The Eye. A Horror Story. Chapter One: SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL

1.

The first time I saw Joni’s Eye was after a huge argument with Lizzie.

Of course, being the chicken I used to be back then, the entirety of the fight had taken place within my dishwashing, soul-searching, rage blowing, bile-venting, and finally, teary admission of defeat and loneliness-succumbing, mind.

Father was, for once, at his book club, and I was both happy he was out of the house and scared to be alone. Isn’t it amazing how one can wish so much for something to happen, and when it does, be not kind of sorry it did, but apprehensive, and waiting for the other shoe to drop?

I was wearing my reading glasses to get all the grease stains out – I just hated how Father had become so neglectful, he who had always preached about the hospital corners when Mom was alive, and maybe it was the old age, too, and for the life of me I don’t know why I just couldn’t find it in me to say something about it.

But that night, getting him to agree that a little night air might be just the thing, I practically pranced about in anticipation of finally being able to do the dishes exactly how I wanted. See, that is how small my life was at that point.

It wasn’t late exactly, I wouldn’t be expecting Father home for another hour or two, but the yard behind our house was a greying black blotch, and the Northern Woods behind it a blackness of unimaginable evils. This is what I thought, a random thought in the midst of adding Fairy to my already bubbly water and trying to adjust my glasses with one wet rubber glow

I mean glove, Teddy, let’s not jump ahead! Sorry.

I kept imagining things to say if I ever saw Lizzie again, a crazy and pointless task since her parents lived at the intersection, maybe half a kilometer from our house, the house at the end of the road just before the beginning of the greater woods and Miss Millie’s atelier and the soap cabin and the Veranda, remember? The luminous and quite unexpected clearing amid the huge, ancient pine trees where we used to go play as kids, then to drink tepid beer and Campari stolen from behind our parents’ bookcases and to make out when we were older. Ha! And that was way before I was out, and seeing things from this totally new perspective, I guess I could say the same about you, Ted. I mean, how could you?

At this point, however, I am tapping into those warm, fuzzy feelings of friends-since-kids ephemera, and praying to Goddess there is still a part of you that will respond to what I’m saying. We were so young. And what is youth but ego and hurt feelings and thinking we have a broken heart when in fact we have not seen anything, and I mean anything, yet?

2.

I was scrubbing away with the tea and coffee mugs, working my way up to the dirtier dishes, with the pièce de resistance, the lasagna dish, waiting on the counter for final countdown.

The autumnal breeze kept the back porch windchimes dinging a little, a wonderful sound that had always made me thing of Mother, and the smells of decay and fall growth, the fungi, kept creeping in from the woods. I loved those smells, the fall having always been my favorite time of year. The ancient lace curtains sort of billowed a little, had they been cleaner they might have billowed a lot, and it would have been very romantic in a French countryside way, had I not been so unhappy at the moment, and I kept trying to shove the window shut with one of my too-large rubber gloves that were really Father’s. I kept putting off buying my own set of cleaning gloves that actually fit me, thinking if I didn’t do that or anything else to that effect, well, that meant I really hadn’t moved back in at all, and my being there, in that house I had been in such a hurry to get out of, the stroke, Father being on the mend for such a long time simply because he was old, then the altered lab results, my book tanking, my wonderful dream, and Lizzie and everything that that word involved, it was still all temporary stuff.

In a way, then, wasn’t it better that things with Lizzie had died down before either of us was in too deep? I mean, what was I going to do, move back into this narrow, dusty, pile-of-rubbish town with their 50’s take on everything that mattered to me at all? Why Mother and Father had chosen this place to live out of all the places was beyond me.

But Lizzie had all but vanished in the summer, ingested into its jaws by some man, I knew it in my heart, without me being so much as a blip on the radar. And the way she had kept on insisting on certain dates and certain places only, rushing to drown me in the negative if I so much as dared ask what she was doing. I felt like such a fool, having automatically made plans with her in mind for the summer.

Now, summer was gone, and the excuses just kept on coming. Or I’d like to think they had kept on coming if I was still talking to her.

