Darker Than Weird: Fourteen Tales of Horror

Behind the Eyes

They say the eyes are windows to the soul. I can tell you this old sentiment is true beyond any doubt. As a passerby inspects a luxurious home by peering through its lucid panes of glass, a man studies his lover’s soul by gazing into the liquid depth of her eyes. But every window has two sides. The house’s owner looks out at the world through those same windows. Here the analogy ends: the door of any house provides entry and exit for its owner each day, but the door that permits a soul to leave its body opens only at death. However, there are exceptions to this rule. Times when doors and windows open and close blindly. Times when something terrible looks out from behind those glassy, blood-veined orbs.

Despite her legendary strangeness, I never truly believed that my grandmother was a witch. I first went to stay with her as a six-year-old, my mother driving me along a winding dirt road until we reached the dilapidated farmhouse. Granny Armaya was my father’s mother; the father who had left us when I was a few weeks old. He’d grown up here, on this farm that had seen better days. There were only a few cows and a single horse left on its twelve acres of thinly wooded hills. We drove by a ramshackle structure that used to be the barn, now a slowly dissolving mass of rain-rotted wood. It reminded me of a piece of candy I’d left lying out in the sun the week before, melting in upon itself until it became a shapeless lump of nothing.

Barbed-wire fences enclosed the farm, and I saw a pale horse chewing the grass of a sun-browned hillside. Granny sat on a wooden porch swing, watching as my mother parked her station wagon. She wore big, horn-rimmed glasses, the first thing I noticed about her. That and her hair, still black as night in her old age — a persistent reminder of her Romany heritage.

Granny was a full-blooded gypsy, I learned later. Mother said she had come over from the Old Country in the thirties, her family spending the last of its European wealth to buy this little farm. Her husband, the grandfather I never met (just like my father), died less than a year after their immigration, leaving his wife and three sons to work the farm. One by one they slipped away, like restless shadows heading for the city, and the farm fell into ruin. Now Granny lived alone in the old house, surrounded by a family of crooked, black trees. Sometimes her other two sons would visit, but my father never came back to the farm. Not even my mother knew where he had gone. To her he was only the coward who left her to raise an infant alone in the city.

Although she was strange to me, I did not fear Granny Armaya. She welcomed me with a warm smile and a hug, and won me over with fresh-baked cookies. She let me run about the farm all day, playing among the twisted trees and trying to coax the horse near enough to let me pet it. My mother left me there all summer while she went back to the city to finish earning her college diploma. She would be the first one in her family to graduate from a university. Fifteen years later, I would be the second.

Granny Armaya cooked big meals for me, with plenty of sweets. Sometimes we fished in the little creek that ran through her property. But the most enduring memory I have of my time with her is when she took me up into her attic. My young brain reeled at the cluttered antiquity on display here.

Animal skulls hung along the walls, dried herbs swung like black chains from the low rafters, a thousand candles of all shapes and sizes sat across the floor, strategically placed among painted images that boggled my mind. Granny showed me her cauldron, an iron pot sitting on a hot-plate, the place where she brewed medicine to cure her arthritis. I watched her work among the candlelight, fascinated by the weird environment. Often I wondered about, combing through ancient chests full of velvet fabrics, antique clothing, gypsy-carved dolls, trinkets, jewelry. Occasionally I found a grainy, yellowed photograph of some sharply-dressed ancestor. Granny could name anyone whose picture I found in these trunks, but their names were Romany and I could not pronounce them. Several of them wore old-world military garb, with spiked helmets and curved sabers held against their chests. Once I squealed to find an ancient war dagger, preserved in a sheathe of moldering leather. Granny said it belonged to my great-great-grandfather, and she let me keep it.

The potions she brewed in the attic smelled horrible, but I didn’t mind. There was so much to discover in that dust-blanketed treasure trove. By the second week of my summer vacation I spent more time browsing through the attic than playing in the fields. There was only one area of the attic that was off limits to me. It was a small alcove, or closet, in the very back of the room, closed off with a curtain of dark purple velvet.

“What’s back there?” I asked Granny. She was stirring up the medicine in her iron pot, adding a pinch of something like powdered bone. At my question, she ambled over to me, grabbed me by the arm, and brought her wrinkled face close to me. She smelled minty, like the ointment she rubbed on her joints at night.

“Don’t ever go back there, Stefan” she said, pointing to the curtain. Beyond its hem I saw a sliver of blackness peeking through. “That’s where the eyes are.”

