But few careers are ever as glamorous as their public image, are they? The cooler it sounds on paper, the more tedious and unpleasant it probably is on the inside. Movie stars spending most of their time repeating the same lines for hours in front of a blue screen, firefighters jerked between deadly emergency calls and days of maddening boredom, famous authors so pressured to meet deadlines they resort to hard drugs. In our case, however, there isn't even a glamorous surface for anyone to admire. Besides the fact that nobody knows we exist, we aren't tracking cryptids or exorcising demons. We aren't hiding little green men or sorcery or spirits from the rest of society. We don't even know if what we fight can rightfully be called "monsters" at all, besides the fact that the things we deal with seem more or less alive, usually, in some sense, and that they're not easily explained.
This probably still sounds romantic to you. Unexplainable creatures! Wow! I get it, but you want to know what my last job was like? The last "monster" we cleaned up? I really do mean "cleaned up," since we heroically slew the beast with nothing but hydrogen peroxide and a mop, and while the office called it a "Class Four Transmutative Plasmodiform," we all agreed the moment we saw it, and smelled it, that its name should be Asscheese. Sometimes "mister" Asscheese, or Sir Ass of Cheese. I told you "hunting monsters" could actually get boring.
And, yeah, this one did technically kill someone...but near as we could tell, that's only because it left enough stinking grease around their house that the poor bastard slipped headlong into a marble countertop, and what likely began as a Class 1 had spent about a week, by our estimate, slowly growing over the body, engulfing his left arm and almost everything from his chest on down in a white, chunky mush you'd never guess was alive if not for the subtle way it rippled, like millions of tiny maggots swimming in slow motion through a heap of cottage cheese. I don't eat cottage cheese anymore.
Maybe you're wondering why anyone would bother to cover up a case like that. Something that looks more or less like dog puke, moves slower than a snail and has all the killing power of a dropped banana peel isn't the kind of discovery that upends society's understanding of the universe, no...but then we started scrubbing the gunk off the guy's body, and the flesh underneath wasn't simply eaten away. It didn't even seem like Asscheese had been "feeding," since it looked like the dead guy was all more or less still there. There could have even been a little more of him than what he started with, if I had to guess, but we aren't the ones who do the final forensic work.
All I can say is that wherever the gunk had been slurping on the guy's skin, the surface was densely tiled with pale, pinkish, egg shaped lumps, each maybe the size of my thumbnail. Every single one of those bumps had the same subtle, pointed ridge in the center, right between the same two shallow, round depressions and just above the same tiny, horizontal crevice. It was unmistakable: the Asscheese had been turning that dead man's skin into a mosaic of tiny, vestigial human faces, which is either how I learned I had that "trypophobic" response I always thought was just a meme, or how I spontaneously developed one on the spot.
If we hadn't interrupted the process, whatever that process was, how far would it have actually progressed? Complete facial features? Working facial features? Whose face? The dead guy? I still can't be sure of this, but I could swear I saw one of them move. Just slightly, just once. The tiniest little tremor, like a nervous twitch. It was after bottling a sample for "the lab" (note that we have never seen "the lab," and we don't even know where it is) that we tested the peroxide solution - you'd be surprised how many of our adversaries share a mortal weakness with mildew - and cleaned everything up in time for the ghoulies to show up. That's what we like to call the body retrieval team, because they never talk to us and we hate them.
That was basically it for this job, unless you count the weird nightmare I had that night, which still kind of spooks me just for how real it felt. I dreamt that my own skin was like the dead guy's, except the faces looked like people I knew in perfect detail, and they were even cognizant. Because dreams are stupid, they were all crying in this goofy "boo-hoo-hoo" sort of way, my closest loved ones begging me in infantile voices to tell them why they had to be a rash on my body, and in an accusatory way at that, like it was somehow my idea. Then, they started jerking themselves loose. I could see my own bones through the lattice of huge, bloodless craters they were leaving in my arms and legs, and I tried desperately to catch them, to stuff them back into their holes as they tumbled to the floor and splattered like handfuls of swollen, putrid grapes. It was around this point that I knew I was dreaming and I felt myself returning to consciousness, but my reasoning skills were still clogged up with enough dream-logic that, for one heart-crushing moment in the interim, I felt with absolute certainty that every real person I recognized in those squealing, shivering, bursting little faces was going to be dead, dead and headless, by the time I awoke.
Instead, I only woke up feeling itchy and a little nauseous. Still, I found myself almost immediately reaching for my phone, just in case, and calling my parents for the first time in a while. They were fine, of course, but while I may have won the battle against the Asscheese, the Asscheese got the last laugh in my book, because, god, do I ever despise calling my parents.