We Live Inside Your Eyes

by Kealan Patrick Burke

  These were animals, something worthy of remark and little else. Like a murmuration of starlings, it was an eerie sight but indicative of nothing, and certainly not worth obsessing over. After a period of three hours and twenty-six minutes in which none of the animals so much as blinked, they snapped out of whatever paralysis had held them in thrall and wandered away. In the years since, many people have brought their pets to the scene in the hope that something similar will happen (surely a form of abuse), but it never has. It seems it was a one-time only party trick, at least as far as the animals are concerned, for we can’t forget the Fourth of July weekend of the following year in which seventeen people snapped awake to find themselves standing on the lawn outside the house. It was 2 a.m., most of them were in their pajamas or slips, two were stark naked, all of them were horrified. And now, because people were involved, theories moved into the realm, not of the supernatural, but of the sinister. Whispers of Soviet mind-control experiments, of Communist infiltration, of chemical agents being tested on suburban neighborhoods, of hallucinogens in the water. The Thalidomide tragedy had yet to be forgotten. Who was to say what nefarious experiments the pharmaceutical companies might have moved on to? Perhaps something to make people forget? Mass hypnosis? Doctors were brought in, virologists swept the neighborhood, men in radiation suits with Geiger counters clickety clicked their way from Holden Avenue down through Abigail and out the other side and found nothing untoward. If there was a commonality to be found, it was that the afflicted had nothing but good health, both mental and physical, in common. Everything from abrupt changes in temperature to the proximity of that night to the first of the year’s two lunar eclipses was floated as a possible explanation for the sleepwalkers.

  Cut to May 21st, 1973. The war is over. Nixon is four months into his second and final term and staring right into the maw of the Watergate scandal. Soldiers come home, not to parades, but suspicion and scorn. Monsters roam the country abducting and murdering children. There is a sense of disorder to the country, of pieces no longer fitting. The relief at the war ending quickly turns to economic anxiety and a distillation of old enmities and grievances. That the president of the United States may be an inveterate liar and all-around archvillain is not a reality for which the nation is prepared.

  The external war has become internal, found a way to crawl inside.

  And the house comes back to life.

  IV

  DOUG LOWELL RETURNED from Vietnam, where he had served as an information specialist, in April of 1973. On May 21st of that year, he moved into the house with his wife Katrina and their three-year old daughter, Serena, who had been born eight weeks after he was deployed.

  Doug was a good guy, and smart. He’d seen the kind of horrors most people only see in their nightmares and somehow managed to come home intact. Experts (if it’s possible to be an expert on the unknown and unknowable) have nevertheless retroactively diagnosed Lowell with PTSD, a postwar psychological affliction that wasn’t recognized as legitimate until after the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study in 1980, seven years after Lowell took possession of the house. It’s hard to argue with this stance given that much of what Lowell documented fits under the umbrella of PTSD: hallucinations, paranoia, agitation, hypervigilance, emotional detachment, and fear. Viewed outside the lens of the house’s reputation, the papers Lowell wrote only bolster this conclusion. He appears manic, unhinged. Inside it, though, it provides remarkable insight into one possible, and relatively recent theory about what might be going on in the house, put forth, if you can believe it, by Arthur A. Windale, noted conspiracy theorist and UFOlogist, whose book They’re Already Here: Aliens Among Us caused outright panic among devout believers back in the early seventies. Even if it reads at best like science fiction and at worst, like an anti-communist manifesto, I must confess I found it unexpectedly engaging. I bought none of it, of course, but Windale certainly had an authoritative, declarative style that made it easier to see how those who might want to believe, would. And though we can’t pretend his interest in the Abigail case wasn’t motivated by money and a need to revitalize his flagging career, Windale’s contribution to the fray nevertheless proved intriguing. While his contemporaries were on cable news blathering on about long debunked mysteries like The Bermuda Triangle and the Marie Celeste, Windale took the time to research the house.

