Despite my predicament, I've found my surroundings to be quite pleasing: my residence, a two-story Victorian settled on a spread of land a half mile from its closest neighbor; the town, quaint, one traffic light and a dozen local businesses catering to my non-abundant demands; my office, situated within the leisure of my home.
I cannot boast many genuine friends, but my wife and daughter provide me with all the support and comfort I need. Thank God for them, and thank Him again they are healthy, so far untouched and unaware of the danger that exists.
As the sole physician in this old-fashioned county of woodland, pastures, and colonial architecture, I have made the acquaintance of nearly every resident and proprietor, as majority have sought my treatment at one time or another for minor aggravations: colds, influenza, an occasional broken bone. But, and even though I sometimes pray it on another, never has a town member sought my assistance for the same clawing, agonizing pain that I suffer.
No other soul, as far as I can tell, has been anguished by the people with golden eyes.
The first one I met went by the name of Fenal, or so I remember it as that, for it was some time ago, although I did not determine his name until later on. He was young, really only a boy—not yet at adolescence but perhaps bordering it, with brown hair, wiry streaks of black and even a touch of gray it had seemed. Shoulders severely stooped as a result of spinal curvature, but bigger than most of his kind.
Of course the first peculiarity I marked was his eyes; I remember the night quite clearly. Sleep had struggled to find me as memories of the day's patients whisked about my head in circles. Trying with great effort to release the pressure, I allowed myself to rise and take seat at my desk.
Once there, my sights roamed casually around my office with its hardwood floors and Monet prints, through the floor-to-ceiling bay window overlooking the moonlit garden and fountain birdbath (I've always made certain that a few moments were spent stabilizing my rationality—gazing at the art, looking out beyond my paradise into the distant woods—even if work ran late and the scenery suggested only fringes of itself in the pale moonlight. Tonight became no exception). The lamps were out, the streaks of embers in the fireplace long extinguished leaving the moonlight shining through the bay unshared by anything as contrived as a flame or bulb. My eyes were set upon the droplets of water cascading from the fountain when I saw the golden eyes—round as orbs, pitch-black points at the crux of their focus—alongside the base of the fountain. They climbed the night air to a height of four feet perhaps, blinked (confirming that indeed they were eyes and not a fatigue-drummed illusion of something otherworldly), and in a smooth and unhurried pace advanced through the garden toward my place in the window, though the body to which they had been attached seemed not to take steps forward, but moved in some other way I really couldn't indicate, as though drifting.
The effect upon first sighting the eyes was very intense and unpleasant for reasons obvious. Soothed to a degree that no other from my family would share this dreadful vision, I shuttered my eyes in effort to cleanse the tender state of mind threatening me, but the image of the fiery eyes stayed with me much like the lingering impressions of a dream immediately after waking. When I finally divulged my sights through the bay window once again, the nightmare had preserved itself, enhanced itself, undermining the frightful sensations thrust upon me just moments earlier, and I could only stare, frozen with a unique icy fear as something grotesque pressed against the glass, staring at me.
Although common sense told me otherwise, it looked like a street kid from the city, the kind that huddles in a cardboard box erected in some alleyway foul with refuse: clothing dark with sweat and hanging upon its body in dirty strips, barely concealing the unwashed skin of its emaciated torso; long, lank hair falling in damp strings; scars—one a red twisting streak—running across its scrawny cheeks.
But the appearance of the bulbous eyes quickly rejected this street-kid hypothesis, their glow professing it not borne of human genes, but that of something beastly.
Like a wizard in mid-charm, it slowly raised its angular arms and scraped ten lengthy yellow claws against the glass of the window. I shuddered as the terrifying screech passed through my body like a powerful drug and paralyzed my senses and body to a state of dreamlike inaction.
A veil of blackness threatening me, I stayed unmoving for what seemed a prolonged time, helplessly charting a territory in my mind previously unexplored, allotting a significant capacity to store the depths of the mystery before me. I wondered if it were an aberration, or whether more like him could be hidden away in a faraway place that no human could project even a perspective of, even if drawn from the most imaginative region of the mind.
The pain darting through me suddenly intensified, a repercussion to my tensed-up muscles, then, still staring, still scratching the glass, the thing pulled its dirty cracked lips far apart and flaunted a mouth rife with gnarled brown teeth.
At once I had the sense of hearing words from those gaping jaws, as if they loomed from his silent mouthing directly into my mind, but I heard and recognized them in my own voice and not in the distorted growls most apt to escape its throat. Nonetheless, it did not matter, for the meaning was all the same, and I finally found the will to shudder again, for now I knew why it came.
