by Shane Staley
Jesus, he was seeing right through the blankets and right through her clothes and, yes, right through her and the mattress beneath and the carpet beneath that.
He pressed a fist to his mouth so he would not scream.
Everything was transparent, physically solid, but visually intangible. He could see the downstairs rooms beneath his feet as though he were standing on a sheet of glass. He could see the kitchen table as if it were in bright daylight, not pitch-darkness. He could see the individual flecks of mica in the countertop, a crumb of toast that looked like a boulder.
It was enough.
He made his way down the hallway…and then he went blind. His vision was shut off like a switch was thrown. When he tried to go towards his bedroom, there was absolute blindness; when he turned towards the stairs, his sight returned.
But he knew why.
The eyes did not want him alerting his wife. They had other plans. They wanted him to go downstairs. They demanded that he go downstairs and then he did, step by step, wishing to God he could close them so he would quit seeing the world as they saw it.
Downstairs, he fell into his recliner, not knowing what else to do. He thought about calling out for Lynn, but he was afraid to. Because if he did, they would know it and he was not so much afraid of what they might do to him, but what they might do to her. There was nothing to do but wait and hope it passed. He sat there in the darkness, terrified of the world around him, seeing it as they saw it: a monstrous and threatening place, a confining place that was like a cage to them.
“Please,” he said. “Please just stop it, please just make it go away…”
But it would not go away.
Maybe what was growing in his eyes was only incubating before, but now it had been born and was fully cognizant of the world around it. He was staring upward, looking right through the ceiling and the second story and even through the attic, peering through the roofing tiles far above and the latticed, ghostly tree branches beyond.
He was seeing the stars out there.
There was a thick cloudbank over the city and there was no way he could be seeing the stars, but he was. They were bright, growing even brighter and larger as his telescoping sight pushed away from the Earth at a dazzling speed and looked into the very marrow of the cosmos itself.
That’s when he finally screamed.
Because the human brain was not conditioned to take in what the eyes were showing him. It was not designed to look beyond the pathless wastes of deepest space and into the primal furnaces of those far-flung suns.
But what the eyes showed him next was even more awful.
Not only was he looking through the walls, the trees, and everything, but he was seeing stars in some far-distant cosmos…except they were not stars, but eyes, thousands of eyes that looked down on the world of men with a cold, merciless intellect.
No, no, no…God, not this, not…this…
But his eyes felt no pity for him and his tiny mammalian brain.
They showed him another world out there, one that pressed in so very close that you could see it, almost touch it even though it had to have been such a vast distance away that it was probably incalculable. They were showing him a linkage of fourth-dimensional space, a nightmare anti-world of impossible curvatures and perverse geometry, a prismatic asymmetrical abyss of blazing colors that was actually the seething, godless darkness beyond the rim of the known universe. Steaming crystalline worms left slime trails of polychromatic bubbles and hunching, loathsome shadows devoured time and space and even themselves.
That’s when he really started screaming.
Because he was certain that those things…those entities…were seeing him as well.
And the idea that he might be trapped in that macabre multidimensional pit with them was enough to drive him stark, raving mad.
There could be no doubt any longer: the transplanted tissue was of no ordinary nature. It was a parasitic life form given birth in his sockets and he was now nothing but a host to it.
The knowledge of this is what finally made him tip into unconsciousness.
* * *
Lynn found him in the chair in the morning.
She shook him awake and he looked at her, expecting her to scream at the very sight of his eyes, but she didn’t. She just wanted to know what the hell he was doing down here sleeping in a chair. His eyesight was perfectly normal. He could not see through her or walls or anything. He rushed into the bathroom and examined his eyes. They were certainly larger than normal, but not discolored or in any other way mutated. Whatever had happened last night had now retreated.
But it’s still there, he told himself. You know it’s still there. Whatever’s generating from that tissue in your eyes, it’s still there.
When he got back, Lynn was waiting for him. “Would you like to tell me what this is all about?” she demanded.
“I think I’m insane,” he said.
“Is that all? I’ve put up with that for years.”
“I’m serious, Lynn. I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
There was no way around it, so he told her everything. Everything that had been happening and particularly what had happened last night. He spoke calmly even though he wanted badly to rant and climb walls and maybe even laugh his ass off at the sheer absurdity of what he was saying or the even greater absurdity of what fate had dumped in his lap. But he did none of those things. His delivery was cool and almost formal.
When he was done, Lynn looked at him for a moment or two, perhaps sizing him up for a straightjacket or a psychiatrist’s couch. Finally, she smiled, and then chuckled. “Oh, you almost had me, Art. You almost had me.”
“It’s the truth,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth.”
She saw that he was or at least that he seemed to think so. “C’mon, Art. Would you please knock this shit off already? My God, you dreamed it all. It was a nightmare. That’s all that happened. You have to see that.”
“I want that damn tissue taken out of my eyes.”
“Stop it, Art.”
“I want it taken out.”
