Dead Man's Eye

CHAPTER 7

Joanna stared at herself in the mirror. Black hair dishevelled after a sleepless night and her transplanted eye puffy, she looked a mess, but felt even worse.

As she stepped away from the mirror, her mobile phone rang and she crossed the room and picked it up. She squinted to read the name on the display. It was her mum.

“Hi,” she said.

“When are you going to come down to see us? You know how long it’s been?”

Joanna rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think I’ve got enough problems with my eyes?”

“I thought they were alright now.”

Joanna read between the lines. Her mum wasn’t the sort to enquire how she was. She circumvented the question, hoping that Joanna would fill in the blanks.

“Well my sight still isn’t right, and I’m not up to a long journey. You could always visit me.” She knew it wasn’t going to happen. Her mum had agoraphobia; hadn’t left the house for over six years, and relied on photographs of special events, such as Joanna’s graduation, to make her believe she was a part of it.

“You know I would…”

Joanna sighed. “I’ll come down as soon as I feel up to it. Promise.”

“Well don’t leave it too long. I miss seeing you.”

“Yes, I miss you too, mum.”

She spent the next fifteen minutes catching up with all the gossip that her mum gleaned from Joanna’s father, then she finished the call.

Just as she put her mobile down on the table, it rang again.

“Morning. I didn’t wake you, did I?” Stephen asked.

“No, I’ve been up a while. Mum rang so I’ve been chatting to her. What’s up?”

“I just thought I’d put your mind at rest. I went to the ward where Lincoln is and spoke to the staff nurse, and she said Lincoln hadn’t been anywhere yesterday.”

The mention of the man’s name made her stiffen. “And that’s supposed to put my mind at rest! How can they be sure?”

“Because he was sedated.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means he was unconscious.”

Joanna exhaled slowly. “So I’m going mad then?”

“Of course not. You’re just, I don’t know, upset still.”

“Ah, the psychoanalysis again.”

“Look, Jo, if you feel there’s something wrong, make another appointment with the doctor. It’ll probably put your mind at rest if you just talk to him.”

“I dunno.”

“You’ve never met my aunt Vera. Now she’s crazy.” He laughed. “Seriously, you’re not going mad. Trust me on that. I should know.”

You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what I have, she thought.

Luckily, she’d managed to arrange an appointment at the hospital for the next morning. She wasn’t convinced that it would help, but she couldn’t think of anything else to do. As she waited outside the doctor’s room, she tried to think of how she should broach the subject. Should she just come straight out and say what she’d seen? Or should she ask him whether it’s possible that the operation might cause her to see aberrations? Whichever way she said it, it sounded the same. She was seeing things that couldn’t be real.

Before long, she found herself sat before the doctor, twiddling her thumbs and staring at the knickknacks on his desk: pens, stapler, notebook, tape recorder, toy dalek, a framed picture of two small children.

“So Miss Raines, how can I help you this time?”

She licked her lips. “I guess I’m seeing things.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll have to speak up.”

Joanna sat up straight and looked at the doctor. “I think I’m seeing things. Well, I don’t think, I know I’m seeing things.”

“Seeing things. What sort of things?”

“Erm, shadows I guess.”

The doctor wrinkled his brow. “And are they visible all the time, these… shadows?”

“No, not all the time.”

“So when did you first notice them?”

She explained about the accident at the train station.

The doctor leaned back in his leather chair and tapped a pen against his teeth. “And since then, when you’ve seen the man who lost his arm, you think you see him with two arms.”

“One arm and a sort of what I guess you’d call a shadow arm really.”

“Is it just an arm you think you see?”

“Well no, it’s like he’s… I don’t know, surrounded by shadows, like a what do you call it, corona. That’s it, a dark corona.” Saying it aloud made her feel stupid and she looked back at her hands in her lap.

“I see.”

Joanna wished she did, or to be more precise, that she didn’t.

“You never see the shadows at any other time?”

“No, never.”

The doctor was about to respond when a knock at the door interrupted him.

“Come in.”

Joanna looked up as a red-haired nurse with stocky legs walked into the room.

“Doctor Hazleton…” the nurse said.

Joanna stared wide-eyed at the black shadow surrounding the nurse. Her jaw dropped, tongue glued to the bottom of her mouth. Although unable to see the nurse clearly, she could see the shadow around her.

“Miss Raines, are you alright?” the doctor asked.

“Do you see it?” Joanna asked.

“See what?”

“The shadow.”

“You’re seeing it now?”

“It’s all around her.”

The nurse stared at Joanna, and despite her impaired vision, Joanna saw the woman’s eyes. Completely black. Darker even than the corona. Evil.

“Miss Raines. Joanna. Look at me,” the doctor said.

Although scared to look away, Joanna turned to face the doctor – could feel those black, evil eyes still staring at her.

“Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real. I’ll need to run some tests, but I can assure you that there are no shadows around the nurse.”

Joanna swallowed to moisten her throat. “Then I’m going mad.”

“Absolutely not. It could be any number of things.”

“Or it could be that I’m right.”

The doctor exhaled through his mouth, making his lips vibrate with a machine gun rattle. “We’ll get to the bottom of it. I promise. It’s common for a transplant recipient to have astigmatism and other irregularities with their vision as a result of the surgery. Don’t worry. Just make an appointment with the receptionist on your way out.”

“But why don’t I see the shadows all the time? Why don’t I see them on you?”

“I don’t know, but like I said, we’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Realising she wasn’t going to get any answers from the doctor, Joanna stood and made her way towards the door, making sure that she didn’t look at the nurse on the way out.

Once outside the room, she sighed and looked at her hands, which were shaking.

The overhead fluorescent lights hurt her eyes, and the one with the corneal transplant watered, so she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes to rest them. She knew stress made her vision worse, and she was up to her neck in stress now, resulting in what she called the foggies, making visibility through the Fuchs’ eye virtually impossible.

Despite the doctor’s words of encouragement, she didn’t feel reassured. Whatever the problem was, she felt it went much deeper.

The loss of vision had been so gradual that she hadn’t even realised she had a problem until she ran a red light and almost collided with a lorry. That had been the wake up call she needed. Before that, she assumed the fuzziness was dirty windscreens, scratched lenses on the cameras and any other number of excuses to divert attention from her own failing sight. Before the transplant, she had mistaken shadows for actual objects (had once mistaken a shadow in the road for a person and had shouted at them to get out of the way before they were run over), but this, this was different. Now she was seeing shadows where there shouldn’t be any.

But it wasn’t just the shadows. It was the feeling that went with them. The feeling of something… malignant. She just couldn’t explain it.

Compelled by the need to return home to rest, she opened her eyes and made her way along the corridor. The sight through her Fuchs’ eye was now like trying to see through Vaseline smeared eyeglasses, making her rely on her transplanted cornea, which wasn’t much better at the moment.

People passing by looked more blurry by the second, ethereal, as though viewed through a heat haze. The effect induced a headache that throbbed at her temples.

Joanna now knew how Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz felt: There’s no place like home – only she would add, ‘and the sooner, the better’.

“Miss Raines!”

Joanna saw a misshapen figure approaching. Despite her sight, she recognised the lumbering behemoth by the voice alone: Lincoln Parker.

Terror infiltrated every pore of her body. Joanna didn’t know why, but she had to get away. Without waiting to see whether shadows enveloped the man, she ran, ignoring the shouts and curses of those she bumped into in her haste to flee.

There’s no place like…