The Aftermath

  And if it remained—what else might it attract?

  The question lingered in the void of unconsciousness, a whisper that followed Kayo through the darkness. Time stretched and folded as he drifted through a liminal space between awareness and oblivion. Occasionally, fragments of reality would pierce through—urgent voices, the sting of a needle, the cold press of metal instruments against his flesh, the nauseating sweetness of anesthetic.

  When consciousness finally returned, it arrived incrementally. First came sound—the steady electronic pulse of monitoring equipment, the squeak of rubber-soled shoes on linoleum, the hushed conversations of medical staff. Then sensation—the scratchy hospital gown against his skin, the dull throb where his left hand should have been, the chemical dryness in his mouth. The scent of antiseptic filled his nostrils, underlaid with something metallic and familiar.

  Blood.

  Kayo's eyelids fluttered open, immediately revealing that something was fundamentally wrong with his vision. The hospital room appeared normal in structure—white walls, monitoring equipment, a window showing late afternoon—but everything was tinged with a subtle darkness, as though he were viewing the world through a filter that leeched away a portion of the light. Shadows in the corners seemed deeper than they should be, more substantial.

  Movement to his right drew his attention. His parents sat beside his bed, his mother's face streaked with dried tears, his father's complexion ashen with worry. They both lurched forward when they saw his eyes open.

  "HONEY, I'M SO SORRY! WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?" His mother's voice cracked with emotion as she grasped his right hand—his only remaining hand—in both of hers.

  Kayo's gaze drifted down to his left arm, where a thick bandage encased the stump that ended just above where his wrist had been. Reality crashed over him in a suffocating wave. The Smiler. The abandoned house. The severed hand. It hadn't been a nightmare.

  His mind raced for an explanation they would believe. The truth was impossible—they would think him psychotic, traumatized to the point of delusion. He needed a story, something horrific enough to explain his injury but plausible enough not to invite too many questions.

  "I-I was, uh... I was kidnapped," he managed, his voice a dry rasp.

  His mother's grip tightened on his hand. "You were kidnapped?"

  His father leaned forward, brow furrowed with suspicion and concern. "Are you sure, son? I mean, kidnappings are rare around here."

  Kayo swallowed hard, embellishing the lie with details that flowed too easily from his lips. "Y-yeah. When I was walking to school, masked men put a bag over my head and took me to a warehouse. They kept asking me where the drugs were, but I didn't know what they were talking about." His voice grew stronger as the fabrication took shape. "They cut my hand off and demanded I tell them, but I truly didn't know anything. After hours of them torturing me, they realized they had the wrong person."

  The horrified expressions on his parents' faces confirmed they believed him. They engulfed him in a careful embrace, mindful of the IV lines and monitoring equipment.

  "Son, we're so sorry," his father murmured into his hair, voice thick with emotion.

  It was then, cradled in his parents' embrace, that Kayo noticed something in the corner of the room. A darkness deeper than shadow, with familiar dimensions that made his blood crystallize in his veins.

  The Smiler stood watching, its form flickering slightly like a television with poor reception. That crimson grin remained fixed and eternal, but now it seemed almost... satisfied. As Kayo's eyes widened in recognition, The Smiler raised one elongated finger to its lips in a gesture of silence, then glided closer to the bed without seeming to take steps.

  It leaned down, placing its lipless mouth directly beside Kayo's ear. The voice that whispered was simultaneously inside his head and vibrating through his skull.

  "Miss me? I'M A PART OF YOU NOW."

  The words carried a cold certainty that settled in Kayo's stomach like a stone. His entire body went rigid, the monitors beside him registering a sudden spike in his heart rate.

  "H-how?" The question escaped him before he could stop it.

  His mother pulled back from the embrace, concern etching deeper lines around her eyes. "How what, honey?"

  Kayo's gaze darted between his parents and The Smiler, who now stood directly behind them, its elongated fingers resting on his mother's shoulders. She gave no indication she felt the touch.

