Phantom Eyes (Short Story Part 1)
This is my first crack at short story writing. My favorite genre is dark psychological thrillers/surrealist movies as you all may be able to tell. Influences for this one are filmmaker David Lynch, author Tim O'Brien, and movies such as Winter's Bone and Take Shelter. Images and themes from my own lucid dreams and nightmares make regular appearances. Second part coming in a few weeks. Dialogue is a little forced right now and I still have to work on being more to the point in my writing cuz I tend to ramble a bit. And sorry if its a bit difficult to read since there are no paragraph indentations. Hope you all enjoy part 1!
Phantom Eyes
The hand of the LORD was on me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” – Ezekiel 37:1-3
The mirror grows more intimidating with each approaching footstep. He feels its authority to determine his sanity or madness. He senses the energy of its surface pulsating through him and back to itself. There is a craving within him; a craving to somehow obtain all knowledge and be at peace, even if that knowledge is of something horrific beyond explanation. The dead leaves crunch beneath his feet and the enclosing trees appear to him as confused old men, bent and misshapen with time. The mirror is leaning against a particularly tall tree a distance away from him, maybe a spruce of some kind. He stops and examines his surroundings. In every direction, the buckled-over trees are tangled into one another and the forest itself seems to be slowly expanding to an intangible horizon. “Nowhere to go but forward”, he thinks, and picks up his pace again towards the mirror.
What a strange, perplexing craving that has overtaken him. It reminds him of the muggy summer day when his mother backed up over Duke in the driveway. His mother pleaded for him to stay in the car, but he couldn’t just remain seated. He absolutely had to burst out of the station wagon and have his own glimpse of the body. Mangled limbs, flattened stomach, blood-soaked fur and all. Then again, maybe this craving isn’t so strange, he reflected. We all check under our beds for monsters. Better to confirm your fears than to drown in the sea of your imagination.
The mirror does not allow him to view the reflection from a distance. It clouds up every time he squints to distinguish shapes or textures. Must be closer. Twenty feet. Ten feet. Five. His toes bump up against the wooden frame and without hesitation he squats down and looks. He is not ready. He reels backward from the sudden sledgehammer blow of terror. His eyes are dangling down at his cheeks. He could give one tug on the optic nerves and they would drop to the ground, useless. Skin rotting away, tender sinews and exposed arteries underneath. Every fiber of him wants to turn and run from this grotesque portrait, but he has to look, he has to look. It’s too important not to look. The convulsions start. He cannot comprehend it. He ca… “Paul?” “Paul?”
The force of the convulsions drift out of existence and Anna’s firm nudging replaces them.
“Everything okay?” she asks with genuine concern in her voice.
“One of those dreams. Don’t worry about it” Paul drowsily responds.
Anna gives him a quick kiss on the cheek and rolls over to her side of the bed.
She had probably fallen asleep with her head resting on his chest again. He didn’t understand why she kept that up. Every night he would thrash around, and so every night the sudden movement of her head support would wake her. She’d always nudge him to consciousness so they could share a few moments of that trancelike waking state. They swap words of reassurance, and then Anna drifts off again while he gazes up at the ceiling fan for a while. Every night. He supposes that it’s a gesture of her concern, but it’s a silly gesture at that.
Paul gazed up at the whirring ceiling fan. It was an old piece of equipment that seemed to tremble more intensely with every next rotation. He wouldn’t be surprised if the thing were to finally become unhinged and come crashing down onto his restless body. The fan’s wooden slats composed a rhythm of their own as they pushed onward through the still air. An irregular, ragged breathing. Paul would often visualize the fan as a beast nailed to the ceiling, panting and straining in an attempt to break free and spin off into the night. Spin above the town of Birch Tree, Missouri, then up and over the valley. He didn’t feel any particular need to fix it. Every other item in their dilapidated house was in bad shape anyways; a repaired ceiling fan would just look out of place.