  “When reading back over the history of this place,” he wrote in his blog, “certain things stand out in my mind. The smells, for one, a detail that has gone bafflingly unstudied. It sounds like phantosmia, which suggests some manner of magnetic anomaly in the house that induces symptoms more commonly associated with a stroke, or schizophrenia, but my compass remained unmoved, and none of the afflicted subjects developed complications typical of these conditions once they left the house. Jeb Foreman died of cancer, yes, but he was in his nineties and a heavy smoker for two-thirds of those years. Harold Wilson went mad with grief typical of anyone who’s lost a son. And while magnetic interference (as suggested by my dear friend Trish [Patricia Burr] scrambling the brain could result in the kind of hallucination necessary to make a man appear to vanish, where then, did Wilson go? Something you think you see should not be so easily written off as a trick of the mind. A man did vanish, did he not? When you open and shut a door in the summer, do you not smell the fresh cut grass, or the heat of the asphalt? That’s the conclusion I keep coming back to, as impossible as it sounds. A door opened and closed behind these people and we smelled what was on the other side. They are over there, those poor souls, wherever there is. Now all we need divine is how to find them.”

  Like so much of the speculation surrounding the house, and taking into account his record of outlandish claims (such as his theory that the colonists at Roanoke were spirited into a wormhole engineered by aliens and likely deposited on some distant planet), Windale’s should have been just as easy to dismiss. And it might have been, if not for Doug Lowell’s account of something that happened to him on the night of May 1st, 1983, not even four months after he moved into the house. The following is an excerpt from one of the four essays he wrote for Marita Hopkins & Karun Venkatesh’s nonfiction study of combat shock:

  I thought I must be dreaming. I remember waking up, bladder full and aching. Katrina was asleep next to me. I could smell the conditioner she uses in her hair. I love that smell and that night, as it so often does, it grounded me in the safe here and the real now. I left her and quietly made my way to the door to Serena’s room. So often I’ve dreamed I would wake up one night and she’d be gone, stolen from us to settle whatever debt I accrued in the jungle. But she was there, safe too, breathing soft and slow. Goaded by my bladder, I moved on, thankful despite the hummingbird hammering of my heart that told me something was awry. Was there someone in the house? The hair prickling all over my body suggested so, but I couldn’t trust that alone. My instinct tells me there’s always someone there who shouldn’t be and there never is. It will pass, I know it will, that certainty, the suspicion that there are people watching me from the walls and that my shadow wishes me harm. I went to look. I did not take my bat. If someone made it past me, I preferred Katrina to have it close by. And I didn’t want her waking to see me wielding it. She’s already worried enough about me since I got home. I’m worried too. The nightmares. Jesus. It’s like someone planted screws inside my head that are slowly worming their way back out. That’ll pass too. I have faith, and God owes a debt of his own.

  I reached the top of the stairs and braced myself in the dark for whatever might be waiting down there with a gun, or a knife. I slowed my breathing, demanded my pulse slow too before my heart exploded. I hurried downstairs into the living room...

  ...and the living room was gone.

  Immediately I smelled chlorine, that strong summertime pool smell when they put too much of it in the water and it burns the hell out of your eyes. And that pool was in my living room, or rather, where the living room used to be. Now, I found myself outside in a d
aylit courtyard, the glare of the sun being slapped to pieces by the waves as children laughed and splashed and hollered at their parents, those patiently smiling bronzed-bodied adults lounging in chairs on both sides of the pool. None of them had faces, only thin-lipped mouths, and their hair, all the same light pink color, moved sinuously as if underwater. The dappled light from the pool animated their faces in place of expressions. It felt entirely reasonable to scream when I looked up and away from these impossible monsters and saw misshapen black birds with half a dozen silver dollars for eyes. Their beaks were like bruised human hands snapping from the air insects the size of my fist. I stepped away, my body tensing to run, and collided with a child, who cursed at me in a language I don’t know, and then giggled. I did not look at him. Couldn’t. Had I seen his face, or the lack of one, I might have lost my mind. I did not look when he called “Olop Ocram!” at me. And I did not linger on the fact that the sinewy faceless man who dove into the pool scattered into a school of pink and silver fish as soon as he went under. No, I kept backing away and whispering the same prayers that went ignored during the war when men caught fire and screamed until their lungs burned and a headless child tumbled from the back of a truck on its way out of a razed village. I backed away now as then and only opened my eyes again when my spine rammed into an obstacle that felt too real to be a dream.