  "C-can you not see him?" Kayo asked, voice trembling.

  His mother followed his gaze, seeing nothing but the empty corner of the hospital room. "See who?"

  The Smiler's grin widened impossibly, stretching past the boundaries of its face. One of its hands extended toward Kayo's father, index finger elongating until it resembled a blade of obsidian. It traced the finger along his father's throat, leaving no mark but making its intent grotesquely clear.

  Understanding crashed over Kayo with nauseating force. The severed hand. The blood. The creature had claimed a part of him, creating a connection that survived its apparent destruction. The Smiler wasn't gone—it had simply changed addresses, taking up residence in the dark corners of Kayo's perception.

  He blinked hard, trying to banish the apparition. Instead of disappearing, the hospital room transformed. The clean white walls dripped with viscous black fluid. His parents hung suspended from the ceiling, nooses cutting deep into their necks, faces purple and tongues protruding. Their eyes, bulging from the pressure, stared accusingly at Kayo. Below them, the linoleum floor had become a shallow pool of blood, rippling with each drop that fell from their twitching feet.

  Kayo blinked again, and reality reasserted itself. His parents sat before him, alive and whole, exchanging worried glances.

  The monitors beside him beeped more rapidly as cold sweat beaded on his forehead. The Smiler now sat perched at the foot of his bed, legs crossed casually, head tilted at an inquisitive angle. It raised one hand and wiggled its fingers in a mocking wave.

  "I'll be with you always," it mouthed silently. "Every shadow. Every reflection. Every blink."

  "Something wrong, son?" his father asked, reaching out to place a concerned hand on Kayo's knee.

  Kayo forced his features into what he hoped resembled calm, though he could feel a muscle twitching uncontrollably near his eye. "Oh, it's u-uh nothing. I just need some rest, that's all."

  The Smiler slid closer, its featureless face now inches from Kayo's own, that bleeding smile filling his vision. Behind it, Kayo could see his parents nodding understandingly, oblivious to the entity that had inserted itself between them and their son.

  "Rest won't help," The Smiler whispered, its voice an intimate violation inside Kayo's skull. "I've tasted your fear. I've drunk your blood. I've taken your flesh. You're mine now, little Kayo."

  It leaned even closer, the scent of copper and decay washing over him. "And when I'm done playing with you, I'll wear your skin to visit your parents. They'll never know the difference until it's too late."

  As a nurse entered the room with a gentle reminder about visiting hours coming to an end, Kayo watched The Smiler place its hands on his parents' shoulders again.

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  "We'll be back first thing in the morning," his mother promised, kissing his forehead. "Try to get some sleep."

  As they departed, leaving him alone in the gathering darkness of the hospital room, The Smiler settled into the chair his father had vacated. It crossed its legs casually, leaning back as if preparing for a long, pleasant conversation.

  "Now then," it said, voice echoing directly in Kayo's consciousness, "let me show you what I have planned for us."

  The lights in the room dimmed further, shadows crawling across the walls like living things. In the sudden darkness, The Smiler's crimson grin glowed with a light of its own, floating disconnected in the void.

  "Close your eyes, Kayo," it whispered. "I want to show you eternity."

  Despite his terror, despite every instinct screaming against it, Kayo felt his eyelids growing heavy. Whether from medication, exhaustion, or The Smiler's influence, he couldn't resist the pull of darkness.

  As consciousness began to slip away, he heard The Smiler's final whisper:

  "Sweet dreams, Kayo. I'll be waiting in every single one."

  Despite his terror, despite every instinct screaming against it, Kayo felt his eyelids growing heavy. Whether from medication, exhaustion, or The Smiler's influence, he couldn't resist the pull of darkness.

  As consciousness began to slip away, he heard The Smiler's final whisper:

  "Sweet dreams, Kayo. I'll be waiting in every single one."

