He took a deep breath, concerned more that someone at the gym might have seen him with snot wilding in his eyes, only somewhat that something might be wrong with the lenses, or even his eyes.
He placed a drop of Rewetting fluid in each eye, revulsed but still hoping his eyes would get used to these new lenses. And soon.
10:45 PM
Sam startled awake, a siren tearing into his dream. It took a moment to realize the wail had emanated from the television.
If he were able to see, his empty plate from dinner would have greeted him from the coffee table. But the contacts were dry and pasty from his unexpected nap, severely clouding his vision. He stood from the couch and floundered to the bathroom, feeling for the rewetting drops. He planted a drop in each eye, then looked into the mirror.
His stomach churned.
His eyes were red, irritated, veins carving the crescent whites like rivers on a map. Fat blobs of mucous packed the corners of his eyes, each yellow accumulation overflowing, streaking from his eyes down the sides of his nose like stray mustard trails.
Grabbing a tissue, he dabbed at the gush of mucous plastered to his nose. The mucous clung to the tissue and peeled from his skin like a damp noodle, but did not tear free from the blob nestled in the corner of his left eye. Instead, as if the blob were tightly leashed to the string in the tissue, it produced a tiny wet sunctiony sound, and pulled free.
Here he felt something very strange.
As Sam gently pulled the tissue away from his face, he saw more strings of mucous attached to the rear of the blob—which now dangled in mid-air between the tissue and his eye—materializing from within his eye socket like thin strings of mozzarella cheese bitten from a hot slice of pizza.
But more so alarming than the appearance of the innermost goo was the sensation of it as he pulled it out. Perhaps five inches in length, thinning but and still emerging, he could feel the yellow string skimming along the posterior surface of his eyeball (and perhaps beyond) as it made its way out. It tickled so much it hurt, leaving a strange itch back there he could no way scratch—even after the string finally snapped into the tissue and he feverishly rubbed his eye.
After repeating the horrific act with his other eye, Sam placed a few more Rewetting drops into each eye. The cool liquid at once calmed the irritating anger within. The redness suddenly cleared.
And the goo was gone. Like that, he felt fine.
Can't sleep with these, he thought. But damn it! The thought of having to wear glasses—even around the apartment—aggravated him, especially after purchasing brand new extended wear contact lenses.
Still gazing into the mirror, he placed the tip of his index finger upon the lens in his right eye. It felt different than normal, kind of...soft, and if Sam had been entirely awake, he might know exactly what it was. But sleep suddenly threatened to take him away from the crystal clear world, as mysteriously as it did a few hours prior, and Sam, frightened only moments ago, at once found himself distracted, reaching for the cool, crisp comfort of his bed and snuggling beneath the covers, smiling himself to sleep, completely defying the horror that just ensued, thinking only of his dreams that would play out like high-definition movies on a wide screen TV.
3:17 AM
Sam awoke.
His eyes hurt real bad.
At once he cursed himself for not trusting his common sense earlier—for not removing the contacts like he knew he should have. Now, with those eyes of his clawing in pain as if red ants were trying to break out from beneath the corneas, he wondered what terrible instinct had persuaded him to ignore the gross effects of the Merman contact lenses and actually go to sleep with them in his eyes.
He leaped from bed and ran to the bathroom, fumbled with the switch—something he wished he hadn't done—and almost puked at the sight staring back at him from the mirror.
First off, he couldn't see very well because there was so much lumpy yellow matter within his eyes. A thick fibrous strand ran from corner to corner along the bottom lids, each one billowing like a cooked sausage link, entirely sheathing the lower lashes. It spread down from there, branching off in thin veiny paths, running across his nose and cheeks like sinewy, insect-like appendages. In the denser patches at the corners of his eyes, tiny bubbles curdled like milk blown through a straw, and it reminded Sam terribly of something he saw on TV not too long ago: the foamy materialization that accompanies amphibians during mating.
In quiet panic, Sam gently peeled the wandering mucous from his face. It proved no problem, came away easily.
Until he got to his eyes.
A tug-of-war of sorts ensued, Sam gently yanking on the strings of solidifying discharge, the inside of his eye socket tenaciously holding on, as if the yellow strings had deeply rooted themselves into the membranous walls within. Additionally, unlike this afternoon when the emission had been wet and soft, and had naturally smeared away on his fingers, this stuff, well, it was...hard, sticky, rubberlike.
