(FICTION) The Maw's Tar Rots Our Teeth

I wrote this initially as a means of practicing explaining some the the things my lovely lil’ Lickyface gets into. I ended up liking it enough that I am playing with the idea of continuing it. If not, I feel it is a nice spot to leave anxiety.

CHAPTER 1: Ecstatic Echo

A vile beast has taken my teeth.

At first, that smile it bore would disgust me. Its features were inverted, with piercing eyes peering out from between the face-framing fangs. Endless eyes across a void; Speckled similar to a twinkling starscape. Their glaring enough a spectacle that it distracted from the tongue tendril sprouting from the spot a simpler organism’s smile might be, should it not have taken over the entirety of the eldritch ulcer’s face.

Somehow, a pair of eyes were able to distinguish themselves from the pack. They weren’t colored any differently from the other eyes in that menacing maw, keeping that same fiery orange hue that displayed either boiling rage or bubbling madness. They were the only ones that felt proportional to the face. Sized and positioned where they should be only sunken back to hover in the void just behind where the tongue tendril began to sprout into existence. In a typical human, it’d be in line with the membrane wall just behind the uvula.

Where the other eyes would wander in their focus and meander, only rarely coming together to lock on one target, these ones kept steady. These ones held drive. Focus. Never locking on different targets and otherwise acting as eyes should, barring the obvious.

These ones always seemed to be focused on me.

That was what was so wrong about them. A crack of supposed normalcy. Either it an attempt to seem more humanoid or a piece of satire. It was apparently a beast that kept many running in-jokes with itself.

Its smile a festering sea of scowling eyes. All framed by a set of teeth that shook my soul when I first was visited by the beast. Now it makes me jealous. Jagged, unaligned spired they may be, but at least they are structurally complete.

Even the flowers sprouting from its scalp have a set of choppers more appealing than the smile the beast has left me with.

Even the cheeky chorus of chucking cracks that circulate the greasy pitch it considers skin had choppers to catch a far more charming shot than my own.

To top it all off, it delighted in this. I had wonder what was causing its violent, almost rhythmic twitching. All those mouths were laughing, causing its body to jerk and spasm violently. It seemed to want to make me ponder this at first, as then it only appeared as a visual figment. I figured the laughter to merely be a malevolent apparition of my madness of the creature in front of me. I soon began to learn otherwise.

I realized it was laughing at my plight.

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The fizz in my cola, I believe, was my first taste of the macabre mouth.

I was lucky to have been dining alone when the figments started. It was my place of private introspection, after all. A booth that surely had been shoved into the corner more like a half-hearted gesture than actual planning. It seated only one person, faced a wall and away from the view of the mountains opposite the one the cafe was perched. A stable set of railroad tracks, plenty of plants and animals scampering about to keep any tourists from scurrying over to gawk and stare at my still serene sea of trees.

Its location in the smoking section helped in further deterring people these days.

The drink I ordered initially seemed to have been the syrupy, sweet liquid I was addicted to when I first ordered it. After a few minutes of idle sipping and spaced staring towards the trees and bush that began the thin clearing just before my window, however, I thought I had felt something brush against my lips.

A spongy sphere that stood in stark contrast to the flatter hemisphere shaped ice cubes. It had only briefly bounced against my lips, but I had plenty of time in the moments before I felt the need to recoil. Enough for my anxiety to deem it necessary temporarily sear the sensation to them. My attempts to lick it away only seemed to spread it to my tongue.

You see, even though the fleshy, veiny mass should have been chilled by the fountain drink, especially since the tourist trap liked to water down their sodas with an avalanche of ice; it felt warm. I had brushed it off as a cherry at first, but the ‘stem’ seemed just a little too large, loose, and fleshy as it flopped against the edge of my cheek. What had made me recoil was the vibration. The pulsing movement that reminded me too much of the beat of a heart. The warmth like a lover’s hand in a snowstorm compared to my icy soda.

I stared at my drink, at that time in denial. I had reasoned that this was merely a result of my pining. Just one more layer to the clustered onion of baggage that made booth brooding a regular hobby of mine.

Staring at the offending beverage made me more uncertain. It made my blood run cold, regardless. The fizz was peering up at me. The reflection, though brief as it bubbled to the surface, unmistakably a multicolored mixture of eyes. Nothing to indeed give them expression, yet you could tell some emotions radiated from them. Madness, rage, sorrow, and grisly glee all evident. SOme more concentrated than others. The bubbling seemed to pick up as the solid mass that I was confident brushed my lips floated towards the front of the glass.

A disembodied eyeball. Yet where I would imagine it's plucking would have made this particularly nauseating peeper seem drained of luster, this one seemed life-like. Not only that, it seemed to be staring at me.

This theory was made more evident as I stood up to hurry to the bathroom, thinking a splash of water on my face might unwind the nerves undoubtedly causing my overactive imagination to bleed into reality. My eyes couldn't help but stay locked on the floating ocular as I rose. Every movement I made, the eye swiveled in the liquid to keep up the staring contest it had sparked.

I was sure it was just a mixture of sleep deprivation and depression finally catching up to me. I might have even stayed in the bathroom if the figment in the mirror didn’t decide to make my ordinarily uneventful, and as such endlessly peaceful, bout to the restroom any more surreal.

The face that stared at me upon splashing my face was certainly not my own. It held my features, but they were not matching anything more than my stance. The expression wasn’t right.

