u/Normal_Kitty

I should have been relieved when my stalker died.

Years of unwanted gifts and phone calls, terror and paranoia, ended when he ended his life in his prison cell.

But soon after he died, the symptoms began.

It began with a pain just between my right shoulder and neck.

I tried to ignore it at first, but the pain worsened and spread to the rest of my right side.

Doctor after doctor refused to take me seriously. All of them said that my symptoms were psychosomatic, caused by the stress of having to relive my trauma Even when my right arm and leg began to feel numb, nobody would even bother to look at me.

A week after symptoms began, one doctor found a lump between my shoulder and neck, and I was finally sent for a biopsy.

Two weeks after symptoms began, I began feeling that old fear again. That feeling that here was there, watching me from some unknown place. The feeling of having to constantly look over my shoulder.

By that time, the lump had already grown to the size of a golf ball.

 

Three weeks after he died, he appeared in my dreams.

He was sitting on the floor of his jail cell, surrounded by pictures of me.

He was smiling, but his eyes were completely dead. The pictures were covered in blood from the cuts on his body.

 

I was awoken by the sound of the phone ringing.

The phone was on the other side of my room, but it was a struggle to get out of bed. My right side refused to cooperate with me.

As I painfully hobbled over, I glanced at my reflection in the mirror. The lump had grown to the size of a baseball.

Not only that, but my body had seemed weirdly… lopsided. It had grown wider, and my head looked like it was too far to the left.

Hands shaking, I answered my phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is Bankside Pathology with the results of your biopsy. I’m afraid we have some very bad news… That lump appears to be a teratoma, which is a very rare form of can-”

I dropped the phone as a wave of pain tore through my body. In the span of a few minutes, the lump had already doubled in size, and it was still growing.

All I could do was watch in horror as it grew more lumps,
and holes,
and hair,
and teeth,
and eyes,
until it had a fully formed face.

His face.

“It… It worked! I can’t believe it worked!”

I screamed in agony and fear. My right arm, no longer under my control, shot up to my face and covered my mouth. Desperately, I scratched at the space between us with my left arm, but he didn’t care. He just kept smiling.

“It’s okay,” he said, caressing my face with my right hand.
“It’s over. The hard part is over. Now we can finally be together.”