Blindspot

I have a job that, I think, most people don’t consider to be too hard. But there’s a knack to it, a sort of catch, that can make it very stressful. Iw write horror stories and I believe that, at its core, horror is about exploration. I have to take you to see places and things no one has ever seen before. Which is hard, because everything in my head is a product of a life I’ve spent living in the same world as you. So I have to make sure that you see enough to get a fright, but never quite glimpse enough of it to break the illusion. But, how can anything be unknown when I’ve had to know it, in order to write it? That’s the catch. That’s the paradox. I have to take a great torch and shine it under a rock and say,

“Come look everyone, I’ve found some shadows.”

But of course, the light makes the shadows go away.

Did you know you have a blind spot? We all do. It’s where the optic nerve interferes with the light sensitive nerves on your retina, creating a small spot in your vision where you can’t see anything at all. It’s just I say this because I think somebody’s playing a joke on me. I’ve spent so long looking for darkness so that I can drag it into the light and show it off. But I’m not sure how I can do that.

It first came to my attention at the optometrist. I’d been getting headaches over the last year and I thought that perhaps my prescription needed updating, so I went for my usual check-up, explaining my symptoms and then playing a little game of which lenses make the world more or less fuzzy. Soon after, I had an irritating burst of air puffed into my eye and then the optometrist asked me to sit down and look into a strange machine that (I knew from memory) would show me a photo of a hot air balloon.

“Focus on the balloon,” the optometrist said, and I did. “Aaaand…”

Click.

A photo was taken. A moment passed. I leaned back and stretched my shoulders. The optometrist walked over to a glowing screen in the corner of the room where he stood with his back to me, his body hunched over. In the oppressive silence that followed, I heard and felt a faint scratching around my ears and behind my eyes but attributed it to discomfort from sitting in the dark for so long.

“I need to take a closer look,” the optometrist said, his voice waivering. I sat back in the chair and patiently waited as he spread my eyelids with latex fingers and loomed towards me with a bright light, his face an obscure shape in the darkness.

“Look to the left please,” he said, which I did, politely enduring the discomfort. “Look to the—” I pre-empted his instructions and looked to the right. I wanted this to be over, quickly. But the moment stretched on, the hands of his watch ticking audibly close to my ear. Somewhere, a beat had been missed; the optometrist said nothing. He didn’t even move.

And then he started screaming.

He threw himself backwards and let loose a shrill cry of unbridled terror that rose up out of his chest like a concerto violin. I stood up immediately, stuttering and stammering trying to think of what to say while the chair behind me spun in the darkness. I took a step forward and he lunged away, diving to the floor and grabbing nearby tables and wrenching them to the ground sending strange lights and metal instruments clattering against tiles. He was trying to get away, I realised, noticing how he scrambled across the floor like a frightened dog, crawling towards the nearest wall where he slowly pulled himself up to a standing position and stood facing away from me.

“Doctor?” I asked.

He flicked his head around, saw me, and started screaming again, pressing himself harder against the wall like he was trying to will himself through solid stone.

“Doctor?” I asked again.

The features of his face had been twisted into strange proportions by sheer terror. His wide bulging eyes glanced around before he reached for a nearby pair of the scissors. I didn’t even have time to utter another word. He thrust the pointed edge into his neck, just below the jaw, and dragged the blade along his throat in a jagged zig-zag pattern. Blood flowed freely down his chest, soaking his lab coat black in electric glow of the nearby computer. From his mouth, the blood flowed fruitfully, dribbling down his chin in oily black currents. After a minute or so, he went pale; life left his face to a chorus of hissing bubbles and timid gurgles. He fell first onto his knees, squirting arterial jets all over my shoes, and then onto his face, his limp body bringing more aluminium tables clattering to the ground. From behind me, lights were switched on and an array of cries and yells and grief-wracked sobs filled the open doorway.

I told the police exactly what had happened, and while I’m certain they suspected me of foul play, there was, thankfully, a security tape that cleared my name before I’d even left the building. Nonetheless, I was asked to not leave town by a stern looking woman who questioned me as I sat perched on one of the ambulances that had parked all over the curb (along with police and the press). After that, she left me alone with a brief look of sympathy and confusion. In the moments that followed, I noticed a gathering of men in white lab coats and paramedics amidst the crowd, all speaking in confused hushed tones. Surreptitiously, I watched them passing around a familiar grainy printout.

“This is the photo? This is from his last patient?” One of them asked.

Another looked as if they were about to reply when the photo came their way and, focusing upon it, they suddenly began to dry-heave. I didn’t feel like being treated as some kind of specimen, so I stood, trying to be as inconspicuous as I could, and began to make my way through the crowd. However, I didn’t get far when, from behind, I heard someone cry out.