Sam managed to twirl a few longer strands around two fingers.
He gave a tug, still gently, but more earnestly than before. Finally, it started to give.
And lord did he feel it. It was so damn odd, as if he were yanking on the muscles and tendons that normally provided movement to his eye. His eye sank in slightly then pointed outward, away from the bridge of his nose. When he released his grip, the eye slid back straight. He pulled again. The eye responded, same manner. Back and forth, again and again, like controlling the strings on a marionette.
Still, it wouldn't entirely give. He pulled harder. His eyeball twisted further. Terrible pain darted through his sinuses.
At last the web of mucous began to pull out.
However, unlike earlier when it grew thinner as it strung out from the depths of his socket, this discharged fattened, sprouting thick, pea-sized globules that shifted his eyeball up and down as each one emerged.
Sam clenched his teeth, grunted as pain wracked his face: burning, itching deep inside his cavity, ravaging his eyes. He pulled harder than ever. Flattened wads, twisting with blood, ripped out. His other eye suddenly started oozing, spilling its discharge on its own.
Overwhelmed, Sam pulled his hands away from his face. They were covered, wet gloves of yellow pus patterned with meandering streaks of blood, dripping beyond his wrists to his forearms. His face, it was masked to his mouth. So much...stuff, pouring out, all from his eyes.
Tastes like tears. No, not tears. Stronger. Salt water...
Suddenly, he heard something inside his head. Just beyond the surface of his forehead. Behind his eyes.
A...squeal.
Sam felt an all-consuming fatigue slap him. He brought his hands back to his face, ran them through the thickening eye-excretions that dangled like wet mop strings from his eyes.
And somehow, through the mess, he saw the card on the counter, amid the empty box, rewetting drops, saline, and weekly cleaner. He reached, picked it up, smudging it. It read:
Poseidon Optical
House Calls, 24 Hours A Day
House calls?
He staggered out from the bathroom, feeling his way to the phone in the kitchen.
He pulled the handset, somehow managed to call. "Help me..."
A familiar voice on the other end. And then perhaps a laugh. But Sam wasn't quite sure because he had to drop the phone.
Something was crawling from his eye.
4:43 AM
Three knocks at the door...
Sam awoke, his back to the kitchen floor. He fluttered his eyes open. They felt sore, but he could see. He rose, leaning up on his elbows, gazing out across the tiny span of the kitchen floor.
Dear God...
The nightmare immediately revived itself, enhanced itself, and he knew at this very moment that if he found the fortitude to survive the shock of the sight before him, the sheer hideousness of it would no doubt torment him for a lifetime.
Amid a great pool of yellow and green slime—perhaps five feet across an
d tiding well into the carpeted living room—swam a small creature. Wriggling like a salted slug, it blanketed itself in the gelatinous substance, utilizing a posterior fin that flipped wildly, splashing the stringy mess on its back like a frantic mud-skipper stranded in a sand puddle. It had taut gray skin, fibrous veins swelling and beating beneath its slimy surface. It could have passed for a newborn mouse, all bare and wrinkled. Except for the eyes, four of them, yellow and bulbous and fish-like, bulging on its skin. And as the creature slurped upon the matter it swam in, those eyes stared up at Sam, watching...
The door suddenly slammed open. Walter the optometrist came in. But not really Walter. It had Walter's face, that much was certain, but the similarities ended there. His eyes were lidless, flat and disc-shaped, his lips round and swollen, like balloons. He was unclothed and had wet green scales covering the entire scope of his body. Clumps of seaweed fell from him, a trail of slime streaking the floor as he trudged into the apartment. Sam caught a whiff of something miserable: the thick, rancid stench of low tide.
Sam rose slowly, like a palsied child. His only defense.
"You did well Sam. Poseidon would be proud." His words were garbled and rotted.
"Poseidon? What is this?" he managed to stammer. Not that any reasonable answer would suffice given the situation. The optometrist took another squishy step closer. Sam noticed his feet were...webbed.
"Sure, Poseidon. You know. God of the seas. He's my—my supervisor. He gives me the ovum. Those contacts you put in your eyes, well, let’s just say the vitreous fluid in the human eye is the perfect amniotic liquid for the Kraken embryo."
Sam felt faint.
This can't be happening.
He thought back: the optical place smelled briny, the contacts were green. Walter, one letter away from...water?
He peered down at the tiny creature. No longer tiny. The wild, wriggling thing was now the size of a guinea pig, now green, now six-limbed.
