THE NEXT TIME YOU LOOK IN THE MIRROR, IT WILL BE LOOKING BACK

Of all the dinosaurs, nothing remains but bones. Of the lesser monsters, few remain—the rhino, the elephant, and so on. But there is one hideous creature still around, if you know where to look. And what a phenomenal size it is.

Since long before man could write down his thoughts, his dreams have been invaded by unspeakable creatures. Later, he would describe them for posterity in folklore, in campfire stories, in novels. His morbid fascination—his virtual celebration of things that go bump in the nightmare—has persisted to this day.

And yet, of all the creepies that have crawled from the back forty of The Twilight Zone, perhaps none is more loathsome than this one. And he is for real. There is no telling how long he has been stalking the Earth. We have no fossil evidence of his ancestors, although his origins are surely prehistoric. And he looks it.

I have a photograph in my files—not a sketch, a photograph of him. And believe me, he is nothing you would want to meet in a dark alley. Scientists call him Demodex. His size is most extraordinary. His body is long, cigar-shaped, twisty and turny, with short, powerful legs. Eight legs. His head… his head defies description. There appear to be jaws so monstrous that one might imagine they could snap a tree trunk in two.

Demodex is pure horror show material—a beast so repulsive, so incredible, that the likes of Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker could hardly have conceived of it. And yet, unlike Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein, this creature actually lives.

Now, you’ll recall I mentioned his phenomenal size. Indeed, for Demodex is phenomenally, phenomenally small. Two-fifths of one millimeter long. And still, this microscopic, prehistoric monster is burrowing now and living out his life, consuming warm, oily fat.

Brace yourself for this next part. Demodex folliculorum is in your house right now. I mean, however fastidious you imagine yourself to be—oddly enough, especially if you are fastidious—however feminine, however dainty, male or female, this hideous mini-monster is alive and thriving in quantity under, and around, and alongside your every eyelash.

We now have microscopes so powerful that we know at any given moment, there are as many living creatures on your skin and in your hair as there are people on planet Earth.

So, the next time you look in the mirror, if you see something looking back… well, now you will know the rest of the story.