2Honestly? I don't usually write horror or long(erish) stories. But when the muse calls, what can you do?
June 28, 2008
Hindsight
When he told her that he made false eyes for a living, he had done so with serious, locked eyes across a table in a three-star restaurant. Weaving their hands and elbows between glasses of wine and bowls of overdressed salad, he had murmured it to her, as if he were afraid that someone would overhear them. Conspiratorially, his eyes shifted between her and their waiter, and she struggled to keep from giggling.
Enamored with his concern, his dark indigo eyes, and his well-buffed nails, she whispered back that it was all right.
He squeezed her hands after she replied, and continued, "Sometimes I bring my work home with me." His face told her that she wasn't joking, the hard set of his jaw a clear warning in the almost-romantic florescent light.
Lying in this overstuffed bed, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, she thinks that it was a sign. The sheets rustle in the pre-dawn purple and she hears him shift and yawn, turning over. His hands rustle on the nightstand as he searches for his glasses; she knows, instinctively, which ones he's looking for. This is Friday, and on Friday he wears the pair with thick lenses and wider frames. Sighing, her body dull and heavy, she reminds herself not to tense. The mornings when he thinks that she's asleep are far better than the others – this knowledge, hard won and harder tested, is one that she's thankful for.
There are so few things that she's thankful for anymore, and she'll take any mercy that she can get.
The first time that she saw the house, she was even more charmed by it than she was by him. It was in a good neighborhood, a neighborhood with children playing in the streets and signs for the next community meeting and picnic. It was a neighborhood that she could imagine living in, with him. The house itself, pale blue, had a wide porch with chairs and windows lined in long lace curtains. Windows for spying at one's neighbors out of, she thought wistfully, and tugged on his hand.
"It's so lovely!" she said, and meant it.
He smiled, a little shy. "Would you like to see the inside?"
When she nodded eagerly, his smile grew, and it was his turn to pull on her hand.
She doesn't get up until after his routine – their routine, she thinks, bitter because this is not what she wanted, not what she expected – is over. She has it memorized and waits with baited breath for each step to finish:
The donning of the slippers
The running of the shower
The making of the tea
The dry, damned kiss on her slumbering forehead
The whisper – always the same damned sentence –
The leaving.
She loves the last step the most, although she hates what comes after it almost as much as she hates the two steps that come before it. Yet, she gets up every morning after he goes, and she tries to make the most of what is rest of her life.
What a stupid phrase, she tells herself, and opens her eyes anyway.
"They'll keep you safe from the monsters in the walls," he said, setting the two green eyes on the nightstand beside her. Alongside the glass of water, they looked inconspicuously out of place, their dark pupils staring up at her.
"All right," she repeated, and suddenly she couldn't stop the laughter. Rolling over to bury her face in the pillow, she tried to calm herself and apologize to him in the same breath, the laughter shaking her body and making it hard for her to breathe. Eventually she was able to sit up and wipe her eyes. She grinned at him, her lips shaking. "I'm sorry," she said again. "It's just so…"
Her words trailed off as she watched him. His blue eyes, dark and serious, weren't joking as they met hers. "This," he told her, "is not anything to be laughed at."
The humor bubbled away in her chest as she attempted to wrench her eyes from his, only to find them drawn back by their intensity and tone of his voice.
"I've heard them," he said, and his voice told her that he believed. The cold sureness of it, coupled with his solemn temperament, made her want to pull away. He rested a heavy hand on her shoulder. "I'm only doing it because I love you."
They're still sitting there, staring at her. It's futile to wait until he's asleep and then turn them away, she's learned; every morning they're facing the same way, and every night that she moves them, she gets a lecture. But it's not just that – it's that they've multiplied.
The green eyes are now accompanied by several blue pairs, a gray pair, several shades of brown, and even yellow and purple. There are so many of them that they're starting to overflow the table; one wrong movement of the water glass during the night, and she finds them on the floor, dozens of strange marbles that accuse and damn her. They were never comforting, but they were never hateful, either.
And now, she knows that they're everywhere.
"Do you have a special room that you make eyes in?" she asked as he opened the front door.
