The Distortionist

    Look at him. See how his form flickers and shudders when you catch him on video, the man you didn't even notice was there when you took it in the first place. See how the video warps and blurs and pixelates. Hear how the audio spikes and distorts and cuts out abruptly.

    Do you see it? Look closely. Notice how his face is always masked by the distortions, as though deliberately scrubbed out, or perhaps as though never there at all.

    Now think about every time you notice something in your peripheral vision that doesn't seem quite right, every little oddity or glitch you can only barely see.

    Have you seen him waiting there?

    Well. You'll notice him if he wants you to.

The Watcher

    He stares in through the window. She stares back at him, certain he isn't really there.

    But he is. She knows, deep in her heart, that he is there. And for reasons she could never even hope to understand, he is watching her.

    He has no eyes and yet he sees.

The Many-Faced Stranger

    He wears many faces. He wears whatever face he has to. He wears the face of a stranger, a friend, a teacher.

    But sometimes, if you look at him when something isn't quite right, when the illusion doesn't work as it's supposed to, you can see all those faces superimposed upon one another, blurred and warped and flickering.

    And sometimes, when he knows that the disguise has faltered, when he knows he's been seen for what he is, when he knows someone has seen his many faces or has seen the blank canvas onto which he paints his crude mockeries of humanity...

     Sometimes, he adds another face to the collection.

The Man Who Waits

    Do you see him?

     He's right outside the window, waiting in the woods. He's waiting in the old, abandoned places, in the places you think you know when day has turned to night, in the places you walk through faster after dark. He's waiting where his form is obscured by shadow and fog.

    He's right in the corner of your vision.

    He's right behind you whenever you wonder if you're alone, only to vanish when you turn around to look.

    He's right there. But you can't see him.

    Not yet.

The King of Trees

    Water the branches that sprout from your arms, said the King of Trees, his words seeming to form in xir mind. Water them, and when unwanted offshoots grow, prune them. They are part of you now, by my hand, and it is your responsibility to make them beautiful.

     And as xe stared up at the terrible face of the King of Trees, xe realized he was right. After all, the same had happened to him. It must have. His arms had been wrapped in tree branches so thoroughly that they were impossible to see, only black, smooth bark remaining.

    The only thing, in fact, that xe could see of his body, of what remained beneath the bark and the branches and the wet black leaves, was a pale white face that hurt xir head to look at.

    And as the rain continued to fall on that deep, dark night, the branches continued to grow from xir arms.

The Nothing Man

    The nothing man had entered.

    He was a walking void, face whiter than white, suit blacker than black. He came from nowhere and he was made of nothing. He wasn't even there at all.

    He stared with a face that was not there, watched with nothing eyes, and the world bent to the will of a man who did not exist.

    Martin didn't even have time to scream. After all, he had never been there in the first place.

The Spider

    All of its long black limbs moved across the ground as it neared her home. All of them had too many joints, bent in too many places.

    Unable to move, she watched as one of those long, many-jointed legs pushed up her window and reached inside.

    She knew what was happening: she was caught in the web, and the spider was ready to feed.

The Man of Blood and Shadow

    His suit was made of shadow and blacker than night. His tie was made of the blood of the dead. His face was impossible to look at.

     When he entered town, everyone there found their excuses, and they left.

     There was a strange, low sound as he followed them. It was almost like he was humming to himself.

     And the shadows and the light and the blood that were him enveloped them with outstretched arms.

The Giant

    And then I realized. It wasn't the sky that I was looking up at. The night sky was his suit, and the moon his terrible face. He was so impossibly vast and old, I knew he was so old, older than any of us, and I did not know why he allowed any of us to live in the first place.