The Eye Unseen

by Cynthia Tottleben

  I had never been in this part of the house before. My nerves were chattering as I made my way up the steps, slowly gathering my courage as I went. The flashlight in my hand wasn’t as powerful as I wanted, and I found myself encased in darkness when I finally made it to the top.

  Most of it was hot pink insulation. As I moved the spotlight back and forth, I kept expecting enormous child-eating rats or even some wintering raccoons to jump out at me, but overall the place was boring. Mom had stashed a small pile of boxes not far from the entry, but that was it. No corpses, no secretive KKK robes, no drug labs.

  Maybe the attic had always been off-limits because the insulation might make us sick. Or, possibly, the place was so boring that it had just never entered conversation in the first place.

  But since I had managed the steps and braved the whole event, I decided to rifle through the boxes anyway. How long had it been since I’d openly defied Mom and snooped through her things? Probably my entire life.

  Time to live on the wild side.

  I crawled to the boxes, staying as silent as possible. In my excitement I had completely abandoned my quest for anything sharp that would possibly save my life in the battle with Mom that was sure to come.

  The cardboard was old. Waxy. My hands felt uncomfortable, just touching it. Like the act of snooping was so filthy it would rub off on my skin, leave me covered in big boils or coat my palms with hair.

  But that didn’t stop me. I plundered with ease, like I was destined to find these boxes and unveil their contents.

  The first lid came off in no time. The box was empty, except for a couple of papers scattered at the bottom. I scooted it aside and pulled the next one closer. This cardboard was falling apart, but the box had weight.

  I don’t know what I expected: lost family photos, the signed confession from whoever killed Jon Benet, the original Constitution. But I was sadly disappointed. It contained neither dinosaur bones nor the lost cutlery from our kitchen drawer. From what I could tell, the box was filled with documents from my grandmother’s life. Her old tax returns, insurance papers. Nothing exciting.

  The last box was almost as empty as the first. Since it was taped shut, I shook it a bit and heard something bang around inside. I determined it was worth going through all of the trouble to open it.

  Quietly I undid the seal. Thankfully the glue was old, the tape brittle. I fantasized that when I finally got it open, the box would contain something marvelous like an emerald necklace or a huge wad of hundred dollar bills.

  But no such luck.

  I pulled out a book, leather-bound and tied with what looked like an old black shoelace. When I flipped through it, I discovered it was some kind of diary written decades before I was even born.

  I almost threw it back in the box. My grief at having found nothing of great significance in the attic caused me to just about give up.

  But then I remembered my boredom. Days of watching chicken drawings play out on the upstairs walls could only keep me entertained for so long.

  I put it on the attic stairs, where I grabbed it when I was ready to head back down to Tippy. She huffed off, exhausted by our adventure.

  I hated to disappoint her again. As Tippy made her way to our room for a nap, I slid down the wall by the bathroom and thought about all the opportunities I had missed: the screwdriver in the junk drawer, the snow globes in the living room, the glass jars I could break into shards ready for stabbing. They were all downstairs and my energy was waning at best. I didn’t want to stand up and waste calories on such an excursion. At this point I didn’t think I’d even make it to my room again.

  I vowed to get them the next morning. Mom didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Tippy and I weren’t completely starving or lingering on the verge of death anymore, but we tired easily.

  Too easily.

  The shoelace slid off the journal.

  The chickens all gathered behind me as I began to read. Almost immediately their squawking took on a fevered pitch, but it quickly blended into background noise as Evelyn’s story consumed me.

  Chapter 36

  Joan

  The rooms were different, but at the same time, evil conjoined twins that had me in a strangle hold.

  My body sprawled on the bed. But instead of sheets, I could feel the touch of our brand-new plush carpeting. My mind knew it was soft, but to my tortured flesh it felt like a cheese grater.

  Curtains kept the sun at bay.

  The darkness, my best friend, sat vigil while I decided whether to survive or decay.

  Brandy, ever diligent, tried to bring me food and make me well again.

  Only this time you were Brandy, and I couldn’t handle being near your devil’s stench.

  Lucyfer.

  Your brief foray into my room made me want to peel off my skin. I could smell him in your every cell. Were you working in tandem? Had you made me your personal captive this time?

  Like before, I could barely speak. Sleep found me and kept me pleasantly occupied, but then I would wake up and the sweaty smell of nightfall would remind me instantly of what I had endured.

  I couldn’t remember if my husband still watched from the new eye blasted into his forehead. If my mother’s final gasp of breath had crossed her lips fifteen years ago, or last night?

  I called my daughter. The good one. The one who, years ago, had finally done as I had asked and gone across the street for help. Two days after the corpses started rotting.

  The neighbor, according to the police, reported my child as announcing with pride that her mommy was going to have another baby and that she was really sick. If Brandy hadn’t been wearing so much of my blood, the old man who answered the door would probably have sent her back home and never thought anything of it.

  But the scene was so similar to my tomb today. Alex, dead. Mom, tortured and catching flies in her open mouth. My body a canvas of blood and semen, the sight horrific but dotted with the activity of a child—the crayons and scribbling paper Brandy had dragged out of the moving boxes in her room, the jar of peanut butter lying by my head, the water she had given me out of the cereal bowl she had filled in the toilet when she couldn’t reach the tap.