  The dreams began gently enough—mundane scenes from school, walking home through Kamakura's ancient streets. But subtle wrongness pervaded everything: shadows that moved independently of their owners, reflective surfaces that didn't quite mirror what stood before them, and a persistent metallic taste coating Kayo's tongue.

  Then came the first shift.

  Kayo found himself standing in the mud-packed streets of medieval London. The cobblestones beneath his feet glistened with something too viscous to be rainwater. Before him, a man in tattered woolen clothes was strapped to a breaking wheel, his limbs already twisted at unnatural angles. The executioner—a hooded figure whose face remained in shadow despite the torch-lit square—raised a heavy iron mallet.

  "Please," the man begged, voice cracking. "I've done nothing to deserve—"

  The mallet came down with a sickening crack that echoed through the square. Bone fragments erupted through the man's skin as his shin splintered. The crowd roared its approval, their faces stretched into unnatural grins that reminded Kayo of someone—something—else.

  The executioner turned toward Kayo, and beneath the hood, a familiar crimson smile gleamed.

  "This one lasted three days before the ravens took his eyes," The Smiler's voice resonated in Kayo's mind. "He screamed your name at the end. They all do."

  The scene dissolved, replaced by the ornate interior of a Roman villa. A patrician woman reclined on a couch, attended by slaves who poured wine into her golden cup. She raised it to her lips, then paused, noticing a peculiar sediment at the bottom.

  Too late—she'd already swallowed.

  Her elegant features contorted as the poison took hold. Blood vessels burst beneath her skin, mapping her face with spidery blue-black lines. She clawed at her throat as it closed, eyes bulging from their sockets. When she coughed, glass-sharp bone fragments sprayed from her mouth, each shard carrying tiny pieces of her lungs.

  "Cantarella, enhanced with ground glass," The Smiler whispered, now wearing the face of a slave who watched from the corner, that same terrible grin splitting its borrowed features. "She took seventeen minutes to die. I counted each second."

  The dreamscape shifted again.

  A Japanese samurai knelt in a courtyard, ceremonial white robes draped around his frame. With practiced movements, he unsheathed his tantō. But as he pressed it against his abdomen, the

  blade transformed, becoming an obsidian extension of The Smiler's finger.

  The cut went deeper than intended. Instead of the controlled incision of seppuku, the dark blade carved upward, unzipping the samurai from navel to throat. His intestines spilled forth in gleaming coils, steaming in the cold morning air. The kaishakunin standing behind him—meant to deliver the merciful beheading stroke—now bore The Smiler's face, its crimson grin stretched impossibly wide.

  "Honor is such a fragile thing," it mused, running its elongated fingers through the samurai's entrails. "Like silk threads that tangle so easily."

  Kayo tried to scream, to wake himself, but the parade of horrors continued relentlessly.

  A witch burning in colonial Salem, her flesh blackening and peeling away in sheets as flames consumed her. As her hair ignited like a halo, her screams morphed into laughter—The Smiler's laughter—and the flames revealed not a woman burning but The Smiler itself, untouched by fire, extending its arms toward the crowd whose faces now all bore identical bleeding grins.

  A Victorian gentleman in a dimly lit opium den, his pipe transformed into a writhing serpent that forced its way down his throat, expanding inside him until his skin stretched translucent, revealing the creature coiling through his internal organs, crushing them one by one.

  A Mayan sacrifice, heart still beating as it was torn from the victim's chest—but the heart transformed in the priest's hands, becoming a miniature version of The Smiler that bit into the priest's face, burrowing beneath his skin like an parasitic insect.

  With each new vision, the deaths grew more elaborate, more impossible, more intimate. Kayo was no longer merely witnessing; he could feel each victim's pain as if it were his own—the crushing pressure of drowning in the hull of a sinking slave ship, the searing agony of being flayed alive in a Mongolian conquest, the suffocating panic of being buried alive beneath the ashes of Pompeii.

  "These are my favorites," The Smiler's voice echoed through every scene. "Just a small sampling from my collection. I've had so many names through the centuries. So many faces—or lack thereof."