It was growing.
"And those drops I gave you..." Walter garbled. "Food."
Sam shuttered his eyes, prayed to his own God for it to go away. But it wouldn't be that easy. No. When he opened his eyes, Walter the sea-thing was on his hands and knees slurping at the pool of fluid on the floor with his big sucker-fish lips. And the thing, the baby Kraken, it had grown even bigger in the passing seconds, to the size of a puppy.
Sam, cowering, heard the chatter of his own teeth slicing through the cool mist rising from Walter's body. He watched as the infant Kraken stopped feeding and wriggled its way through the sludge to his feet, its four twisted eyes pointing up, studying him, round sucker-like mouth riddled with needle-thin teeth producing an obscene slurping sound as it went for his toes.
"I think it likes you, Sam," Walter said, a hunk of mucousy seaweed falling from his…its mouth.
Only dimly aware of his own sudden screams, Sam brought his foot up in a staggering motion and brought it down hard upon the creature. A combination squeal and flatulence sound blurted out as the thing smashed limply under his foot, flaps of rubbery skin tearing away, pancakes of viscera floating beneath its tatters.
Instantly, Sam felt a welling of power, of revenge. He tasted escape. "Not any more."
Walter brought his gaze up from the dying infant. Smiled. "Sam...you have two eyes."
A deep growl emanated from the bedroom.
Sam shuddered. He felt tiny again.
Then the second Kraken appeared at the doorway, just barely squeezing its massive body through the frame before it lunged at Sam.
And the last thing Sam Morrow saw before he himself became food were the dripping, grinning, razor sharp teeth of the Kraken nestled tightly inside its scaly, misshapen head.
Crystal clear.
The Startling Supplements to Brione Heloise's Depictions
I say, with unequivocal passion, that every object created with the consideration of defining it as an art form, deserves an equivalent work to parallel its implied significance.
It can also be said, incontrovertibly, that the God of Art has arrived to fulfill my ongoing visions—to make them utterly complete, but not without, to my misfortune I might add, some explicitly offensive outgrowth. It could be that the repercussions of my creative exploits spur negativism as either a consequence or climax to fully rationalize an emergence from the norm into the darkness that is my world. Regardless, I have seen the arrival of evil in the form that emulates my creativity, I have touched its skins, and now, I must model my future on its own abhorrent ingenuities.
It may appear as if I have decidedly bequeathed my soul to the curse that has beset itself into my work, into my world. Be that as it may, the episodes to which I will confer to you may shock, startle, or surprise—that being the obvious intention of the interloper who has so ruthlessly meddled into my livelihood. Only at this final juncture will you realize that I must choose a pathway towards the pinnacle of my inspiration, despite the consequences.
My name is Brion Heloise. As a young boy there was no mistaking the desire within me to become an artist, nor was there any doubt to the kinds of things I wanted to create. While other prejuveniles allowed themselves to be ushered through the universal learnings routinely emphasized by those so-called educators, whose aspirations settled into the soils of habit and salary-gathering, I fed upon the topsy-turvy, inside-out, awry, and sometimes sinister universe of my mind. A faithful mercenary of oddness, my mind and body buckled before normalcy, crusading to disclose even the slightest indication of something foul or swollen below its illusive surface. The demons hiding amidst the whorls of fog on a windshield; the bitter acids rising in a plume of cigarette smoke; the tiny creatures frolicking in the breading of my cutlets; or the landscapes in which I imagine they thrive. I conjured these and similar nightmares on canvas, embodying not the faceless evils themselves, but that of the husks with which they furtively hide.
Far into the bowels of the village of Nyx, there exists a gallery, a thin slice of building enfolded between two abandoned brick-faced structures in a zone—ironically—overcrowded with roaches, rats, and rot. Still, for four days a year, tribes of people brave the decrepit environs to marvel at the legion of bizarre icons (apportioned by artisan) exhibited upon its peeling walls. Mine, comprised of four efforts, three of which bragged full completion, hung buried in the deepest pocket of the room, at the furthest reaches of the labyrinthian walls. A maze it would be for the enthusiast to finally locate my pieces, then stand in the paltry floor-space provided as the walls closed in upon them, threatening claustrophobia should they stay gazing too long.
