by Fritz Leiber
THE WATCHING EYES, by Robert Moore Williams
Originally published in Fantastic Adventures, May 1948.
The patient pounded on the door of his room.
“I want to get out of here,” he yelled.
Dr. Thomas Cavanaugh, making his late afternoon rounds of this big public institution, cocked an ear toward the commotion.
“A new patient?” he asked.
“Yes,” the nurse answered. “He was brought in this morning.”
“How long has he been trying to escape?” the doctor questioned.
“Since noon, Dr. Cavanaugh,” the nurse answered.
“He was quiet before?”
“Very quiet,” the nurse answered. “I looked in once or twice this morning and he was lying on his bed.
“I got to get out of here,” the patient yelled again. “They’re after me. They’ll get me if you don’t let me out.”
His fists thudded violently on the door.
“His name is Kirkham,” the nurse said. “He was brought into the hospital last night and was assigned to this ward this morning. Dr. Jones was on the admitting desk when he was brought in. His tentative diagnosis was paranoia.”
“Paranoia! Ah!” The doctor’s interest quickened. He was writing a book, ‘Visual Hallucinations in Paranoia.’ This case might provide interesting information.
The nurse took a ring of keys from her pocket. “Do you wish to talk to him, Dr. Cavanaugh?” she asked.
“Certainly,” the doctor promptly answered.
The nurse unlocked the door.
Kirkham, the patient, looked appealingly at them.
“Did you come to let me out?” he said.
Kirkham was a little man. Not young any longer. Bald head with a thinning gray fuzz around the sides. A worried, wrinkled, yet somehow kind face. He was wearing a hospital nightgown and a faded blue hospital bathrobe and he looked pathetic in them.
He blinked at the doctor, seeking help in this new face.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” he said, with simple directness. “Will you help me?”
“I’ll try to help you,” the doctor said. He stepped into the room, spoke to the nurse. “I’ll call you when I’m ready to leave.”
She nodded, closed the door. The lock clicked softly. Kirkham looked at the door, his gaze centered on the clicking lock.
“I thought you were going to let me out,” he said reproachfully.
“Tell me about yourself,” the doctor said.
“About me?” Kirkham looked surprised. Very few people had ever been interested in him. No one had ever invited him to talk about himself. He didn’t know what to say.
The doctor waited. It was good technique to let the patient speak for himself. He smiled and nodded encouragingly.
“They—they’re after me,” Kirkham said at last.
The doctor’s nod said this was a reasonable statement, that it made sense, and that he was glad to have the information. He was a psychiatrist, this Dr. Cavanaugh, and an expert in dealing with mental cases.
“Who is after you?” he said.
Kirkham frowned. He hadn’t been expecting this question and he didn’t know quite how to answer it. He was eager to answer it, though; he was anxious to oblige this doctor who had asked him to talk about himself. If he hesitated it was not because he was unwilling to tell who was after him but because it was difficult.
“I know who it is,” he said slowly. “I know all right. Sometimes it’s right in my mind, right on the tip of my tongue. But before I can think of it, it’s gone, before I can say it, I’ve forgotten what I want to say.”
* * * *
The doctor nodded again. Another name for paranoia was the persecution complex. Somebody was always after the paranoid. Or people talked about him. People watched him when he wasn’t looking. People were trying to kill him. Or this was what the paranoid thought. So far, Kirkham’s case presented the standard pattern for this mental affliction.
“How do you know they’re after you?” the doctor asked.
“I feel them looking at me,” Kirkham answered promptly.
“You feel them? How is that?”
Kirkham fidgeted. It was hard co answer these questions but he wanted to try. “Did you ever have the feeling that you were being watched?” he asked.
“That’s quite a common feeling,” the psychiatrist answered, dodging a direct answer. “Go on and tell me about it.”
“That’s the way it started,” Kirkham spoke. “I kept getting the feeling that someone was watching me from behind. Only I never could catch them at it.”
“You couldn’t?” the doctor said sympathetically.
“No. No matter how quickly I turned around, they were always gone before I could turn my head.”
The old delusion, the doctor thought. They always think somebody is watching them from behind. No one is watching them. They just imagine it. He kept his thoughts from appearing on his face.
“But I fooled them once,” Kirkham continued. There was a note of triumph in his voice. “I saw them, once.”
“You did?” the doctor questioned. Here was something concrete. What had Kirkham imagined he saw? The form of the hallucination might provide a clue that would lead him to the reason for the patient’s difficulty. “Who were they?”
“I thought of a way to fool them,” Kirkham said.
“How was that?” the doctor questioned.
“I fixed up a little mirror,” Kirkham answered. His wrinkled face was aglow with pleasure at the thought of his cleverness.