He shook his head and tucked his key in his pocket. "I have to work bench and file cabinets in the living room," he answered, leading her into the main hallway. It was beautiful, all pale colors and shelves on the walls. The living room was the same, as was the kitchen and his bedroom.
All of the shelves, she noticed, were covered with silk, and she finally couldn't restrain her curiosity. "What are on the shelves?" She reached for a fold of the fabric, but a determined hand on her arm stopped her.
"They're my…" She remembers thinking that it was odd that he should have to pause for so long, his tongue nervously working at his lips. "They've my insurance," he had finally said, and refused to answer any more questions.
As she finds her clothes and walks towards the bathroom, the eyes follow her. No longer covered, they're free to watch her and to stare at her. Not even the bathroom is sacred – he's created a display on top of the medicine cabinet. They're backlit by the bathroom lights, and they stare down at her, appalled, as she brushes her teeth.
She eats breakfast surrounded by oddly colored eyes, cat's eyes, all of the oddities that he's still looking for a home for.
"What's a better place for them to find each other than one where people go to meet?" he asked, and she didn't have an answer.
She still doesn't, but she doesn't think that that makes it right.
She hadn't known that coming meant that she couldn't leave again.
It wasn't that he had forcibly made her stay – the opposite, in fact. He's barely laid a hand on her over these long months, these days that are beginning to stretch into years. He doesn't need to. It wasn't his body that made her stay that first night, but his fear:
"The monsters know you now. If you leave, they might get you, and I can't stand to have your blood on my hands," he had begged.
It sounded ludicrous, and it remains that way. Despite that, it was powerful enough to get her to stay one night – his nails still fascinated her, and he was so sensitive – and one night was long enough for him to install extra locks on all of the doors and windows.
She can't find the keys, and if he didn't come and go, she would think that there were none.
She's glad for the lace curtains, because spying is the only activity that she has left. Settling on a windowseat, she watches her brunette neighbor walking her little dog on one leash and her toddler on another. In her mind, they have no names, but she knows that he admires this woman's eyes, their sheen and softness. He gauges eyes like other men gauge precious stones, and she doesn't know whether she's a diamond or fool's gold.
He's kept her for this long, and she doesn't know if it's simply because he's afraid, or if it's because of something else.
"Come here and pick a color," he had called the night before, his voice good-natured. He was watching television – some special on the mating habits of African mammals – and she had been listening to it, half-engaged as she watched the final strollers being pull back into the houses.
It was hard to rise, hard to look away, but she circled towards him slowly. He had an entire village set out on his table last night; their colors ranging from amethyst to zinc, they stared at up at her. Some of them were tougher, tighter, wider, kinder than others, and she let her fingers fall towards a pair of violet ones. She traced the surface before jerking her fingers back up; surprised that she hadn't been reprimanded, she asked him, "Why?"
He just smiled. "You'll see."
In hindsight, it sounds even worse this morning than it did then.
She never keeps track of how many hours she watches, although she's sure that she could repeat the schedules of their neighbors to a disturbingly detailed degree. It helps – if she doesn't try to record her days, then time doesn't matter so much.
It's just something that she does, she tells herself. It doesn't mean anything. If their lives have become part of her fantasy life, thoroughly thought out and pictured, that doesn't mean anything, either.
She never pleaded to be let go.
It's one her biggest doubts, now that she knows that it's not going to happen soon. If she had pleaded, could she have changed it?
His smile makes her hesitate to believe that it would have made a difference, and his words each morning – "I'm doing this because I love you" – reinforce her hopelessness.
These days, she doesn't fight. These days, she watches and she agrees, and, every night, her dreams are filled with people who can come and go as they please, people whose houses are filled with faux antiques and mismatched furniture and museum prints on the walls. She always blocks out their eyes.
When he comes home, he's clutching a large bag and looking even more pleased with himself than usual. "I got you something," he says, his nasal voice teasing, after he's locked all of the locks and hidden the keys.
"What is it?" She can't find it in herself to find excited, can't even pull herself far enough away from the after school games and the family barbecues to look at him for an extended period of time. He pushes the bag at her anyway.