The eyes bore into my soul with an intensity and passion I had probably never given anything in my life. I could have my moment of drive and motivation, but this was an intensity I had never seen before in even my most self-driven idols. The eyes of my reflection calmly demanded I stare into them, every desire to flee taken from me as if unseen hands gently guided me by the cheek to stare back into the mirror. Still half-lidded like my own, but it seemed more wily than tired.

Its hands still gripped at the sides of the sink like myself. While I tensed and twisted my digits and palms against it, my reflection seemed calm. It otherwise mimicked my stance like any reflection should, but it carried its own emotion. A sly smirk contrasted my gritting teeth.

Instead of fingertips threatening to bruise themselves and trembling palms, the reflect tapped a single finger to the beat of the blood he heard rushing to feed my fluttering heart.

My distress increased, which, of course, caused my heart to pump faster. My blood to chill. My headache to grow. All to the tune of the pounding in my ears, or was it to the tapping of my reflected finger?

That is when I first started to hear the chuckling laughter. The first layer, it sounded almost like my own snickering should. While not a giggle left my lips nor a vibration in my throat, the bathroom’s walls began to echo with my soft snickering. Still held back then, still reserved.

It was surely my reflection. Its lips were twitching in tune. I stood still, shocked static by my splitting sanity and chewing on my lip in a nervous habit. It tensely twitched, trying tenaciously to mimic my movements even though I had tagged the thespian chewing on its lip as not to stifle anxiety, but sneering. I was afraid to move; it seemed to be playing a game with me.

I couldn’t handle this haunting round of figment chicken any longer. I straightened my stance up, readying myself to retreat further into my denial by fleeing back to the table.

My reflection did not.

My reflection kept itself hunched over. Its twitching made it more menacing. The worse part of a reflection is that, by nature, you have a tendency for your eyes to meet. A problem only in situations like this. Situations you couldn’t expect.

Troubling still, as my reflection’s eyes were beginning to widen, picking up in intensity. The eyes themselves almost felt like their own entity, their own reality. Searing my mind and making me tense and twitch in horror, my chest fluttering as I was near hyperventilation. It’s chest rippling as its laughter picked up.

Its mouth widening in unison with its eyes as that cackling built up steadily into uproarious laughter with every step closer to the door. An inky black substance was beginning to dribble down my echo’s lips like spittle, tiny speckles starting to dust the other side of the mirror, caking on like years of residue on the side of reality.

My ears popped as the radiating giggles, tears of this same syrupy black liquid slowly dripping from the figment’s tear ducts as it inched closer to the thin square on the wall that seemed to separate it from myself. The same moment the tears bubbled from its face like hot tar, the reflection of my eyes began to change. Their color became washed out by the same enraged fire as my Eldritch ulcer.

I struggled to open the door, my quaking mind seeming to momentarily forget how door handles work as I twisted it too far in one direction, jagged in the other direction, and appearing to do everything in my power to keep myself from fleeing the magnetic eye contact I seemed to be forced to follow.

My doppelganger's face was smooshed against the mirror now. Seeming invisible thanks to the vantage point of it being on the other side, the oily tears spread and smudged the reflection. Pulling at its cheeks like its skin was sticking as it violently thrashed its head side to side. Its lips began to stretch, both thanks to its thrashing against the black glue and its private volition, beyond what my muscles would be capable of, with my then sugar soaked though still near-perfect looking teeth following as they jerked back and forth in laughter like a deranged cartoon.

The reflection reared back and slammed its head against the mirror.

We both froze, and the laughter momentarily ceased for me to notice the audible crack the action had made. Both to radiate through the bathroom and echo through the room. I began to scratch limply at the door. Desperate for it to open as my other hand derped its way into finally obeying me.

The door creaked open. The cracks began to spread and spider web against the mirror. The laughter no longer sounded merely like an echo. A new layer I had started to realize made it seem like it was seeping from the new fissures in the glass.

I flung the door open and bolted out into the small hallway just as I began to register the same black liquid begin to bleed from the cracks and down to the sink. Slamming the door behind me, I tugged on it as I weighed my options. I hear a glass-shattering boom on the other side of the door. Muffled as it may be, I didn’t need to divert much pondering power to figure out what might have caused this sound.

If this was merely a figment, I surely must look mad. Holding the door to a bathroom shut, I am lucky the patrons of the diners were shielded from seeing me by the tiny hallway that lead me here. The fact not a single person, be them customer or staff member, had yet to investigate what HAD to be a terrible racket. Especially as that horrid laughter was just getting louder and louder.

However, if it wasn’t a figment, was there any guarantee I would be able to make it to the dining room before it caught me? Could a group of patrons possibly take on… Whatever this was? Surely it sharing my appearance would cause me plenty more issues. Wait, the laughter was much too loud now. Was it on the other side of the door?

The laughter stopped. The crashing stopped. Every noise on the other side of the door seemed still.

Tugging the handle close to me, pressing it against the frame of the door, I pressed my ear to the wood, allowing me to hear only the frantic dripping of liquid, had a pipe burst?

The door jerked as if it were trying to tear away from me. I could briefly see the chaos beyond the door, a brief glimpse of oil-coated madness. Bubbling and boiling much like tar, only to pop and reveal an eye. Then another, and another.

Shoving my boot to the wall beside the door, I used the leverage to slam the door back against the frame. Figment or not, let our game of tug-of-war begin.

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