  I was home, in the dark, but not alone. The living room was a conspiracy of shadows and among them I could hear a man speaking backwards in a low voice. I did not care to hear him, so I jammed my fists against my ears. I could still smell the chlorine, could only watch as the man rose from behind the armchair where he’d been hiding. Arms outstretched as if for balance, he took one step, then another, and on the third his thick silhouette split in half and then there were two men standing in the room.

  A scream barreled up my throat and turned to a mewl in my mouth. My heart pounded against my ribs, a tribal drumbeat demanding an end to this horror before it split in two like the guest who’d followed me home.

  I shut my eyes and knew when I looked again, the men would be gone.

  But they weren’t.

  They were right in front of me, standing so close I could smell the sunscreen on their skin. “Ereht rehto eht morf er’uoy,” one of them said, his words sluggish bubbles in a clogged sink. “Yats thgim ew.” Self-preservation took over and I lashed a clumsy fist in the direction of the nearest one’s head. I expected resistance, collision, meat against meat, but realized I should have known better because nothing was normal now. My hand passed through what felt like warm wet jelly that spread across the air in an arc and then stayed there like a swipe of paint on a windshield. “Yllis,” said the undamaged one, and then both fell to the floor like dropped coats.

  My breathing sounded like the last exhalations of a snared jackrabbit. I did not dare move even when the sun rose and filtered through the blinds, even when Katrina found me, her face pallid with concern, even when I finally looked down and saw the puddle of piss on the floor at my feet. I did not move.

  I still don’t want to.

  LOWELL SOUGHT OUT A therapist after that. She assured him his imagination was to blame for the incident he described above, that he’d experienced a night terror, an expected consequence of his exposure to the horrors of war. As he could hardly argue with the definition of what he’d experienced, he embraced it as the diagnosis. His doctor prescribed diazepam, and when six months passed without incident, he was happy to accept his therapist’s version of events. The conjurations of a haunted mind, and nothing more. Nevertheless, on Christmas Eve of the same year, the night he would pack his family into their Country Squire Station Wagon and drive nonstop until they reached his sister’s place in Madison, Wisconsin, the house delivered onto him another unpleasant surprise, and this time Doug’s wife was there to see it:

  That last night, the last good night, Katrina and I were on the sofa, watching a Christmas movie. I can’t remember which one, only that it was an oldie. We were happy. I remember that because it was the last time. The fire was blazing and though the weatherman told us not to expect snow, we did anyway. We wanted it to. It was all that was missing. The house was profusely decorated. Tinsel wreathed the tree. The multicolored lights blinked slowly on and off. We were looking forward to the morning and the small selection of gifts we’d wrapped for Serena, and each other.

  Then, my ears popped, and Katrina wrinkled her nose. “What is that smell?” she asked. I started to tell her I didn’t know what she was talking about, but then my nose filled with the odor of popcorn and sawdust. She sat up and looked around, and I told myself it was nothing to get worked up about. Popcorn, for goodness sake. What kind of a man loses his nerve over that?

  The knock on the door made Katrina scream, and my heart became a cold hard rock in my chest. Her smile chased it away. “Carolers,” she said. “It must be.”

  “This late?” I asked, but she was already up and moving toward the door. Dread fell over me like a shroud. That feeling was back, the same one I’d had on that night when The Backward Men followed me home. “Honey, don’t—”

  Despite the paralysis threatening to turn my limbs to stone, I rose as she opened the door onto an absence of carolers. She turned to look at me, questioning, and then her gaze moved past me to the stairs. I didn’t want to look. Seeing the color drain from her face and her eyes bulge in horror was enough. We needed to go, to run, to hide, to be as far away from here as we could get before the gas ran out.

  “Oh...” was all she said, and I watched her back into the door, slamming it shut behind her, trapping us with whatever was in the room.

  “What is it?” I asked, but didn’t want to know, even though the not knowing was even worse. Was something bearing down on me with claws raised to flay me?

