My Eyes Are Nailed But Still I See

by Wilson, David Niall

  But there he is, floating in the mosquito-amber light of the pendulum’s blade. Laid out on the dark concrete slab.

  Long, thick ten penny nails still sticking out from his mashed eyeballs.

  Pounded in by his wife, his son.

  ... only if you have a mind to catch it, son. It doesn’t have to be this way...

  He is tied to the slab with fraying rope.

  The pendulum clicks into place somewhere high above Johnson. The arc widens more. Drops. Hovers several inches from Pig’s chest. Slips minutely lower with every back-and-forth swipe of the blade.

  Johnson sees in the hole’s near-complete darkness every instance of Pig’s idiocy, every time Mother and Morgan punished him for it. But he is a much smarter man than they thought. He was trying to please them. Trying to be a good husband, a good father. But the disease—

  —too strong. Ubiquitous.

  “I lost myself inside, son. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The world is tears. Darkness and tears, as they well up from every painful place inside Johnson’s soul. Stop it, is all he can think. Please. Just. Stop.

  The blade swings lower. Incremental. Decisive. Perfect. Less than one inch from his father’s chest, the rope that holds him on the slab.

  Johnson feels a tickle on his arm. Glances down through his sheen of tears. The misty halo makes the spider wobble in his vision, as if uncertain. He knows it: it’s the one from beneath the sink. Morgan’s gift—probably Mother’s idea. A composite image of their love for him.

  A sense of calm comes over Johnson, seeing the spider on his arm. It has the same effect that the blowing breeze from the hole had earlier. He sees things he has no way of seeing. Understands things he cannot possibly comprehend.

  He plucks the spider gently from his arm, places it inside the Tonka truck, smearing blood on its legs as he does so. He places the leather pig inside, too, making sure to get his blood on it, as well. Mother and sons, and sons and mother. The love that we hate—the spider that binds us together, spinning, always spinning, whispered secrets, all too late.

  And all for father, he thinks. All for father.

  Johnson walks toward Pig, the blade now slicing through the rope across his father’s chest. Pig’s body doesn’t twitch, doesn’t move at all. The Pig is dead; long live the Pig.

  Pig’s arms lie at his sides. Fleshy, plump, but fish-belly white. Johnson sets the truck down on Pig’s chest, just beside where the blade swings and slices. Another arc of the blade and the rope snaps, falling away to either side of Pig’s body. On the way back, it slices through the first few layers of his chest fat.

  Pig has said nothing in Johnson’s head since his apology. Maybe he thinks there’s nothing left to say.

  Another slice, and flesh parts. A slow uncovering of secrets, of voices Johnson hasn’t heard.

  Johnson reaches over the dark slab, pulls Pig’s left arm onto the Tonka truck, leans back again, lifts his right hand onto the truck’s other side. Adjusts it as best he can so that the arms stay across the truck and his chest.

  Slice. Split. Blood trickles from the incision. Dribbles under Pig’s ribcage.

  Johnson pulls the nails out of his father’s eyes and puts them inside the truck with the leather pig and the spider, who is only now recovering from being plucked from its original intent, and is creeping out from the truck, probing the air with his forelegs, seeking. Always seeking.

  The spider lumbers onto one of Pig’s hands, crawls up his arm and settles into the curve of his neck. It sits, motionless, unwilling to test the terrain any further—more blood is coming and the spider knows it.

  “Say something, father,” Johnson says, eyes now dry. “Say something, or I’ll take them away. I’ll take your family away from you.”

  Pig is silent.

  Johnson waits.

  The blade cuts deeper. Soon it will hit bone. Johnson looks up at the dark-shrouded upper section of the pendulum and knows it will not stop until it has cut clean through.

  Blood pools on either side of Pig’s body, some of it dribbling off the slab and into the black below.

  Johnson waits another thirty seconds, but there’s nothing coming from Pig. No signal at all that he even exists. And Johnson realizes that he doesn’t even know what he wants to hear from his father. What words could explain? What sound from human lips, tongue, teeth can make this better?

  Metal scrapes against bone.

  The spider bites deep into his dead father’s neck.

  Johnson blinks back tears, steps toward the little wooden chair, sits down, and closes his eyes. He breathes deeply, each breath a shudder, each a heartbeat closer to calm.

  • • •

  At his mother’s request, Morgan finally turns off the tape of the British man’s voice, the story having run through seven or eight times.

