Jack had suddenly started seeing faces in places faces shouldnt be, just when he was searching for peace of mind. The particular items could be anything,from the green, neatly sheared hedges he passed on his walk to work, to the pillows he laid his head on, which produced frightening visages too wicked for his naked eye. The wall behind his bed oozed in faces, some plain containing just noses and eyes, the others featuring wrinkles and detail that peiqued the abyss of the imagination. Coming and going, at times low like a baritone, and at other as high as the castratos final note.
Jacks place of work, a generic car parts factory, manufacturing the cheapest of car parts this side of the east river, had hims pinned as employee of the month material. Maybe he would become a manager, a foreman on the factory floor, leading his old work buddies, being the one on top. Jack had no such need for such wild fantasies, where was the heart in the throws of power? It didnt matter, the attacks had only gotten stronger in the following weeks, during performance reviews that could change the ourse of the future. Machinery whirred as Jack placed metal to be pressed into a mold for a vars hood. Stiff shirts stood, admiring the protective steps and measures Jack took, delivering such quick movements to produce the products they held so dear, or perhaps the sneered at such lowly filth, feeling sweet success at the higher rungs of the ladder. One could not know staring at such blank, studious expressions.
Words suddenly echoed, where were the words, where were they produced? Vibrations swung the air, and suddenly laid an awkward heat that formed sweat on the furrowed brow of the digruntled Jack. Disgust soon set in and tinged the frotal lobe, sending shockwaves to the stem and down the spine. Oozing faces suddenlt crept out from the torso of a stiff suit, and soon his clipboard followed suit.
"HELP"
Why screams of help?
Why were they screaming help?
Jacks mind was set off in a domino effect like no other which set oof a set of dusty switches. He eminated a loud squeal, a call for help in the highest degree as the faces consumed the flesh of the scenery around him, everything going a dull gray, opposed to as black one usually relates to nothingness.
In reality, perhaps, the gentlemen in the performance review stared in a mixture of disgust and awe. A madman? In our midst. They would surely see his neck, his slender physique, dripping with a muscle or two from some intensive labor, would be thrown out of the front doors. The machinery word and mixed with the echoes of Jack's screams. The whole factory floor saw an emergency shutdown, searching for the cause of the disturbance.
The faces had not yet disappeared for jack, who stood screaming, motionless. Scared for his life, he did not know the machinery around him existed, but he could hear it. Imagine the gnawing of machinery and the cries of cosmic agony by otherworlds faces. The agony needs only little description. The faces soon became larger, growing on to disembodied heads floating the grey dullness that had become the backdrop to the world. Jack was standing, or floating, one can not know when one isn't even sure of existence. They suddenly stopped screaming, but the noise did not cease. The sound of the screams died, but it gave birth to a loud buzz, a buzz that lasted forever. One would think it lasted forever, for it got on ones nerves in a matter of seconds. A buzz that vibrated the eardrums with its shear volocitude. Mental, just mental.
"MY MIND IS NOT GONE
IT IS FOUND
I AM AT PEACE
MY MIND AND BODY
IS SOUND".
Jacks cries did not sound, but his mouth uttered them, he could feel it with all the senses in his body. With his heart, he knew he spoke, but the sound was nowhere. The vibrations fell flat. Someone had slipped him something.
He wasnt thinking clearly, but who could at times like these?
The sudden terror of the situation strikes again, and like the terrors that often come suddenly, ity is amplified tenfold from the initial fear of petty disgust and horror. The eyes of the faces had stood complacent and stoic untul terror had grasped his mind. The eyes suddenly had hate plastered all over them, brows furrowed in the way only evil does.
Was this sudden, or were they always like that? Were they always there? Judging, perhaps.
In the real world, perhaps, the stiffs threw him out of the steel double doors, into the parking lot of the cheap car part factory. The wretching man wwas cast aside, and many day time passersby on their morning jog, or on their morning routine of sort didnt even give a passing glance. It may have all been familiar, similar faces seeing each other like they had always seen, like a dream. Maybe they though this man was in a dream, a bad nap on the job, on a break. Absurd! They were dreaming, the man just one of those signals, those signs that you were asleep.
Jacks mind compresses, and squeezes, erasing the fog of gray dullness, diluting the faces into the primary and secondary colors of the city. He had a recollection of what had happened, but he wasnt there. It was like an odd premintion, the weirdest feeling of dejavu, but never experiencing the dream, knowing one experienced the dream that was once reality. Jacks brain then started to swell and heave, a walk home was in order. To sleep this off and maybe approach help. Maybe he could find someone who would not jump at the chance to commit him to a madhouse, on madder than the world that he already thought he was trapped in. The brain allowed the limbs to coexist and drag his grim form to his apartment that only existed a few short city blocks away. He had passed the green hedge, on without faces, on ripe with flower buds, and the songs of a few birds. The world was beautiful, faces? What was he thinking. Mere illusions caused by a stressful mind, but one cant be in that much denial. He came back to reality for a quick second, but then realized that he had been stressed, and he loved excuses. He was worried, and was running a fever, and was hungry, and needed relief, and sleep.
He opened the door with one turn of the key, and flung himself to the fridge for drink of something particularly cold, and  hopefully refresing.