The breathing of the ceiling fan comforted Paul. More than anything, he feared being alone with his wandering thoughts. A silent room was unbearable, but a little background noise always made any situation tolerable. He honed in on the whirring, suppressing the lingering aftertaste of his last dream. Within twenty minutes, the images had been forgotten, but the one thing he could not wash away from his mind was a strong notion of prophecy.
Levi screeched with delight as he swung higher into the humid air. The chain links would grate when he rose but calm again when he returned to Paul. It was their favorite thing to do together. During the summer, they would regularly make trips to the park in the lazy hours after dinner. If they weren’t already munching on popsicles on their front porch. Paul enjoyed the pastime as much as his son, if not more. Pushing Levi again and again, providing the occasional underdog, while watching the day retreat into darkness – it was therapeutic in a way. After an hour, the first lightning bugs of the evening started flickering on and off. Their green-yellow specks of light were little havens of consciousness in the shadows.
The park was a modest construction offered to the neighborhood by various civic organizations. The swings, merry-go-round and jungle gym were provided for with government grants. The merry-go-round spun unevenly, and most of the structures were rusting with age. The funding was merely a gesture by the city council to prove that they knew of the neighborhood’s existence. The wooden play structure was in fine condition since another church group with good intentions built it just a few months prior. A few inverted crosses and pentagrams have been etched into the fresh timber since then, but nonetheless, the structure was in fine condition. Levi always kept a distance from this play structure as if a magnetic field were repelling him. One day he stepped on a hornet’s nest when romping around underneath the wooden bridge, so he has avoided the area ever since. They usually kept to the swings. The feature that Paul most liked about the area was the tall hedges marking out the boundaries of the park, concealing them from the neighbors’ watchful eyes. The hedges tapered off behind the play structure, offering them a pleasant view of the Ozark Mountains.
Usually at this time in the evening, the cool breeze would arrive simultaneously with the advancing darkness and the materializing lightning bugs. Not this day. The air was muggy enough that their damp shirts clung to their chests. The clouds above them were swollen like tumors. Paul couldn’t understand the weather’s blatant defiance against his commands.
“Levi? We’re going to leave now”, asserted Paul.
“Do we have to go right now?”
“One more underdog. I’m serious though, bud. We need to get home”.
The clouds burst. Rain drizzled down onto the park. Bleach from the heavens. Sterilizes the town but sears like chemical burns with the memory it brings.
Streams of rainwater flowing down the rocky slopes flowing down to mangled body water mixing with blood pouring from gaping holes granite smashes through her skull shatters like urn man with remorseless grin gazes through me because I’m transparent drifting like specter nowhere to hide from omnipotent stare gravel oozes panic seeps into veins can’t release can’t exhale shouldn’t have seen it shouldn’t have seen it.
Paul found himself leaning against the pole of the swing set. Twinges of sharp pain vibrated through his head. He panted for air.
“Daddy? Why are you hurting?” Levi asked, visibly distressed at this sight.
“Don’t worry Levi. Nothing’s wrong with me. Let’s go home. We can finish reading The Mouse and the Motorcycle.”
This won Levi over. They left the park and sauntered along the side of the dirt road towards home. The rain still fell, piercing like bullets. Levi’s long blonde hair was a shade darker from the downpour by then.
“Daddy? Can you really make the weather do what you want?”
“Of course. The sun and the clouds listen to what I say”. Paul didn’t feel the need to elaborate; this should be common sense for Levi.
“Can you stop the rain?” pressed Levi.
“I promise you that I’ll make the sun to shine for you tomorrow” answers Paul, with nothing but sincerity in his eyes.
Paul saw the beings twice the next day. It was as if they were waiting patiently to be noticed. The first time was a little after ten in the morning. He was out in the driveway, tinkering with his car’s dysfunctional exhaust pipe – something that he should’ve gotten to a long time ago. He was drenched in sweat from working in the hot air pocket under the body of his car. Suddenly, his entire body felt cool, relaxed and weightless as if he were in a flotation tank. The exhaust pipe’s refusal to cooperate no longer frustrated him. This wave of tranquility that struck him – what had set it in motion? He drifted out from under the frame and scanned the vicinity. His eyes initially passed right by the being - it had a slight translucent quality that allowed it to blend into the foliage - but then detected it on their second scan. It was standing motionless among the pines of Ms. Dekker’s front yard across the street.