“You are crazy,” she said. “I mean, you have to be. Dr. Moran saved your eyesight and you want him to take that gift back? Sorry, Art, but that’s not only absolutely crazy, it’s ludicrous. Do you honestly expect me to sit here and believe this crap about things living in your eyes? Monsters or aliens or whatever the hell you’re talking about?”
He felt like she was not only pushing him into a corner, but holding him there with her foot against his throat. “Please, baby, you have to believe me.”
“Believe what? That you want Dr. Moran to reverse the procedure? To set you back on the course of blindness? Well, I don’t believe that and I sure as hell do not believe you can see through walls or see into Hell.”
“I didn’t say it was Hell.”
“Okay, Wonderland. What Alice saw when she looked through the looking glass.”
“Lynn…”
She held up a hand. “Whatever. Art, I love you. I’ve always supported you in every way, but I can’t support this. It’s…it’s just crazy. Why don’t you tell me what this is really about?”
“I already have.”
“Bullshit.” She was really getting angry now. Lynn was a good kid, he knew, and you could trust her and count on her and she’d never let you down. But there were limits and Art had just crossed the line. More than crossed it, he had danced drunkenly over it, clicking his heels. Had he come strolling down the stairs wearing some of her lingerie and talking like Bette Davis, she could not have been more distressed or more offended.
“Please, Lynn, please…”
“I don’t believe any of that shit and neither will anyone else, Art. Tell me what it is. Did you suddenly get some half-assed, misguided conscience in the eleventh hour because they used fetal tissue from an aborted baby? Is that it? Well, you and your conscience have fun, Art. Have a good old time with your dark glasses and your white cane sellin
g fucking pencils outside city hall.”
He had an overwhelming desire to slap that mouth right off her face. “Listen to me, Lynn. Just shut up and listen. I’m not going to fight with you. I’m not going sit here and tell you what an insensitive bitch you’re being, because I think you probably already realize that. I’m in trouble. I’m in bad fucking trouble. Something has happened. Something impossible. Something that is scaring the living shit right out of me. All I’m asking for you is to discuss it with me. Is that too much?”
She pursed her lips and wiped some moisture from her eyes. “I’m sorry, Art. I’m just…I’m worried about you.”
“I’m worried about me, too. So worried, in fact, I’d rather be blind as a bat that be able to see the things I’ve been seeing.”
“I guess there’s no point in me saying again that you maybe had a nightmare?”
“None. I wish it were true, baby, I really wish it were. But it’s not that simple. None of this is.”
She thought it over for a time. “Okay, Art, I’ll play devil’s advocate. How about that? You said your eyes changed, right? Well, they look normal now. They’re not bulging and red and weird like you said.”
“They were.” He got up close to her. “Look closely. Look at them very…closely.”
She sighed. “They look okay.”
“Are you sure?”
She shrugged. “Well, I mean, they seem bigger than they used to be, I guess. But not huge or anything. There’s some little bumps on them.” She shook her head and sighed. “They’re just eyes, Art.”
“They weren’t last night.”
“Art, just listen to yourself. You’re telling me there’s things living in your eyes. Things that have grown from that transplanted tissue. Things that are letting you see as they see. Do you know how that sounds?”
“Paranoid? Crazy? Like I think there’s a tissue conspiracy going on? Yes, dammit, I know how it sounds. Maybe they look fine now, but they were not fine last night. That’s when the weirdest stuff always happens, Lynn. At night. That’s when I feel things moving in them, growing, changing. They’re active at night, whatever these things are, they’re nocturnal. Maybe that’s why they’re hiding now.”
Oh, it sounded rich, all right, just completely loony. Like something a little kid might say. The boogeyman only comes out when you turn out the light, Mommy. He won’t come out if you’re in the room.
“I think they’re taking over somehow, Lynn. I think they’re beginning to assert themselves. They’re testing the waters, stretching their legs, whatever you want to call it. They make me look at things I have no interest in.”
“Art…”
“They make me look at the stars. They’re fascinated by the stars.”
“Art, please…”
“You think I’m nuts? Okay. How about the textbooks, Lynn. How about that? You know me. You’ve been married to me for fifteen years. Have I ever had any interest in science or higher math?”
This was evidence she could not refute. “No. No, you haven’t. You always hated that stuff.”
“I still hate it. Do you think I understand any of that shit? I have a high school education, Lynn. I don’t know shit about biology and chemistry and astrophysics and differential equations.”
“But you read it.”
He shook his head. “No, Lynn. I don’t read it. They read it.”
“So they’re controlling your mind, too?”
“Yes, maybe, I don’t know. I’m just a host for them. That’s all I am. They compel me to do things and I’m not even aware of it. Sometimes, like when I go and get those books or read highbrow shit off the Internet that I can’t even pronounce, it’s like something in me has shut down. Like I’m just a machine and they’re at the controls. They’re curious, Lynn. They’re curious about us, about this place. It’s not like where they’re from.”