  The kaleidoscope of suffering accelerated, images flashing too quickly to fully comprehend but searing themselves into Kayo's memory nonetheless: A Jazz Age flapper choking on razor blades hidden in her champagne. A Cold War spy whose skin sloughed off after exposure to radiation. A stone age hunter whose skull was methodically crushed between two rocks while his tribe watched with those same bleeding smiles.

  In each scene, The Smiler was both victim and perpetrator, observer and instrument. It wore countless faces but always retained that signature grin, that essence of malevolent delight in suffering.

  Then suddenly—stillness.

  Kayo stood in a simple wooden room. The architecture was unmistakably American colonial, with rough-hewn beams and small, diamond-paned windows. A man in Puritan clothing knelt in prayer, Bible clutched in trembling hands. Blood leaked from his eyes, tracing crimson paths down gaunt cheeks.

  When he looked up at Kayo, his face bore the ravages of some unknown horror—skin stretched too tight across the bones, eyes sunken into dark hollows. But unlike the other victims, his expression held no trace of The Smiler's influence. Instead, his gaze burned with desperate clarity.

  "YOU. HAVE. TO. BREAK. FREE." His voice sounded rusted, unused, as if he had been silent for centuries. Each word seemed to cause him physical pain. "It can be sealed. I did it once. You must—"

  A familiar darkness coalesced behind the Puritan. Long obsidian fingers wrapped around his throat, constricting with a sound like wet leather stretching. The man's head wrenched backward at an impossible angle, vertebrae shattering one by one like firecrackers. His neck elongated grotesquely as The Smiler lifted him from the ground. With a single violent twist, it separated the Puritan's head completely, arterial blood fountaining toward the ceiling in pulsing jets that defied gravity, hanging suspended in midair like a macabre chandelier.

  The Smiler turned toward Kayo, the decapitated head held aloft in one hand, its fingers sunk deep into the man's eye sockets. Blood and clear vitreous humor oozed between its digits.

  "He thought he could escape me too," The Smiler said, its voice suddenly gentle, almost tender. "But I always find my way back. Always."

  It tossed the head toward Kayo. As it flew through the air, the features transformed, becoming Kayo's mother's face, then his father's, then his own—each wearing expressions of such profound anguish that Kayo's heart felt physically crushed within his chest.

  The head never landed. Instead, everything dissolved into absolute darkness.

  Kayo gasped awake, his body drenched in cold sweat that turned the hospital gown translucent. Something felt different. The strange filter that had tinted his vision was gone. The shadows in the corners seemed ordinary, no longer harboring impossible depths.

  For the first time since confronting The Smiler, Kayo felt truly alone in his own mind. The constant sensation of being watched had vanished.

  "D-d-did I break free? Is he gone?" he whispered, afraid to hope.

  For three glorious seconds, silence reigned. Then, like distant thunder, The Smiler's voice whispered from the deepest recesses of his consciousness:

  "You can't seal me forever."

  The voice faded, leaving behind only the faintest echo before disappearing completely. Kayo held his breath, waiting for The Smiler's return, but nothing came.

  A nurse bustled into the room, clipboard in hand, her cheerful demeanor incongruous with the horrors that had paraded through Kayo's unconscious mind.

  "Oh, you're awake! Good to see that," she said, checking his vital signs. "You've been out for a week. The doctors were starting to worry."

  Kayo glanced toward the window, where morning sunlight streamed through the blinds, casting perfectly normal shadows across the floor. But in the corner of his eye, he thought he detected the faintest crimson gleam—gone when he turned to look directly.

  Had he truly broken free? Or was this merely another of The Smiler's games—a momentary respite to make the eventual return all the more terrifying?

  Kayo closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. When he opened them again, the world remained mercifully ordinary. But he couldn't shake the certainty that somewhere in the darkness behind his eyelids, The Smiler waited, its patience as eternal as its hunger.

  And when it returned—and Kayo knew with bone-deep certainty that it would—he would be ready.