It needed me.
I tried but still could not move, fear holding every muscle in my body immobile.
Then, something horrible.
Beneath my pant leg, between the calf and knee, a stroke, gentle yet steady, determined.
Sickly confusion struck me. I looked down to assess the source of this strange sensation and beheld a smallish figure like the being in the window stooping under the desk, its clawed hand no longer caressing me, but now groping my shin painfully hard, its mutilated stare meeting my terrified one, its golden eyes glowing beneath a black mask of soot.
I tore my sights away, so strongly wanting to believe that somehow my bleakest, most terrifying nightmare had released its delusions from my subconscious and placed them within my home to terrorize me.
But my poor fortune would have it otherwise.
Somehow I found the strength to hobble from the chair, to no good use as the demon beneath the desk held me firmly, and I stumbled to the floor. I managed to look up, saw another golden-eyed demon only feet from me, doused in ashes like the one still gripping my leg, face-down on the floor but pushing itself up on all fours. Behind it another wriggled in from the tight sweep of the chimney, arms dangling, reaching for the concrete hearth. Rustling sounds emanated: more pushing their way down the length of chimney. Coming for me.
An unnamable, gristly odor so high suddenly invaded my nostrils, and my eyes automatically released sour tears. A gray cloud veiled my sight, and simultaneously with my slamming heart, tiny scraping footsteps pattered about the hardwood floor all around me.
And all I could see were their eyes, flying about my head like fireflies, eight, ten, then more than a dozen golden lights, dizzying me.
Many hands groped me, tore at my clothing, dragged me.
Sweat, hot and odorous, fell upon my skin. Transient whispers brushed my ears.
I prayed for death to take me, and thought it had. Until I woke and found myself in Hell.
I awakened in the same manner I had swooned. On my back.
I heard murmuring throats, grinding teeth, then the soft sounds of movement, of tentative feet shifting stealthily about me. Breaths, hot primitive sighs danced across the surface of my skin.
Their lair. The people with the golden eyes.
I suspected more movement, but could not see quite yet. Suddenly I perceived a dark shadow looming over me, a misshapen silhouette, eyes shining through the curtain of haze obscuring my vision. A rough hardened object touched my face. A claw. I shivered, a prisoner—and witness—of their camp, and I wondered with great trepidation if it had intentions to silence me.
The gray haze cleared and in the midst of the burning firelight one of t
he monsters came into view. It groveled immediately to my right, head tilted down, sniffing me. Its hand, still stroking my face, did so quite gently, and I could see something within the glow in its eyes, something thankful that I was here.
A stirring erupted and the thing next to me scurried away on all fours, legs as thin as broomsticks pushing clouds of dirt up as it disappeared into a hole in the dirt wall. A chorus of growls and grunts spewed out from the mouths of many. Many. Not three or four or even a dozen. Many.
I forced myself up on my elbows, peered out into the distance and saw hundreds of small glowing lights in the gloom. Eyes. In my direction.
I had quit praying years ago, scoffed religion for scientific beliefs, but for this I quickly reinstated my faith through an urgent internal invocation.
A beast approached me, the smile broad upon its deformed face—a face with a gash racing along its cheek—and I recognized it by the horrid feature as the ghoul that had first appeared at my window.
Kahtah! he yelled raising its sinewy arms in the air. The crowd, a multitude of voices, repeated the foreign gesture: "Kahtah!"
I remained silent.
It drew a claw into its body. "Fenal," it said in a deep, gravely voice, head tilted in my direction. There was a damn frightening silence, and then it said, demanded, "You...will...help," and placed my medical bag before my feet.
The creature—Fenal—forced me to my feet and hurried me along a cave-like corridor lined with red soil and slimy moss, the brutal odor here reminding me of the summer stench that rides the wind over from the neighboring farmlands. Brisk, meandering activity surrounded me as the twisting passage widened, some sections breaking off into branched corridors. Bodies scampered by, hooting as they did so, and I continued on, the blind being led by an untrustworthy source, gripping my bag as if it were my only means for survival.
Soon I found myself at the forefront of a large room that seemed to have been either constructed within a mound of dirt, or built entirely underground. It appeared to act as a hub, hovels dug out in the muddy walls, glowing eyes peering from within their far-away depths. Hundreds of torches burned, igniting the chamber to a ghostly yellow luminescence, and I saw a group of the strange people gathered at one of the gouged-out areas at the opposite end of the room.
