ask me about my strange gait and limp, I lie, because I’m not sure how I got it. Maybe the demon-faced girl did something to me… besides clawing her way into my mind.