Although this being obviously had the skeletal structure of a human, Paul couldn’t quite call it a human – that would be a grossly inadequate term for what he was observing. Its emaciated form stretched to an intimidating nine feet tall and its head was in the tops of the trees. The most startling feature of this being was not its height, but its incredible thinness. Every part of this beings body – its legs, arms, waist and even its head – appeared to be only half the thickness of the respective part of a physically fit middle-aged man. The limbs were so thin that they appeared as if they would simply snap from the exertion of standing up, but yet they held firm. Its face, looking at nothing in particular, had the same simplistic and artificial appearance as a child’s plastic doll. The eyes of this being were pure black, a sharp contrast to the corpse-like whiteness of its skin.
The skeletal quality of the being and prior ones reminded Paul of a Sunday school story he was told when he was a child. He only had a vague memory of the story, but from what he did remember, God rose up a pile of bones and rebuilt them to human form. First the bones joined together by ligaments and tendons, then the internal organs, lastly the skin. For this being, however, it was as if its reconstruction process was only half completed, and then its body was elongated with one of those medieval torture racks.
Later that day, when he was eating dinner with Anna and Levi, Paul saw them again. He was dishing spaghetti onto his plate and drumming his knife on the table. Anna was restlessly talking to him about what to do regarding their dwindling savings account. “There’s always so much worry in those beautiful eyes”, Paul thought. His mind began to wander from Anna’s words until her melodious voice was nothing more than droning in his ears. He wasn’t doing this deliberately. He felt as if there were some entity dragging him by his shirt collar out of that present reality. Just as he lifted the fork to his mouth, that same overwhelming feeling of tranquility and detachment overtook him again. Even the glasses and cutlery softly vibrated, and the birds outside chirped with incomparable clarity and lucidity. “They’re here. And they’re close”, Paul rationalized in his head. He turned around in his chair to come practically face to face with one of the beings. There, on the other side of the windowpane, a thin, nine-foot man was squatting down and peering into their kitchen. Still another one was meandering around their humble backyard garden twenty yards behind. He jerked back, slamming his body against the table and knocking over his glass of iced tea.
“Paul! What’s gotten into you?” exclaimed Anna, her face contorted with an expression of alarm. Levi, sitting at the side of the table between them, saw their sudden fright and started to quietly sob.
“Uh… I… I’m okay. Really, a bird made a noise out there that just startled me. Here… let me clean this up”. Paul grabbed some paper towels and started wiping up the spill.
“I didn’t hear anything. Listen, Paul, we’ve been through so much these last few years. I’ve been there for you during every single one of your episodes. Don’t you think I might know the difference between when you see something I can see and when you see something more?” Anna reached across the table and gripped his free hand. The warmness of her skin calmed his franticly racing thoughts.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m a liar. I just don’t want you to worry any more than you need to.” He couldn’t look at her.
“Hey… it’s alright. Everything’s okay” Anna consoled. She walked around the table to Paul, who was still soaking up the spill. She wrapped her arm around him and rested her head on his shoulder. The conviction emitted from the beings had drained from Paul’s body, and another equally mystifying conviction replaced it: that of unwavering commitment.
The neighborhood watch. That was his name for the beings. It was far more fitting than the other potential names he once had for them. Despite their eeriness, Paul found that he was strangely comforted by their presence. His only problem with them was how they would appear out of nowhere and startle him from time to time. They were his safety nets, his buffer zones that cushioned his falls, the forces that prevented him from truly descending into madness. And why should he feel any differently about them? The neighborhood watch was simply incorruptible – all the filth of Birch Tree couldn’t touch them. They were above the desperation, above the deteriorating homes and neglected yards, above the spousal abuse, above the empty whiskey bottles strewn across the ditches along the sides of the roads, above the meth labs. And yet, unlike Siddhartha Gautama in the lotus position, they were inexplicably involved; they were conduits of change. Paul couldn’t quite describe their restorative power. Like much everything else about them, it was beyond words.