  She tells him to open the sink cabinet and let his brother out. He’ll have certainly learned his lesson by now.

  Morgan unlocks the cabinet door, peeks inside the darkness—

  —and jumps back from the doors screaming, slamming them shut over and over again.

  What he sees is his father. What he sees is a pig, dead and impossibly stuffed beneath the sink, nails hammered into his eyes, a bloody Tonka truck with one of Mother’s leather pigs in his fat lap. The spider Morgan put in with his brother is attached to his father’s gray, puffy neck, suckling.

  Morgan screams again and kicks the cabinet doors until Mother enters the room.

  “Morgan!” she shouts, shaking him. “Morgan, what’s the matter with you!? Stop it, stop kicking, right now! Do you hear—”

  “Pig’s in there!” Morgan yells in his mother’s face. “Our Pig! Our Pig!”

  Mother stands back, shocked for a moment. Then she quickly regains her composure. “Surely not,” she says. “Surely not...”

  Morgan’s face is ashen, his lips pulled down at the corners. He suddenly looks much older than his years. “Where’s Johnson, Mother?” he whispers, his lips barely moving. “Where’d he go?”

  Mother steels herself, considering this. “Why,” she says, “he’s in that cabinet right where you put him, Morgan. Right in”—she grabs Morgan by the sides of his head, turns it so he’s looking in the direction of the sink cabinet—“there.”

  But Morgan just shakes his head side-to-side, still in his mother’s bony, too-white hands. He groans deep inside his chest.

  There’s something terribly wrong about all of this. It is certainly not the way Mother thinks things should go. And, of course, it’s impossible that her husband could be in the cabinet. Nothing more ridiculous.

  Yet Mother does not move toward the cabinet to prove her eldest son wrong. She just stares at the cabinet, wide-eyed, unaccustomed to the feeling of genuine fear crashing through her system. Muting logic. Defying reason.

  The cabinet door opens slowly, pushed from the inside.

  A large, horribly bloated spider trundles out, falls a couple of inches to the kitchen floor. Content with its work, it scuttles toward a small hole in the wall that leads outside.

  In search of secrets.

  Voices it hasn’t heard.

  • • •

  This time, the file folder simply flutters to the ground, pages scattering on the plush carpet of Dr. Wagner’s office. His face is pale, drained of blood. Eyes wide, staring at Johnson. Tears glisten on his lids. He moves his hands to the desktop, a foot apart, palms flat. His training fails him in the face of what this young boy has written, drawn, experienced. Nothing he can offer will soothe; nothing he can say will bear an effect on a mind so left to fester, defy, imagine.

  Johnson does not look up from his sketchpad.

  Red. For the blood. I need red, he thinks. That’s all I ask. All I need to make this real. To bring life to this death I’ve lived.

  Pig sidles a little closer to Dr. Wagner; Wagner does not see the movement on his desk. Or if he does, he assumes it’s the landscape shifting merely by way of viewi
ng it through the salt of his tears.

  But Johnson doesn’t need Dr. Wagner’s pity, doesn’t need anything from Dr. Wagner. He told the psychiatrist as much when they started down this road last year. But he didn’t listen. No one ever does. Johnson is broken and the world wants to fix him, but the world does not understand how deep the breakage is, how intrinsic it is to the very soul of who Johnson Milhone now is.

  Only the words and images he puts to paper can convey even the slightest hint of who he is. But no one wants to see that. Really see what he’s creating: a graphic novel peeling back layers of his mind.

  Pig, nails jutting from his eyes, edges a little faster toward Dr. Wagner, straining to move his stuffed feet quick enough, yet quietly enough, to sneak onto one of the psychiatrist’s hands.

  Johnson looks down at what he’s been scribbling: pane after pane of rough sketches. Detailing, in black crayon, this latest visit. Stepping into the office; dialogue bubbles of snippets of his and Dr. Wagner’s conversation; the spider in his web, sitting behind his desk, unaware of his true nature; quick scribbles of his stories as the doctor read them out loud. And now, pig, edging closer, closer still. Tears dropping from Wagner’s eyelashes into his lap, onto the seat of his expensive leather chair.

  Johnson starts a new page, a new panel: Several flicks of his wrist and Pig finally reaches Wagner’s left hand, trundles up onto it slowly. Out of breath.

  Johnson grins.

