by Shane Staley
Please come back. I promise I won’t scream again.
She pulled out another one, dated twelve years ago, when she’d been away at college. Please come back. Another, from when she’d been in high school, identical again. Junior high. Middle school. I promise I won’t scream again. She imagined the box sitting in the closet’s darkness, gradually filling up, as her ten-year-old self played in the next room. She pictured these letters sliding through the slot in the front door and landing on the hall floor for her to step over when she returned from school every afternoon. Her stomach felt like it was leaking mud. She pulled out another and another. She had no reason to keep reading—they were all the same, all of them—but she did anyway.
A bang sounded from somewhere in the house, quiet but close. Her head snapped up. Who else could be here with her? The only person who would have made any sense at all was Jack, but he’d made clear he would never come back here. She strained to listen. After a stretch of silence, the sound came again. She stood up. The hatbox lay on its side. Its contents covered the floor. She moved out into the hall.
The absence of the smattering of objects they’d taken to her apartment—two of the five framed photos in the hall, a floor lamp in the den, one whole row of books from the bookshelf—gave every room she passed through an imbalanced look, as though they could tilt beneath the added weight of her footsteps. The window through which the helpful neighbor had spotted her dad admitted a rectangle of sunlight onto the carpet. She realized that this must have been where he had collapsed. Had he called out? Had he pissed himself? She tried to imagine his fear, his pain, his hurt, but all she could conjure was his slack, passionless face.
Another bang. The door to the garage stood before her. She opened it and stepped in. A tug on a chain brought to life a naked bulb suspended by a cord from the ceiling. Her father’s Camry took up most of the windowless room. It hadn’t made it as far as the driveway in years. A canvas tarp covered it.
She followed the sound to an unswept corner where the trash can stood, its sides spotted with dried garbage water. A stripe of white plastic trash bag peeked out between the bin and its lid. She stood over it. Something thudded within. The can’s side bulged in concert with the sound. Connie flinched. It happened again. She reached out. Her hand hovered over the lid, trembling. She lifted it off and let it fall to the floor. It wobbled until it was still. She reached inside. Her hand closed around something soft, cold, and slick. A shudder passed through her, and an instinct to snatch her hand away, but she fought it back. Fingers interlaced with her own, short and delicate. Connie squeezed, and the fingers squeezed back. She held tight. She lifted.
That night, when she heard Jack’s screams in the next room, she covered her head with a pillow. It didn’t quite block out the explosion of glass that followed a moment later.
The Eldritch Eye
Tim Curran
Long before the bandages came off, there was an itching and a pulling, a sense not of healing but of growth and change and strangeness. Art felt it and knew something was not exactly right, but he had trouble putting it into words that would make any kind of sense.
He had never been a hypochondriac.
He wasn’t the sort of guy who got a pain in his chest and associated it with an oncoming heart attack or thought that indigestion was bleeding ulcers. The body was a complex thing, he knew, and it only stood to reason that some days there would be aches and pains. Same way that some days your car ran like a fine-tuned watch and others days, it just took its time starting and didn’t have any get up and go.
But this…this thing with his eyes, it was different.
Something was going on.
Something was not right and for the life of him, he couldn’t put a finger on what exactly it was. He only knew that it was not normal and it did not belong. He tried to tell Lynn about it, but all she did was nod like she understood, but obviously she did not understand at all.
“You’ve just had surgery, Art,” she said in that condescending voice of hers, the one she reserved for small animals, children, and silly men who thought something abnormal was happening to their eyes. “You had both your eyes operated on for godsake and you’ve been bandaged and blind for two weeks…is it any wonder you’re out of sorts?”
“But it’s not that…not exactly.”
“Then what?”
But, again, the words failed him. “Something’s just not right. I know it’s not right. They feel weird. They itch all the time.”
“That’s called healing.”
“But—”
“No buts about it, Art. You’ve never had surgery before. I have. I had my appendix out when I was seventeen and I had a pin put in my hip when I was twenty-five and broke my leg skiing,” she told him. “It’s no fun. I know that. When the healing starts, it drives you crazy. It feels like you could scratch your skin off. Been there, done that. But if you’re worried, I’ll give Dr. Moran a call.”
The way she phrased things made him feel like some crazy old woman beset with imaginary illnesses. She was right, of course, for the most part. He had just undergone surgery and had been blindfolded with bandages for two weeks. His vision had been failing in both eyes for years and when he finally got it checked out, he was diagnosed with advanced retinitis pigmentosa, ARP, a hereditary disease that causes the retina to degenerate. No surprise, really. His mother had been functionally blind by the time she was fifty. But things were different now. There were technologies and procedures that weren’t available back then. Dr. Moran had grafted fetal tissue to replace that which was damaged due to the disease. The surgery was pretty commonplace and had a 90% success rate.
Nothing to worry about.
Yet, something was happening and he just could not explain it.
But he gave in. “No, don’t call him. The bandages are coming off in three days anyway.”
“Now you’re being sensible.”