Fenal ushered me in, gently in fact, every damn creature in the place pinning their golden irises upon me. I ignored the reek of sweat, blood, and feces as I followed Fenal's lead to the opposite end of the dirt chamber, to the gathering at the far wall. Upon my arrival the crowd there dispersed, some on two legs, most on all fours. Fenal pulled aside a burlap bag used as a curtain and allowed me access to a smaller chamber scooped out in the wall.
The interior of the room was miserable, cramped, and I could barely stand up. A dozen or so candles carved the dark interior with various sized flames.
"Help...Cerpdas," he said, pointing.
I followed his finger to a being—Cerpdas its name—not unlike himself, laying bare-chested and trembling along the slime-ridden wall, a spread of rags for a mattress beneath it. She—I say this as the breasts, however flattened and mottled, were evident upon the exposed torso—had been covered to the waist with a burlap bag, fresh bloodstains saturating the upper half.
I gazed at Fenal and he peered back at me, the same emotion I saw through my bay window pasted again upon his deformed face. Suddenly, for reasons I could not explain, I no longer felt fear. I felt only pressure now for I knew for certain that I was brought here to perform what would perhaps be an impossible task. Fenal squatted next to the injured Cerpdas and stroked its shoulder. Her eyes rolled up, the glow diminished to a dull luster. Sick.
I placed my bag down, took a deep breath of rotten air, then slowly rolled down the burlap bag, a few inches at a time until I saw the first splash of crimson washed across its distended abdomen. A powerful stench of waste and rot assaulted me, hinting that it hadn't been away from this spot for quite some time.
Wanting to get this over with, I tugged the cover away...
...and stared in horror at the freakish sight lying on the rags before me. It was beyond believability. Yet here in my presence, much too real to renounce.
The female creature's legs were spread eagled, a pool of blood and substance tiding from the vaginal canal.
A gnarled claw protruded crookedly, wriggling like a worm out of earth.
"Help Cerpdas," Fenal begged, gently stroking the rotting strands of hair on her pear-shaped head. Help.
So I worked, trying not to think about what I was actually doing, because now was not the time for me to doubt my abilities, ask myself questions. All I could do was remain strong—and sane—and convince myself that this was just another patient, a woman in need of an emergency C-section, and not whatever else she might be. I cut her open, plucked the bawling creature from the womb, cleansed her wounds and crudely stitched them back up. I buried all her injuries under a thick layer of bandages, fed her a dose of penicillin, and acquiesced myself to the fact that this was all I could do.
Once done, I backed away, shaking, leaning against the dirt wall in the shelter, the back of my head pressed against a patch of fungi. In the soft glow of the candles I observed the others in the room with me: a half-dozen of them, silently scrutinizing me, their glowing eyes now full of questions. One being, horribly deformed, separated itself from the horde and slowly writhed across the room, its leg dangling helplessly behind it like a wet noodle. It confronted me, tracing a finger through a damaged gnarl of skin on its thigh.
Gunshot wound.
Another leaped from the group, pushed the fiend in front of me aside and grasped my arm, tears flowing from one golden eye. The other hung shriveled and lifeless from the socket like a pendulum, the miraculous gold changed to a stone cold gray.
Fenal intercepted. "No Pentaff! Savior needs rest." Fenal gazed at me, his golden eyes glowing with admiration. Savior?
Dizzied, I stumbled back into the large antechamber. They immediately rushed forward, groping me with broken bones and mangled limbs, mouths dripping fetid with disease, their wails echoing in helpless pain, desperate for my aid. Yet with this all suffering, their eyes still glowed, bright with hope, desperate that I would be the one to nurse them all back to health, give them the chance to thrive as they once did, lest they face extinction.
Savior...
Overwhelmed, I felt a wave of darkness consume me, and I gratefully succumbed to its grasp.
And now, so tired, I sit—a year later—at my desk in my office with the hardwood floors and Monet prints, looking through the floor-to-ceiling bay window, to my garden and into the woods beyond.
Within the darkness, I see the golden eyes.
This is my sign—no, warning—that it is once again time for me to go, treat their sick, assist their injured. It's like the old saying goes: feed a cat once and it'll keep coming back for more. How true, how true. Only here, I have no choice. I must go. Too great will be the ramifications if I do not. Additionally, as I mentioned, they will never let me leave. I've tried, and have paid dearly. The bite marks I've suffered tell the stories of all my attempts.
I know when the sun brings a new day, my wife will again implore me to take her and our daughter away someplace nice, on a vacation that they both so greatly deserve. I can't, and I won't. My reasons are obvious.
God help them if they decide to leave on their own.
Dregs of Society Page 19