She reached out and pulled the curtain aside with one liver-spotted hand. Inside was a visible nothingness: a rectangle of infinite darkness, where the candlelight could not go. A few days earlier I had stared into the black depths of the farm’s stone-rimmed well, and could see no trace of the water that must lay far below. But this darkness was deeper, more solid, more impenetrable than even the subterranean gloom of the well. I felt that I might stumble and fall into that alcove, into that absolute dark, and I realized that I wasn’t breathing. I sucked at the smoky attic air.

Before Granny let the curtain slide closed, I saw two orange pin-points of light staring out from the darkness. Narrow, burning things that made my skin crawl.

The eyes.

I was crying then, and Granny scooped me up into her arms. I sobbed into her shoulder as she carried me downstairs. “It’s all right, Stefan,” she whispered into my ear. She carried me out onto the porch, where the brilliant sun fell on my face, dried my tears. I sat on the swing watching a light breeze play through the leafy branches of the trees, and she brought me cold lemonade and a slice of cake. Soon I was my old self again. We never spoke about the alcove, or the eyes, again.

Three more weeks I stayed at Granny’s house, spending most of my time outside. Eventually I coaxed the pale horse near enough to the barbed wire, offering it a red apple. I petted its soft nose as it ate the fruit. Granny seemed proud of me, though she warned me not to cross the fence into the horse’s running ground.

In the evenings I watched cartoons on her big, floor-model television set, while she went about the house hanging strands of herbs, or painting odd symbols on the windows. She sang odd little songs to herself in the old tongue as she hung talismans and bone charms along the roof of the porch. These were the behaviors that caused the children who lived on neighboring farms to call my Granny a witch.

Sometimes I played with these kids on top of the green hills surrounding the farm, but they wouldn’t come down into the witch’s realm. I tried to tell them how nice she was, tried to bribe them with promises of candy and cookies, but none of them would visit me in my grandmother’s house. I had to go up to meet them if I wanted to play. Eventually I decided, with the simple wisdom of a child, to let them think what they wanted to think about her. But I never believed it. Even after I saw the eyes, I never believed it.

When my mother came to pick me up, I cried. I would miss Granny, her wonderful meals, her willingness to indulge me, the wide playground of the lazy farm. I’d miss the pale horse, who I had named Dancer. But it was time to go. That year I entered third grade, and I soon learned once again to enjoy life in the city. I saw Granny one more time before she died, though. I was eleven.

The farm looked very different than I remembered, now that winter had claimed it. The hills were white, covered in a shroud of pristine snow. The horse was gone, sold three years prior along with the rest of the cattle. The trees were barren, grotesque giants bending ice-gloved claws toward the earth. The creek was a silver pathway of ice winding through the colorless landscape.

Granny’s house sat unchanged beneath its snow-crowned roof, with a black coil of smoke rising from its chimney. My mother and I had come to visit her for the holidays, probably the only ones who cared to do so. But she didn’t come out to greet us. I carried her present, wrapped in a crimson bow, up to the door. Our knocks went unanswered, but the door was unlocked. Although the house was warm, and fresh pastries lay along the dinner table, Granny was nowhere to be found.

“I’ll check out back,” my mother said. “See if she’s in the attic.”

At once I remembered that alcove where I had seen the eyes. I didn’t want to go up there. But I was older now, and reluctant to tell my mother about my fear. So I walked up the creaking set of stairs into the fog of Granny’s candle-smoke. The iron pot bubbled with some noxious brew, but where was my grandmother? I called out her name. She had to be here somewhere. I avoided looking toward the back of the attic until I heard footsteps.

Granny pushed back the dark curtain, walking out of the alcove, out of the infinite darkness. She squinted at me through the gloom. “Stefan?”

“Merry Christmas, Granny,” I said, full of improvised cheer. She smiled and came toward me. But as the curtain fell across the darkness, I found my own eyes drawn to that black pit — I expected to see those evil eyes glaring back at me. I almost screamed. But there was only darkness, thick and invulnerable to vision. Then the curtain hid even that from me. Granny hugged me, and I helped her down the stairs where we celebrated the holiday and enjoyed one of her immaculate dinners.

I always regretted not visiting her again, but we lived so far away. Once I entered high school I stayed busy with sports, clubs and academics. Then I attended State College, earning a degree in English. Soon I was teaching middle-school and my next goal was to find a woman worthy of marriage. So I spent most of my time working or trying to please a seemingly endless procession of vapid, self-centered women.

