The Eyes - A Halloween Special

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THE EYES

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- I've kept my word old man! You'll have to let me pass...

- Very well, young blood. Make haste; not long before the daylight dies.Tread lightly and beware the darkness, for the Night has Eyes.

- Night has eyes? What the HELL is beyond this gate anyway?!

- Hell itself, precious lad, is what you've just set about.
Whatever secret it holds, you'll have to die to find out.

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Noone could tell how long it had been since the last time she had that innocent expression on her face. Now, she was staring into her victim's eyes, with a smile on her lips that could only belong to an infant. 

"When did it all start?"

The question was so ordinary, and at the same time so exceptional, that she had to pause for a moment before uttering an answer... Then she thought better of it and went for crude humor!

"Why ask a hooker about her first kiss?"

Pure laughter charged forward, galloping all the way up her throat, barely falling short of her lips. She was just about to taste his blood for the third and last time, when the most vivid flashback thundered into her mind. She was both annoyed and scared at the sudden sight of a car wreck under the black cloak of that misty night. But she greeted the memory all the same; it had been quite a while without mortal memories.

She decided to tell it all, not that she was concerned with her prey's curiosity, but to reminisce with her memories from a time when her favorite drink was ice-cold beer. To her amusement, she smiled for a second time, then wiped the warm dark blood off her lips. Then she started telling of that dreadnight, the words pouring out easier than the easiest she could have hoped for.

"It was a simple night, a night like any other night. I was driving home in my husband's brand new Corvette...."

Like every other thing that ever belonged to her accursed husband, she hated that car! She paused for a brief moment and dreamed of feasting on random workers at the Corvette assembly line. She could turn that factory into a blood bath if she really wanted to! - not that it would satisfy her thirst, let alone the longing for  the pulse in her veins.

"It was almost 2 AM when a fine track came up at my favorite radio station. A track that goes by the name: A Tout Le Monde..."

This time, it was a longer period till she regained command over the revolt of her mind.

"That's when I took my eyes off the road, albeit for just a short while. I realized my safety belt was off when the car seemed to hit something and ran off the road like  furious woman divorcing... her drunk husband."

Another flashback invaded her being and she saw her first victim lying in a pool of blood by a kitchen counter; the ugly remains of an ugly man with an ugly wedding ring - one identical to her own.

The memory was short-lived, as was her marriage.

Her fingers, gripping the signature of her fangs on her victim's throat, loosened a bit. Blood started slowly seeping out. The pressure was a lot lower since she had sucked in more than half of his life from out of his veins, but still, that funny red fluid, like the most desperate of all seamen, would keep trying to escape from the sinking ship. She moved her fingers to seal those gateways to salvation!

"When I opened my eyes, I was lying on damp grass on the skirts of a foggy valley, roughly some two hundred feet down and off the road. That brand new car (she almost smiled again) was gazing at me like a cat in the night with a blind left eye, purring wearily as if just been shaken by a vicious dog... (she stopped to ponder) You know what's funny?"

Her victim was looking straight into the pupils of her eyes, with a relaxed expression on his face and a gradually fading beat on his chest. Though she found the taste of cold blood now as disgusting as that of hot beer long before, the reborn memories glittered like giant neon signs to her mind's eye at that very moment. So she decided to keep telling of that night, instead of completing her curse that instant by giving the poor man a final kiss.

"The funny thing is, A Tout Le Monde kept playing as I laid there motionless in fear of discovering a broken limb. The song was echoing throughout the whole valley;

`Don't remember where I was,

 I realized, life was a game.'

Oh I did realize life was a game! The song did its best to help me get a grip on what had just happened. Yet the tune grew sour as the verses followed:

`A tout le monde, a tout les amis,

 Je vous aime, je dois partir.'

With these words, a sudden rush, a `fear of death' struck my heart! And despite the previous two moments in my life which had brought me face to face with the end, this time the feeling persisted. No room for the hit and run of guerilla warfare! The feeling would not go away, but would grow stronger and even more ruthless. A hand was clutching my soul harder with every passing moment as I tried to set my being free of its paralyzing grasp. I decided to try and get up before the pressure became unbearable."