I just could not wrap my mind around it. I really thought I had found someone special, someone to really care about, and who really cared about me. Someone who got me, instinctively, without explanations or a hundred footnotes. Now I was the footnote, wasn’t I? She had been so available to me the whole winter, so supportive, knocking on our door at all hours, bringing her special sauces and soup, mending Father’s pants even, and the way we had kept on talking and talking, taking walks in town, lying in the unseasonably hot spring sun on the pier, checking out the full moon and just seeing her everyday made my heart I know sing, I know, Teddy, I’m sorry, but that was how it was to me. 

I think I was in love with her. 

And I thought she loved me back.

Yet the unceremonial way of letting me know, and not even bothering to say it to my face, that she had grown tired of me, my company, that maybe she had been curious about what it would be like, or I don’t know, maybe she hadn’t even been that curious, maybe it had all been just – marking time; I could no longer see things for how they had been, I felt everything was clouded by my burning longing to be with her. Everything inside me both kept screaming for her, I wanted her near like I had never wanted anyone, and in my mind I kept accusing her for treating me, and my offerings in friendship at the very least, like garbage. Because she had to have known, it was so obvious. She knew how I responded to her, and yet she ignored it, disrespecting both our time together, the sense of unity I had felt, everything I had told her, all the tears I had spilled in her company, but also, I felt, growing warmer and warmer in my absolutely impenetrable moss green gloves, my father, and our entire house.

You seem so happy, I don’t think I have ever seen you so happy, Father had said to me, sometime in March. Before the lab tests. 

Of course, there is nothing as unreliable as the month of March. That is when Spring Fever sets in, the skies rage with sudden downpours or enormous quantities of winter backlash snow, nothing can be trusted, and least of all a woman’s love.

I had kept on drawing The High Priestess, and alternated considering Lizzie my priestess, or myself, thinking like Father did, that I really had never been this happy, and wasn’t it amazing how we can find soulmates in the most unlikely of places, how meeting Lizzie had made my entire vision of things change, how even the most mundane things, the furniture, the porch swing, the raindrops, looked different with her there, and how I felt about myself and all that crap. Such was my delusion of the power of love. 

But now having had the chain of events revealed to me, I think The High Priestess turned out to be Joni. For all the good it did me. 

You can insert the laugh track anywhere you’d like, Teddy. This is where the laughs stop, though.

3.

I was lamenting a particularly lovely afternoon with Lizzie, buying sweaters at Cullen’s Second Hand, that was the day I got the heather grey boyfriend size with the rose gold print on the front, my favorite sweater ever since, and how had I known how things would turn out I would have – what, punched her in the face? Tried to kiss her right there where anyone could see us? Told her how I felt? Cherished the moment a bit longer?

I guess I was alternating between the first and the last options, using all my bent-up anger to get the stains from the cups, when I saw it.

I mean, I saw something. A scarlet red glint at the hemline of the woods. The evening had suddenly grown still, the crickets, the crepuscular animals, even the wind seemed to have died down. I stopped clanking the mugs and splashing the water and tried to focus my gaze on the treeline. Wearing my reading glasses I was unable to do that however, and had to carefully remove them, thinking the red dot was just a reflection of the inside light from a drop of dishwater.

But the glasses weren’t sprayed at all. I turned away from the window long enough to place them on the island, and turning back I swear I saw a pair of scarlet red dots right by the open window. It couldn’t have been more than two seconds time lapse, so I didn’t even consider the glint and the pair of eyes to be from the same entity at first.

Still, I jumped from the scare, this time slamming the window shut with a loud thump, latching it hastily with part of the lace curtain stuck in between. For a while longer, I stared at the dark scenery through the kitchen window, and sure enough, there they were again, this time somewhere in the middle of our backyard. A pair of eyes, luminous from the lights coming from the house. A dog? A wolverine? Something worse?

I rushed out of the kitchen to secure the back door which I knew to be locked, but running towards it, I saw clearly that the door was cracked open, with the darkness from outside pouring in. Through the small windows on the door I spied the eyes, just hovering there in the middle of the yard. As I ran to get the door, I saw the dots suddenly multiply, and other similar pairs of eyes appear further down by the forest entry. I slammed the door shut, giving it a couple of good old-fashioned backwards-and-forwards yanks to ensure it was locked, and killed the porchlight. The back foyer wasn’t lit, and as I stood there by the door, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness, I could no longer make out any dots anywhere, in the yard or by the trees.

