Creepypasta Files

The Face in the Crowd

THEY SAY YOU SHOULD never really believe anything until you’ve seen it with your own two eyes. Well my eyes have seen more than most, and I still don’t know what to believe. One thing’s for certain, though: I know my own fate is sealed, and has been for some time. And let me tell you – it doesn’t end well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first. I’d better tell you how it all started.

Just another normal day, in a normal town, with me, a normal guy, going about my business. And running late, as usual. I don’t drive, so I find myself on buses a lot. I’m an engineering student, so mostly I’m going back and forward to and from classes. Headphones on, music blaring, skimming through notes from my last class trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to be doing and exactly how late I already am. Bus rides give me a little slice of time when I can almost relax and try to catch up with myself again.

So I’m half zoned-out, not really paying attention to anything but the music in my ears and the complexities of my schedule in my head, when I glance out of the grimy bus window. And my eyes randomly settle on something that instantly stops my heart in my chest.

There’s a corpse walking around out there.

It’s a face I only glimpse for a moment, in a crowd of people waiting to cross the road, but it’s smashed and bloody and horribly misshapen, one side of its skull squashed so flat that there’s no way it could belong to a living person. The sight of it steals the breath from my lungs. The bus moves on and I turn in disbelief to look more closely at this impossible sight, but it’s already lost in a sea of people, in the surge of the crowd as it spills over the crosswalk.

I put it down to overwork: to tiredness, to an overactive imagination or a dirty window or to anything else that I can think of, but a part of me still knows what I saw. That was a dead thing. A dead thing up and walking about in the middle of a bright sunny day.

But I can’t think that. That’s insane. So I put it out of my mind, and get back to being late and making excuses and trying to catch up with all the reading and studying I should be doing…

Only the next day I see it again. I’m travelling back from a morning class this time, and as the bus belches and farts from stop to stop I happen to look out through the window and there he is. Sitting alone on a bench in the park, with people walking past him as if he’s a perfectly normal person. But he’s not normal. He’s a corpse. His skin is ivory white, streaked with blood from his horrific injuries. His limbs are broken and twisted. His body looks as though an evil giant has picked him up and just squeezed. Sharply splintered bones poke through his flesh, lacerating him from the inside out, and no-one seems to notice but me.

By now I’m sure I’m seeing things. Obviously I’ve watched too many zombie movies or something, and I’m having some sort of breakdown. The bus rolls on oblivious, and soon he’s out of my sight, leaving me wondering whether the whole world’s gone mad or whether it’s just me.

For the remainder of the journey I scanned every face in every crowd through the filthy window of the bus, half afraid of what I might see, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything was as it should be, and the world carried on as before. But that was twice I’d seen him now. The same person each time. My head was spinning, and I felt sick to my stomach.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much that night. The next day, getting on the bus again, my nerves were even more strained. Was I going to see that mangled, bloody body once more? I pressed my face to the window of the bus like a wide-eyed child, determined to spot the walking corpse if it was out there again.

So I almost didn’t notice him when the bus stopped and he walked right on.

Waited in line, paid his fare, and nobody batted an eyelid. And of course he strolls down the centre of the bus and sits down right next to me.