  The next frame shows Pig, stitched mouth, head bending down toward Wagner’s fingers. Johnson stops drawing, puts the heel of his palm to the paper, smudges the stitches, smears them off the page as best he can.

  On Wagner’s desk, Pig’s stitches evaporate, his mouth opens, shuts, opens... then clamps down hard on Wagner’s index finger.

  Another frame, in which Wagner’s mouth is open wide; a dialogue bubble with a scream written in it. But his hands do not move from the desk.

  The spider is caught in its own web.

  “You do not know my father, Dr. Wagner,” Johnson says, his own eyes misting up while he draws, while Pig teeters off the psychiatrist’s hand, blood dripping from his mouth, a small chunk of flesh between his jaws. He moves toward Johnson.

  “You do not know my mother, Dr. Wagner,” Johnson says. His chest hitches, crayon moving swiftly from frame to frame. Pig’s legs moving smoother now, the animation feeling more natural to Johnson’s fingertips.

  “You do not know my brother”—black lines getting thicker, the crayon nearly snapping in Johnson’s grip—“Dr.”—thicker, broader strokes, the spider web behind the desk nearly solid—“Wagner.”

  Johnson grinds the words out of his mouth, spits them onto the page.

  Faster, faster, another page; four, five more frames; black on black, the paper curling at its edges. Nothing but wax. Now Pig falling off the edge of the desk into Johnson’s lap, onto Johnson’s paper. Spilling Wagner’s blood and the chunk of meat from his finger onto the last page.

  Johnson lifts his hand, stops drawing.

  Pig falls to the floor between his feet, lands on his side, legs kicking for purchase. He is proud of his son. As proud as any father could ever be of his boy.

  Wagner’s blood spreads across the page, taking on a life of its own, mixing with the black crayon, melting into the paper beneath.

  Johnson rises from his chair, sheet of blood in hand. It drips from the edges onto the carpet as he walks around Wagner’s desk.

  More red than Johnson knows what to do with.

  He gathers up his stories, drawings, and other assorted files with one hand, then places the last page—now a dribbling fountain of red—on top of the stack. The blood drenches the pile of manuscript, seeps toward the edge of the desk, patters onto the carpet. It just keeps coming and coming. The blood that Johnson needed, the color that Johnson needed, to define his family, his life.

  Dr. Wagner just sits quietly, maybe dead, maybe alive. It doesn’t matter now. This book of blood traps him here, wide-eyed behind his desk—the spider grown fat from feasting on its victims. Unable to move.

  “And most of all, Dr. Wagner, you do not know me,” Johnson says quietly, his voice barely more than a whisper. He comes back around the desk, picks Pig up from the floor, rests him gently in the palm of his left hand, next to the nub of black crayon.

  Johnson pushes on the set of oaken doubledoors leading out.

  Just a father and son, leaving bad blood behind.

  About the Authors

  David Niall Wilson has been writing and publishing horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction since the mid-eighties. His novels include Blue, the Grails Covenant Trilogy, Star Trek Voyager: Chrysalis, Except You Go Through Shadow, This is My Blood, and the Dark Ages Vampire clan novel Lasombra. He has over 100 short stories published in three collections and various anthologies and magazines. David lives and loves with Patricia Lee Macomber in the historic William R. White House in Hertford, NC, with their children, Billy and Stephanie, occasionally his boys Zach and Zane, a neurotic cat, a dwarf bunny who continues to belie his “dwarfness”—two hairball Shelties, and a fish named Sushi.

  Brett Alexander Savory is a Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. He is Editor-in-Chief of The Chiaroscuro/ChiZine, has had nearly 40 stories published in various print and online publications, and has written two novels, In and Down and The Distance Travelled. In the works are a third novel, Running Beneath the Skin, and a dark comic book series with artist Homeros Gilani. A benefit anthology he co-edited called The Last Pentacle of the Sun: Writings in Support of the West Memphis Three was released last year through Arsenal Pulp Press. When he’s not writing, reading, or editing, he plays drums for the southern-tinged hard rock band The Diablo Red.

  Version History

  Version #: v3.0

  Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2

  Original format: ePub

  Date created: November 12, 2016

  Last edited: November 12, 2016

  Correction History:

  Version History Framework for this book:

  v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.

  v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.

  v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.

  v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.

  v4.0 ==> I've done a complete readthrough of the book, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.

  Some additional notes:

  vX.1-9 ==> within my o
wn framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".

  Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.