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The first time Lex had seen the Smiler was twenty three years ago.
She’d been a newly minted magical girl then, naive enough to think the eyeless face peering around the corner had belonged to a normal monster, that its burning stare was the kind of threat she was supposed to deal with. Though none of her teammates had seen it, they’d given chase with her, but it got away. It always got away. By the fourth encounter they’d stopped believing her and by the fifth they’d left her entirely, but that didn’t matter.
Every time she met the Smiler’s gaze her blood boiled, every time she chased it she’d manage to follow it around one more corner, every time it eluded her her hatred of it grew.
Her power’s left her shortly after the ninth encounter and she’d even dared to hope that would be the end of it. A week later the Smiler taunted her from the alley opposite her bedroom window, its grotesquely long limbs silhouetted against the gauche inner barrier. Twice more it taunted her like that.
And then it broke the rules.
Walking home from classes one evening the Smiler had the gall to simply stride across the street in front of her. Although its face never changed, she could feel the smugness in its eyeless pits and tilt of its head. She chased it for so long she had to spend that night in a safety center.
That was also when she learned it wasn’t just sapping at her sanity, the burning sensation she’d felt under its glare had been quite literal. Years of back and forth later her doctors would determine it was congenital, but she knew. She knew it was responsible.
Lex wasn’t just a plaything for the Smiler, she was prey.
The Smiler only became more brazen from there. Before long it started appearing before her outside the hours of darkness. Worse, it knew that only she could see it and soon after it began appearing in broad daylight it started to flaunt that fact.
At first it still preferred to appear when she was mostly alone, peering over the windowsill while she chatted with a coworker, walking just behind the only other pedestrian in view, stalking between the trees during the only date she’d managed in the last decade, but that didn’t last.
It was among commuting crowds, it perched atop the local playground as oblivious children swarmed around, it perused the meat aisle of the grocery store, and a dozen other crowded places. Two weeks ago it had waited at a nearby tram stop, daring her to come after it like a raving madwoman in front of two dozen onlookers. She’d only barely been able to restrain herself. That time. In many of the earlier such encounters she hadn’t.
Which was not to say Lex only rabidly reacted, a massive map of the city occupied one of her apartment’s walls with her every encounter with the Smiler, their start and end points, marked upon it. Most of the rest was taken up by tomes and documents, old storybooks, newspapers, and the odd scholarly publication… Almost all of which she’d found to be completely useless.
Lex had nearly been at her wits end until she got a lucky break. A few months ago one of her few remaining friends had recognized a sketch among a pile of old journals at an estate sale and gotten her the whole crate. It wasn’t the full collection, but it was more than enough.
Before her the Smiler had haunted another.
Warwick’s story, laid out across nineteen years of journals, was much like her own. He’d never been a magical girl, obviously, but he’d worked the morning cleanup detail when the Smiler first found him. He’d thought it was a monster that had somehow avoided the outer barrier at first, but it appeared again and again and as it became more brazen Warwick’s health declined—exposure to various toxic substances was his diagnosis—and his life frayed apart at the seams.
He’d started his journals later than Lex had, but he’d perhaps been even more obsessive from what she could tell, and she copied his encounters to her own map. Several years worth of writings hadn’t made it into her possession, leaving large gaps in his deductions, but it was still the most progress she’d made in ages.
Towards the end Warwick had become convinced that the Smiler had a lair somewhere in the city, that he could find it and put an end to it. And then she’d reached the end, one final entry followed by a hundred blank pages. She’d had to triple check the date.
According to missing persons records Warwick Johnathan Rhodes had been declared missing two days after his last entry. A day later part of his left hand had been found by a sewage worker and he’d been written off as killed by monsters.
The next day the Smiler had first appeared to Lex.
That should have stopped her short, made her reconsider, but Lex’s blood still boiled. She needed to end this before she wasted away.
Lex barely had the strength to pry open the manhole and descend the ladder. Maybe her cane could hurt what magic never did. Assuming she found it before she collapsed of exhaustion.
She’d settle for knocking that damn smile off its face.