His first sighting of them was at the wreckage next to the hardware store on Jennings Avenue. Their nimble frames paced smoothly, almost glided, among the burnt, skeletal remains of what was once a house. This was one of the several locations in the town where kitchen sink chemistry – the mixing of fertilizer, paint thinner, and ammonia - had turned disastrous. He peered at them through his car window for several minutes. Their pallid faces seemed to be aware of the human misery amidst the ashes, but at the same time they were unspoiled by it.
The most astounding thing was that the neighborhood watch seemed to materialize closer and closer to his home as the days went by. Nearly two months ago was when Paul first detected them lurking around the former meth labs in the opposite extremity of Birch Tree. He held a steady job at Snyders Brothers’ Auto Repair, located in the general vicinity of these burnt remains, and consequently would catch glimpses of them most evenings when coming home from work. Ten or so days passed, and he stumbled across a new gathering place of theirs – Birch Tree First Baptist Church. In all honesty, he couldn’t call it a church – more of a hollow shell than a sprouting seed. It was really nothing more than a memorial for a better generation that had passed on. But their presence sanctified the ground, as if it were sprinkled with holy water. Throughout the last week, their overshadowing forms were rooted in the shade of the small forest at the end of his street. That day, his backyard. Paul was utterly convinced that there was significance in this, just as he was utterly convinced that the earth orbited the sun.
The neighborhood watch filled the void that the Shannon County Police Department failed to satisfy. The police were prejudiced, drug-addicted and bribable. They neglected the duty of patrolling his street. They laughed when he called them and demanded that they detain his neighbor for planting video cameras in every room of his home. Most importantly, they failed to apprehend the man responsible for that murder in the rock quarry two years back. But he knew that the beings had their own patient, quiet way of solving all of it. He could sleep peacefully that night.
“Open your eyes, Paul. Open your eyes, Paul. Open your eyes, Paul. Ope…”
Paul opened his eyes to a sterile, blank room. Where was he? His body was lying rigid on a hospital bed. He twisted his head to his right and then the left. Just blank, white walls, only disrupted by a narrow chrome door at the far end of the room. The persistent void was audible, resembling the sound of a whirring power drill. A dozen questions competed in his mind for precedence. Did he injure himself? A result from one of his blackouts, maybe? He didn’t sense any trace of pain, lying there, staring up at the ceiling. And where were the signs of human habitation? No misplaced surgical utensils, no synthetic paintings of nature on the walls, and most upsettingly, no indicators that his family had ever visited him. No care packages, no cards, not even a few words scrawled on a piece of scrap paper. Had they finally dragged him to a psychiatric hospital? No… they wouldn’t do that. Was this solitary confinement? How much time had passed? He had to get up and out of the room. He made an effort to raise himself to a seated position, but felt as if he was bound down with ropes. What the hell was happening? He strained his neck in order to take a look at what was constricting his movement. A thin white blanket swathed his entire body up to his neck. He threw it aside in one quick motion.
Oh God what am I seeing God help me vision blurring room shattering splinters ricocheting piercing me how can I be alive still must be hell or at least purgatory how long how long is this condition eternal never want to see again God extinguish me
His eyes were detecting the light particles. His retinas were processing the light and generating the color differentiation and depth perception. His occipital lobe was interpreting the data from his retinas to images that he could comprehend. But what seemed like an eternity passed before he could accept that he was really seeing it. He was no longer a human of flesh and blood, but merely a human of bones. No skin or arteries or nerves or pockets of fat or organs or toenails or hair or blood. Just bones. The bones, what was left of his identity, were bound by thick, black, organic cords. Their organic property was revealed in how they pulsated and stirred. Gazing at the barrenness of your own skeleton – an inconceivable horror. He cursed his very consciousness. He wanted to be obliterated into a billion independent particles of dust. He did the only suitable action left. He screamed an unwavering, earsplitting scream. Just then, things started to change.
