(original charcoal and pastel, by JMCrouse)
The world you see is not the world you live in.
This run down little café, for example, seems innocuous enough to the casual observer at two o'clock in the morning. Any establishment with a place to sit harbors some interesting characters at that time of night, but there the resemblance ends.
I studied the couple down the bar from me, trying not to be obvious about it. This was something akin to passing a particularly grisly accident on the freeway; you couldn’t help but stare in sick fascination, no matter how hard you wanted to look away, no matter how badly the images that seared into your mind scarred you. I scooped up a slow bite of the piece of lemon meringue pie I sat hunched over. Still strange to me that no one else in the joint stared, or ran away screaming, gouging their eyes out… But no one else saw what I saw when I looked down the length of the sticky counter.
The young woman laughed a little too loud, tossing her long hair back as she slanted a coy look at her would be partner. This caused the man beside her to smile, and I shuddered, forced to avert my eyes from the result of that expression. Too late. I gazed down at my pie with distaste, and some small amount of accusation, seeing only ragged rows of needle-like teeth in a mouth too wide for the face, as though someone had messily carved the mouth open back to the hinge of the jaw. I swallowed thickly.
The low murmur of a masculine voice, a softly throaty feminine laugh, and my eyes were drawn back to the end of the bar as if of their own volition. The girl’s body language said all too clearly that she’d swallowed the lure good and well. She leaned forward onto the counter, her body slanted toward her coffee companion as though gravity were pulling her in. Her lips were gently parted as she gazed up at the man with a slight smile. The pupils of her luminous baby blues were dilated.
I shook my head in mute negation, a wholly unconscious gesture. This was like watching a baby crawl toward the gaping jaws of a crocodile. Except that in this case, there was nothing I could do about it. A baby you could run after, snatch up into your arms and carry away to safety. If I tried to rescue this woman, she’d probably call the police on me.
‘It’s not real… It’s not real… It’s not real…’
The doctors claimed that the head trauma from the car accident was causing me to see things. They thought that it was damage to the part of the brain that received information from the optic nerve, that the messages were getting jumbled, misinterpreted, causing me to think I was seeing things that weren’t really there. They said that there was a good chance it would repair itself in time. I was lucky to be able to see out of that eye at all; once brown, it was now a pale, cataract blue. Just try to ignore the images, they told me.
All I knew was that if it didn’t go away soon, I was going to end up in a loony bin. I really tried to tell myself that none of the strange things I was seeing were real, but it was damned hard sometimes to ignore them.
I watched from the edge of my vision the scene that played out down the counter, and tried to tell myself, again, that it wasn’t real. It was all my imagination. The man’s sickly, slightly lambent, reptilian yellow eyes; skin that looked jaundiced and sunburnt both, with a mottled texture like cottage cheese; bony protuberances beneath the skin of his forehead and sharp cheekbones and a nose that appeared to have started to melt; none of it was real. The creature - I couldn’t think of it as a man, no matter how hard I tried to make myself - reached one gnarled, claw-fingered hand up to chuck the girl playfully under the chin, and I watched her smile broaden despite the sudden, shy flushing of her skin.
(original charcoal and sepia, by JMCrouse)
This was bad. But no, it wasn’t real, it wasn’t real…
And the gremlins that were beginning to melt from the shadows, squeezing through the cracks around the door, those couldn’t be real either, right? I groaned softly, almost inaudibly, with dread. I suspected by now why they had appeared, what drew these creatures and what their purpose was.
As casually as I could manage, despite the sudden sweat that prickled the skin beneath my shirt, I tried to glance around the diner in an effort to see all of the disgusting little creatures, gain an idea of their numbers. Three were stealthily making their way toward the young woman, staring avidly at her with hungry gazes and nasty little grins filled brimful with gleeful anticipation. One disappeared behind the bar, perhaps to circle around. Another had crawled up onto the back of the booth where an older woman sat staring morosely ahead of her, the cup of coffee between her hands having gone forgotten until it was surely cold. Her blank gaze stared right through the gauzy image of an aging man with blood staining the front of his rumpled suit, sitting across from her with a sad expression. Would it have given her comfort, I wondered, to know that he was with her, that he still watched over her? My gaze had wandered on, but was snagged suddenly back with shocked surprise. The ghost of the old man snarled silently and leaned forward to swing a threatening fist at the gremlin stalking up behind the woman. The creature hissed at him, but scuttled hastily back. It stared balefully at the ghost through narrowed eyes as if considering, and, after a last parting shot of bared teeth, moved on in search of easier prey.
Interesting, I thought, for an instant distracted from the pair down the bar. The old man turned and looked right at me. Before I could look away, pretend I couldn’t see him, he flashed me a brief smile of triumph and then turned back to his wife, sorrow enfolding his features once more.