She looked down at the raped soul at her lap. He was listening just like a four-year-old would succumb to his grandmother's dull tales. She contemplated on the chance that her victim could sense the strain in her utter existence. Yet she quickly got rid of the thought, since it would not matter: The poor man would be dead in no more than half an hour.

"I did get up. To my surprise, and my gratitude, apparently no bones were broken. Cautiously, I dragged my feet towards the wreck. The `fear of death' was slowly packing its bags and preparing to leave my innerself. Oh it was the worst guest ever to accommodate within the confines of my conscience!

I reached the car, and stretched my arm through the broken windshield to cut the music short; the song was now pissing me off, or maybe just injecting anxiety like a snake does for a horse. Someone might hear those ominous lyrics, or (her voice went low into a tone of hissing) something..."

She felt a cold tremor overtaking her body. It was so abrupt that she failed to stop it, nor could she moderate the wobble of her victim's head as she kept shaking, flesh and soul. It was a rather funny scene to watch, except for the blood leaking through the holes in the neck. 

She looked down, trying hard to ease the instability of her state of mind, but the memory was still suffocating, the deadlock on her body still firm and strong. Even though her shell nestled life no more, she HAD to breathe. So she gave her tale a rest and diverted the subject.

"Damn that song" she said, "You got a favorite song?"

She knew *bloody* well that she would receive no other response to her pointless question than the shrieking echo of that last word in her brain's dark halls.... "song...song...song..."

The man was drained of all answers... but his lips seemed to move all the same! She leaned towards him, and was all ears to grab the weak words out of his mouth. She almost respected this valiant soul refusing to give up as easy as many would wish.

He was trying to sing something weird; something in between a children's song and some ancient chanting; a living tune that couldn't make up its mind to become either the national anthem of a proud country or the worthless whining of an addict in crisis.

"What bitter vampire made you this?...

  Gave you life with its deadly kiss..."

The shivers came to strike back, as sudden as they did a moment ago. She wandered her eyes around the room quickly and looked back at the faint man, lying like an enchanted groom awaiting his black bride, arms wide open. Could he really be listening to her tale all along?! How could he still have that touch of life that murmured a chime out of lips half dead? She realized she had hastily started talking as her brain kept on wrestling that mishmash of questions...

"I reached through the windshield and managed to mute the stereo. I was sick of the noise, but dead silence was not the cure. I headed for the road that had triggered me off its back like a wild horse. However, I collapsed after a few steps. I was on my knees, crying instead of getting up and continuing the climb.

 What would I do? How would I explain the accident to my husband? The car belonged to him and was not under insurance. He refused to believe in the need for such things.

 `Caution eliminates all danger' he always used to say, `if you're not cautious enough to avoid the danger, you pay!'. And I had `paid' so many times before..."

Her words came to a sudden halt with an urge to grind her teeth, but the impulse passed away as soon as she remembered her mouth was `armed'.

" `Maybe I'll just kill him!' I thought, `Here I am, having just seen how quick and easy death may come.... Yes, maybe I'll kill him, drag the corpse over here and warm my hands over the blazing fire of this cursed car and that damn drunk....'

A gush of wind through the thick woods cut my thoughts, like a knife cuts through..."

She shifted her gaze from nothingness back to her victim's throat,

"...butter."

She began trembling again, this time softly, as if swaying to a peaceful lullaby.

"Then a second current of air hit my body, chilling me to the bone. In an attempt to shake it off, I rushed to my feet; there was seemingly nothing left from the initial exhaustion that had brought me down to my knees.

  I recited prayer over prayer as I gave everything I had to climb through the damp grass. That did not help. The horror had already nestled itself and it would not move. I was, only much later, to remember that the intense fear was not of death but of something even more terrible.

