Tales from the Fringes of Fear

Knife.

There was no thinking involved.

Grab a knife. Defense. Escape. That was all that coursed through the reactive part of his mind, a blind survival instinct already kicking in, here in the staff lunchroom, of all places, with his best friend.

But there was no knife in the drawer. Only more of those skins.
Faces. Masks.

Ali’s stomach rolled and twisted until he was sure it was in the misshapen form that this collection of faux-human skin was.

“Why do you think I brought you down here?” Max said, moving closer.

Ali didn’t respond. He threw open another drawer with such force that it clattered to the floor. Marbles spilled out and rolled across the linoleum tiles.

Marbles,

No, not marbles.

There were spherical, but they were all uniformly white, with circular designs on each one.

Eyeballs.

Not real, of course, and that’s what made his skin crawl.

No cutlery, No forks, no spoons. The room wasn’t a lunchroom. It was a dressing room. Skin and hair and eyes.

Ali tried to move out toward the door, but he slipped on the eyeballs and fell to the floor with a thud, landing face-first in the mess of horrid orbs.

He pushed himself back onto his knees, but Max was standing over him, leaning in close.

Ali could see that Max was still breathing heavily, but the breaths weren’t coming from deep within his chest. The sides of Max’s neck were swelling and deflating as if he had gills.

He pulled at his neck, and the skin covering it began to come away, revealing a slick surface underneath. Dark and oily and covered with scales.

Ali’s gaze moved from the scales to the flaps of skin hanging from Max’s face. His skin was loosening around the eyes, around the nostrils and, yes around the mouth. He’d been wearing a mask himself this whole time? A long, slender tongue snaked through the opening of the mask, where Max’s mouth should be. It was yellow and forked and curled like some kind of proboscis.

“C’mon dude,” Max said. “This is the lunchroom. And I’m feeling really hungry.”

In the distance, a long, sustained bell rang.

The lunch bell.