  My eyes shut. Closed to this world.

  I had wet the bed. How pathetic was that? My legs couldn’t recall the simple method used to transport me to the bathroom. They didn’t understand movement. Urgency. Grace.

  Instead, I stay silent and still. Let the blackness consume me. Not like a shark or giant snake, but like a veil of fragrant poison, slowly taking away my ability to breathe.

  I had lived in this same cloud for months after you joined me.

  My cousin Jasmine buried them. Kept Brandy while I lingered in the hospital. Put my husband in the ground and sent him on his way before I even knew my own name again.

  During those months I swam through seas of sorrow so deep no one else would have survived. But you did. You latched onto my bones and gnawed, did laps around me while we floated through the black together, emerging only to show me your red tresses and that horrible deformity you inherited in your eye.

  Jasmine brought Brandy to visit, but even then I couldn’t shake the swarm of nagging memories that hounded me. My precious daughter never asked about her Daddy, didn’t seem concerned with the stitches that kept my face together like Frankenstein’s monster, or even ask when I was coming home. All she wanted to know was when you were arriving, so she’d finally have a sister.

  My cousin suggested I tear you out. And how I wanted to! But the darkness beckoned, the black hole I called home, and I would run to it for weeks on end, emerging when it was really too late to take care of you. And what if you weren’t his? What if you belonged to my husband, the love of my life, the man who had watched while his hired man practically pulled my womb from my body to make it his own?

  She buried my family. Raised my daughter while I remained in bed, my mind a burned out husk, and felt you lay root in my soul.

  But after my cou
sin mentioned the word abortion, she was taken out of the story. Obliterated. Her children additional victims of the semi that crossed into her lane and totaled her car.

  Brandy, by the grace of God, was on a play date at the time.

  Her smiling face the hands that reached into my abyss and pulled me up again.

  Without me, my daughter would go into foster care. Jasmine had been our only family. The last one. I could no longer wallow in my own despair. I had to resume my role as a mother.

  But no one could force me to care about you.

  I stood up and said hello to the world I hated. Found a job. Made us a new home. Hobbled through life like a robot, completely devoid of passion and sentiment. Did what was needed to survive.

  When they pulled you from my body, I immediately saw your hair and wanted to die.

  When you left my room today, I saw the same thing. If I had been able to move, I would have grabbed the ax and been done with business. But my legs had completely forgotten what it meant to have a duty. To be obligated to protect the universe.

  To be a mother with a child to kill.

  I closed my eyes and welcomed the black back in.

  Surely this time he would let me die.

  Chapter 37

  Lucy

  I wouldn’t let sleep catch me.

  The day had been too quiet, with Mom locked in her room. The threats of violence and irrationality that were her trademark were hidden away as long as I didn’t open her door. Tippy and I worried about her, and wanted to help, but at the same time our new-found freedom was addictive.

  The second I opened Evelyn’s diary I felt jumpy. Plucky would straighten her feathers behind me, and I’d practically scream with fear. Tippy called me a frog, all fidgety and ready to leap. But my dog had no idea what the book was about, and I refused to let her call me a coward again.

  I couldn’t put it down. Her language was stilted and sometimes hard to understand, especially when each page was dotted with foreign words or quotations, but I got the drift. Boy, did I get the drift.

  This woman was scary. No wonder the attic was off-limits. I wouldn’t want my children to find this book, either. Mom would beat me senseless if she knew I was reading it. But then again, that box hadn’t been opened in decades. Maybe Mom had no idea this Evelyn woman even existed.

  Evelyn began with thoughts of her sister. Laughing at her. The feminine weakness she wore like a badge, and how belittling Evelyn found it. She thought very highly of herself and expounded on her own intelligence, her independence and ability to take command. She discussed her tours of Europe, going on a safari, even an affair she had had with a woman in some remote area of Russia where they had lived for several months.

  Then she had met a man and fallen completely in love with him.

  A beast, really, from her description. Brutal and sadistic. No one I would ever want to meet.

  At first I couldn’t decide if the book was fact or fiction. My experience with popular culture was limited to conversations the other kids at school had around me. I had listened to them discuss scary movies, where people were butchered and raped and cut up and even eaten, but I had never seen one of these films. Sometimes I read the magazines in the library and learned about serial killers and people who committed horrible acts of violence. Kids who came to school with guns and killed their classmates. Parents that locked their kids in cages and sold them to men for sex. People who lit other people on fire just for wearing funny clothes. Or dragged them behind pickup trucks because of their skin color.

  These things seemed surreal to me, but other people incorporated them into their everyday life without batting an eye—watching violent movies, reading the countless books that promoted a deviant lifestyle, living with a complete lack of morals that I found utterly devastating.

  When Evelyn moved into the story of her first encounter with her new boyfriend, I was convinced she was an evil storyteller. They didn’t meet on a date, or at a church function, or a neighbor’s barbeque. Evelyn was in an alley attacking a woman, and he jumped in to help her.

