Chapter 8: The Smiling Sickness

Chapter 8: The Smiling Sickness

Percy left Hemlock’s junk-strewn property with the old man’s final words ringing in his ears: A death sentence. The phrase was a cold stone in his gut. He stepped back into the deceptively neat and tidy world of Mountain Rim, but the illusion of normalcy had been permanently shattered. He no longer saw a boring town; he saw a pasture, meticulously maintained and filled with placid, grazing livestock, utterly oblivious to the butcher who walked among them.

He saw the butcher that afternoon. While serving coffee at the diner, he glanced out the window and saw him. The Man in White was standing across the street, by the bus stop, holding a conversation with Mrs. Gable from the library. She was laughing, her head tilted back, a wide, genuine-looking smile on her face. The man’s own smile was fixed and perfect as he nodded along. He looked like a charming newcomer, a friendly stranger. But Percy saw him for what he was: the Shepherd, inspecting his flock, ensuring their contentment, and letting his one rogue sheep know that he was always, always watching.

With Hemlock’s warnings as his new lens, Percy began to see the subtle wrongness everywhere. It wasn't one single, obvious thing. It was an accumulation of a thousand tiny, unnatural details. He noticed it first at the diner. Mr. Henderson, still enjoying the “best sleep of his life,” would hold his placid smile for a full minute after his conversation with the waitress had ended, his eyes focused on nothing. It was like a screen that had frozen on its last image.

Then he saw it in the movements. Two men, strangers sitting in booths on opposite sides of the room, both picked up their water glasses at the exact same moment, took a single, measured sip, and placed them back down on the exact same beat, a silent, mirrored piece of choreography they were completely unaware of performing. Percy felt a cold prickle of sweat on his neck. It was the synchronized, unthinking movement of a herd.

The sickness was quiet. It was insidious. It infected the spaces between actions, the moments of stillness. Later that day, while walking home, he saw a small group of people waiting to cross at the intersection of Main and Ocotillo. They stood in a loose cluster, staring ahead. When the light changed, all four of them—a young mother with a stroller, a teenage boy on a skateboard, and an elderly woman with a walker—all turned their heads to the left in perfect, fluid synchronicity, like a flock of birds startled by a sound only they could hear. Then they crossed, the moment of unnatural unity gone as if it had never happened.

No one else noticed. Or if they did, their minds, scrubbed clean of suspicion and fear, simply smoothed over the cognitive dissonance. It was Percy’s unique, terrible privilege to see the strings.

The true horror, however, was waiting for him at home.

His father was a simple man, worn down by twenty-five years at the copper mine. His default emotional states were tired frustration and grudging acceptance. Laughter was a rare, rusty sound from him, and a genuine smile was an event. But since he’d gone to see ‘A Good Film’ on Percy’s frantic, unknowing recommendation, he had become different. He was quieter. Calmer. The perpetual frown lines around his mouth had softened. At the time, Percy had tried to see it as a blessing. Now, he knew it was a symptom.

He sat across from his father at the small kitchen table, pushing a piece of dry meatloaf around his plate. The silence in the house used to be heavy, thick with unspoken resentments. Now, it was just empty.

"Good shift?" his father asked. The question was normal, but the delivery was off. The tone was flat, the inquiry lacking any real curiosity. A ghost of a smile touched his lips and stayed there.

"It was fine," Percy mumbled, his eyes fixed on his plate. He didn't want to look at his father's face. He didn't want to see the vacant peace in his eyes.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the scraping of forks on ceramic plates. Percy felt a tension coiling in his stomach. He was sharing a table with a stranger wearing his father's face. This house, his only refuge, no longer felt safe. It felt like a contaminated zone.

"Saw that Henderson fella today," his dad said, still chewing. "Said his lumbago's barely bothered him all week. Said he feels… clear."

The word hit Percy like a punch to the gut. Clear. The same word he had used to describe his own feeling after the film. It was the brand of the creature, the name it gave to the hollowness it left behind.

"Yeah," Percy managed, his throat tight. "He seems… better."

His father nodded, that serene, empty smile locked in place. He put his fork down beside his plate. And then he did it.

His movements were slow, deliberate, and utterly divorced from the context of their dinner. He raised both of his hands, palms facing forward, about a foot in front of his face. He pressed them against an invisible barrier, his fingers splayed. He traced the edges of an unseen box, his expression remaining one of mild, pleasant vacancy. First the flat plane in front of him, then the walls to his left and right, then the ceiling above his head. His hands moved with the graceful, unnatural precision of a performer.

Percy froze, his own fork clattering from his nerveless fingers onto his plate.

It was the mime.

The silent, unsettling star of the pre-show. Percy remembered the mime’s act now in a flash of horrified clarity—the goofy walk, the fake tears, and the final, menacing routine where he had become trapped in an invisible, shrinking box, his face contorted in a silent scream.

His father was performing a piece of it. He was miming the box.

The performance lasted only a few seconds. Just as suddenly as it began, his father's hands dropped back to the table. He picked up his fork and stabbed a piece of potato, completely oblivious, as if the last ten seconds had never occurred. The placid smile had not wavered.

Percy couldn't breathe. The meatloaf turned to ash in his mouth. The influence of the creature wasn't just a memory wipe or a phantom happiness. It was a seed, planted deep in the minds of its victims, and now it was beginning to sprout. It was bleeding into their muscle memory, turning them into unwitting puppets who would dance whenever their unseen master pulled the strings.

"What's wrong?" his father asked, noticing Percy's stare. His voice was calm, his eyes empty of everything but a mild, bovine concern. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

Percy looked at the shell of the man who was once his father, at the vacant smile and the hands that now rested so innocently on the table. The parasite wasn’t just in a theater in another dimension. It was here, in his kitchen. It was sitting across the table from him. And it was looking at him through his own father's eyes.