My mother eventually got remarried and took a job up north. I stayed in the city where I had grown up, and was perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life there, looking for an ideal mate and teaching kids to read. But the recent news of Granny Armaya’s death took me once again into the country.

It wasn’t really a funeral, since I was the only mourner present. It seems all of Granny’s progeny had vanished, like my father. The pastor said a few words and the undertaker lowered her coffin into the ground of the local cemetery. It rained. Granny had left me the tiny farm and her old house, but the estate taxes and burial expenses had to be paid. Only by arranging to sell everything could I avoid going into debt. I decided to visit the old farmhouse one last time, to salvage what I could for posterity before I sold it.

Fall was in full swing when I drove down the winding road, still unpaved after all these years. A swirl of saffron leaves filled the air behind my car as I approached Granny’s house. It was quiet as death on the farm, ruled now by the trees that wept dying leaves across the earth. No smoke rose from the chimney, and the porch had caved in on the east side. I noticed one of the living room windows was broken, and as I neared the front door a black raven flew out of the shattered pane, startling me. Remembering the Poe poem, I smiled grimly.

The power had been shut off so I brought a flashlight from my car. Inside the house, the smells of a half-forgotten childhood filled my nostrils, the lingering scents of sugary baked goods, homemade candy, and charred firewood. Beneath it all, the barely perceptible tang of Granny’s medicine. It appeared the house had been looted, the couch and chairs were overturned and ripped as if with a hunting knife. Anything of value had been taken. I found an old photo album laying on the floor of Granny’s shattered bedroom, that was all. On my way back to the living room, I passed the door to the attic.

Even as an adult, I did not want to climb those stairs. But I remembered the treasures Granny used to keep up there, and I knew it might be the only way to gather momentos of any worth, sentimental or otherwise. Dismissing my childhood terrors, I ascended. The attic was largely unmolested. Granny’s implements of supposed witchery lay scattered across the floor, or hung from the peeling walls. All the dead candles were burned to stubs, and the iron pot lay cold and bare, turned on its side.

Like steel drawn to a magnet, I walked toward the back of the room. The purple curtain still hung there. I forced myself to stand before the alcove, trying to get up the nerve to move that fabric aside and shine my flashlight into that interminable darkness. I reached for the curtain. My fingers trembled. I tore it aside and a battery-powered ray of light sliced through the darkness.

The alcove was lined with dozens of shelves, each one loaded with glass jars of various sizes. Exhaling, I entered the tiny space, holding my flashlight before me like a crucifix. Its light shone through the dusty glass of the containers, and my flesh crawled like it did when I was six. Within each jar lay a pair of round objects. There must have been hundreds of them, glistening like pallid marbles dotted with ruby, sapphire, or onyx. A vast collection of preserved human eyeballs.

Some of them were dry and yellowed, while many retained a perfect whiteness surrounding the prismatic irises. They seemed to stare at me, uninterested, lifeless, unconcerned. Entombed behind dirty glass. Granny had hidden her bizarre collection from me, no doubt for good reason. I remembered the eyes I had seen as a child, glaring out at me from this room. Just as I knew for a certainty that these were all human eyes, I knew that those feral things were not.

The batteries of my flashlight gave out. The light fluttered once, then died completely. Darkness fell over me like a smothering blanket. My breath caught in my throat, and I no longer knew the way out of this room. I could see nothing; or nothing was all that I could see.

Dizziness filled me, and I felt as if I would fall. But I no longer felt the ground beneath my feet. I groped outward, but I could not feel any shelves, my flailing arms disturbed no glass jars. An immense pressure filled my ears, as annihilation filled my eyes.

Suddenly, I saw flames. Soundless vision filled my brain. Flames leapt, and stars glimmered beyond them in a black sky. Murky faces stared at me through the flames. I looked down and found that my body was not my own. I was naked, and a woman. Ropes of strong hemp bound me to the tall pole at my back. The flames licked at my flesh, and I watched it curl and blacken. I was screaming in agony, but I could not hear myself, and I felt no pain. I knew then that it was not me who burned, but the poor woman whose eyes through which I now looked.

The faces beyond the dancing flames spat at me. I saw them clearer now. Garbed in the black and white garments of a Puritan society, they stared at me with hate-filled eyes that mirrored the color of the flames. I looked out from behind the eyes of a witch as they burned her living body into ash. I gazed on, deaf and mute, until the eyes through which I saw burst and melted. Then I plunged back into darkness.