First, a tingling sensation vibrated up through his frame and back down again. Next, he felt the constricting pressure wane, and he momentarily silenced himself and looked at what was happening. The cords suddenly broke free from his skeleton and the bed with a loud popping noise. He saw them slither all over the bones, rebuilding as they moved. It was like the time-lapse video of a decaying rabbit that he watched in a biology class. Bugs and worms and time chewing away at its rotting flesh. Except this was reversed. Cell by cell, he was being restored. The cords traveled with absolute purpose, depositing multiplying cells in the wakes of their paths. The longer he watched, the stronger his feeling of liberation. Within twenty seconds, he possessed a body again.
Whether he was in his old body or if he were actually a new entity – it didn’t matter. He leapt off the comfortable mattress of the hospital bed and rejoiced when he felt his feet contact the tile floor. He burst through that oppressing chrome door and darted out into an equally sterile and blank hallway, stretching out so far that its end was out of sight. Dozens more chrome doors were lining the walls of the hallway, except that these doors were all wide open. He started to run. Each step was a reason for unadulterated celebration. He never wanted to stop running. As he passed the doors and the identical compartments they revealed, he saw further skeletons lying on hospital beds. Yes, they were only piles of bones, but yet he could distinguish each and every one. There was his brother Sam, whom he hadn’t seen in four years. His first girlfriend, who had moved to Indonesia as a missionary. The timid, dark haired man who he only knew by face because he always ate in the diner across the street from Synders Brothers’ Auto Repair. His father. His boss. His drinking buddies. His Levi. His Anna. Eventually, white light enveloped him, a whiter white than the blank walls. He awakened. For the first time in months, his wakening wasn’t accompanied by thrashing and groaning. For the first time in months, Anna wasn’t woken up with him, and he was able to appreciate how beautiful she was when she slept.
Paul sat down on a fold-up chair and rested his feet on the wooden railing of his front porch. The evening breeze cooled him as he opened a can of beer. A nearly perfect evening. Only spoiled by the fog hanging low in the air, which only reminded Paul of his dwindling influence over the weather.
Beyond the porch, the hillside dipped down for several hundred meters until the ground leveled out in the dusty back lots of Greenwich Tavern and Rhodes 101 Stop. Built on the flat surface of the valley was the five square blocks of downtown Birch Tree. The bulging hills on the far side of the central hub were thick with pines. Their slopes were jagged and uneven, fashioned by the recent mudslides. Paul examined the territories of his neighbors. In the overgrown backyard of the beige house, the two Dobermans had finally stilled. Their heads drooped; they seemed weary of the chain link fence that closed them in. In the shadows of the oaks to the left of the beige house, the toad-like woman was dusting off her rugs against a slab of rock. After five minutes, she rolled them up and scuttled through the front door of her ramshackle ranch home. After she went inside, she walked up to each on of her windows and pulled the curtains shut. That’s how I like it, thought Paul. Most of the time, the curtains were sufficient barriers. Sometimes though, he could feel her gaze through the curtains - a gaze that scorched through the fabric and left holes like cigarette burns.
Anna opens the screen door and takes a seat next to him.
“You know Levi is just so impressed by you”.
“Really?” responded Paul as he leaned his chair back against the wall.
Anna gave him a teasing nudge in his side and continued, “He was going on and on about you when I was putting him to bed. Talking about how you tell the clouds and winds where to go. He’s already skeptical of Santa but one hundred percent convinced that his daddy is a demigod.”
“Well, then I guess I’m really rubbing off on the kid. You know, maybe he can take over that job for me when he’s older” Paul considered.
“You mean, controlling the weather?”
“Yeah. This town needs a successor. Someone who makes sure that it stays sunny during the barbeques and rainy when the crops are dying. Especially since the weather reporters on channel five here can’t predict shit”.
Anna chuckled. “That’s for sure. But you think that your ability’s genetic? Could Levi pick it up or can it only be passed down through genes?” she asked as she grabbed a drink of her own from the cooler next to her.
“Well, considering that I’m the only person who can do these things, Levi would be the only possible heir. I’ve passed down my athletic skills to him and he has your eyes and nose, so he probably has my power as well” Paul reflected, staring off into the sky of red and purple hues.