I returned to the kitchen, removing the sweaty gloves and discarding them on the island. I yanked my phone from the counter top, aggressively snapping the power cord off its butt, with the intent to text Father to be extra careful getting home because I think the old skunk problem might be back, and that was when I saw the message from Joni.

Want to see something exciting, Tammy?

The sender was just a number, but there was a picture, and it was a picture of you.

After busying myself with being so angry and distraught with Lizzie for the whole day - mind you, Father had never once asked about her sudden disappearance from my everyday plans, a discretion I found both heart-wrenchingly loving, and the tiniest bit unnerving, like maybe he had forgotten she ever existed, I mean when you and I broke up it was a mountain of how-you-feelings and questions clad in sheep’s clothing; of course, that was when Mom was alive and I guess it would have been her to ask those questions and not Father, isn’t this, too, amazing, how our minds play tricks and draw equals on completely different people when it shouldn’t, and doesn’t do it when it should? - anyway, after the whole Lizzie memory lane and imaginary confrontation during my solitary dishwashing, I was in no mood for games, and replied:

New number, Theodore? Look im busy and trying to solve a possible pest problem atm so don’t think im in the mood for excitement yeah?

The response came almost at once:

Suit yourself, Tamara. Should you change your mind, we’ll swing by in half an hour. Joni

I immediately checked the SafetyNet on my phone. I thought maybe I should call you to let you know your likeness had been stolen as someone else’s avatar. No one had called me Tamara ever since my grandparents died when I was little; it was always Tam or Tammy, and even my publisher, should she have anything at all to discuss with me, used the diminutive, as per instructed. Never Tamara, even if that was the name in the poor back spine of my one and only rock-bottom remainder. Tamara. Tamara Waves. Come Pick Me Up, by Tamara Waves. A love story. 

I had a sudden impulse to laugh, and I did, heartily. A love story? Oh god. We are such children, trying to give names to celestial beings, or attempting to realign constellations.

And if I’m truthful, it did occur to me that you might still be upset about the book, even if it had been read by maybe three people, and that included my father and you. I thought maybe you were trying to scare me as payback for spilling the details of our love gone wrong, and maybe I was expecting retaliation for making it about my realization of who I was instead of writing about it as some tragedy of the century. Part of it was tragic, sure. And returning to Halem after failing in such spectacular fashion, having entertained notions of being hailed as the new posterwoman for the minorities, getting what’s hers, empowering herself and others like her, encouraging people to be who they were no matter what. And I guess, despite dedicating it to you, or perhaps because of it, making it crystal clear instead of just hinting at it, I had betrayed you in a monstrous way. Even if you said it was alright when I called you from the big city, bringing the hammer down in one fell swoop about having written about us and about my big discovery at the expense of our relationship, only of course I never worded it like that, and please tell me it’s okay because they want to publish it, and what on this god-given Earth could you possibly say but okay? You had known since always what I wanted to do with my life, and being the one to stand in the way of that – of course I had known you’d okay the book. 

Even if you resented it, and me for being an asshole about it, and so selfish, and not realizing it, either, before having to move back here and really seeing for myself how things were, how things had been for you, since I left to do my bigshot things in the big town. 

 

As I said, all ego, all hurt feelings and stupid broken hearts.

Outdated. Sensationalist rubbish. 

This book might have been earth-shattering, had it come out twenty, or even ten years ago instead of this year, ran the ingress to one of the very few reviews.

Ms. Waves likes to think of herself as walking in the footsteps of Gloria Steinem and Maya Angelou, but rehashing a childhood love and trying to tie it into the greater political changes in the climate of our society with such naivete and superiority of faux-maturity makes the reader redden with shame. Read some Joan Didion and James Baldwin, hell, read some Carson McCullers and Lauren Groft, Ms. Waves, and report back when you actually have something to say about being a woman, being gay, or any other topic relating to or regarding being a “woman on the cusp of emergence from the beaten path of Small Town, America”, as you so pompously, and entirely without merit, and with deadly accuracy, towing the line of your own literary unskillfulness, put it. Let us know when, if ever, you have emerged from your stagnate waters of self-involvement, magnificent glorification of mediocre, bourgeouis emotion or lack-there-of, and remarkable sampling of school paper quality vision. The only thing that this critic truly cannot stop marveling at is why this dilettante essay of near-incestuous harlequin romance and coming out in a way that was relevant in the early Noughties perhaps was published now in the first place, when there are true revisionists writing for online magazines and not getting any recognition at all.