I was coming to believe that I had little to fear from the lingering dead. So far, they uniformly had all been too absorbed in their own personal stories, most often concern for the loved ones they had left behind, to take much interest in me. Still, I was cautious. I was afraid that if they came to realize that I could see them that I would soon be haunted by the spirits of every ghost in the city that wanted me to perform some service for them. And I could hardly avoid the notice of the more dangerous entities that lived among humanity if I was followed everywhere I went by a swarm of imploring ghosts.
If what I was seeing wasn’t all in my head, that is, but even these figments of my imagination seemed to behave with some kind of predictability.
The intimate murmurs of the two down the bar reminded me of my previous subject of study.
The gremlins were clustered around her now, seemingly fearless as they clung to the young woman’s barstool and sat upon the counter. They petted her with their tiny clawed hands and leered up at her, growing more bold by the second. She laughed lightly and placed her hand intimately on her companion’s arm as she spoke. The gremlins all but wriggled with delight, delicate fingers toying with the gossamer strands of energy that connected the woman to the world all around her. As I watched, one of the creatures climbed up near her shoulder, its long tongue flicking out to circle her ear. She reached up and brushed her hair back. The gremlin snickered and bent its head to begin nipping through one of those softly glowing strands. The wispy threads severed, the ends curling in upon themselves. Though she released a small sigh, and a brief expression of regret flickered over her features, when she returned her eyes to her consort, there seemed to be a new resolve in them.
“What are you looking at?” the demon-thing growled.
My heart leaped into my throat, stopping my breath as I looked up to find its yellow eyes glaring into my own. “Huh?” I said stupidly, trying to affect a bleary expression as I reached up and rubbed one eye with the heel of my palm, watching his face go from demonic, to human and ordinary, and back again. “Wasn’t looking at nothing,” I protested.
The young woman placed a placating hand on the creature’s shoulder. “It’s nothing, Jared,” she soothed laughingly. “Let him be; he’s half asleep sitting up.”
I experienced a pang of guilt ridden gratitude toward the woman as her paramour turned to put an arm around her shoulders possessively. “Why don’t we continue this conversation somewhere more comfortable? Someplace a little less seedy…” He smiled down at her in a manner that I was sure he intended to be warmly solicitous. “I just met you; I’m not ready to give the night up yet.”
She stared up at him, struck for an instant with indecision. A few more of her aetheric lifelines were cut by the gremlins as she paused, and a shiver coursed through her, making her cling tighter to the monster. She nodded, and the gremlins were all over her now, nipping threads. With each strand that was severed, she seemed weaker, somehow diminished, and the aurora of light that glowed around her darkened.
“Hey, you alright?” the monster teased, pretending concern, because I was sure it was pretend. I felt certain that he could see the gremlins, and that as they worked to disconnect her soul from this world, he grew more confident.
She nodded again, somewhat confused. “Yeah… I just feel a little lightheaded all of a sudden.”
“Maybe I should take you home.”
Her eyes widened with sudden fear. “No… No, we can’t go back to my house.” She flushed, and not out of shyness this time. “I don’t live alone.”
“My place, then?” the thing suggested, not missing a beat.
She looked up at him, deciding, and the gremlins seemed to wait with baited breath, no less than I. She bit her lip between her teeth, and then nodded a third time. “Yeah… I think I’d like that.”
The monster kissed her gently, savoring, and the gremlins snipped a few more threads. Despite what the doctors said, I felt a sinking certainty that before the evening was done, they would all be cut, and she would have irrevocably chosen her fate, though not the one she thought.
I looked down at my half-eaten pie, but the sight of it made me nauseous.
I'd seen a few other people, their spirit cut off, the aetheric ties severed as hers soon would be, and it was a slow death. In fact, they seemed already dead, and just not knowing it. One was struck by a car shortly after I’d seen him. Another, I watched for two days, wondering, before he ended his own life. Yet another was a woman I’d hovered over - she lived in my building, alone - hoping to prevent the fate of the previous two. She had a fatal heart attack as she dined listlessly on her Chinese take-out. So far, experience told me that the condition always proved fatal.
But, if this were all in my head, the product of some inner physical damage, then how was that possible? Why should anything I thought I saw bear any effect on reality at all?
I watched the young woman leave the coffee shop on the arm of a demon, gremlins scrambling in her wake where they weren't still clinging to her. My gut clenched up with a sickening admixture of fear and guilt.
Tomorrow, I’d give the Doc a call, make another appointment. Maybe I would get an eyepatch…
It's all in my head...
It's all in my head...
All in my head...
(cont'd in Eye of the Beholder, pt. 2)