He hesitated to open the fridge, and soon went go wash his hands of oil and metal debris still laying in the skin of his palms.
Opening the fridge door , he grabbed some cold fruit juice and began to drink from thew carton.
But the contents were warm, and far too thick for fruit juices. The bitter, metallic taste made him spit it out instantly, without the hesitation he had once had opening the fridge. The fridge was as hot as the bowels of hell. Spoiled milk boiled and curded, fruits rotted out and sooned raisined, some just compiling of a mess of sweaty goop. It was much too hot in the apartment now that he thought of it.
In the real world, perhaps, others lived in the luxury of the ac that was provided for additional cost in the apartments. They were reading there magazines, and watching their telivision shows, unaware of a gray dullness, of the disembodied heads that judged their moves with a sort of stoicness, until one questioned the life and sanity of their own brain. The bell rang, and like the dizzying tunes of a jazz sax, Jack collapsed like a sack of heavy burdens, witnessing the swrilling textures of his rigid wall spiral until a mash of deep , comsic purple, letting in a a mist that gave birth to a thousands of compelling stars, all in the shape of the most twisted faces. The larger planet that laid in the center of the galaxy was the largest thing Jack had ever witnessed. The shock one feels when imagining falling from great heights suddenlt overwhelms Jack, and he feels like no other being has ever felt. Scared in the coldness of space, witnessing monstrous faces gnaw at everything he sees.
Then sudden peacefulness of the situation becomes apparent. The screams once heard in earlier situations died, and even the buzzing ceased. Wonderful silence overcame the darkness that prevailerd between shining stars, and the bright infinite comsos. Melancholy, perhaps, would be a fitting word to describe the exact feeling of Jacks float through ther faces that twisted and contoted, but in an apologetic way, like they had been sorry they were trapped, and they were to weak to break out from the flesh that tried to contact me.
The immense planet suddenly opened up a massive hole, that revealed in it an underlying truth, a chilling reminder of the emptiness and comfiness of the nothingness that was a miniscule nothingness of human kind.
"You're dead, perhaps"
Words echoing through an endless darkness, a realization hiting the pleasure receptors of the body. A drum solo of good feelings.
Or horror, perhaps.
Do such attacks have an origin, not quite. Jack remembers just waking up and eeing the faces. The faces had met him in a time of uncertainty. His mother had died, the last of any family connection Jack had. Even if their relationgship was not the greatest, it was still his mother. The faces appeared the day after, with a haunting presence in his minimally furnished apartment. He slept on the floor most days, observing the first faces, emerging from the corners of the walls thats seemed to converge and form a flat point that was the projection point of the sprouting faces. The first faces were fun, and bright, with bright yelps, and the brightness of childhood naivity. Now it has come to this in such a short time. The peacefullness of the deathly echoes suddenly returns to the foreground odf the nartratrive, as well as the wandering mind of the floating Jack. He wishes for his mother now, so if he was dead, or if reality was crumbling, whatever the matter was, he wished to see his mother. He looked for her in the comsic sea of faces, but was lost, only having her image in his brain, his eyes seeing the underlying truth. the truth of death, the truth of life, the twisted visions of the paranoid Jack, who wasn't really paranoid at all. Becoming paranoid is something that happends when visions torture you, trouble you in the very was the world does. The visions were peaceful now. The world was peaceful now. Can one go back to madness after touching a slice of the peaceful ,poetic silence of the truth.
In the real world ,perhaps, a man convulses in his apartment, foaming at the mouth, muffled by the foams of insanity.
If we could only tell what was real, and what was imaginary.
Jack scoffs at the reality that once was, he may be dead in one reality, but the void called his name, being swallowed by the information. He was one, and he was whole, he didn't breathe, yet he lived. He lived like that man he could be. labor makes a man, peace of mind makes a great man, a humanistic man that sees the good in the world. The faces all swirll inwardly, to the ponint of origin in their golden spiral. The massive planet in the form a visage closes its truth and implodes, peeling the mold of its form inside our, revealing the muscles behind the mirage's flesh.
In the real world, a neighbor hears convulsions, and a muffled cry, one without severity, which makes one even more worried. Medical attention arrives, and bring Jack back. Back to life perhaps.
The constant buzzing that comes with tainted silence suddenly sounds in his conscience ears, and his eyes hazily recollect the images around him, as light floods his corneas. The faces, the peace, they were gone. The officials ask him a few questions, and lies are hurled from Jack's mouth to drive the intruders out of his abode. He shuts the doors of his apartmen and focuses on the lines of his hands. He traces them, runnning his fingers over callouses and bumps.The buzzing of tainted silence continues, and all Jack could do was stare out of his fourth story window, observing the sun setting on this horrible day, if it was even the same day he remembered starting. What a beautiful sunset, he thought. Light beamed through the streets, giving an appearence of two different levels of light, on the top a purple atmosphere that struck the heart and caught the eye with its beauty, the bottom level being the pure, direct, blinding light of the sun. Looking directly down the block, Jack could see the neatly trimmed hedge he has observed on his walks from work. Budding from one wayward branch sprouts a wonderful purple flower, in the shape of a delicate women's face.