Thomas Wren — The Boy Who Found an Insect With a Human Face 
The Boy Who Found an Insect With a Human Face
It clung to the stone wall like a wet stain that refused to slide down. The candlelight flickered, and the shadow twitched, rippling unnaturally. The boy blinked once — thinking his eyes were playing tricks — but then it moved.
A soft clicking noise followed. Not like a beetle’s tiny scrape, but slower… deliberate… like knuckles tapping a windowpane. The creature scurried along the wall at a speed too quick for something so large, vanishing into the darkness where ceiling met shadow.
The boy ran. He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.
By breakfast the next morning, the rumor had spread. Something was crawling around the school — too big to be an insect, too slick to be a rat, too… wrong to be ignored.
And Thomas was missing from the dining hall.
Not unusual at first — he often skipped meals — but when midday came and the dormitory matron went to retrieve him for lessons, his bed was empty. The pillow was still slightly indented, blankets folded neatly. As if the boy had made his bed for someone else to sleep in it.
Worse was the floor beneath.
The old wooden planks had long been stained and scratched from decades of restless students. But now — beneath the bed where Thomas always knelt to tend his jars — a wide circle had been burned into the wood. Not with fire, but with… something acidic, something that had eaten through the varnish like rotten spit.
And in the middle of the circle was a drawing.
Not in charcoal this time — but gouged deep into the wood itself. The lines were jagged but precise, carved with a tool far sharper than nails or pencils. It depicted a figure: a boy, thin and small, with a face that looked almost like Thomas — except the features were stretched, distorted, as if someone had tried to draw a human face from memory and failed.
The mouth was too wide.
The eyes too round.
The expression almost begging to be corrected.
A note was found beneath the mattress. A page torn from Thomas’s precious notebook:
“It is learning too fast. Soon it won’t need me.”
Night Three
The dormitory monitor insisted it was nonsense — Thomas must have run away. Children did that. Especially strange ones.
But when the gas lamps went out that night and the boys fell into uneasy sleep, the quiet whispers began.
A skittering sound.
A wet rasp against metal.
The faintest murmur of breathing that didn’t belong to any boy.
Near midnight, Peter — the same boy who had tried to speak to Thomas — awoke to a cold pressure on his cheek. He thought it was a mouse at first, crawling over the pillow. He swatted at it — but instead of fur, his fingers brushed something smooth, like chilled flesh.
The candle-light glow from a distant corridor caught a silhouette:
A face inches from his own.
A human face — but the wrong size, the wrong shape — stretched and plastered onto a body that shouldn’t have had one.
The mouth moved first.
Opening and closing like a fish gasping for air.
And a sound came out…
A whisper.
A whisper in a child’s voice that wasn’t fully formed:
“Pe… ter…”
He screamed. The lamps were lit. Teachers rushed in. The creature was gone — scuttling into dark corners faster than anyone could follow. But the marks left behind on Peter’s cheek were undeniable:
Tiny scratches.
Fine and symmetrical.
Like fingers too small to be human.
The Science Room
Professor Godfrey had not slept. For hours he examined Thomas’s abandoned notebook — each page more unsettling than the last.
New drawings.
New observations.
The creature’s face becoming more human each day.
Imitating expressions it saw.
Practicing smiles.
Practicing fear.
On the final page:
“It doesn’t know what a person is — but it wants to become one. I think… it chose me first.”
A sudden knock on his window broke his concentration.
Three knocks.
Slow.
Measured.
He stepped closer.
The fog outside the glass was thick, but through the condensation he could see an outline — small, hunched — like a child waiting to be let inside. Godfrey swallowed hard and wiped the window with his sleeve.
Nothing there.
But on the glass, left behind in tiny droplets of dark fluid, were fingerprints.
Too small to belong to a boy.
Too perfectly spaced to be random.
Godfrey locked every door.
Saturday — The Vanishing
At dawn on the sixth day, the alarm bell rang through all of St. Aldrich’s College. Not for fire. Not for storm.
For Thomas Wren.
He was gone.
His shoes still beneath the bed, his coat folded. The window above his mattress open just a crack. The ground below showed no footprints. Not even a trail in the mud.
As if he had lifted himself into the fog and dissolved.
The only sign he had ever existed was on the dormitory floor:
A final drawing — larger than any before.
An insect body — but standing upright on two legs.
Human arms sprouting from a thorax.
And the face…
The face was now unmistakably Thomas.
His eyes.
His crooked little smile.
His sadness.
Below it, etched deeply:
“It learned.”
Epilogue — Many Years Later
The boarding school eventually closed — too many disappearances, too many quiet tragedies. The building still stands, abandoned and broken, swallowed by the same forest that once comforted Thomas.
Local hikers avoid it for one reason:
The things that watch from the walls.
They don’t look like spiders.
They don’t look like beetles.
They look like children who never grew up.
And sometimes — when the fog settles low and moonlight hits the old stones just right — you can hear a tapping sound on the windows.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
As though something small is reminding you:
It remembers faces.
It practices yours.
And maybe…
It wants to see how well it can wear you.
