Just another wretched riddle, the kind his daddy liked to confuse him with when he was pretending to be Dr. Faber. All those questions made him feel ill, and, when Dr. Faber tried to make him think about all the bad stuff he’d done, he struggled to find his daddy at all.

Mack tilted his head towards the large window that opened onto the facility’s green expanse of landscaped garden. Even now he could see his daddy bending down, attending to one of the rosebushes. His face was soft, like putty, and Mack had to stare hard at him to make sure he kept him in place. Daddy’s eyes, Daddy’s nose, Daddy’s teeth. They were everywhere.

He caught sight of a reflection in the window and vaguely wondered who the old man was staring back at him. He looked like a really old version of his daddy and Mack was quick to notice that his features didn’t flutter out of alignment once. He was wearing a skin-colored silicone mask over the bottom half of his face, covering the upper lip and the entirety of the jaw. In the middle of the mask there was a small opening through which Mack could see a hint of yellow teeth. He tried to remember if his daddy had ever worn such a thing, but his memory was unclear. His daddies would be no help either; whenever he asked them about the past, they always looked utterly blank. Their face would lose definition and change completely. Mack would close his eyes and scream until the daddies in white coats came back. Everything would be better after that.

He turned his head back towards the common room and watched the patients whose faces he couldn’t see going about their early evening tasks. For many this simply meant pacing up and down the common room. For others it was a gentle game of drafts or canasta. Those that walked did so in a kind of slow delirium, trudging towards some dark inevitability that Mack could never quite see. When he stared at them, he was often appalled to see small tears in their mottled skin. The bones inside looked metallic and, if he concentrated, he could see steel filaments poking through the hosts’ flesh, straining to keep them alive. The walkers terrified him. They had from the moment he’d arrived. The facility had the capacity to do terrible things, and he felt a chill whenever he watched them shuffle by.

He glanced towards the door and saw his daddy dressed up as Dr. Faber accompanying a gentleman whose face was still in flux. Mack watched them approach, intrigued. The man with Dr. Faber looked a little like Daddy, but there was something about the evolution of his features that Mack didn’t like. They didn’t seem to sit right on his skull, sliding over the bone and tilting between something known and something not.

As they drew near, Mack felt a sudden panic attach itself to him. The man’s face was taking shape.