Another flash of light and I was a man again. Or at least I looked through the eyes of a man. He wore the uniform of a colonial soldier, and carried a long-barreled musket. Again, there was no sound, only vision. I imagined the man to be a glass jar, myself a bodiless pair of eyes trapped inside, looking out helplessly. I trudged through the snow, feeling neither the frostbite of my hands and feet, or the bloody wound in my right arm. Ahead, through a curtain of falling snow, I saw the wall of a wooden fort, with comfortable smoke rising from the peaked roofs beyond. I paused to wipe the cold sweat from my brow, almost home.

A black shape leapt from the snow. Its fangs ripped into me, painlessly, soundlessly. It was a lean, dark wolf, ravenous and desperate. But I recognized its smoldering orange eyes that glared into mine as it ripped my body apart. Those were the eyes…the ones that had stared at me from the ultimate darkness. The wolf tore out my own eyes then, whosever they were.

Once again I floated in the infinite dark, panicking. Then a flash and I looked through the eyes of yet another person. I was a woman again, or a girl. I walked along a deserted road, far from the lights of the city. Looking down at my own body, I saw a plaid skirt and high heels. Turning my head, I saw the smoking wreckage of a crashed car, its front end wrapped around a huge oak tree. I stumbled along the road, light-headed, until headlights came into view. Flagging down the car, a red Chevy Nova, I spoke a few words to the lone driver, who beckoned me inside. As I sat down, the man smiled at me, and turned his head. His eyes were those of a slavering beast, and he smiled. Before I could fumble the passenger door open, he pressed a gleaming blade against my throat. He whispered something I could not hear as he drew the knife across my flesh. And darkness came again.

I spun, tossed by invisible winds out of some primal void. I knew nothing else to do, so I called out my grandmother’s name. This time I heard my own voice, echoing through the nothingness.

I looked then at my own six-year-old self. I wrapped my arms around the little boy, smothering him with my genuine love. I realized that I now looked out from behind my Granny Armaya’s eyes, when she had still lived. My arms were hers, thin and spotted, my dress was an old, threadbare green, the one I always remembered her wearing. I watched the little boy that used to be me wander about the attic, prying into chests full of old junk. And I turned back to my cauldron, where I dropped in a batch of herbs. I saw the sigils scrawled across the attic floor and somehow, now, I understood their meaning. There was one particular symbol that sat within a crude pentagram, studded by lit candles. It drew my attention powerfully.

Vingaal.

I knew that word. I knew it meant “enemy.” I knew it meant “devil,” or “evil thing.” And I knew it represented everything I stood against. It was the murderous owner of the eyes.

Time passed, and I saw my grandmother work many strange spells. Only then, suspended behind her aged eyes, did I come to accept that she was a witch. But that wasn’t the correct word, for she battled the evil that was the Vingaal. To defy it was her purpose in life. It had claimed the life of her husband since it could not claim her own. It also took her children one by one, my father among them.

I learned that the name “Armaya” means “cursed” in the old tongue. I learned that Granny Armaya had come here far earlier than the thirties, and was far older than anyone would dare to guess, her life sustained by her arcane potions. I learned that the thing called Vingaal roamed the world feeding on the suffering and blood of innocents. If it could not murder directly, it seduced other innocents into murdering for it (like the Puritans who burned alive the innocent girl accused of witchcraft). I also learned what my grandmother was really doing all the time she spent weaving magic in her attic.

She followed the Vingaal, anticipating its victims, climbing behind their eyes and alerting them to its danger. She saved the lives of thousands in this way, spoiling the creature’s blood-play. For this it would never forgive her. It longed for her blood now more than any other.

I watched through my grandmother’s eyes as she entered her alcove of darkness yet again, sending her mind through the void, settling into the brains of those the Vingaal was stalking. Urging them to avoid the dark path after midnight, or to sidestep that particular alley where doom waited with an eager knife. Sometimes she even took control of the person’s body, physically driving the victim away from the Vingaal.

She wasn’t always successful. The Vingaal was clever, and determined. But she saved those she could. In the end, she even saved herself. But her potions could only hold off a natural death for so long, as her body continued to grow frail. It was a heart attack that finally took her life. I saw it strike her, in the middle of a conjuring, saw through her eyes as she staggered down the attic stairs to die on the living room floor.

Then I was alone in the darkness again.

I felt empowered by this knowledge of my grandmother’s sorcery. On impulse, I concentrated on my own body, willing myself to return. I had to get back to my living self, or be trapped in the void forever. There was a rush, a fresh falling sensation. Then I looked upon my adult body, standing in the dark alcove among the jar-lined shelves. I knew instantly that something was wrong.

