I awoke to a reddened face, and a feeling of emptiness settling in my stomach. Light poured in through the window, warming my face, the lines of tears across my face seemingly imprinted from the night before. I brushed my hands across my face, trying to lessen whatever marks were left.
I sat up slowly, my body protesting from sleeping in an awkward position. Leon's memories told me this was normal, the bed was old and lumpy, inherited from whatever previous occupant had lived in this room before Frank took him in.
The wooden floor creaked under my feet as I stood, and I could already hear movement downstairs. Frank was an early riser, always up before dawn to start the first batch of bread.
I put on my boots, the leather worn and comfortable from years of use.
As I walked down the stairs, each step seemed to echo louder than it should.
Frank was already baking bread, heat radiating from the oven, which made the small bakery feel like a furnace. The sweet scent of freshly made bread permeated across the room.
"Open up shop and work the counter," Frank called out without turning around, his hands deep in a batch of dough.
"Aye, aye sir," I replied, falling into the routine that Leon's muscle memory provided.
I went over to the door, my fingers working automatically to change the sign from 'closed' to 'open.' The wooden sign was hand-painted, probably by Frank himself years ago. I then opened the door.
Soon I became bored, my gaze settling on the door waiting for anyone to come in, but nothing. The usual morning customers hadn't appeared yet. Mrs. Henderson, who always bought two loaves for her large family, hadn't shown up. Neither had old Thomas, who came by every morning for a single roll and fifteen minutes of complaints about his aching joints.
The absence made the empty bakery feel even more isolated, reminding me how now I was truly alone in this world. I found myself tapping my fingers against the wooden counter.
That was until someone finally came in.
William.
A friend of Leon's, someone I recognized immediately from the flood of borrowed memories. William was the same age as Leon, a carpenter's apprentice with calloused hands and perpetually disheveled brown hair. He had kind eyes and an easy smile, like almost everyone else in this village.
But today, William looked anything but easy-going.
He seemed out of breath, his face flushed red from running. His chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath, one hand pressed against the doorframe for support. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and his usually neat appearance was completely disheveled.
"Leon," he began, sucking in air to alleviate himself. "You're gonna want to see this."
The urgency in his voice sent a chill down my spine.
At that moment Frank came out of the back of the bakery, fresh bread in hand, flour dusting his apron and forearms.
"Oh hello William, say hello to your father for me," Frank said somewhat joyfully, after which he noticed William's appearance. "You look tired. Want any bread?"
William looked at Frank, he didn't reply to his question instead he said. "You're gonna want to see this too."
"See what?" we both asked at the same time, our voices overlapping in a way that would have been comical under different not so eerie circumstances.
"Just come with," William said, his voice cracking slightly. He was already turning to leave, clearly expecting us to follow without further explanation.
Frank and I stared at each other for a moment, but Frank would never leave the bakery unattended.
"You go on, I'll man the bakery by myself. Just tell me about it later," he said waving me off.
I nodded and walked out of the building. William was already moving, not quite running but walking at a pace that was just short of a jog.
"Come on dude!" he yelled, breaking into a full run.
I ran after him, my feet pounding against the cobblestone streets. Street after street, we moved through the village, and I began to notice more people seemingly gathering into crowds. Children were being pulled close to their parents, and more than one person crossed themselves when they saw us running past.
Whatever William wanted to show us, word was already spreading through the village like wildfire.
The crowd grew thicker as we approached what I realized was the sole entrance to the village. This was the main road that connected our small community to the outside world, though few travelers ever used it. The village was remote, nestled in a valley and surrounded by thick forest, a place where nothing exciting ever happened.
Until today.
William and I pushed through men and women alike, their bodies pressed together in the way crowds form when people want to see something but are afraid to get too close. I could hear fragments of their conversations.
"-never seen anything like it-"
"-poor man-"
"-should send for the constable-"
As we made our way to the front, my gaze settled on something that made my skin crawl and my stomach lurch violently.
I was standing at the sole entrance of the village, and there, sprawled on the ground in a grotesque parody of sleep, was a body. The body of a man I recognized from Leon's memories, Victor. A quiet man who kept to himself but was always willing to help.
But the Victor lying before us bore little resemblance to the man from Leon's memories.
His fingernails were torn, ripped from the man's hands with dried blood caked underneath what remained. His hands were positioned as if he'd been clawing at something, or someone, in his final moments. But what made the sight truly horrifying was his face.
His cheeks were red with dried blood where he'd scratched them raw. Deep gouges ran from his temples to his jaw, as if he'd been trying to claw his own face off. The wounds were savage, and clearly must have been painful.
I had the urge to vomit, to tear my gaze from the body, but that wasn't what made fear settle like ice in my veins.
No, that was the smile spread across his face.
The smile was wrong in every possible way. It stretched from ear to ear, so wide that his jaw seemed to have dislocated to accommodate it. His lips had torn at the corners, creating gruesome extensions of his mouth that reached almost to his earlobes. Dried blood painted the tears dark red, and his teeth were visible in a hideous grin that no human face should be able to make.
It looked like he had died laughing.
I could hear murmurs across the people, voices growing louder as more villagers arrived and saw the scene.
"That's Victor, isn't it?"
"What happened to him?"
"Was he attacked by wild animals?"
"But what animal could do that to a man's face?"
"Maybe he fell? Hit his head?"
"You don't get a smile like that from falling, Martha."
Questions began to get asked, theories proposed and shot down, but no one asked the most obvious question that was screaming in my mind.
Who killed him?!
The reason for that was simple, and it made the situation even more disturbing.
This village was supposed to be a utopia.
There were no murderers, no thieves, no criminals in this place. According to Leon's memories, the last serious crime committed here had been a case of cattle theft nearly two hundred years ago, and that had been resolved when the thief confessed out of guilt and made restitution.
Violence simply didn't happen here. The village was too small, too close-knit. Everyone knew everyone else, had grown up together, worked together, celebrated together. The idea that one of them could be capable of this kind of brutality was unthinkable.
At least, there weren't supposed to be any killers here.
This definitely wasn't a romance story.
I'd been so focused on the idea that this was some kind of romantic trial, based on my interactions with Lily and the festival atmosphere. But standing here, looking at Victor's destroyed face and impossible smile, I understood that I'd been completely wrong about the genre.
This was horror.
Pure, undiluted horror.
Then I heard it, cutting through the murmurs and gasps of the crowd.
A laugh.
High-pitched, delighted, completely inappropriate given the circumstances. It was the kind of laugh that made everyone within earshot stop talking and turn to stare.
My gaze tore from Victor's body, scanning the crowd frantically to find the origin of the sound. The sea of horrified faces made it easy to spot the source.
A small child had made it to the front of the group, somehow slipping between the adults' legs to get a clear view of the corpse. He couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old, with tousled blonde hair and a chubby face, one filled with baby fat.
And he was laughing.
"HAHAHAHAHA!"
The sound was of pure joy, as if the child had just been told the greatest joke in existence.
The crowd began to shift uncomfortably, parents reaching for their own children, pulling them back and away from the scene. But no one seemed to know who this laughing child belonged to, and no one wanted to get close enough to stop him.
The boy's laughter grew louder, more manic, echoing off the buildings around us until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. And as I watched in growing horror, I realized something that made my blood run cold.
The child's smile was stretching.
Just like Victor's had.
Just like Victor's impossible, jaw-breaking grin.
The child's laughter was spreading his lips wider and wider, and I could see the corners of his mouth beginning to tear.