“Which is?”
“I have no idea.”
“What do they want?”
Again, he shook his head. “No idea. I only know that they’re getting stronger, Lynn.”
She considered it for a time even though it was plain that she did not buy any part of it. “This is beyond me, Art. If it’s happening or if it’s not, it’s still way beyond me. I’m going to make you an appointment with another ophthalmologist. If something’s really going on with your eyes, something fantastic, then there’ll be signs, changes. The anatomy will have to be different. Right?”
“Yeah, I guess it would.”
“Okay, I’ll find you a specialist and get you a complete exam.”
“It takes months to get in to see those people.”
Lynn offered him a sharp smile. “I can be very convincing.”
There was hope now. A shred, but it was something. And a starving man will eat just about anything. At least the wheels were turning. Things would happen. If it was all in his head, then they’d discover that, too. If that was the case, there was always therapy…or confinement and drugs.
Oh, Christ. How could it be happening? How could any of it possibly be happening?
Art sat there in the chair, almost willing the mutation to happen. Wanting those alien red orbs to reassert themselves so that Lynn would believe him absolutely. He really needed that. But…what if he was going insane? No, he knew unequivocally that he was not. He’d noticed something odd happening the day after the operation and that feeling had not lessened, it had grown geometrically. He was not a hypochondriac and he was not paranoid or wildly imaginative. His fantasies never went any further than having sex with leggy cover girls or maybe the Detroit Tigers winning the pennant again like they had in 1984. That was the extent of it. What was happening here was certainly not his imagination. It was something much larger, something infinitely malefic and loathsome.
Sitting there, he began to feel activity in his eyes.
Not like last night, but something much more subtle and insidious. What was happening was happening inside his eyes or just behind them, maybe at the roots of his optic nerves. He could almost feel things moving and undulating in there, tiny cords and tentacular growths spreading out from the backs of his eyes and enveloping the nerves like threads of dry rot moving through wood, following them back to his brain and planting themselves there in fertile soil, ingesting and assimilating gray matter, neurons and dendrites and synapses, making his mind into what they were—
He sat bolt upright, listening to Lynn in the other room talking to someone on the phone.
It was too late.
It was all too late.
She could make him all the appointments with all the best eye specialists in the world, but it would do absolutely no good. He would never see those doctors. He would never be allowed to see them.
For they would never let it happen.
* * *
Lynn got him an appointment with a Dr. Galen Friday morning.
But it was only Wednesday night and Friday was an eternity away when something was sprouting in your eyes, spreading out its vile rootlets and webbing your entire nervous system.
That night, he lay in bed next to Lynn. She was sleeping and the only reason for that was because he had feigned sleep himself so she had given up the watch for the night. So now he was alone. Alone with what was growing in him. It began to happen right away, he could feel his eyes enlarging and soon enough he could not close his lids. There was a fierce burning as his ocular physiology and chemistry was altered, as what hid behind his eyes in the daylight now emerged to consider its new world. He could feel them not only physically now, but mentally and even psychically.
They were sentient.
They were aware.
He decided that they must have thought the human race was sloppy and primitive and inefficient in comparison to themselves. Something to be used as hosts, draft animals, but nothing more. Wherever they came from—whatever multidimensional gutter of reality or anti-reality for that matter—things were not as they were here. There was no cumbersome hardware, just
a perfectly seamless and functional organic technology. They did not invade in rockets or subjugate other races with anything as impossibly crude as weapons or brute force. They invaded at the subatomic, nuclear level, manipulating mankind’s very biology and exploiting it to their own ends, using the very cellular matrix as raw materials to replicate themselves in a world where they were fantastic aberrations at best.
It was simple really.
And in its simplicity there was a rank, ugly malevolence.
Maybe it was completely natural wherever they came from and Art was pretty certain he would never know where that was any more than he could know the origin of a particular virus that gave him the flu. But maybe that’s how these things evolved. On Earth, it was said that life sprang from the sea. Simple one-celled creatures evolved into multi-cellular organisms and colonials and ultimately into advanced forms such as plants and animals. Maybe the evolution of these things was far different. A sort of parasitic evolution. Using existing cellular matter from other life forms, they modified and converted it, laying the groundwork for themselves, altering genetic codes to bring themselves into being.
And maybe the cow jumped over the moon, too, and the little fucking boy ran away with the spoon.
He would never know.
But the fact that he was able to even contemplate such things showed him that their forced reading program had not been a complete waste. He’d learned a few things…not that any of it did him one bit of good.
He found himself sitting up on one elbow, a cold sweat drenching him, his heart pounding and his head aching, his eyes burning like hot blades had been stabbed into them.
He tried to think at them, to make them know he was there, that he was alive and aware and that they had no right to use him like this, to parasitize all that he was for their own purposes. But if they could hear him, they gave no sign. He was a dumb beast of burden and they would converse with him no more than a man would converse with a donkey that carried his packs.