“A mirror?”
“Yes. So I could watch what went on behind me. I saw them in that.”
The doctor nodded. “That was very clever,” he said. His tone of voice and the nod of his head congratulated the patient on a smart piece of thinking. In professional circles, this technique was known as establishing rapport with the patient. When you had won the patient’s confidence and gotten him to speak freely, you had succeeded in establishing rapport.
“What did they look like?” the doctor questioned.
Kirkham frowned. “They didn’t look like anything I had ever seen before,” he answered. The frown became more intense. “No, that’s not quite right,” he corrected himself. “I have seen them before, somewhere, but I can’t seem, to remember where.”
“Ah,” the psychiatrist said. His interest quickened again. This case might go very nicely into his book. Visual hallucinations of unusual types—but Kirkham was speaking again.
* * * *
“There was a glowing window hanging in the air behind me. It was about six inches in diameter and it looked like a halo. It was sort of a ring of mist. The eyes were watching me through this window.”
“Eyes?” the psychiatrist questioned. Kirkham had imagined he saw eyes watching him. “What kind of eyes?”
“They looked like the eyes of a goat,” Kirkham answered. “They were yellow, with narrow, slitted pupils—”
“The eyes of a goat!” the psychiatrist blurted out. “Now I wonder—” He caught himself quickly. It wasn’t good practice to wonder out loud in the presence of the patient.
Why would this patient think it was the eyes, of a goat hanging in a circle of mist that looked like a halo?
There was something important in this fact. There was something significant in the fact that the patient had thought he had seen goat eyes looking at him.
The doctor thought of goats. Had the patient owned a pet goat when he was a youngster? Had he harmed the goat and felt guilty? Were unresolved childhood guilt feelings responsible for the paranoia of middle age?
“Did you have a pet goat when you were a boy?” the doctor questioned.
“No,” Kirkham answered promp
tly. “Not that I remember anyhow. I don’t—” and he frowned “—I don’t remember my childhood very well. Now that I think more about it, it does seem that somehow I remember seeing goat eyes a very long time ago.”
He shook his head. “But I can’t remember where or when I saw them.”
He shivered as though the subject were unpleasant.
“Are you sure you never owned a pet goat when you were a boy?” the doctor persisted. He felt he was hot on the trail of something here. Childhood conditioning accounted for most of the mental aberrations of later life, he knew. How had this patient been conditioned so that now he was haunted by the eyes of a goat.
“I can’t remember ever owning a goat,” Kirkham answered. He shook hi, head. “No, I don’t think I ever owned a pet of any kind.”
“Did some of your friends own one?”
“Not—not that I remember,” the patient answered. “As I told you, I can’t remember my childhood very well. But I don’t think I ever knew anyone who owned a goat.”
Unpleasant childhood memories have been blocked out, the doctor thought. His childhood was unhappy. Therefore he can’t remember much about it.
That was the way the mind worked. It tended to forget the unpleasant, the unhappy things.
“Tell me,” the doctor continued. “What is the first thing that comes into your mind when I say the word ‘goat’?”
“An association test, eh?” Kirkham said brightly.
“Has someone given you an association test before?” the doctor asked.
“No. Not at all.”
“Then how do you know about the test?”
“I read about it.”
“I see.” The doctor was a little disappointed. The value that might have been found in an association test was largely lost now, but he persisted, hoping for some small crumb of information.
“What comes into your mind when I say ‘goat’?”
“Eyes,” the patient promptly answered. “Goat eyes looking at me through a misty window.”
* * * *
Again the fine shiver passed over his body. He was afraid of those eyes. Maybe he didn’t know exactly why he was afraid of them but the fear was in him, deep-grained.
“I have to get away from here,” he said, looking closely at the psychiatrist. “Are you going to release me?”
Again that patient, pathetic appeal for release.
“Why do you have to get away from here?” the doctor questioned, probing. “You’re being treated all right, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“No one has done anything bad to you?”
“Not at all.”
“Then why do you have to get away?”
“I have to, that’s why,” Kirkham answered.
“But why do you have to?” the doctor questioned. He was seeking the reason for this fear.
Kirkham didn’t want to give the reason. He had to be urged, he had to be prodded, before he would talk. The doctor had to use all his skill and powers of persuasion before the patient would answer.
“Because they’ll find me if I stay still,” he blurted out at last.
“Ah. And who are they?”
“The eyes that look at me.”
“But I thought you said they had already found you. Having found you once—”
“When they first found me they were just watching me. They didn’t want me, then. They do want me, now.”
“Why do they want you now?”