She opens it without looking inside, lets her hands scrabble against the cardboard and the tissue paper. They collide with something soft, something smooth, and she glances down as she pulls out a doll. It looks expensive – lovely features, rosebud lips, well-formed limbs. It's also quite large; when she sets it on the floor it almost reaches her seated hip.
It pleases her that the doll has no eyes; in a house full of them, she thinks that it shouldn't need any. "I love it," she says honestly, and picks it back up. "Thank you." Cradling it awkwardly to her chest, she turns back to watch the scenes outside of their window.
"No, sweetheart," he says, and tugs gently on its arm. "It's not done yet." When he walks over to the table and picks up the purple eyes, secure in a black box, she thinks that she's going to be sick.
Even so, when he insists that she sleep with it that night, she doesn't argue. It's a calm presence against her chest, cold and calming as it faces the eyes on the nightstand, and the first thing that she does the next day is fashion it a blindfold.
The next afternoon, they sit in the window together and the neighbors begin to stare in earnest.
Despite his insistence of their presence, she's never heard the monsters in the walls. It's a horrible surprise when she wakes up one night, gasping for breath as something scuttles behind the bed, hidden from sight as it lurks somewhere between the wiring and the insulation.
That first night, the faint creaking and sharper scraping sounds combine to make her think of insects, their shells beating against the pipes to create the hum that fills her mind. Shuddering, she holds her doll closer and pulls the blankets over their heads; he murmurs in his sleep, but doesn't stir. The noise grows louder, and she hopes that morning will come soon.
"I heard them last night," she tells him before he's all the way inside the door. "The monsters."
When he doesn't answer, she assumes that he hasn't heard her; it's only when he turns around and she sees how pale his face is that she realizes that he has.
That scares her more than the noises in the walls did.
The second night, she thinks that she can hear claws thrumming and scraping against the wires; the noise reminds her of rats. Although she's still afraid, she finds that the noise isn't as terrifying as it previously was. Rats don't worry her as much as insects, and the noise dies away more quickly.
The next morning, she pretends to be asleep again, but she rises as soon as the last lock clicks into place. There's a hammer in the garage, she knows, but thinks that that would be too drastic. She doesn't want him to know what she's doing, and so she takes an oversized kitchen knife into the closet. Lit by his desk lamp, carefully lifted from the rapidly growing army of eyes that watches him, she begins to cut into the plaster.
That night, it's the sound of wings, and she's no longer frightened at all. If anything, the noise makes her think of angels and the dreams that she had before she came here and found herself trapped in his omniscient nightmare.
The next day, it comes to her as she's cutting out another square that perhaps the doll is to blame for this. It's sitting outside of the closet, leaning against the door, its blinded eyes staring hard at the foot of the bed. As soon as the thought crosses her mind, she reprimands herself. Shaking her head, she thinks that she must have been here too long if she's thinking such things, then smiles sarcastically to herself.
She passed the line of being here "too long" the morning that she awoke to containment and a beside table littered with eyes trained on her own.
Besides, this wall is empty.
Two weeks later, she's gone through everything. She's crawled under the beds, pulled out dressers and cabinets, climbed under sinks, cut and searched and shined a light inside every wall of the house. There are no shells, no droppings, no feathers.
And yet, she can still hear them, and she knows that he can, too. He's no longer sleeping at night, but pacing and dropping things because his hands tremble too hard to hold them for long. During the day, all that he does is work when he comes home. She continues to sit by the window, the doll in her lap, but she watches his reflection in the immaculate glass instead of the people outside.
His fear brings her a savage joy, one that's tempered with shame and revulsion, but she pushes those emotions away. Has he always been this trapped by his work, and I just couldn't see it? she wonders, or is it only now that he can't find it in himself to think of anything else? Before, even though he was obsessed, he occasionally looked away.
Now, there are more eyes around the house, more colors, more wild variations of shape and size and scheme. They sit on top of shampoo bottles, inside of the breadbox, and they line the windowsills. While she looks out, they look in, and it's only a few nights later that he forces her to move so that he can cover her windowseat as well.
