The Animator

[Volat]

There once was a man and a woman.
The man wore a mask to cover his real face. At night, but sometimes during quick moments throughout the day, the mask would slip and she could see it. She could see the the thing. It would come out and do all sorts of nasty things. The mask would contort as if to fret, to feel remorse, to show it had wronged. But underneath it would grin.
“What awful things have I gotten away with doing to you?” It would taunt.
But it never got away with anything. Because she never truly forgot its existence. She could not be made to forget the memories, the fear it had trained into her. Her love did not equate to warm acceptance, and did not wipe away the actions of the past.

So the woman learned to draw. She drew fantastic shapes on flat white pages. The man wearing the mask showered her with gifts to realize this glorious fledgling art.

Then the woman took these extravagant gifts and learned to animate. Her fantastical shapes assumed life. They had form and charm. The thing under the mask became uneasy. The woman was getting powerful. This made the mask smile. But something was changing. No matter the expression of the mask, the body began to twinge to commands coming from it.

It started to take over the sleeping and waking worlds of both the man and the woman. The mask slid into fixed, frozen dismay. The mask would maintain efforts to smile and mouth the word “okay”, but the man was clearly not. The house of his mind divided. He began statueing. When the woman needed him he was not there. When the woman begged to speak to it, it would pull down the mask covering the face even further and sulk. It wanted her dead and she knew it.

She had two options. 1: run away and never return. The safest bet for sure. The only sane choice. Or, option 2: stay and have a showdown with the it.

She coaxed the thing out with cunning, doing everything right and wrong and possible to call it into the open. Then the thing arrived. It stated its true intention to hate every part of her, and rape and kill her.

She unfolded her tablet case and drew forth from the tip of her stylus a silhouette of a cartoon. The black empty outline stepped into the space between her and the man. The silhouette sized up the it.

“Your drawings can’t save you. You are going to die.”

She addressed the it directly. “No. You are.”

Her cartoon launched itself into the man, slicing in along the fault where the man and the it conjoined, shattering the mask on impact. The man cried out in pain as the cartoon burrowed further into him, cutting in, as deep as humanly possible. He didn’t bleed when the thing sheared all the way through him, but he did in an instant realize agonies beyond all previous imagination. The it reeled on the floor, bleeding and bested. Now it was the thing’s turn to look up at the bruiser.

“If you kill me, the man dies too!”

“No he doesn’t. And it won’t be me killing you. I’ve given the man the perfect chance to do whatever he wants with you. I have interrupted your control over him.” She stood over the it with her stylus at the ready. “What will you do with this chance?” she asked the maskless man.