Stories to Tell in the Dark

My Face

I'm not sure why I'm writing this right now. I'm not even sure if I am writing this now or, if I am, whether the words I'm seeing in my mind's eye are the same as the words my hands are typing. I suppose the only way to find out is to check tomorrow and see if this is still here. If it is, and it still looks like this, then I'll know it wasn't some dream I was having with my eyes open.
'Dream'. Even looking at that word right now makes some guttural part of me tense up. I'm not surprised though. After all, my dreams are the reason I'm even awake at this hour. Everyone else in the house is asleep right now. Well, except for my mum, but she always wakes up at 4 AM like clockwork. Hell, she doesn't even need an alarm.
I'm looking back at what I've written so far and I realise I've been rambling. I tend to do that, simply because my thoughts just get scattered like dandelion seeds when I don't completely concentrate. There's only so much concentration you can give something when you keep getting flashes of terror every time you blink. It might just be that I'm doing it so that I can stay awake as long as possible by writing. Either way, I should probably at least explain what I'm babbling about some time before my parents find me awake like this.
I've been a student at London University for a year now, studying psychology. I would be in my second year, but I had to stop mid-way through, so this year is a resit. I was hoping at some point to be a counselling psychologist, to help people get past their problems without being the guy who forces a prescription down their throats.
It went fine for the first semester; I even managed to make a few friends, which is an achievement for someone as socially awkward as me.
For the first few months I would hang out with a small group of people, all of whom shared my weird interests: we'd talk about the usual nerdy pop-culture we'd digested that week, about how we all threw our shoes at the television when a certain character from one of our shared favourite TV shows was killed off very ignobly and needlessly by a bear, that kind of shit. Of course, as close as we got we never saw each other outside of lecture days, which suited me just fine.
I remember exactly the day that my current "predicament" started. I only call it that because even now, six months later, I still don't know what the Hell it is.
It was February 2nd when we received a foreign exchange student from Canada. I'm not going to name him here, partly because he wouldn't want me to and partly because I don't want this to come back to him. It was clear on his first day that he wasn't the talkative type, so it wasn't surprising when he started gravitating towards our little clique. He seemed enthused about what we were saying, sure, and he even managed to get some of the references we flung out about some of the TV shows that was more localised to Britain, but none of our geeky bullshit would ever stimulate a reaction with him quite like his extensive knowledge of urban legends. I'm not talking "Sewer alligators of New York" kind of legends either: I'm talking about the kind you see on the darker underbelly of the internet; the ones that make your palms sweat and give you a nervous tick while you read about them.

The first time he ever mentioned his . . . "hobby" was after a lecture we'd been given on the neurotransmitters involved with fear. Our lecturer, on one of his slides, put up a rather disturbing image of a dog with a malicious grin across its muzzle in an effort to demonstrate one of the technical variations of fear. Needless to say, it worked.
After we left, our new Canadian friend told me and the group that he knew where that image came from, and then went into great length on the mythos surrounding what he called "Smile.jpg". At one point, I remember him using the word "Creepypasta" and one of my friends, who we'll call "Michael", inquired, after the obvious quip about haunted ravioli, what he meant. After a quick explanation on what he meant, our friend continued on to say that, according to the Smile Dog myth, everyone who saw that image and didn't pass it on to someone else would be plagued with nightmares from the creature in the picture.
After joking away the macabre subject and going our separate ways, I took the Canadian aside, curious about where I could find the original story. At that point, I thought it might give me a good laugh, and when he told me to listen to a narration on YouTube for the best effect, it didn't take long to find what I was looking for.
Of course, being the cynical asshole I was back then, it did make me giggle a little to think that something as simple as a photoshopped picture of a husky could inspire such fear in people, but ever more curious, I kept going into the topic of Creepypastas to see what else I could find. Most of it was the same shtick about being stalked by creatures with no face or eyes as big as dinner plates with claws the size of your arm, or the trope about some kid picking up a bootleg copy of a nostalgic game only to find out that the main character had been warped into some sadistic shadow of its original self, but some of them actually sent a real, visceral chill down my spine, which really surprised me.
I think by about 2AM the next morning, I'd watched about twenty different videos of narrated Creepypastas and I was about ready for bed. I didn't have anything resembling an early morning lecture the next day, but I knew I'd have to be up and about by around ten o'clock.
Now, I always considered myself a rational human being, not prone to believing in boggarts and the sort, but for the life of me I swear I couldn't keep my eyes closed for five seconds without flinching from some gut feeling that there was another presence in my room, and in my mind's eye it kept metamorphosing from one form to another, and after around half an hour of my futile attempt at sleep I decided that enough was enough and that I should go into the kitchen and get something to calm myself down.
As soon as I put my hand on the wood of the kitchen door on my way back to my room, a sense of danger jabbed at me inside my stomach, just like it had before in my room. I got that same irrational feeling that I wasn't alone, and I spun around, my eyes scanning every facet of the brightly lit kitchen, even checking the doors of some of the cabinets, and saw nothing. I sighed, knowing that my binge on horror stories was getting to me, and that it was my own fault for listening to so many of them, especially so late at night, so I went down the corridor and back to my room.
As I opened the door, I did my best to swallow down the feeling of dread that was accumulating in my gullet like a stone, and when it was open all the way, I had to take a step back for a second. My breathing picked up as I stared wide eyed at the empty space where my bed once sat. Everything was gone, from the crates underneath to the posters on the wall, leaving a barren, white-walled corner.
As I stared in disbelief I heard a soft, muffled whisper of a chuckle from one of the nearby rooms.