“It hardly runs, honestly. While you’re looking at it, nothing happens, I swear. The problem comes when you blink or look away for a moment.”
The Gaze is the name wanderers give to the most reliable behavior of the Smiler: that of a figure that advances only if no one sees it. Those who have crossed it alone say that what scares them most is having to keep their attention nailed to it, and that they don’t even remember its speed.
The rule of the Gaze
The Smiler moves only when no nearby survivor sees it. Being “seen” means having it inside your field of view, with a clear line to it. A survivor staring at it freezes it. The attention of anyone in the group counts, not just yours, so if one person looks at it, it stops for everybody, and everybody sees it the same.
The legacy records tell of a cruder version that walked and approached without that rule, noticed a survivor at 10 m, lost them at 16 and stopped at 2.5 m, at a pace of 1.2 to 2.2 m/s. It was less frightening and harder to predict.
How it behaves
- It stalks at the edge. It positions itself at about 11 or 14 meters, on the axis of a long corridor, facing you. Sometimes it peeks out and vanishes the moment you point your gaze at it.
- It advances in leaps. Each leap lasts 0.7 s and goes at about 6 m/s, and between leaps it stays still for a second.
- It stops at two and a half meters. From there the scream reaches one meter and thirty centimeters or less.
Group cases
In large groups there is almost always someone looking at it, so it barely moves. Some groups have left it like that for a whole hour without knowing they were containing it. With only two or three survivors, that same smoke advances without anyone seeing it.
What is said
This is what is said of it, as the wanderers write it down:
- Eyes in the dark. Beyond twelve meters you see only two white points, at 1.65 m. The smile appears when it is close.
- A smile that grows. The closer it gets, the more it curves and warps. It never blinks.
- Layered sound. A very low drone from afar, a quiet laugh between twelve and twenty meters muffled by the walls, breathing under eight, and total silence a second and a half before it approaches. That last one is the one most wanderers mention.
- Where you were looking. When you look away and look back, it is one leap closer, at least three meters in a long corridor.
For other versions, see Smiler: The Smoke Front. Its body and voice are in Smiler: Smoke Body, Face and Sound, and to compare it with the rest, the Field Guide.