  The climb was like a swim in a mound of quicksand. It was nearly impossible to gain adequate footholds on the soft damp earth, nor could I deliver a firm grasp on the moist grass that mockingly slid out of my palms.

  Meanwhile, something, some macabre tingling was growing inside me.  It could be the alien cold of those two rushes of wind - or maybe the anticipation of a third one.

  I looked back, awaiting something, some unidentified fear contaminating more of my cells with every passing second."

She studied the giant cuckoo clock that stood like a punished student, there at the corner of the room. A punished student here in this gloomy room.

Who was the teacher then?..
The answer was straightforward.
The teacher was the time; it was the best yet most merciless teacher.

She smiled as her thoughts wandered.
For her kind, the school was over.
That teacher had long lost the authority.

Mr Lovecraft should be well aware of this fact when he quite fittingly said:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
Yet with strange aeons even death may die.

Blinking wearily, she went on with her story,

"I realized I had given all that effort in vain; I had only climbed two or three feet as the reward for my desperate struggle. The unknown fear of an unidentified intruder had almost conquered my entire being, polluting the blood in nearly every vein, sapping the strength of heart and muscle; eating into the brain'.
   Something was FOLLOWING me!

  A movie line long forgotten thundered into my skull, spilling sparkles over my mind. And the coldest of everything instantly began pouring in through the cavity it burst open:
   `Night has eyes'."

She noticed the intensity in her victim's gaze, now approaching infinity. It was as if he had willingly agreed to exchange the remainder of his life with the untold part of her mournful memoir. If that were the case, he would be heartbroken to see that she was in no mood to care the least. Who cares about a broken heart if it beats no more?
She carried on.

"My vision, enlit by torches of panic, enhanced by the peak of all my senses, had turned the night's dark cold embrace into daylight. 
   A cry of terror had sailed, floating like a storm-struck ship, out from the core of my soul, but it wouldn't move an inch further into sound, maybe in fear of an enormous waterfall.

  My head was spinning, as was my gaze. I would pay a brief look of high density to every object around me, till I would grow dizzy of the circular motion, and my eyes would hug the pain of the strain.

   I found out nothing, but the sweat all over my body kept telling me that the night did have eyes.

  Then I completely lost myself, and started clawing the blind earth, in hopeless attempts to climb.... to flee.... from.... it... them........ the eyes...

  I slipped off and, having sacrificed all my balance to the engulfing trepidation, I stumbled down the slope."

She dived into her victim's eyes, which were now half-fixed on her brow, half-fixed on emptiness.

"Then I met the eyes. I knew I would face them the moment I raised my head after the fall. And I raised my head to surrender to their call."

She remembered a self-hypothesis she had derived from the wild-life documentaries she used to watch back when she was a teenager (a human!). She had named her theory as "The Language of Death". According to her theory, there was a fatal channel of communication between a wild animal and its prey: The Eyes.

The Eyes spoke the words of the Language of Death...

She had heard the language spoken so many times. A fawn in the woods would encounter a dire wolf. The eyes would make contact and the gazes would be sealed in an instant. Both alert, both busy encoding and deciphering, they would just stand idle. Then suddenly the wolf would cut communication and tear the fawn into pieces, feasting on its meat. OR the fawn would quit speaking and bounce away comfortably, while the wolf wouldn't move a limb, let alone follow.

She thought this had got nothing to do with the hunger of a wild dog or the agility of a deer. It all ended up in The Eyes. If the victim says "I'm yours; end my existence now.", the predator kills and eats. If its prey conveys "I'm not ready to die; let me go.", then the hunter sets it free and goes on searching for some other food.

This was not related to the civilized human life and the exchange between an assassin and his target; this was nothing like having mercy on a begging man or just pulling the trigger in cold blood.

This was all wild life; a vital symphony of kill-eat-live; a vicious circle of nature's choice. This was the undeniable set of standards, a dictate of grim rules put forward by the unseen hand of death.

