Unveiling Nightmares: A Father's True Face

A couple of days have passed since the night he woke me up and led me to that abandoned, cursed place. I started to think it was all just a bad nightmare. He was behaving normally; there were no hints of what he did to that man or of what he had shown me. I almost convinced myself that it was all just a bad dream, until one night he entered my room again.

I remember it very vividly; it was in the dead of night, and a heavy silence hung over the house. Only the occasional creak of the floorboards would break the silence. The moonlight gave life to the shadows in my room; they played a game as the wind whispered through the opened windows. A loud sound woke me up, and the clock slowly ticked away. The air grew colder, and an unsettling feeling took over. I felt someone’s eyes on me, on the back of my head, where the entrance to my room was. I was afraid to turn around and look. Unbeknownst to me, my father stood there, his face obscured by the shadows, watching me sleep.

Then, the silence was shattered, and the floorboards beneath his weight started to scream. A chill ran down my spine, the moonlight slowly dancing across my face. I turned around, pretending I was still asleep, slowly peeking and seeing a shadow led by an invisible hand moving closer to my bed. The moonlight revealed only fragments of his figure—a man covered in darkness, his eyes hidden beneath the brim of a hat. The walls were pressing closer; my breathing quickened, and I was afraid. My instincts screamed at me, encouraging me to run away, but I couldn’t move. The dark figure took a step closer to my bedside. Panic surged through my veins. I had to get away from this shadow; it was going to hurt me.

"Wake up, son, I need your help."
At that moment, I realized that what happened the other day was not a dream, and I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. My father is The Crow.

I didn’t want to wake up, but he kept calling me. He knew I wasn’t asleep; he knew I was pretending. I put my clothes on as slowly as I could.
"Be careful not to make much noise; we don’t want to wake anyone up." He had that weird smile on his face. I wondered to myself, What would happen if I made enough noise to wake up someone? Would the nightmare stop?

We got into his car and drove out of town. I still didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing. I was afraid to ask. We were driving in silence for about 20 minutes; he didn’t say a word, and neither did I.
I just sat there in the passenger seat of his old truck, looking out of the window. With my hands clutching the edge of the seat, the gentle hum of the engine was the loudest thing in the car as we went down a quiet, deserted road.

"Dad, where are we going?" I had to ask; I couldn’t stand the mysterious behavior any longer.
He looked at me with that smile again. "We are going on an adventure, Adrian."
My heart skipped a beat. I loved spending time with my father. Maybe this isn’t what it seems like; maybe we are actually going to do something fun. But a strange, uneasy feeling has been eating at my mind since we left the house.
The landscape was transforming, from the open fields to the dense woods that lined up on the sides of the road. Shadows were following us, moving and dancing through the trees.
"Do you think we’ll see any animals by the road?" I asked, trying to distract myself from this eerie feeling.
He didn’t take his eyes off the road. "You never know; nature is full of surprises."
We continued down the road, and soon, just behind the curve in the distance, I noticed a figure. Someone was standing there at the side of the road, his thumb outstretched. A hitchhiker.
"Dad, there is someone there!" I pointed it out.
My father nodded, his gaze fixed on the hitchhiker. "Yes, Adrian, I see."
He slowed down the truck as we approached the hitchhiker, and then he stopped just a few feet from him. My heart raced, and the pulse echoed in my ears. "What is he doing?" I thought to myself.

"Where are you headed?" My father rolled down the window.
"To the next bus station, I have to catch a bus."
"Hop in."
The guy looked nervous, but then he saw me in the car, sitting next to my father, his guard completely dropped.
"I hope you don’t mind sitting in the back; I have my son here."
"No problem, I don’t mind." He waved at me. "Hi kid."
I waved back at him, not saying anything. I had a bad feeling about this.
"Let me help you with your bags." My father turned toward me. "Stay here, Adrian, he said, his voice steady. "I’m going to help him fast."
I watched him as he stepped out of the truck. He took one of the bags and opened the truck. In the side mirror, I could see the guy standing next to my father, placing his belongings in the truck. My father looked around; no one was there. He smiled; he saw me looking. Then he hit the guy on the head and knocked him out cold. He tied him up and put him inside the truck very quickly; he didn’t hesitate for a second. The next moment, he was sitting in the driving seat, turning the truck around. Everything happened in less than a minute. I knew that this was not his first time doing something like this; he must’ve had a lot of practice.

"I am really having fun, Adrian," he said, looking at me. "This is very important to me, and so are you. But please remember, if you don’t want to end up on that chair, keep your mouth shut."

We drove off the road and followed a dirt path that led us deep into the forest. And then we stopped, and we were there, in front of that house. He opened the truck; the guy was still out cold. He picked him up without any trouble, and I opened the door to the basement. There, we tied him down to that chair. We took all of his stuff and looked through it. In the corner of the room there was a barrel, and there we burned it all. I saw his ID; his name was Robert Smith. He was 23 years old and out of luck.
When Robert Smith woke up, The Crow was standing in front of him with a knife in his hand.

"Good morning." He said that and stabbed him in the leg.
Robert started to scream, and The Crow started to smile. I was sitting there in the dark, watching.
"Watch and learn; this is how you make art!"
Robert screamed for help; the more he screamed, the more he was tortured. When he started peeling off the flesh from his face, he lost consciousness.
I sat there in a worn-out chair, my heart racing, my fingers trembling as I clenched the armrests, my knuckles turning white under the pressure.
My eyes were fixed on the scene that developed in front of me. I wanted to turn away, not to watch but to shield my eyes from this gruesome sight, but an invisible hand seemed to hold my gaze locked in place. I felt a knot in my stomach and a sickening feeling moving up my throat. I wanted to puke; the room felt small and suffocating. The light flickered from the single bulb that was above my father’s head, casting a harsh shadow on him and highlighting the intensity in his eyes and the madness that took him over.

I watched him stabbing, slicing, cutting, and at the end gouging his eyes, eating them, and a question lingered in my mind: What is going on? What is happening to the world I knew? What can I do, and how can I escape from this nightmare of mine?