Before I met Lizzie, all my spare time was used coming up with fresh ways to either commit suicide, or kill the person who wrote the unnecessary cruel piece of commentary. It was all fantasy of course. I know you know, but still, given everything that has happened since, I feel I need to clarify this. That for real I did not have blood on my hands then the way I do now. 

And to the best of my knowledge, neither did you.

4.

After receiving no response to my request for the messagist’s identification, I rinsed the now sparkling and spotless dishes, and drained the water.

The sudden rush of adrenaline, fueled by fear, had subsided, and rather than imagining unseen horrors, I had concluded that the gleaming sets of eyes had in fact been the beginning of a new drag chore for the upcoming weeks, getting rid of skunks and other small predators from the woods, looking to get lucky on our trash cans. It had been years since the last time – then again, I had been living in the City, hadn’t I, and had no way of knowing how common it was now, to have these visitors to our yard in the fall, because Father wasn’t exactly the chattiest man on Earth. And I guess I had let our communication wither – not die, but wither, and along with a whole bunch of other stuff I had been acting like a complete idiot about, I chose to not inspect our lack of insight into each other’s lives too closely now.

I shot a short message to Father to come in as noisily as possible and to take care, because caution was the gods’ lime juice, and better safe than sorry, even though not once had the small predators tried to attack but rather run away, and, not bothering to put on lights, went into the living room with a full disclosure of the front yard and the driveway from the window, and sat on the couch with arms crossed. I kept trying to adjust my reading glasses with a finger even though my glasses were still in the kitchen, and kept an eye of the yard. Anyone swinging by a cul-de-sac like ours would be clearly visible in the window, especially now, in the waning light. 

I saw the sweater I had bought with Lizzie on the farside of the couch. On a whim I decided to wear it, and I reached to get it. I took off my shirt and put it on, smelling Lizzie’s perfume, very faint but very much there, on the fabric. Suddenly, I felt like crying. I sleeved up the tears welling in my eyes, and felt sleepy, and wanting to see you. And there was a sudden recollection from a few moments before.

A smell, a sweet, almost rancid smell, of a heap of mint being cut from the bushes at the height of summer, or jasmine, or nectar from some exotic fruit, spilled on the ground where the bees would come, attracted to the sugary scent. I remembered smelling it through the open window right before I saw the red glimmer outside. I closed my eyes. I saw the red dot, then a lot of red dots, and I saw myself running for the back door, and how the back door was open although it shouldn’t have been.

There! What? I opened my eyes, realizing now for the first time the fact of the door being open instead of closed. 

“Who’s here!?” I almost screamed.

The yard was bathed in light. There was a van parked outside, and the shadow of a person standing in front of the headlights.

I shot out of the couch and ran to the front door. I opened the door, fearless, angry, for how could the van arrive into the yard without me noticing it, since I was specifically stationed right in front of the window to check for any vehicles?

It was an ordinary, blue van, and the woman standing in front of it an ordinary woman. I mean, you know it wasn’t, but let’s just for the moment pretend it was.

She just stood there, looking at me, calm, not challenging, just waiting. She was older than me, very thin, and very beautiful. Her hair was a brown, curly bob, and instantly reminded me of Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise.

I have no recollection getting out of the house, or if I locked the door or not.

I was sitting inside the van, and it was very comfortable, with seats and little tables, like a small bus, and very well lit. We were moving. There were five people besides me inside, and yet another person, the only one whose face I could not see, was driving. The woman was sitting opposite me, with a hint of a smile on her face. The men were gathered around her, not obviously in a protective formation, since I didn’t pose a threat, but still, I could sense they were ready to pounce at any moment. Everyone besides the woman looked faintly familiar to me.

“Is Teddy here?” I asked, stupidly, since I clearly saw you weren’t. That was when Joni spoke for the first time.

“I’m sorry, I figured you would be likelier to come with us if you saw a familiar face.”

“What have you done with him?” 

Joni scoffed. “Don’t be absurd. Unless, would you like something to be done with him?”

“Jocelyn –“ Almost a sigh, a friendly reminder, not exactly a warning, but a remainder, to not say too much. The speaker was the driver.

