PH//FACES

"Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places”

Howard P. Lovecraft

Casey’s hands were spread out infront of him. He could feel the sticky texture of dried coffee stains and syrup beneath his fingers – no one had cleaned the table before he and his father occupied it. He had been digging into the guck for the last 4 minutes. His father’s battered, bloodied and bruised face was the inciting element that sent every molecule, thought and mental defect into overdrive in a matter of seconds.

Suddenly calm felt like yesterday.

“Dad, please, tell me what’s in the box, and why are there bruises on your face?” He tries to sound as detached as possible from the words he’s uttered. Logic over emotion, his father always said.

His dad rearranges himself in his seat, a visual malaise. He glares over at the box he brought in, wrapped in brown paper sitting at the edge of the table. His eyes focused on the distressed looking string wrapped around it. It looked as worn and battered as his own features. His eyes gave him away, he was sinking into fear.

Logic over emotion, that’s the answer so rapid resolution, Casey could hear his father’s words echoing with irony.

“Dad, I can’t help you if you don’t speak. Come on, man.”

Dale looks at his son, he nods in approval, but not before sticking a cancer stick between his lips and inhaling as if with purpose. His eyes shake behind momentarily closed eyelids.

“Dad!” The other people dinning behind them gaze over.

“sir, you can’t smoke in here,” yells the waitress from across the server’s window.

“We’re in a diner in the tail end of the Bronx, are you serious?” Dale rebuttals.

The waitress raises an eyebrow, her tangled bun dancing in disapproval. She wasn’t having it tonight.

Dale throws the bud in his coffee, snarling.

Casey’s face was no less perturbed, his dad’s tactics of avoidance were getting on his nerves, and he had picked the table clean with his nails.

Dale clasps his hands, “I have to go away for a little, and by a little I mean indefinitely. I wanted to say goodbye.” His jaw clenches. He was trying to remain detached; at least the Anthropologist in him was. “We prepared for this; we knew this day would come. That’s the cost of my work.”

Casey gazes up at the moon, crescent, luminescent and snarling – a sinister smile hidden in plain sight. “So, you were right then, there’s something sleeping inside our moon?”

“Casey, far more than something.” His bruised knuckles graze against the zipper of his coat, dead skin falling off as he pulls out what looks like an old vintage photo. “This was taken off the corpse of my colleague, Dr. Hubbard. My proof.” He slid the photo across the table.

Casey found himself at a crossroads - process his father leaving, indefinitely, or react to the evidence of hell presented before him. He can’t believe his eyes, his anxiety is consequently dethroned by dread. The photo shows the moon’s surface, but it wasn’t just any Hubble telescope image. It was a sonogram image exposing the moon’s entrails.

“You’re kidding…,” Casey thought his father’s research was a curiosity, at first. A successful, ambitious but bored man’s way of passing time. But after Casey’s mom passed 4 years ago his dad buried himself in the work, it had become an obsession - one that would ruin both their lives.

The image was washed in static, but you could see clearly, thousands of irregularly shaped faces staring out from inside the moon. Her phases displayed in horror inducing faces as they seem to fill the space within – those things were inside, waiting, watching, filling the void, all melting into each other.

“You…you have to go,” Casey said it without realizing. Logic told him his dad had to run, this was too big, and they would hunt him.

…but emotion…

Dale takes one good look at his son, “we planned for this,” he takes a slow but deep swallow, his Adam’s apple feels as heavy as his chest. “I love you; you’ve got this,” then he pauses. “They’ll find me again soon, if they haven’t already. This discovery; it’s proof of an origin so far beyond our own cosmic understanding.” He pauses again, taking in Casey’s features a final time as he speaks. “The influence the moon’s had on the human mind since the inception of time, finally explained in a single image. They tried to keep me from it, from all of us. The truth about the moon landing, what Armstrong really saw and heard, the true history of our origins.”

Casey’s eyes go dead, a single tear trails down his tightened jaw. He never thought his relationship with his father would end when he turned twenty-one, and yet, there they sat.

…but emotion… “The world gains a savior, but I lose a father. Was it worth it?” If looks could kill.

Dale sits back, a single tear to match his son’s. The diner’s lights flicker, the lamp above them hums as it loses and regains power. Dale knew this was it.

“Look Casey, we’ve planned for this, we’ve talked about this. I can’t have you involved – not if…,” he couldn’t get the words out, “if I’m to figure out what your mom’s passing has to do with those things inside that moon.” He never confided in Casey the real reason he delved so deeply into exposing the true horrors of the moon.