I've never the chance to encounter the leaser of the 'gallery' (I hesitate naming it just that, as for the remaining three hundred and sixty one days of the year the building is vacant, and to the common passerby looks not unlike any other sickly foundation infecting this stretch of Nyx), and find it mostly unimportant to do so, as long as my invite continues to arrive annually in the post.
My decision to alienate myself from those others in the gallery is strongly supported by the creative processor in my mind, for it tells me that if I choose to involve myself in the non-productive social activities instigated by my fellow exhibitors amongst the patronizing enthusiasts, I would suffer malaise, that being a meltdown of the outer fringes of my inspiration—a dulling of the finer details that ordinarily bleed from my work. Without this, my art would fall into the dark abyss of mediocrity, hence forcing me to abandon my penultimate endeavor: an answer to the evil that has found its way into the deepest corner of the gallery, where my work resides.
Now, to explain…
Wednesday, eight in the evening, the doors opened to the public. Men and women (but not a child) paced from the front to the back and then side to side, glancing to and fro at the dark arts on display, most exhibits prevalent in painted form like my own (although I dared not gaze at any of the pieces suffocating in their cumbersome frames for fear of corrupting—of brightening—my own dark creativity) and some but not many e
rected in sculpted form, as evident through the misshapened figures present in my peripheral vision.
Although I had access to all of the gallery, I stayed far away from the crux of activity, and even separated myself from the areas where a random encounter with another individual might occur, these places being a single unclean bathroom festooned with mildew and an office within which sat a rusted steel desk and some magazines, but nothing else; not even a chair to rest on. Although I never saw anyone enter or exit the room, I still kept far away from it. Its climate carried too much optimism.
So I chose the stairwell, a cool dark haven for me. Soon it made sense for me to descend the wooden steps all the way into the cellar.
Going down made me feel as if I were in a dream.
Like this:
I am wearing clothes, it appears to my skin—or my mind’s eye, perhaps—that I am naked and vulnerable, afraid of what I may find resting at the bottom. The stairwell is partially illuminated by streetlight beams bending their way through the tiny windows at the top of the basement wall: a pallid yet dismal yellowing of the cinder-blocks and gossamer webs around me. It appears as if everything has sustained a coating of phosphorescent chalk, the steps before me, and then, the strange fixtures I find upon reaching bottom. Whittled chairs alongside pocked tables, gas pipes riding the walls and ceiling like iron serpents. Within these pipes I hear a subtle whistling, as if a circle of phantoms determined them the most sufficient means of exploring this age-old building. Dying coat racks, torn plastic wastebaskets, the wiry steel skeleton of an umbrella. And a legion of bodies. Bodies. They...they appear to me as misfortunates of war, torsos once finely chiseled from clay, now the dismembered remnants of the creative mind's yield to defeat. Castaways from the sculpt-artist's floor, exiles from the gallery to the graveyard. Some have heads, many do not. Most are devoid of arms, and none have hair, of course. They lay in no discernible direction, nor with any evidence of purposeful arrangement. Pacing about them brings me to the center of the room and I feel like a savior of the damned, a Jesus Christ figure cast into the bowels of hell, surrounded by a sea of lost souls too emaciated to beg for forgiveness. A multitude of emotions well up inside me, that of sadness, pity, even regret. Yet strength and power find the rushing flow of my blood, and I am immediately stirred with the long to create. A surge of dizziness consumes me and I place a hand against the shoulder of an androgynous figure, motes of dust (this being the strange illuminous powder I reasoned earlier, alight beneath the waxen streetlamp) taking to the air like a flock of birds escaping a tossed stone. I blow it from my face, then turn and witness a shocking sight. Lined on a shelf beneath the stairwell, there are small, inhuman heads. Many if not all presumably intended to be utilized in this, as I now comprehend, unshared creative venture. Each countenance is unique in its own way, yet all display just one appreciable emotion. Fear. Their paralyzed eyes stare at me, and as I return their gaze I wonder if my eyes shine as brightly as theirs do in this darkness. Then, unbelievably, one head stiffly turns, just enough so that I might question the occurrence, but not doubt it should I recall the odd circumstance later. Its unblinking stare penetrates me. Only when it talks do I shudder uncontrollably and fall to my knees as a part of the underground assemblance. Weakness—it has become one with me while the sing-songy words enter my mind: One great art form deserves another, Brion. I clutch my heart as it claws the inside of my chest like a hungry animal seeking escape. Finally I unleash a scream—not so loud that I might alert those perusers in the gallery above—and stir this dream-like state from my consciousness...
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