Chapter 579

Tilo was a man carved from the earth of Samoa, a landscape lush with vibrant life and shadows that knew how to hold their secrets. His forty-two years had molded him well: his skin bore the deep brown of sun-baked soil, his hands were tough from years spent working the land, and his eyes, usually bright with warmth, reflected the deep blue of the surrounding ocean.

That brightness, though, began to dull. It started subtly. At first, Tilo attributed it to the everyday pressures of life. The crops hadn't been yielding as much as before. The village elders voiced worries about the changing tides. Simple stresses he always managed with relative ease.

Then he started to sense things.

A presence, always at the periphery. It was a feeling, cold and uncomfortable, like stepping into a patch of shadow on a sunlit day. It was unsettling. At first, he dismissed it as fatigue. Long days working the fields, restless nights under the heavy blanket of humid air. He tried to brush it aside, seeking comfort in the known world around him.

He failed.

The feeling intensified, taking on a defined form. He began to catch glimpses of something, a fleeting shadow, a movement where there shouldn't be movement. Behind a curtain. Reflected in the dark glass of a window at night. Just for a fraction of a second, gone before he could truly register what he'd seen.

Then it escalated. He noticed a face.

Not a clear one. Obscured, distorted, but undeniably a face. A warped impression looming just past a surface. The darkness within his kitchen cabinets. Behind a framed picture of his family. Always gone when he blinked, replaced by familiar space.

"Am I dreaming?" he mumbled one night, staring hard into the still surface of his coffee.

The coffee stayed still. He did not.

It started consuming his thoughts. Was he going mad? Sleep deprivation? Was this his family's burden that passed through his bloodline like a disease? He tried to confide in his wife, Sina. But how could he articulate the sensation of being watched by something that shouldn't exist, something that peered at him from just beyond reality?

"Tilo, you're working too hard," Sina said gently, stroking his brow. "Rest. Take time for yourself. Let your mind rest."

He attempted to take her advice, but there was no peace. He would close his eyes, seeking a moment of relief, only to snap awake with the suffocating conviction that the thing was there, closer than before. He became reluctant to shut his eyes completely.

The instances grew more common. More obvious. The warped image appeared now in broad daylight. Behind the leaves of a breadfruit tree, staring at him with a nameless malice that sent icy needles through his heart. He caught its reflection in the smooth skin of a coconut as he hacked it open. In the dark pool left in a footprint filled by rain.

Everywhere. Watching. Always watching.

He tried explaining what was going on again to Sina after weeks of sleepless paranoia.

"I keep seeing it, Sina," Tilo insisted, his hands shaking. "A face… always just out of sight."

Sina gave him a sad smile. "You need to see the village healer, my love. I am so concerned for your mental state. It's only to make sure you're alright."

He wanted to shout. He wanted to shake her and make her understand the terror that was festering inside him.

But he knew she wouldn't believe him. She only saw her husband fracturing from the inside out. To everyone, it seemed he was ill-equipped to handle life.

He sought out the village healer, hoping for some remedy, some explanation. The healer, an old woman with eyes as deep as the ocean, listened intently to Tilo's story.

"There are things," she said finally, her at a loss for an explanation. "Things that exist between worlds, unseen by most. Dark forces. Usually they are of no issue to mortals. Usually we can't perceive them. Have you done anything recently to disrespect them, to catch their eyes?"

Tilo thought about her suggestion and came up blank. He held reverence for their ancestors, for their environment, and made sure to live as pure as possible.

No mistakes stood out from memory. This left him feeling like his predicament was truly unexplainable and terrifying.

He stopped sleeping. How could he rest when the distorted countenance lurked just outside his field of and sight, always at the fringes of reality? The less sleep he received, the easier the sightings came to be. It enjoyed Tilo's pain and lack of consciousness.

He became afraid to look at any surface. Mirrors. Windows. Reflections in puddles. Even the shadows cast by the sun became potential gateways for the thing to watch him. He lived in a world of constant dread, every moment tainted by the dread of what he might see lurking at the margins.

His once steady hands trembled. His body shrank into the same size of an adolescent youth as he skipped meal after meal. His complexion paled from sunless seclusion in his home. The neighbors made sure to look at Tilo like he was now a shell of a person.

The incidents now came rapid-fire. The figure peered from every corner, never letting Tilo exist for a moment in bliss.

One evening, as Sina cooked dinner, Tilo found himself staring at the smooth surface of a cooking pot. The light from the fire danced across the metal, creating distorted shapes. And then he saw it. The face. Clearer now, more defined than ever before. It lingered a moment longer, the hollow eyes boring into him with cruel awareness, a smirk that could instill a fright into even the bravest soul.

He recoiled, stumbling backward and knocking over a stool.

"Tilo!" Sina cried, turning to him. "What is going on? You're making a scene when I am busy, always."

"It's there, Sina! Don't you see it?" he pleaded, pointing toward the pot.