  Unwillingly, I glanced over my shoulder.

  On the stairs was a ten-foot clown. He was dressed in a tattered costume and stooped over to avoid cracking his head on the slanted ceiling. In one hand he held a smoking umbrella, the edges burnt black, as if it had been struck by lightning. In the other hand, he held a dog collar.

  “You see it?” I asked my wife, and from the corner of my eye, saw her nod.

  “What...is it?”

  I had no answer. Nobody would ever know what that thing was. Its hair was electricity, arcing and sparking and dancing around its raw red peeling skull. At first, I thought it had bandages wrapped around its face until it looked toward my wife and I saw the hands and the little fingers moving against its cheek, and realized what I was looking at was a mask made of tiny arms. I needed to look away because I was more frightened than I had ever been before, but I couldn’t. Instead I glanced down, looking for a way to rush past it, and saw that beneath the filthy cuffs of its baggy blue polka dot pants, its legs ended in brown serrated spikes, like the leg of an insect.

  What should have been comforting, but wasn’t, was how it seemed confused by us, confused to find itself here in our house, but ascribing human reactions to such an offensively alien thing would have been a fatal mistake. It looked this way and that, though how it could see anything at all with no apparent eyes was a mystery. Maybe it couldn’t. Then: “Peekabooooooo,” it said in a voice like a fistful of pennies being dropped into a glass jar.

  “Serena,” my wife said, voice strained by tears, and I knew the time for inaction was over. Though petrified, and yes, afraid of dying at the hands of the monstrosity blocking the stairs, I refused to let my own fear keep me from saving my daughter. And if I failed...no, I couldn’t fail. I would tear it asunder if it got between me and my little girl. I didn’t truly believe this, of course, but the thought was enough to get me moving, even as I registered the chittering sound and the undulating motion beneath the thing’s silver and blue jumpsuit. And now there was another sound too: static, repetitive, like a record spinning on an empty groove.

  With a hastily whispered prayer, I stepped forward, and an orange light blinked on upstairs, drowning me in
the creature’s shadow. The clown straightened in surprise and bonked his head against the ceiling. “Oof,” he said in that same terrible voice. The electricity bowed and sizzled and sparked. He grunted and looked back over his shoulder at a studio warning sign which had been affixed above the door to our bedroom. In dark red letters it read: CLOWNMANTIS LIVE IN FIVE. He gave a sigh like an autumn wind, looked back at us, those fingers on his face drumming his agitation, and then he turned and lumbered back down the hall. Incredulous, we watched him leave, until the door that only moments before had led to our bedroom, creaked shut behind him and the light went off.

  We got our daughter and went to the car, with just the clothes on our backs. I don’t care what explanations you might have for what happened to us. Say I imagined it. Say we both did. It doesn’t matter. We were never going to set foot in that house again, and I will forever curse the day I bought it.

  FOR A WHILE, LOWELL kept his story to himself. No media, no police reports, no sensationalism. He just upped and left his home, without a word to anyone. But no matter the circumstances for leaving one’s abode, mortgage lenders expect to be paid. Lowell would have gone broke paying for the house that had almost driven him insane if not for the kindness of his sister and her husband, who let him stay with them rent-free until his situation improved. He took a part-time job tending bar. Such situations can fracture a marriage, or make chasms of existing ones, and by the fall of 1974, Katrina moved back to Columbus to live with her parents. Doug pleaded with her to stay so he could be with his daughter, but she felt him an unstable influence, and no matter how desperately he wanted to argue, he knew she was right. He let them go, as much as he’d let go of himself.

  A few months later, he accepted the offer from a publishing house for a series of essays documenting his experiences with postwar trauma (An Affliction Without a Name: Combat Shock in the Vietnam Era, by Marita Hopkins & Karun Venkatesh, Veteran’s Day Press, 1976), from which the preceding excerpts were taken. The week after he received his contributor copies in the mail, he left a note tucked inside one of them thanking his sister and her husband for everything, told her to ensure Katrina and Serena knew he loved them and had tried so very hard to be the husband and father they’d needed him to be, and then hanged himself from the limb of the oak tree in his sister’s yard.