Joni didn’t react, only smiled for real now, her eyes never leaving mine.

Despite the casual attire, and the nonchalance everyone in the van seemed to be conveying, I sensed there was something of extreme importance happening. Everyone, including Joni herself, were clad in blue jeans and different kinds of practical jackets, and I fit right in in my sweater and leggings.

“Support your local”, Joni read outloud the print, “I like that.”

I faintly realized seeing Lizzie’s house as we drove on, but it may be an exaggeration, since it was dark, and it could not have been visible in the window for more than a second.

The van stopped. No one spoke. Joni got up, then everyone else, including me. What I find interesting is that no matter how strange it all was, I never felt any fear for my life, or that I was being kidnapped.

We spilled out of the van, to what seemed like an enormous sand pit. I felt the gravel beneath my boots, and smelled wet sand. Everything around felt muffled, like I was on drugs. Which, of course, I was.

I had no idea how long we had been in the car, if anything else had been spoken, or which direction we had been headed, although I had not been blindfolded, or manhandled in, gagged, or even touched by anyone in the party.

I seem to remember the driver killing the engine but leaving the headlights on. No one payed too much attention to me, so I technically could have run, but it never even occurred to me. The party seemed to fan out, as if they were moving in a previously agreed upon pattern, or even a dance, with Joni in the middle. I must have drifted off, because the next thing I remember was Joni screaming as if dying, screaming so loud, and holding her face. Everyone ran towards her, myself included. Blood seemed to be spilling from where she was holding her hand to her face, and when for a second she lifted her hand, I could she her right eye had been gouged out. This changed her entire being, and her face looked like the face of a skeleton, made even ghoulier by her horrible screams of what I understood at the time to be pain.

Her screams seemed endless, like they could unite centuries and make the hilltops bleed, and I felt someone nudge me and call me by my name.

“Tamara, can you see it? Can you see it, Tamara?”

I knew they meant the eye, and without questioning the lunacy of what was being asked of me, I started to scour the soil, kneeling close to the earth and carefully running my palms against the sand.

There was a small puddle of black water, and there was a faint glimmer of red at first, then, when I saw it, it became brighter. I said nothing, only looked at the puddle, but I immediately heard someone yell for the others to gather round. Joni grouched down beside me and tried to grasp for the eye, but the pool of water didn’t yield, I saw her fingers try to reach through, and what should have been the easiest thing in the world, she could not do. The water didn’t so much splash but looked like magnetic goo, escaping from underneath Joni’s touch.

“She can’t reach it! Quick, Tammy, grab it!” I heard someone say, and I reached for the puddle, the eye glimmered in scarlet tones so near, and when my fingers touched the water I realized it wasn’t water at all and it was no puddle, but some kind of force field, small but very powerful, and when my hand went through it it felt what I imagine inserting one’s arm inside a cow to pull out the calf must feel like. I was elbow deep inside the goo, the eye just out of my reach, and my head was swimming in nightmarish images: the whole Halem sinking in similar goo, the eye staying out of my reach, staring at me, which seemed very terrible in the moment, the creatures from the woods not skunks at all, but some hellions from this place, the place where the eye had fallen, and I’m guessing I was screaming now, too, because the next thing I knew the men, the guards, were all around me, pulling me away, and it took all they had to extricate my arm from the Well.

Because that is what Joni had been looking for and that was what I had found for her. 

There is nothing I could have done to stop it. I was like a sleepwalker, and I cannot claim I went with them unwillingly. How they knew I could do it I don’t know, unless you told them, and I’m thinking that is exactly what had happened. No one else even knew about the Wells, Ted.

I thought we had destroyed all of them, all of the goddamn Wells, but obviously I was wrong. I would like to think you had no idea what would happen if you told them, because knowing would make you a bad person, and not bad like I was a bad person, not considering your pain when I was busy revealing to the world how my seven-year relationship with my high school sweetheart came into a screeching halt when I discovered I liked girls by going to bed with my sweetheart’s sister, or not a bad person like when I moved out to the City, leaving my parents to deal with the aftershocks and the awkwardness, or even not a bad person like when I wouldn’t call my father for over two years after the burial but always texted, becoming more impersonal and cursory by the text.

But a bad person like evil, Teddy.