Chapter 5: The Face on the Table

Chapter 5: The Face on the Table

Liam looked.

He knelt, his brow furrowed with sleepy concern, and stared at the faint, ashen marks on the polished hardwood. For a single, breathless moment, Elara felt a surge of triumphant terror. See? See? I’m not crazy.

Then he reached out and swiped a finger through the larger of the two marks. He rubbed the fine, dark powder between his thumb and forefinger. “Soot,” he declared, his voice gentle, reasonable, and utterly devastating. “The heating vent must have puffed some out. It happens in old buildings.”

Before she could protest, he was gone and back with a damp paper towel, wiping the evidence from the floor. He erased her proof with a few calm, methodical strokes.

“It’s okay, Elara,” he said, kissing her forehead as he got back into bed, his warmth an unbearable comfort. “Your mind is playing tricks on you. You’re exhausted and you’re under an incredible amount of stress. We’ll get you some help.”

Help. The word echoed in the space where her hope had been. He didn’t mean an ally; he meant a psychiatrist. To him, the monster was in her head. She was the one who was broken, not the world. Lying beside him, feeling the chasm widen between them, was a new and profound kind of paralysis.

The next few days were a waking nightmare of administrative purgatory. She was tasked with inventorying surgical supplies, a mind-numbing job designed to keep her contained. But her own mind was becoming an unreliable prison. Time began to hiccup. She’d be counting boxes of sutures, look up, and find herself standing by the window, the afternoon sun now low in the sky, with no memory of moving. She’d pick up her coffee cup, and in the space of a blink, it would be empty, a phantom warmth still on her lips. They were small slips, tiny blackouts, but they were accumulating, eroding her confidence, making her feel like a stranger in her own skin.

The call came on the second day of her suspension. A multi-car pile-up on the interstate had flooded the ER. It was a mass casualty event, an all-hands-on-deck crisis that rendered administrative punishments irrelevant. Ms. Albright’s voice on the phone was clipped and urgent. “Vance, get to OR Two. Now. Dr. Evans is taking on a crush injury, and he needs his best.”

A jolt of adrenaline, sharp and clean, cut through the fog of her fear. This was her territory. A high-stakes, high-pressure surgery. This, she could control. This was a chance to prove she was still the competent professional, not the unravelling woman Liam saw.

OR Two was a scene of controlled chaos. Dr. Evans was already scrubbed, his face a grim mask of focus. “Vance, thank God,” he grunted. “We’ve got a twenty-year-old male, crushed pelvis, massive internal bleeding. We’re racing the clock. Let’s move.”

She fell into the familiar rhythm, her hands moving with an instinct that went deeper than thought. She prepped the instrument tray, her mind a fortress of checklists and procedures. The patient was wheeled in, unconscious, his body a geography of trauma. For a while, the sheer, overwhelming reality of the task at hand pushed the shadows back. There was only the patient, the surgeon, and her, a critical link in the chain of saving a life.

“Suction,” Evans commanded, his voice tight.

Elara reached for the suction tube. Her fingers brushed against the cool, sterile plastic.

And the world blinked.

One moment, she was reaching. The next, the tube was already in Evans’s hand, and he was staring at her, his eyes narrowed over his mask. “Vance, are you with me? I asked you for that ten seconds ago.”

Ten seconds. A black hole had opened up and swallowed ten seconds of her life. She hadn’t felt it go. She just stared at him, her heart suddenly pounding a sick, heavy rhythm against her ribs.

“Sorry, Doctor,” she managed, her voice sounding distant.

She forced herself to focus, her concentration a physical effort, like holding a heavy weight over her head. But the crack had appeared. The briefest of blackouts had shaken her professional mask, and through the fissure, the horror began to seep in. The rhythmic pulse of the blood pump started to sound like the subsonic hum. The round, shadowless operating lamp above felt like a single, vast, unblinking eye.

“Retractor,” Evans barked, his hands deep in the patient’s body cavity.

She turned to the tray to grab the instrument. And as her gaze swept across the patient’s anesthetized face, the world didn’t just blink. It shattered.

The young man’s face wavered, like a reflection in disturbed water. For a horrifying, eternal second, it wasn't his face at all. It was hers. It was Elara’s own face lying there on the operating table, slack-jawed and pale under the harsh lights. Her light brown hair, her cheekbones, her chin. It was her.

But the mouth was wrong.

Carved into her own flesh, where her lips should have been, was the thin, pale, waxy crescent of the Smiler’s grin. It was a dead, emotionless wound, and as she watched, a single, perfect bead of red blood welled from the corner of the incision and traced a slow path down her—the patient’s—chin.

The heart monitor, which had been beeping steadily, suddenly let out a long, piercing, unbroken tone.

Flatline.

The sound snapped Elara back to reality. The face on the table was the young man’s again. The vision was gone. But the flatline was real.

“He’s crashing!” the anesthesiologist shouted. “V-fib!”

The room exploded into action. “Paddles!” Evans yelled.

Elara moved on pure, unthinking instinct, her body taking over as her mind reeled from the impossible vision. She slapped the charged paddles into Evans’s hands.

“Clear!”

The patient’s body jerked on the table. The flat tone on the monitor broke, stuttering back into a ragged, frantic rhythm. He was back.

The rest of the surgery passed in a blur of adrenaline and residual terror. They stabilized him. They saved him. As they were closing, Dr. Evans, stripping off his bloody gloves, finally looked at her. He didn’t look angry, as she expected. He looked… unsettled.

“Vance,” he said, his voice unusually quiet. “When he crashed… just for a second there… you smiled.”

Elara froze. “What?”

“Not with your mouth,” he clarified, his brow furrowed as he struggled to find the words. “Your mask was on. It was your eyes. It was the strangest damn thing I’ve ever seen. For a second there, you weren’t smiling… but you were.”

He shook his head as if to clear it and walked out, leaving her alone with the chilling, nonsensical observation.

She fled. She stumbled out of the OR and into the sterile scrub room, her heart a cold, tight knot in her chest. She tore off her mask and stared at her reflection in the small mirror above the sink.

It was her face. Pale, stressed, exhausted, but hers. Her lips were trembling. Her eyes were wide with a fear that was bordering on madness. There was no carved smile. There was no monster.

But Dr. Evans, a man of empirical data and cold, hard facts, had seen it. Mrs. Gable had seen it. And she, herself, had seen it—on the patient’s face, on her own face in the supply closet door.

The horrifying conclusion was inescapable. The blackouts weren’t just her losing time. They were moments when she was being pushed aside. Moments when the thing, the Smiler, was stepping forward. It wasn't just haunting her anymore. It wasn't just following her.

It was starting to wear her face.