Iceman

South Blytheville, Arkansas

There is a single eye. An eye alone. This eye watches from the darkness, seeing nothing yet seeing much. If, indeed, it IS an eye, what does it see? From its vantage point it sees shapes, strange outlines, large, shadowy forms, the familiar look of a room. An eye. One eye by itself. Cyclops.

Darkness in the room. The eye has no ears, so it cannot hear the detective on the wooden stairs, wire-cutting tool snapping the wire, breaking the police seal of a crime scene, fumbling for a set of keys. Inserting one. Clicks. Pause. Inserting another. Metal pressure. Movement.

Cyclops sees a frightening sight. A blinding rectangle of the brightest light smashes into view. A bright, dazzling opening of light in the dark outlines of what the eye sees.

A man's fearsome silhouette is framed in the brightness. He is only a large, looming black form in the center of the light. He enters, stumbling. Hand slapping the wall. Fumbling for something. Pause. Another stab into Cyclops's field of vision.

The unseeing eye, if indeed it IS an eye, might see the stabbing brightness of a flashlight beam shooting into the black, sweeping across the long expanse of rooms, illuminating a spot on the wall as the detective finds the light switch.

The flashlight blinks off and the room is bathed in electric light. The interior of a mobile home. Yet not ordinary at first glance. The initial impression of something extraordinary is enhanced by the smell. The stench of the abbatoir. The hideous, nauseating stink of the killing fields. The foul and lingering odor of the hasty burial ground. It attacks the nostrils in a merciless wave of stinging horror that hammers the olfactory sense.

Cyclops watches over this hellish place. 1458-1/2 (Space G) South Utica.

The first thing Jack Eichord sees are the serving trays, but for that first moment the monumental horror of it seizes his thought processes and he cannot focus in on any of it. He looks but he does not see.

Then the wave of shock recedes enough that his mind begins to register.

Cyclops is the first thing he will see and perhaps the last thing he will remember in his nightmares.

Atop a pile of bloody human intestine is perched a single eyeball.

And then he sees the rest of it and his heart cries.