How could I see my own body if I had re-entered it?

As I watched my own head turn to look straight at me, I realized I was looking out from inside one of the jars. I looked through a pair of those dried, preserved eyes kept in my grandmother’s alcove. And the smiling face that stared back at me was me, yet it was not me.

It had my face, but its eyes were blazing orange like hungry flames; narrow, bestial things that I recognized at once. I had none of my grandmother’s powers, and I had left my body standing defenseless in the alcove.

I had left it empty, and the Vingaal had filled it.

The wicked thing stared at me from behind my own eyes, grinned at me with my own mouth.

It reached out for the jar in which I lay, and instinctively I jerked backward, into the void once more. I was a bodiless, homeless soul adrift in an ocean of starless night.

I thought of the city, the thousands of people living there. Maybe there was someone who could help me. It was the only chance I had. I willed myself toward them.

I emerged from the dark behind the eyes of a cab driver, looking out his windshield at the rushing lights of traffic. I don’t know how long I looked helplessly upon those rain-soaked streets while he picked up one fare after another. Still I could hear nothing, say nothing, do nothing. How had my grandmother managed to take control of another’s body? If I could only do that, maybe there would be hope. Somehow, maybe I could reclaim my own body. But she had practiced her hidden craft for centuries…how could I hope to duplicate her mastery?

It was well past midnight when the cabbie picked up the last fare of his shift. He looked into the rear-view mirror at his passenger, asking for a destination. Helpless to do otherwise, I looked along with him. There, smiling in the back seat, sat myself with orange wolf-eyes. The Vingaal, using my hands, reached up and slit the cabbie’s throat with one of my grandmother’s kitchen knives. With my tongue he lapped up the spilling blood like a thirsty dog. Then I was free of the dead cabbie, hurling through the dark again.

I found myself looking through the eyes of a police officer, responding to a domestic abuse call in some less desirable neighborhood on the city’s south side. I watched his gloved hand knock on the door, hearing nothing. I knew who would answer it. As the door opened, the eyes looked back at me from my own face. I watched myself (the Vingaal) stab me (the cop) through the gut, wrenching the blade upward until it reached the heart. Behind me, the cop’s partner was going for his gun, but I knew the Vingaal’s knife would be faster. Then blackness.

Several more times I tried to find sanctuary behind the eyes of city dwellers. But every time the Vingaal came for me with his blood-smeared blade, his cruel smile that was a twisted perversion of my own, and his wicked eyes. Every time, someone new died. Then I realized what was really happening.

The Vingaal wanted me. Just as it had wanted my grandmother. She had cheated it by dying of natural causes. Wherever I went, it would follow me. By inhabiting anyone, I was condemning them to death at the hands of the immortal thing that wore my body.

So I stopped searching for eyes to look through. I couldn’t bear the thought of more deaths on my conscience. My intervention would only bring more slaughter. There was only one way to avoid the Vingaal now.

I floated in the empty space between souls, caught in that infinite darkness. I could neither see nor hear. Blackness cocooned my disembodied consciousness. It was either this, or dive behind someone else’s eyes, and so draw the Vingaal to take their life.

I know that I will be remembered as a murderer in the world of the living, and there is no way for me to tell anyone that it is not me killing all those people. That is not me walking in my body.

All I can do is float here in this ultimate dark, sinking ever deeper, drawing further and further away from the world of sunlight and living beings. I embrace the nothingness, wanting only to become a part of it. Let it dissolve the last bit of my guilt-wracked soul. Let there be an end.

I fall away from a string of violent deaths, into bottomless oblivion. The Vingaal will never follow me here…the lure of murder and pain is too powerful…it will not abandon its blood-play to descend into this nameless, formless void.

And yet, there is something here…a presence. More than one. They come to swim about me like shadows against darkness, invisible, but somehow I sense them.

They stare at me with burning, hungry eyes, like shapeless wolves.

There are millions of them. Millions of wicked things, one of whom is called Vingaal in another world so impossibly far away. They envy his freedom, they all want what he has.

I understand now that this non-place, this dark oblivion, is where they dwell. It is where they are born, dreaming of succulent living flesh.

They whisper to me. Telling me secrets.

Soon you will be one of us, they say.

I sink deeper, dissolving, the tattered threads of my mind spinning into the dark.

Now you are one of us.

Open your eyes…