I Saw A Man In A Mask And What Was Underneath Was Terrifying

Carinne’s long brown hair is fanned out across her bed. She’s beginning to stretch and stir several minutes before her alarm goes off. It’s her late alarm because it’s Saturday. Slowly, she gets out of bed. With bleary eyes she walks down the hall to the bathroom. She can’t help but notice how quiet the house is. Her mother and brother had probably gone out, she thought.

She splashes some water on her face and looks up in the bathroom mirror. It is then that she realizes how pale she is. Leaning closer to the mirror, Carinne begins to notice the faint lines on her face and how thin her skin is. She makes a mental note to drink more water today, thinking it might have been because of the night of drinking she had on Friday. Reluctantly, she stumbles back into her room and goes to pull out her uniform for work.

Her mother had helped her to get her job at the Copy Palace and she both loved and hated her for it. Though it was an easy job, Carinne found it to be very boring. Once she had enough saved up to put down on the car she wanted, she planned to quit. She was hoping by the summer she would be able to buy her car and find a better job before college in the fall.

It didn’t take her long to get ready, despite her lack of desire to go anywhere. Carinne once dressed, threw her long hair up into a bun, grabbed her bag and walked out of her house. Once outside, she noticed how cold and dark it was for a mid-September morning. She thinks briefly about going back in to get a sweater, but she doesn’t want to be late for work.

The highway is empty as Carinne makes her way to the other side of town. It’s almost eerie how calm everything is around her. To Carinne, even the sky seems to be getting darker as she drives. She is about three stoplights away from the store when she sees a man about 100 feet away from her. He’s dressed in what looks like long robes and he’s wearing a mask. Carinne stares at the man for some time, she has an unsettling feeling about him, but at the same time she tells herself that he’s probably one of the weirdoes from the comic book store. He is tall though, she notices and whoever he is his long robes send a shiver down her spine. It doesn’t help that he seems to be staring back at her, though she can’t tell—the white, long plague mask that he wears blocks his face completely.

Carinne speeds off once the light turns. She glances back several times into her rearview mirror, but the man that had been there seemed to be gone. She shakes her head, trying to convince herself that she didn’t really see a man and it had been something else entirely. She spends the rest of her short drive trying to convince herself.

When she finally gets to work, she is the only one there. It happens on some Saturdays when her boss has his kids. Carinne opens the store and begins to read over the paperwork that she left on the desk in the back two days ago, but she can’t get the masked man out of her head. She absent-mindedly takes the orders that were left for her and begins to fill them. She feels cold and wishes that she had gone back for the sweater. She knows that she will feel better once some of her co-workers get in. She can’t believe how late everyone is running today.

After awhile, she goes back to her boss’s office and opens the top drawer of his desk. She knows he keeps a pack of cigarettes there even though he’s told everyone he quit six months ago. Slipping out the back, she lights the cigarette she took and takes a long drag. When she looks up, she can see the strange man again. This time he was only on the other side of her small parking lot. He didn’t move again, he simply stood and stared at her. Carinne isn’t exactly sure what she should do, but she knows the masked man has followed her to work. She wonders how long he has been out there.

She throws her cigarette down, but before it can even hit the pavement, the masked man quickly moves towards her. Carinne quickly gets into her building, slamming and locking the back door behind her. Terrified, she runs through the store and locks the front door, flipping the open sign to closed.

“Where the hell is everybody?” she mumbles as she looks around for something to protect her with.

She runs into the back office, locking the door behind her. She grabs the phone and tries to call for help, but she finds that the phone doesn’t work. She calls out and it just rings and rings. That’s when she realizes that she hasn’t had any calls that day which was strange for a business that is always busy. Her cell phone hasn’t rung at all either, not even a text message. She rushes over to her boss’s desk and turns on the computer. She isn’t surprised when she finds that the internet is down too.

She becomes startled at the sound of the storefront door opening and closing. Standing back up, she grabs the letter opener off the desk. Her heart is pounding so hard that she can feel it in her throat, even hear it behind her ears. Swallowing hard, she braces herself against the wall. Part of her thinks she should run, but then where would she go? She has no way of getting in touch with anyone and she knew even if she got home, no one would be there. She is alone.

The man in the plague mask pushes through the locked door, splintering it with his super human strength. Carinne screams out in sheer terror. The masked man is across the room in moments, his hand wrapped around her neck, squeezing the air from her throat. Frantically, she scratches and slaps at him trying to knock herself free of him, but she only manages to knock the mask free from his face.

She tries to scream, but her voice will not come out. She is not prepared for what she sees. The man under the mask is not a man at all, but her own face staring back at her with eyes that burn in hatred. Carinne doesn’t understand how can she be killing herself? Then the once masked killer speaks.

“You don’t remember, do you William?” the killer asks as she slowly releases just enough to allow Carinne to catch her breath.

“What? William? Who’s William?” Carinne gasps for air.

“You’re William. You killed me while I was at work. I was your final victim.”

Carinne stares at herself in horror. She reaches up and touches her face and is terrified to find that the soft skin that she had woken up with that morning is now replaced with a rough beard and a jaw much wider than Carinne’s.

The killer tightens her grip around his neck, growing in hatred towards him. His eyes never leave hers. “I told you. I told you when you killed me, William. I told you that I would see you in hell.”

Carinne shoots up in her bed. She can’t believe how cold it is in her room. She grabs her phone and looks at the time. It’s ten o’clock on Saturday. Frightened still, she wraps her blanket around her and slowly gets out of bed. Everything about this morning feels completely unnatural to her and when she looks out her bedroom window, she knows why. There stands the man in the plague mask watching her from the lawn.

When she turns to run, she catches a glimpse of herself in her mirror. What stares back at her is the face of William McCleary, 44 years old and a serial killer who preyed on young teenage women that he would find on his postal route. He killed over 40 women before being executed.

And now, William gets to live his last kill over and over again—just not like he ever planned.