Some would think this was all nonsense and they would give the example of predators that simply massacred farm animals. These wild creatures would just shred and kill the domesticated animals, but not feed upon their meat.
However, this was not a counter-argument. Quite the contrary, it provided a firm support for her theory. A tamed animal wouldn't know (or would have long forgotten) the language of death, and therefore would only resonate a message of chaos through the eye contact with the wild. This message would consequently violate the wolf's frequency and the wolf would tear the sheep apart in its own panic, running away without tasting the flesh.

"...the eyes that sent waves of death beyond death, full of life beyond life, that roared towards my shore of consciousness. Along with the waves came a parching breeze that spew burning sands into my eyes, slashing through my nostrils, scorching my lips and deafening my ears. 
   A black veil, love relentless,
   A blackout of all my senses..."

She remembered her grandfather's words. Up till the moment she met that wildest twist in her destiny, she hadn't taken those words seriously. 

"Life is a song, my mini. Mine is but a long one, though not as sweet as I could have composed it. Sometimes, they won't let you sing as you like, but that would not silence the chirping of a bird, would it? No, my mini, you shall never give up.

Every song has a beauty in itself, so there's no harm in lending an ear to other people's lives. Be cautious though, lest you be deceived by their overwhelming tunes. Even the most brilliant of all melodies may lead you wrong. Worse still, they may even spoil or dominate your own song.  You've got to cut off people who persistently ignore the beauty of your composition. 

Now listen close mini, don't take a leaf out of grandpa's book, for I've tried to sing for as long and loud as possible. I was wrong, because longevity is nothing compared to sincerity. Do everything, everything to make it sound like your song, even though it may last short and sound rather off-key. Just remain true to your self. Stress every note and emphasize every melody. Then, when the time comes for eternal silence, even though you may quit, your song will live forever."

"A wind that whistled my own song...."

She had to take a deep ragged breath to continue.

"...that offered eternity."

All of a sudden, she recalled an extract from Tunnel of Love, one of her favorite songs from the time when she was dying to learn to play the guitar:
"Your hands are cold, but your lips are warm."

"Then a hand, even colder than the gusts of wind that had struck me, caressed my neck. My soul was frozen long before my body; maybe that was why the cold did not hurt me this time. Then it... kissed... my throat; an eerie gravity in its... its... lips...... teeth...
  I fell in love that instant. I still have no idea about its nature or its gender. The one thing I know is that it was beyond all possible descriptions, beyond the reach of words or notes... or even imagination. It had spoken "the language" and pulled out the roots of my surrender from my eyes, along with every breath that tied me to life."

She had to swallow the bitter taste in her mouth. Rotten cheese.
She could neither stand the sight nor bear the smell of it! Due to reasons not concerning anything else than her stubborn nature, cheese was her enemy, from cradle to eternity.
Even though she had never taken a single bite of it, she was somehow sure the taste right now in her mouth was that of a rotten piece of cheese.

The grimace on her face grew more unpleasant as she remembered the only other instance she felt that very same taste on her tongue; the moment her grandfather died in front of her eyes.
A bank robbery...
Death by crossfire in the heart of the city...
What a sad way to end a song.

The police applied the emergency first aid, but her grandfather passed away before the first ambulance arrived. The robber disappeared from the crime scene. Days of criminal search ensued, all to no avail. It was as if the man just vanished into thin air and became invisible!

"Well," she thought, murmuring softly to herself, "invisible to the eyes of the sun...".
The grimace flooded her face, "...but the night has eyes too."

Her grandfather could only whisper something like "Take care of my song, mini." before he left for his eternal silence. How could she, a six-year-old little girl, take care of a song the notes to which she didn't know? How could that girl comprehend what that song was about in the first place, considering she hadn't learned singing her own song yet?

Now she understood. She stared out through the window at the pinky blue smile of dawn. Then she nodded.

Her first painful experience with her husband shone pale like the full moon against the crimson skies of her mind. It was only the first week of their marriage when the blasted man got the pink slip from work and perceived alcohol as his ticket back. But that didn't grant him his old beloved job. In the following week, apparently having understood that alcohol did no good by itself, he began beating her like a rookie boxer on a workout.