“Wait, what did you just say about mom?” His heart contorts.

But Dale had no time to answer, as he reaches for his coffee cup and stares inside bewildered. You could swear by the look on his face that he had just seen his misfortunes foretold to him in the reflection of the coffee. His final thoughts, as he gave in to a permanent sleep, had nothing to do with the poisoned cigarette floating in his coffee – but had everything to do with leaving his son to inherit the hell that was coming for him.

“Dad!” Casey throws himself across the table and lifts his father’s lifeless head. The knot in his stomach felt as invasive as those faces inside the moon. “Dad please, not like this.” He cries as every face in that diner watches him lean over his dad.

The lights shut off again, this time for seconds, including the two streetlamps directly outside the diner window.

The diner falls silent, and the darkness settles in like an unwelcomed visitor. Nothing stirs, nothing moves, everything seems to give in to the eternal sleep that fell over Casey’s dad. He felt cornered, and then the emergency lights paint the diner in a neon red and Casey melts in the horror’s tapestry that stands before him. Every face in the diner has turned to look at him, their eyes give off a faint glint in the cascading ocean of red. Something was off in the way they were staring at him, as if it wasn’t them looking, but something inside them looking through.

Casey looks at the moon, a gash in the sky, a haunting smile.

He can feel…them.

A hum emanates from everyone around him, their throats bulge outward as if something was trying to make its way out. They shoot up from their chairs, their hums turning into guttural shrieks that sound like the audible manifestation of hooks, ache and suffering.

Casey breaks from his paralysis and grabs the brown paper box next to his father’s corpse. They’re everywhere, blocking every exit. Logic over emotion, damnit think, Casey. He spots the server window that’s still open – he runs for it, clutching the box tightly against his chest. He jumps over the server’s counter and is greeted by a pair of hands. The cook, a slender, young guy with long fingers, shoves Casey against the stove still on. Casey drops the box as he tries to keep his back from being scorched by the heat, but instead pays for it with the skin on his palms. The hot iron sears into his hands, he yells in agony. The young cook throws his head back, his neck bulges, and swells. Something pushes itself upward from inside his mouth dislodging the cook’s jaw. A pair of tentacles with jagged teeth traced around it emerge and jerk violently in the air.

A pan connects with the cook’s face as he shrieks in disapproval. The waitress shoulders the cook against the wall while Casey scrounges around for the box, his hands still in agonizing pain. The waitress grabs the slender man’s dislodged bottom jaw, and slams it hard against his top half clamping the tentacles between his teeth before she flips him on top of the burning stove.

“Let’s go, now!” She grabs Casey who is still clutching the box like his life depends on it – the nerves in his hands still active from the heat that kissed his lamenting skin.

Casey stares at the waitress who just saved his life. Her driving is erratic but rightfully so, what the hell was all that?

“Thank you for saving me,” he’s visually shaking. She seemed calm, rational, logical.

“No worries, I’m sorry about your dad,” she has kind brown eyes, the kind that disarm you in an instant.

She pulls over into an alleyway, “We’ll stay here for a moment. Hopefully they didn’t follow us.” She looks at the rearview mirror, her disheveled red hair sticking out in every which way.

“I agree. I need a breather…damnit dad,” his dad’s final moments replay in his head.

Logic over emotion, Casey, not now. Close your eyes, lean back, collect yourself.

Minutes pass, Casey wakes up from what seemed like just a few seconds of slumber. All this hell must’ve drained him. It’s silent again. He looks over at the waitress – his heart stops, he’s rendered immobile. Her head was drawn back, her lower jaw dislodged, like a pair of scissors opened as wide as you could get them. Two long tentacles stuck outward from her innards, slowly caressing the car ceiling. Her right eye stares at him, unblinkingly. A hum, then a shriek like that of screeching train expels from its throat.

From outside the car, in the dark alley, no one could hear Casey’s final screams.

The waitress retracts her mouth back to normalcy. No one would be able to tell what she really was, she wore her skin like any other apparent human. She reaches into her glove compartment and pulls out a cell phone, and dials.

It rings, someone’s on the other line waiting for her to speak.

“It’s done, both of them. Like father, like son, and I’ve got the package,” a moment of silence passes, as she waits for a response.

“Perfect,” a clean, personable voice answers.

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she closes her eyes in utter joy, “I’ll discard of the vehicle and return to you as requested.”

And just before the call ends, they both utter glorious praise at their lunar gods, “In light we wander, in darkness they reign.”

The moon smiles down it’s crescent grin as she drives off into the lunar night.