Art wondered how sensible she’d think he was if he told her that sometimes at night he’d wake and sense a nameless sort of movement behind the bandages. Not his eyes blinking or rolling of their own accord, but a crawling, wriggling motion in there like something was trying to get out.
* * *
The bandages came off. Dr. Moran removed them in a room that was nearly dark so the brightness wouldn’t cause Art any discomfort. He unwound them slowly during the next fifteen minutes or so. Art gradually adjusted to the sudden intrusion of light. After two weeks of darkness, the light caused him pain, but right away he knew there had been results. Things that had been fading and growing obscure, like the details of faces, were much sharper. He could actually see the stunning blue of his wife’s eyes.
“And it’ll get better, Mr. Reed,” Dr. Moran told him. “Given time, you’ll be shocked at the results. You’ll see things you never thought you would in ways that will astound you.”
“See?” Lynn said. “I told you everything was fine.”
“Hmm? What’s that?” Moran said.
He was a thin, nervous little man with an assortment of odd twitches and trembles, but his hands—long-fingered and delicate—were steady as a rock. When he spoke—and he had an inclination to ramble nearly incessantly—the corners of his lips were beset with little tremors. Which was what he was doing now.
Art honestly wished that Lynn hadn’t brought it up. “I don’t know. My eyes just felt…funny.”
“Funny strange, eh? Well, that’s no surprise, is it? Of course your eyes felt funny. Surgery does that to them. A change, a difference, a transformation even. Trauma is to be expected.” As he spoke, he examined Art’s eyes with a head-mounted ophthalmoscope that looked like some crazy virtual reality device with its jutting binocular lenses. “Good, good, good. I like what I see. Things are progressing just fine. You may never have the twenty-twenty vision you had as a boy, Mr. Reed, but then again, you just may! You just may! You stick with me and we’ll work wonders, absolute wonders!”
Lynn left the room to fi
ll out some paperwork for the insurance and Art set his chin on the biomicroscope so Dr. Moran could make a close examination of the frontal structures of the eye, the cornea and iris and lens. Next came the visual field tester and the keratometer that, Moran told him, was a very handy device for measuring the curvature of the cornea and the smoothness of the ocular surface.
Then it was all over, just a regimen of eye drops that Moran explained to him in detail. One was an antibiotic, another a topical anti-rejection ointment, and still another a sort of steroid to speed healing.
Finally Dr. Moran sat back, studying Art from behind his own huge dark-rimmed glasses. They made his bulging eyes look even larger. Art always wondered why he didn’t have some corrective surgery done, Lasik or something. But he supposed it was the old story. Same reason the cobbler’s kids never had any shoes or the mechanic drove around in a beater.
“Questions? Questions? Do we have any questions today?” Dr. Moran said, mouth twitching.
“No,” Art told him. “I guess you covered it all.”
“What about this funny feeling you mentioned?”
Art tried to explain it the best he could, which was much easier without Lynn in the room humoring him. He told Moran about the itching and the sense of movement.
“Well, well, well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Hmm. I grafted complete sections of tissue to your eyes, Mr. Reed. Why? Because the implantation maintains those oh-so-vital connections between the transplanted retinal cells. What you’re feeling is nothing more than your eyes reacting to the transplant and putting the tissue to good use. Growing and healing and making you well.”
“But should it feel like that? Like something in my eyes is moving?”
“Of course it should, of course it should. Development, progression.”
Art wanted to believe him. This guy was a retinal specialist. Maybe he was a little odd, but he came well recommended and was supposed to be one of the best. He did a dozen of these procedures every week. Yet, that sense of something abnormal remained. Even as Dr. Moran talked in great depth about tissue grafting and the miracles it could bring about, he could feel something in his eyes. Maybe just behind them, a pulling and a sliding, a swelling motion like something was coming to term in there that did not belong.
“You just give it time, Mr. Reed,” Dr. Moran said. “And you’ll get used to it.”
* * *
But he did not get used to it.
Two weeks later it was still going on, only worse. Oh, his vision was excellent and he had no complaints about that. He was seeing perfectly, but still his eyes itched and watered and sometimes they drove him crazy with that wriggling, pulsating motion that reminded him of the beat of tiny hearts. Often he’d come awake in the dead of night and they’d be wide open and staring. He told Lynn about it but she always asked him how he could possibly know if they were wide open when he was sleeping. He’d probably just opened them as he woke and thought they’d been wide open.
But, again, she did not understand and Art could not find the words to explain.
His eyes were acting…independently of him. Like they were doing things of their own volition. That was absolutely insane and he did not dare mention it to her, but it was as if they had a mind of their own. They seemed to want to look at things. Things he himself had no interest in seeing. At least, that’s how it seemed. He would find himself staring for an interminably long time at a housefly brushing its forelegs together or maybe gazing intently at the texture of tree bark or the moon hanging in the sky. Things like that, natural things, had never interested him. He liked sports. He was an ESPN junkie. Basketball and football, baseball and soccer. Anything. But whenever he sat down in front of the TV to watch those things or even a movie, his eyes began to get sore, to feel dry and aching and all he could do was close them.
