The drive home was a blur of screeching tires and frantic prayers. Every red light felt like an eternity. Toby’s voice—thin, trembling, and hauntingly rhythmic—echoed in my ears. “New Dad woke up… but he’s acting weird.” I had been married to Marcus for exactly thirty-two days. He was charming, a software engineer with a gentle smile who had spent the last year winning over both my heart and Toby’s trust. Or so I thought.
When I burst through the front door, the silence of the house hit me like a physical weight. The air felt heavy, smelling faintly of metallic copper and the lavender floor cleaner I’d used that morning.
“Toby? Marcus?” I shouted, my voice cracking.
No answer. I moved toward the living room, my heart hammering against my ribs. There, sitting on the edge of the velvet sofa, was Toby. He looked small, his face pale from the fever, his eyes locked on a point behind me. He didn’t turn when I entered. He just lifted a trembling finger and whispered the words that froze the blood in my veins.
“That’s not him, Mommy. He forgot how to use his face.”
I spun around, bracing for a blow, but the hallway was empty. Only the shadows of the late afternoon sun stretched across the hardwood.
“Toby, honey, where is Marcus?” I knelt beside him, grabbing his shoulders. He was cold—ice cold.
“In the kitchen,” Toby breathed, his voice barely audible. “He was making me soup. But then his eyes… they went flat. Like a doll’s. And he started peeling.”
“Peeling what, Toby?”
“The wallpaper,” Toby said. “But there isn’t any wallpaper in the kitchen, Mommy.”
I stood up, my legs feeling like lead. I walked toward the kitchen. As I rounded the corner, I saw him. Marcus was standing by the sink, his back to me. He was perfectly still. On the stove, a pot of soup was boiling over, the liquid hissing as it hit the gas flame, but he didn’t move to turn it off.
“Marcus?” I whispered.
He didn’t turn. Instead, he reached up to his neck. I watched in horrific fascination as his fingers dug into the skin just below his jawline. There was no blood. Instead, there was a sound like dry parchment being torn.
“Marcus, stop it! You’re hurting yourself!” I lunged forward to grab his arm.
He spun around with a speed that wasn’t human. I fell back, hitting the kitchen table.
It was Marcus, but it wasn’t. His features looked… blurred. As if someone had taken a charcoal drawing of my husband and rubbed their hand across it. His eyes were wide, vacant pools of obsidian, and his mouth was fixed in a wide, frozen grin that didn’t reach his cheeks.
“Dinner… is… served,” he said. The voice was his, but the cadence was wrong—distorted, like a skipping record.
“Who are you?” I screamed.
He tilted his head at a 90-degree angle, a sickening crack echoing through the room. “I am the New Dad. You invited me in. The paper said ‘I do.’ I am doing. I am being. I am… fitting.”
He reached up again, and this time, he pulled. A strip of “skin”—pale, rubbery, and bloodless—came away in his hand, revealing something dark and shifting underneath. It wasn’t a man. It was something that had spent a month learning how to mimic one, and the fever in the house—the stress, the heat—had caused the glue of its identity to melt.
I didn’t stay to see what was under the mask. I scrambled back into the living room, scooped Toby up in my arms, and bolted for the front door.
“Mommy!” Toby shrieked.
I looked back. The thing that looked like Marcus was standing in the hallway now. It wasn’t walking; it was gliding, its limbs jerking in unnatural directions. Its face was half-gone now, a void of shifting shadows where a nose and mouth should be.
“You… forgot… your… keys,” it warbled. It held up my keychain, the metal jingling Mockingly.
I didn’t care about the keys. I dived through the front door, ran to the car, and realized with a jolt of pure electricity that I’d left the spare key under the wheel well. I fumbled for it, shoved Toby into the backseat, and roared out of the driveway just as the front door of the house drifted open.
The thing stood on the porch, perfectly still, waving a hand that had too many joints.
We spent the night in a motel three towns over. I called the police, claiming a home invasion. When they arrived at the house, they found it empty. No sign of Marcus. No sign of a struggle.
The only thing they found was in the kitchen. On the table, laid out with surgical precision, were Marcus’s clothes, his wedding ring, and—most terrifyingly—a pile of thin, translucent material that looked exactly like human skin, shed like a snake’s.
I sat on the motel bed, holding Toby as he finally fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. My phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was a text from Marcus’s number.
I hesitated, my thumb trembling, before opening it.
“I’m learning, Sarah. Next time, I’ll use more glue. See you at home.”
I looked down at Toby. His fever was gone, but as he slept, his hand reached up, subconsciously scratching at the skin just below his jawline.