“Yeah, you’re probably right” Anna agreed. She used to try so hard to convince Paul that these beliefs of his were only delusions. Grandiose fantasies designed to keep his ego afloat. Eventually she learned that just playing along with them was a far better course of action. Those arguments over the nature of reality only left Paul more confused and herself more mentally fatigued. She even suspended her disbelief sometimes and allowed herself to accept Paul’s ridiculous statements as true. It was fun, diving into Paul’s world.
They sat in silence for several minutes. Paul appeared to be debating himself in his head, as if ruminating over an indigested, recurring thought. The cicadas, nestled in the surrounding tall grass and trees, became audibly noticeable with their persistent chirping. Eventually, he made a brief clicking sound with his tongue, which always indicated that he’d made up his mind on something.
“Anna, am I crazy?” he asked with an unwavering gaze.
Anna reclined back in her chair and released a sigh. She thought for a moment.
“According to the psychiatrists and DSM-IV you’re crazy. I don’t think so. But the most important question is do you think you are?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore,” he said. “It’s just… these dreams I’ve been having. You know I have terrifying dreams. Except these ones… they’ve reached a new level. In all of them, my body is mutilated in some way. Most of the time I’m missing my eyes or decomposing. Hell, last night I was just a pile of bones. They’re beyond disturbing, but in some strange way, they’re healing. I know there’s a purpose to them, almost as if they’re guiding me towards some unclear end. I feel sometimes that everyone should see the same things I see… because they’re too important to be kept to myself, you know?”
Anna responded after some contemplation, “Have I ever told you about Evelyn?”
“Not that I remember.”
“She was a high school friend of mine”, Anna said. “A strange girl – kind of scrawny and always wore glasses too big for her face. But very sweet. Evelyn had quite a history of mental problems, but the weirdest thing about her was that she would occasionally go through these episodes she’d call ‘hazy spells’. I remember that during our geometry class she’d have them every now and then and the teacher would always ridicule her about it.”
“What were they like?” Paul interrupted.
“I’m getting to that. Anyways,” Anna continued, “the way she described these ‘hazy spells’ was that everything around her would get blurry and start warping. Kind of like staring at a reflection in a puddle of water after a heavy rock has been dropped in it. She said that it looked like the reality around her was going to break and white light would come spilling through the cracks. It never did though. Evelyn had it in her head that these ‘hazy spells’ were signaling that something bad was about to happen. We didn’t believe her obviously. But one day during lunch break she had a really intense ‘hazy spell’ – so bad that she collapsed to the floor and started mumbling incoherently. We helped her up and calmed her down – she seemed to be pretty worried about her family – but we forgot about it. That night, her brother was found in the garage. Dead in his Buick – a hose running from the exhaust pipe into the car interior. He had always struggled with depression and chose that day to do himself in. Ever since then, I was certain that Evelyn wasn’t just crazy. There was something more than that.”
Paul ran his hand through his wiry, disheveled hair. He finished his beer and set it down on the porch. He answered, “Okay, but what does this mean for me? Are you saying that my dreams are beyond my control?”
“Well… you’ve told me about some of the stuff you’ve been seeing. Visions and dreams that would scare the hell out of any functioning, breathing person. I don’t think we should discredit them just because they’re scary and they don’t make sense. I know that you haven’t been the same since that murder you saw last summer, but your disorder isn’t meaningless. Maybe it’s a conduit for messages from something greater – God, fate, the universe itself… who knows? Maybe you’re seeing more of reality than others, and I’m the one that’s out of sync with everything”.
Paul placed his arm around her and pulled her closer. “No” he said, “you’re too much of a genius to be out of sync with everything. Can you promise me something, though?”
“Yeah?”
“Promise that you’ll help me through these visions, even if they start getting a lot worse. That you won’t get so freaked out that you’ll run off.”
Anna gave him a gentle smile. “No need to ask. You know I’ll stick with you.”
END OF PART 1. PART 2 COMING SOON.