She remembered how the ache in her soul surpassed the pain from those "boxing lectures"; a swollen bruise was no match for a broken heart. For the second time in her life, she was caught in the crossfire. A wedding ring was the police, a shell of a man the robber. She could never figure out the type of bullets fired by her husband's fists, but she knew that her bullets would have eyes if the time to fire them ever came.

"Pain was my anticipation, but there was none of it. My skin was made of glass, enormously heated under the sun; setting whatever there was inside on fire. My heart was like a fish out of water. 

 As the kiss turned into a bite, I felt I was living through my most secret fantasy. My emotions were alert beyond expression; everything was solid, but unreal all the same. I just wished that moment would last forever, because it was the purest thing in my life. Yet, it somehow had a faint smell of sin...

  I felt like... exactly like.... (rotten cheese) .... letting go of my virginity."

It was as if a hundred years had passed since she had last looked down at the young man whose facial lines were now easier to distinguish under the first rays of the awakening sun. Her skin was slowly sizzling; an itchy feeling, revolting against the morning sunlight. The dusty mirror on top of the nearby dresser was now barely visible, unlike her own reflection on the dull glass.

"You are invisible!"

"No, I'm just transparent for you to see me through."

Looking out the open window, she saw a mass of wings in the distance, flying south, taking the rising fire to their left. She could see they were flying in a V-formation. She knew that the birds flapping wings at the outer border of the giant V formed a comfortable air channel, a safe tube for the birds on the inner ranks to travel. Then the two groups of birds would swap places and interchange duties; fresh power would replace weary wings exhausted by fierce wind exposure.

It was rather unfair that she had flown on the outer line her entire life. Nobody inside cared to see how she spent herself just to provide a wind-free channel for others. The wind would grow stronger and fiercer, but she would still be sentenced to confronting it.

Now she was the wind herself. She smiled despite the increasing hurt from the sun. She stared at the flock of birds for a couple minutes more and thought on the inevitable nature of migration. Everything migrated, literally everything; the ones that showed resistance had no chance of existence.

She caressed her victim's throat and all in a moment decided to grant him the wits of the undead. She wouldn't finish him off; not because the blood grew colder, not because the sun had almost risen, but just because he deserved another chance of existence. He was extremely strong, yet he showed her no resistance. He now had a dark touch on his soul, yet he was the light shed on her memory.

She took one last glance at the migrating birds, and imagined herself as one of them.
She was a dove, breaking away from the group, spreading wings towards where the sun will be setting.

She shook her head.
"Why a dove?" she asked herself, "Doves wouldn't migrate...".

Then she looked down again at the pale face, at the now blinking eyes reflecting the hue of the newborn day. She smirked...

"Are you a Corvette manufacturer by any chance?"

The worn-out man was baffled by the question but his lips managed to part ways with a semi-conscious reply.

"N...no."

He looked up at the vaguely familiar silhouette of an enchanting woman; it was only when she bent down as if to whisper a secret into his ear that he noticed her eyes. They were oddly dark, a set of pearls tucked away from the fiery fingers of the sun outstretched along the clear sky. Her eyes were now scanning him like those of a painstaking gardener scanning a bug newly discovered beneath the fragile flowers.

"Then I'm glad I did not kill you!"

The grin on her face was disturbing. Then again, her crooked smile drew such an inviting picture that he felt he could do everything to stare at the sight a few moments longer. 

Soothing warble of a long forgotten song pacified the scream which kept warning him of an unidentified danger. Some wicked feeling was concealed under the gentle touch of a silky smile.

"Who are you?" the man dared ask, consumed by confusion.

The expression on the woman's face almost swallowed him.

Somehow, his whole life was hidden within that expression. He knew he was still alive, but the countenance told him tales of distant lands where lives stepped over a frontier to be purified by love... and cursed with eternity.

"Who am I?" she rephrased the question, then sighed.

The giant clock stopped ticking.

"You'll have to die to find out."