Sina looked, her expression one of weary exasperation. She saw nothing. To her, it was just a pot, reflecting the flickering flames of the fire. But in his head, the malevolent gaze continued to taunt.

His terror was turning into panic, and panic led to the beginning of madness.

He began lashing out. Covering every reflective surface in the house with cloth. Smashing mirrors. Boarding up windows, turning their home into a prison, one darkened with shadows from which the thing could stalk him undisturbed.

Sina threatened to leave him.

"I cannot keep living like this, Tilo," she declared one morning, her breaking finally reaching their limit. "You're not the man I married. I will not sit by idly and allow you to spiral when there is a life for us to live. Please fix this, please change."

Her plea failed to penetrate his wall of fear. He couldn't explain the thing because no one could see it as well as him. He continued descending deeper and deeper into an abyss of paranoia and anguish.

His breaking was so close.

The appearances accelerated to multiple times a minute. There was no escape from the entity. No moment where he felt safe or was safe.

He was a prisoner to his fear, his prison with no way of him escaping the torturer who seemed so fixated on him and his downfall.

One day, it reached him directly.

He was alone in the house. Sina was gone, spending time with her mother, trying to get away from the prison her husband was transforming into something far more haunting and frightening. He sat in the middle of their darkened living room.

It would be days since he had taken a bath or ate more than a meal. Desperation permeated every pore of his body and took the same place of the blood flowing through his veins.

A sound caught his awareness, a scraping noise from behind the boarded-up window. He could picture it on the other side of the planks, standing perfectly still, listening for any indications of Tilo. It began lightly thumping onto the wood paneling of his home. The knocking then escalated to scratching, then gnawing.

He squeezed his eyes shut, hands clamped over his ears. But the sounds were everywhere. Surrounding him. Growing louder, closer, almost as if it had breached into the walls around him. He felt as though he was sitting inside the entity and waiting to come to a crashing halt that came at his sacrifice.

He screamed but there was no escaping its wrath. The sounds filled his head and heart with the terror it has given him for almost a year straight.

And then a touch. A cold, slimy touch on the back of his neck.

He whirled around, scrambling back. He then stared at his usual kitchen where nothing made any noise just moments ago. A form was starting to materialize now, coalescing from the darkness, just inches behind the pots and pans on his rack. He was now completely vulnerable to the evil that seemed to always lurk around him.

The thing's warped image became defined. Hollow eye sockets and pale white face and skin greeted him now in broad daylight for the first time, staring at him in silence.

"Why?" Tilo whispered, his voice hollow. "What do you want?"

The thing did not reply. It gave the horrific smirk Tilo had seen during his hallucinations, raising a long, skeletal finger to point directly at him. The face gave Tilo the last image he ever gave his loved ones before disappearing, but only to him did the creature's true design became transparent.

Tilo screamed one final scream as he bolted forward out the door of his prison. He was then chased.

He fled into the jungle, driven by primal fear. Branches tore at his skin, but he felt nothing. Roots tripped him, but he scrambled to his feet and kept running. He could hear the thing behind him, the sounds of snapping twigs, the heavy rush of breath.

He broke through the thick foliage and found himself at the edge of a cliff, the vast ocean stretching before him. A feeling of bleak despair filled him completely.

The entity cut him off, and towered behind him at the entrance of the jungle, almost beckoning him toward the path he traveled and spent his youth exploring.

He turned to face the thing. To face the malevolence that had stolen his life. Its features had changed into his. The mockery sickened him, confirming his impending doom. A being to never become an end.

With a final surge of desperation, Tilo spread his arms wide and stepped off the cliff, plunging into the endless ocean. He fell through the air and the sky and saw the water grow close with immense quickness.

But he looked at his face for one last glance, and knew that that ocean would be anything but freeing. His life on Earth with it's physical restraints would then be moved to the hell he would now be forced to live in thanks to that horrible monster.

He made a heavy splash into the cold waters. A sound so massive that could mark any man's ending.

But that heavy ending then phased out in silence.

The village mourned. Sina, shattered by grief, was consumed by endless guilt over Tilo's action. They searched for his body, but it was never found.

As weeks became months, Tilo slowly transformed into nothing but a faded memory. Then, he had begun not to be acknowledged and lived the life of an outcast. Soon his photographs phased in silence with dust and abandonment.

His name disappeared completely from their shared times, as if he had never. Existed.

In that same island village of Samoa where their tragedy began, a young boy was helping his mother clean the house.

When walking past one of their dusty kitchen pots hanging high up on the rack, he caught an unusual sight of their reflection. A person who never stood to the boy like himself. A person in disarray and of fright that could strike most of men.

The mother stopped her activities and gazed at her son to catch any further odd behavior but his normality prevailed in tact for the passing minute. All that could register with his passing awareness was that they had been normal their entire shared moments.

That, to the island and cosmos, it remained the day.

That nothing had ever happened in his family history.