She wonders what will happen when the shaking becomes so prevalent that he can no longer make eyes, and what will happen to his insurance then.
When the walls begin to whisper to her, she thinks that she's going mad.
At first, it's little things:
"I like your doll."
"Do you miss sitting in the windowsill?"
"When was the last time that you went outside?"
… and then the little things grow.
"It's why I decided to talk to you. You remind me of someone."
"You can do that again, you know."
"If you listen to me, I can get you outside."
It's not always the same voice, but the ending message is always the same:
"Have you tried the fireplace?"
When he makes her replicas of her own eyes, she breaks. He looks so earnest, both of his hands extended pleadingly towards her. In the left, his own glisten and shimmer; in the right, hers stare up at her, a beautiful, mocking parody.
"I've found a doctor to do it," he babbles, stepping forward as she backs away from him. "I won't do it without you, because I love you, and I don't want it to get you." His voice runs on, the words getting faster and faster as they run together. "Please do it for me. Please please please; it'll only hurt for a little while, I swear; I swear that it will."
"My god," she whispers, and searches his face. There's nothing in it but honest desire and fear, and she's never been so revolted in her life. As her stomach turns, she finds herself backed up against the fireplace. She sets the doll down and it comes to her – in hindsight, she never loved him, but just the idea of him. The reality isn't worth living for.
By the time that he tells her, "I'll keep you safe," the fireplace poker is already in her hand.
"I don't need your safety!" she screams at him, the words echoing off of the pale, classic walls and the eyes that have made it into their cage. First she aims at his hands, scraping the palms as she sweeps the staring orbs onto the carpeting. He shrieks, more with fear for his craft than with pain, she thinks, and the eyes roll in dull circles. Suddenly, they're funny again, dizzy and scrambling against the blue carpeting, and she finds herself wanting to laugh.
Instead, she turns and smashes the poker into the bricks that make up the fireplace. A pale trickle of dust starting to fall from them, dusting over her hair and her shoulders. The surface is unnaturally brittle, and as chunks begin to fall, she looks over her shoulder to meet his real eyes. They're wide, shocked and paralyzed, as wide of circles as his mouth is. His fingers hang limply by his sides, and she suddenly feels as though she should pity him.
She swings again, and a hole begins to form.
"Honey –" he squeaks, and her anger flares. It consumes her, and she swears to herself that after this, she'll find a way to leave – a way to leave and never come back.
Continuing to hammer at the fireplace, she shouts at him again. "They're your monsters, not mine! Yours!"
The trickles are beginning to enlarge and take shape, and he whimpers and backs away as she hits once more. Letting the poker fall by her side, she pulls her doll towards her and huddles against the hearth, her knees against her chest. Her heart is beating rapidly, and she can hear it in her ears; the thumping of blood in fills her vision and she takes a deep breath, trying to calm herself. When she reopens her eyes, her mouth falls open.
The creature standing before her is both hideous and gorgeous, and she now knows why it had so many different voices – for every set of eyes, it has a mouth. The body is humanoid, half-bent over with age and with the weight of giant, all-seeing wings. She can't count how many pairs of eyes it has; they're all looking different directions. When a pair of pale gray eyes, located against its spine, meet hers, she's no longer afraid.
"Thank you," it says, and its voice is like what she imagines thunder in Heaven – or Hell – would sound like. The creature turns its head to look at her, and her stomach flutters when she realizes that it, like her doll, is blind. It holds huge, gnarled hands out to her, hands with eyes on the fingers in the place of nails, and she takes one carefully, the other around her doll's waist. The eyes on its fingers blink against hers, and she's torn between giggling and throwing up.
"You're welcome," she whispers, and then clears her throat. "Thank you."
It nods, stiff and somber, and releases her hand. She massages her fingers, and they both turn their attention back to him. He's cowering, his hands over his eyes, on the floor. Their eyes lay between his legs as though they were carefully gathered there, then forgotten, and he gasps when the creature reaches down to touch pull his hand away from his eyes. Instead of realization of its beauty, she sees his obsession reflected in his eyes – glossy and compulsive, its strength draws her in even as it repulses her.