Again the patient didn’t want to answer. Finally he spoke. “I know something,” he said, a little sullenly. “I’ve made a discovery. It’s an important discovery. They were afraid I would make it and they were watching me to see if I did. As long as I didn’t make this discovery, they wouldn’t harm me. But, now that I’ve made it—” His voice trailed off into silence. Fear walked along the lines of his face.
He has made a discovery, the doctor thought. He wondered how many men who thought they were Edisons or Steinmetzs were held within the walls of some lunatic asylum. How many great secrets existed only in diseased brains?
The doctor continued his patient questioning. If the patient would talk, if he could get at the root of the conditioning that had warped his mind, it might be possible to help him.
“What is this discovery?” the doctor asked.
Kirkham shook his head. The sullen look settled firmly on his face. “I’m not going to tell you,” he said.
“Why not?”
“And let you steal my idea!” the patient jeered.
The doctor paused. He could see the stone wall being erected in front of him. This man was not going to do much more talking. His paranoia was coming strongly to the front once more. It was making him suspicious.
“I’m trying to help you,” the doctor suggested. “If I am to help you, you must try to answer my questions. I’m not going to steal your discovery.”
“That’s what you say,” the patient answered. “If you want to help me, get me out of here.”
The doctor sighed. They were back where they had started. He recognized the ending of rapport, the termination of the interview for this time. Later, he would talk to this patient again. Kirkham, in many ways, presented an interesting case, one that would well be worth discussion in his forth-coming book. He wanted to know more about Kirkham’s hallucination concerning the eyes of a goat. What an odd idea that was!
He rapped on the door.
The nurse came and opened it.
Kirkham watched them suspiciously.
“So you’re not going to release me,” he said.
“Not today,” the doctor answered. “I’ll come back tomorrow and talk to you again. Perhaps in a few days you can be released.”
He stepped out of the room. The nurse closed and locked the door. Kirkham’s fists thudded against the heavy oak panels.
“Let me out of here!” he yelled. There was hysterical frenzy in his voice and in the way he pounded on the door.
“I suggest you keep a close watch on this man,” the doctor said to the nurse. “He will try to escape if he can.”
The nurse laughed. “Escape from here?” she said. She made a little gesture which indicated the steel bars on the windows, the stone walls, the steel bars on the door at the end of the corridor. This was a public insane asylum. The architect who had designed the building had made provisions for the restraint of violent patients.
“No one has ever escaped from here, Dr. Cavanaugh,” she said.
“I didn’t say he would escape. I said he would try to escape,” the doctor answered. “Now, I would like to see his records.”
“They’re in the office.”
An attendant at the end of the corridor unlocked the door for them and let them out. The office was in a room adjoining the closed ward. The nurse found the records for the doctor. He sat down at the desk and began to read them.
Somewhere in the building a man screamed.
The doctor ignored the sound. This was the place of screams, the place of wailing, the place of pounding on doors and on walls. The nurse left the office and returned to the ward.
A few minutes later she rushed back into the room.
“Doctor! Doctor Cavanaugh!”
He looked up. She was breathless and her face was white with sudden strain.
“What is it?”
“That patient—Kirkham—the one you just interviewed—”
“Yes. What about him?”
“He’s gone!”
He heard the words but his brain was slow in accepting their meaning.
“Gone?” he echoed.
“Escaped,” the nurse answered. “I looked into his room just now and he isn’t there.”
The doctor fin
ally realized the meaning of what the nurse was saying. He got quickly to his feet.
The attendant unlocked the ward door for them. They stopped in front of Kirkham’s room. The doctor looked through the small window in the middle of the room. He needed only a glance to see that the room was empty. “Unlock the door,” he said.
The nurse already had her key out. The lock clicked and the door swung open. They stepped inside.
The room was empty.
There was no closet, no place for a man to hide, except under the bed. They looked there.
There was no one under the bed.
* * * *
The bars on the window were intact, the door showed no signs of tampering, the room was not disordered.
The doctor and the nurse looked at each other. Each tried to grasp the significance of this locked, empty room.
“Possibly he picked the lock. In that case, he’s somewhere here in the ward—”
He had the feeling he was grasping for straws.
“We’ll search,” the nurse said.
She summoned two attendants. They searched the ward.
The patient was not in the ward.
The doctor thought about this fact. Kirkham was gone. It was incredible. It also happened to be true. He couldn’t imagine how the man could have escaped from this locked room, escaped without being seen, without leaving a trace.
He thought something with the eyes of a goat was watching him, the doctor thought. He was afraid of that something. He wanted to escape. He has escaped.
The doctor shook his head. He didn’t like this line of reasoning. It somehow led to an uncomfortable conclusion.
“He’s gone,” he said to the nurse. “Well, we’ll report his escape to the police. They’ll pick him up.”