His eyes did not want to look at sports or current events or action movies, they were interested in other things. They had no use for TV, but they did like books. Art was not much of a reader, but suddenly he found himself going to the library and pouring over books on zoology and anatomy, physics and mathematics. Boring textbooks that he could not pull his eyes away from. He tried to read them but they were so dull, none of it made sense. Yet, his eyes kept looking, scanning the pages and photographs and diagrams. They seemed particularly interested in pictures of other worlds and distant stars and clusters.
He was losing his mind.
He knew he was losing his mind. The eyes were his eyes. They did not have any will of their own or any independent intelligence. They were essentially tools that had evolved to help animals orientate and survive in a three-dimensional world. Nothing more. But if that were true…then why couldn’t he look away from those boring texts? Why did his eyes throb and ache whenever he tried? And why couldn’t he watch TV or do any of the things he liked? Why was it that it seemed they were taking charge, that they owned his vision and would use it to suit their own ends and only their own ends?
One night, lying awake in bed as his eyes studied the full moon drifting out the window, he thought: Don’t you see what’s happening? That tissue Dr. Moran put in is not normal tissue. It’s something else, something that does not belong. It’s not becoming part of your eyes, it’s making your eyes part of itself.
But that was crazy thinking.
It had to be crazy thinking.
* * *
A few nights later he woke up and his eyes were again wide and staring, this time at the stars out the window. His head was even inclined on the pillow to give them a better view of the constellations. He got out of bed, his heart hammering and his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. He tried to blink his eyes shut, but he couldn’t.
They refused.
He went into the bathroom, splashing water in his face and then putting some eye drops in. It did no good. His eyelids would not close. It was as if the muscles controlling them were paralyzed. He stood there, in front of the mirror, panicking, wondering if he should wake Lynn or not. He stared at himself in the mirror, knowing something was wrong, terribly wrong.
His eyes were unnatural.
The lids were shriveled back, looking pale and almost vestigial. And the eyes themselves…they were not his eyes. They were grotesque, alien orbs, huge and swollen and glassy, the size of golf balls. The sclera were no longer white, but sort of a pale bubble gum pink and the irises that had always been such a deep chestnut brown were a brilliant, almost crystalline red suffused with bands of the deepest crimson and metallic threads of yellow. There were no pupils. The irises had consumed them and as he watched, they seemed to be ever expanding, pressing out into the whites themselves…or where the whites should have been.
He was beyond panic now.
This was something larger, a mute and insane horror that made his throat feel like it was stuffed with rags. Trying to breathe, trying to think, trying to make sense out of something essentially senseless, he pressed a finger to his left eye. There should have been some pain, but there was nothing. No sensation whatsoever as if his nerves were no longer connected to those jutting ruby orbs. But what made him jerk his finger away was the feel of the eye. Not like ordinary tissue, but soft and pulpy to the touch like the flesh of rotting fruit that you could sink your finger right into.
It was revolting.
The thing that made him want to scream was the sudden, almost hysterical realization that he was not only looking at those eyes, but they were looking at him. Studying him, appraising him, somehow appalled by what they were seeing as if he were some slithering monstrosity, something they despised and would have liked to crush. He could not stop looking at them…or they at he. They seemed to be growing larger, utterly dominating his face, red and leering and positively obscene. A gelid membrane had covered the entire ocular surface of both eyes and it did nothing but magnify what was beneath.
“What are you?” he heard his voice say. “What in the fuck are you?”
As if in answer, they began to move in th
e sockets, rolling and squirming, tears of clear sap running from them. And the most disturbing thing was that not only were they growing brighter, but they were actually moving independently of one another…the left keeping an eye on him in the mirror while the right looked around, up and down and to either side.
He let out a little cry and pulled himself away from the mirror.
What he saw was not earthly possible. It just wasn’t. He was hallucinating or something. The fetal tissue had caused some sort of bizarre infection and he was feverish. Yes, the sweat was rolling down his face and he felt dizzy, nauseated. There was even a funny, sharp taste on his tongue. He was ill. He would simply wake Lynn and she’d get him into Dr. Moran at the hospital and things would be put right.
That’s it. That’s all there was to it.
As he moved towards the bathroom door, he was amazed at how very clear his vision was. How he could see the inlaid wood grain of the door and the smudges of overlapping fingerprints on the knob. A fleck of dust in the air was so distinct he could make out its very texture. He left the light on and walked out into the corridor.
Or he would have.
Except as he tried to, he slammed right into the door itself. It was closed. He had closed it, yet he could see right through it as if it were transparent. He reached out a trembling hand and, yes, he could feel its surface, but it was like it was made of the clearest glass.
Practically hyperventilating, he looked around.
Yes, the walls were fading and he could see into the spare bedroom, the linen closet, even his own bedroom at the end of the hall, Lynn curled up and sleeping. Not only could he see her, but he could see her perfectly. In the darkness he could see her skin, the pores set into it. The fine hairs on her forearm. A mole on her left hip. Even the thatch of dark hair between her legs.