  Literally, jumped into her skin and muddled the lines of reality. Two souls contained by one body. Two souls mauling the poor woman that Evelyn had found so attractive.

  Together they tore her apart. Ripped her to shreds. Used their fingers like knives and shredded the poor woman. Evelyn described it in minute detail; the transformation of her own body as her hands turned into his talons, as they slid through her victim’s pale skin and into her gut, Evelyn had taken the time to maul the woman’s breasts, cut off her nipples, fling them across the alley for the dogs to eat. When she ran from the scene, Evelyn had left little intact. The dead woman’s intestines spilled into the alley, her spine tossed behind a building as the killer made her way home. I hated her, this Evelyn woman. Why would anyone even consider something like that? She enjoyed it. Couldn’t wait to do it again.

  And again.

  The chickens bickered in the walls around me. Swatted at one another. Fell out of the woodwork and onto the floor, only to hurry back again into their charcoal formation.

  For a second, I thought about my reality. How headless fowl that went from drawings to living, physical entities and back again didn’t seem that odd to me anymore. Maybe Evelyn wasn’t weaving a bold, nasty tale. Maybe I was. What other purpose could the chickens have in my life but to symbolize my own break with sanity?

  That got me laughing. So hard that my dog ran into Brandy’s room, tucking her tail and hiding from my hysterics.

  Maybe Evelyn and I were a lot more alike than I wanted to admit. But, however horrible, her world was certainly much more exciting than the one where I sat watching chickens, waiting for Mom to either die or kill me.

  The woman in the book loved blood. However demented her world, I easily fell prey to it. My eyes wouldn’t leave the book. I was mesmerized.

  I practically screamed when something started thumping down the hall.

  Big, bass-drum vibrations, making the very floor beat like a giant heart.

  I dropped the book, tried to hide it in case Mom was coming, but the only place suitable was in my waistband.

  The hens squawked louder, more frenzied, twelve of them issuing a warning cry I couldn’t understand.

  Then one voice stood out above the rest, and the birds all flew over to the corner by Brandy’s door, scurrying to be part of the action.

  One of the decapitated heads started screaming. A horrid noise, shrill and full of agony. I worked my way to the banister, the pounding noise accompaniment to my every step, and found the bloody neck flopping in the pile of chicken parts. With my toes, I moved it aside from the rest of the garbage and felt my heart pinch as I saw the desperation on this chicken’s face. Her eyes were wide and panicky. Her beak, cracked from the careless way her head was flung over here, emitted a curdling cry.

  The other chickens were attacking.

  After reading Evelyn’s story, I thought for sure they were coming after me. As if they were her minions and she didn’t want me to know the private details of her blood-drenched life.

  But they gathered in the corner, all of the girls pecking away at one headless chicken. From the side it looked like Ms. Antoinette, already bloodied and battle weary. The others were killing her.

  I tried to shoo them away, but they crawled into the walls and took her with them. Her protests filled the house. No matter how hard I tried, my hands couldn’t enter the paint to pull her back out of the plaster.

  They fluttered their wings and stabbed poor Ms. with every bob of their necks, staining some of her feathers with blood, pulling out others and decorating the walls with them.

  Her severed head never stopped screaming. At one point her body broke free of the others, and I couldn’t help but cheer her on, trying to get her to jump out of the drawing and back into my world, but Ms. was too weak to move that quickly. The hens ripped her to shreds.

  Just like Evelyn and her first victim.

  Th
e other girls were vicious, like a clique at school, intent on making the weaker one suffer. Just because she was headless. Maybe they were jealous that she hadn’t had to see the weird world they inhabited or because she maintained her weight without ever having to eat anymore.

  As Ms. Antoinette took her last breaths, I stroked her head and tried to make her feel more comfortable. Loved. I promised over and over that I wouldn’t eat her. Mom and I weren’t going to have any chicken dinners for quite some time.

  I was exhausted when she finally passed. Tippy was already on my bed, acting like nothing had happened, when I collapsed against my pillow.

  * * *

  The house sat silent, backed up against the woods, surrounded by the devastated fields.

  Occasionally it would shriek when the wind chilled it to the foundations or creak when stretching its frame, but otherwise the place was a tomb.

  Mom didn’t make a sound. I wondered if she was alive.

  The walls were empty, void of all fowl and their related activities.

  I forgot to eat. Even Tippy stopped harassing me about keeping her bowl full. During one of our forays downstairs, I realized that it wasn’t so much that we couldn’t remember to stop by the kitchen and load up plates of tasty treats, but that the plates themselves were empty.

  We were out of food.

  How long had it been since we’d had a real meal? The fog hovering in my head didn’t allow for such deep thoughts. I found some stale crackers on the top of the refrigerator, and Tippy and I feasted on them.

  “How about a stick of butter?” Tippy asked.

  I shook my head.

  The refrigerator wasn’t just empty, it was clean. Clean like it had only been during my first months of captivity, when I’d had my chore list and scrubbed every day.

  How long ago had that been?

  Was Mom still alive?

  We sat on the floor, in front of the cabinets that held all of our cleaning supplies. Tippy, as usual, crawled onto my lap, stole part of my heat to help her thin body stay warm.