The creature touches his forehead, and he whimpers. "What did I do to deserve this? Why did you choose me to torment?" he asks, and she is filled with pity. He seems so harmless, here, now, and she finds herself asking, again, why she never tried to walk away. He never had any power over her, she understands. She could have cut her way out, broken the glass, or even pushed past him when he came in each evening. They're both pathetic, she thinks to herself, and has to look away.
"Isn't obsession enough?" the voices ask, the thunder offset by the screeching hisses of insects and rats. "You've turned art into fear," the creature murmurs to him, and runs its hands over his eyes. He screams, the sound full of hospital bells and wind rushing through sewers, and when the creature's hand is gone, she sees that his eyes have already been turned to glass. "You'll never make anything," the creature continues. "Not ever again." The selfish joy in its voice does not off-put her as much as it would have, had she heard it before living here, alone and trapped – by herself, if not by him –, for so long.
It steps away from him, and he begins to rock back and forth on the floor, clutching his face. She begins to move towards him, and the creature turns its gaze on her. She can hear its wings, the soft movement of air through the room surrounding them swishing against their faces. "Are you going to stay and care for him?"
She thinks that it's a very silly question until she realizes that she's not sure of the answer. "… Should I?" she asks, uncertain.
The creature shrugs. "Will it make a difference?" All of its eyes challenge her, and their expressions remind her of the ones on his table. It seems like it now has more eyes than it arrived. They're three to a mouth in some places, four to a mouth in others, and when she glances around, she realizes that the house itself has been blinded.
"Will it make a difference?" she echoes, asking him, asking the empty house.
"I only did it because I love you," he says, miserable, still in pain, and she can't tell if it's a justification or an excuse.
"I know," she says, and reaches down to pat his shoulder. Tensing, not wanting to, she leans further down and presses a kiss to his cheek. "Thank you for the doll," she whispers, "and for being the person that I almost thought you were."
He opens his mouth as if to ask, but she's already begun to walk away. "How do I get out?" she asks the creature. Unsure of which group of eyes to meet, she glances between as many as she can before looking at its face.
It blinks its blind eyes at her. "I can open the door. So can you. All that you have to do is look at it right."
Instead of asking, she walks over to it to look – the locks are fake, she realizes, feeling ashamed as she fingers them. Only the bottom one is real, and it has a latch. Turning back to the creature, she starts to say "But –" only to realize that it's already gone. Even from the door, she can see that the fireplace is filled with shells and droppings and feathers, and that it's also covered with graffiti – not only whispers like the ones that she heard, but crueler words as well. Is that what he listened to? she wonders, and then shakes her head.
Opening the door, she walks outside, away from the house with the eyes and the lace curtains and the man trembling on the floor. Strolling into the darkness, she tells the doll, "Tomorrow, we'll get those eyes removed."
When suitors come to her apartment, they almost always comment on the eyeless doll that sits like a sentry in the doorway to her bedroom, and she always smiles tightly when they do. "It's my… insurance," she tells them, and they're never sure if she's joking or not. She's careful not to bring work home, and she tells them that she doesn't. They don't seem to see the importance, but she says it anyway.
When she sleeps, the doll watches over the rest of the rooms. She opens her eyes when she wants to and keeps real locks on her door. Some nights, she dreams about wings and wakes up in a cold sweat. However, voices never whisper to her, and she takes comfort from that. Checking to make sure that she's alone, except for the doll, she reminds herself that that's why she didn't rent an apartment with a fireplace.
Sometimes, she wonders about him, asks herself where he is and what he's doing now. They're idle questions that she doesn't really want to know the answers to, and she never goes back to that house, to that neighborhood.
In the darkness, she sometimes thinks that she can hear his voice in her ear – "I only did it because I love you," he says softly, his breath making her hair sway in the darkness – and those are the nights that she screams herself awake.
Even though she's left, it never really goes away.
As she installs another safeguard, she wonders if she's falling into the same trap that he did and then chuckles to herself. "It's just a precaution," she whispers, "just a precaution," and that night her mind is filled with monsters dressed in chains and keyless, clanking locks.