“No bones, no skin, nothing. A face that opens slowly and a breath you can’t even tell which wall it’s in.”
The Smiler’s body isn’t made of flesh, or bone, or rope. It is a volume of smoke that thickens and loosens, formed by bands that shift as it advances. Those who have seen it up close say it has no outline for the eye to follow, and that the only firm thing is the face.
The smoke
The body is a layered cloud, up to ninety-six overlapping volumes that change shape without anything seeming to move. It isn’t transparent either, and you can’t see through it. As it moves it leaves bands that stretch in the direction of travel, which is why it looks more like a current than a figure. To see how it advances, look at Smiler: The Gaze.
The face
It has three pieces, two eyes and a smile, held 1.65 m off the floor at the center of the smoke’s density. There is no mouth that opens and no jaw. The smile is wide, with a pronounced curve and ragged edges, and its opening wavers with small tremors and sometimes contracts all at once. It is the easiest part to recognize and the one that survivors of the encounter remember most.
The sound
It is barely heard, and low. Everything sounds made rather than born.
- Breathing. A low tone, between 34 and 36 hertz, repeating every six seconds. It is the most constant.
- Whisper. A half-second puff that comes every three to seven seconds, with no clear direction.
- Hiss. Only while it is moving.
All of it is heard up to about twenty meters and is quiet, so in those carpeted corridors the ambience easily covers it. There is another sound that isn’t its own, a slow heartbeat with a low drone that rises when a Skinstealer reveals itself. Wanderers use it as a cue that “something is near,” even if it isn’t the Smiler. The rest of the creature noises are in How Creatures Sound and Traces and Visible Signs.
What is said
It is said over and over that the Smiler sounds different as it gets closer.
- A very low drone, between thirty and forty-five hertz, that rises with no telling where it comes from.
- A quiet laugh between twelve and twenty meters, muffled when there is a wall in between, and breathing under eight.
- Total silence a second and a half before it approaches.
- Whispered phrases in a human voice.
- Drawings of a smile or the word “SMILE,” traced near where it already appeared.
- Smoke at floor level, in threads, before it arrives.
Another version says the noises resemble nothing alive and that voices are missing. The archive notes the detail and has not been able to explain it.