“Excuse me, sir,” they said, some part of me hoping to God they meant another ‘sir. “Mr Rittle, Mr Rittle sir. Mr Rittle SIR!” they cried, and I increased my pace to a brisk walk. Luckily, there were nearly a hundred people on that small pavement, and I ducked my head down and carried on until, a few seconds later, my pursuer cried out: “I can’t see him. He’s gone.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and hurried home where I uncontrollably paced between various mirrors for the rest of the night. I spent hours holding my eyelids open and rolling my eyes around in their sockets. But all I saw were grey and foggy irises the colour of a polluted and rainy sky at 4 o’clock. My sclerae were pockmarked and faintly yellowish in places, and even the spidery veins that crawled across the glassy surface had taken on an unhealthy bluish sheen. They looked thick and sore, like the roots of a tree burrowing through soil. And that scratching sound had followed me home, making it harder and harder to focus on the problem at hand until, eventually, I collapsed from fatigue on my sofa.

The next day I awoke to a hammering on the door and opened it to find a haggard looking man in white overalls.

“Mr Rittle?” he asked.

“Yes?” I answered, putting a firm hand on the edge of the door, just in case.

“I’m Doctor Sutton, I’m from… I’m, uh, I work at a nearby research facility and am, or was, a colleague of Doctor Millow who you saw yesterday.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “I told everyone what there was to know.”

“I um… I know. Can I come in?” he asked hurriedly, moving as if to enter. I leaned forward and barred him, reflexively at first and then a little more deliberately. But when he looked at me it was with pleading eyes, like he was a death row inmate looking for appeal. Looking at him then I felt that he deserved pity more than suspicion, and I stood aside.

“Come in,” I said, and he promptly did.

“Oh my,” he said, stopping for a moment to look at my personal effects all laid out. I watched a strange train of thoughts tarry through his head before he eventually turned to me and asked, “What are you?”

“I’m a horror writer,” I replied. He looked back around the room, taking it all in once more. “It’s research,” I said, answering his question before he’d spoken it aloud. “It’s just stuff to try and make everything a bit more authentic. Folklore, myths, things like that.”

“But…”

“I’m just a writer,” I said, with a shrug. “A struggling one, but I do try.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “It’s just we’ve spent all night going over the photo. How can you be normal? There’s already been two suicides, probably more. One of my students shredded the only physical copy and smashed my laptop to bits and it was the most sensible thing anyone in that conference room did all night.”

“Are you saying that what’s in that photo is the reason that all that stuff from yesterday happened?”

“I think you know that,” he said, looking at me with just a hint of aversion. “I’ve seen the tapes and looking at you now, I can only assume you’re smart enough to put two and two together. But… yes, that’s exactly what happened. And it didn’t just stop there either, Mr Rittle. That photo is… it means terrible things, for all of us. And it’s just not stopped taking lives, but the thing is… and this is what I’m struggling to understand, that thing is a picture of what’s inside you.”

“Can I see it?” I asked. “The photo?”

“No,” he replied. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea at all. There is a digital copy but… no, I’m sorry but no.”

“Can you at least describe it to me?”

“No,” he snapped. “Absolutely not. I can still… feel it, in the air, in my skin. I can taste it. I wouldn’t describe it to you, even if I could.”

“So why are you here?” I asked.

“Because that thing is inside you!” he cried. “We need to… we need to… I don’t even know. I think I’m the only one who’s seen it who has enough sense to even think about what we need to do next, as a society… as a species.”

Carefully, I took a step backwards.

“I need to see it,” he said. “It’s the only way to know anything more about it. Until then we’ve just got pixels and as far this thing is concerned that’s about as good as words. You can see the computer struggling to process it. A jpeg is… it’s like a blurry reflection of a reflection. I hate to say it but I really do need to see it.”

“Another examination?” I said.

“Yes.”

“If you show me the digital copy then I’ll agree to an examination.”

I could see the desperation in his face as he accepted my terms, and about half-an-hour later, after I’d showered and dressed, we both left in my car for his office. He had, bizarrely, left his behind after walking the fourteen miles to my apartment at 2am.

“Were all those things really research?” he asked as he led me through the open doors of the small office building where he worked.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Probably gone home,” he replied. “After Professor Garrett mass emailed the photo to everyone in a state of religious hysteria I imagine most of them are either at home recovering or… well,”

We were passing a glass office and Doctor Sutton turned and faced it, directing my attention to a pale man lying on the table, his eyes torn out and his ribcage cracked open. The doctor turned and gave me a pained look before leading me on. “After that, Lana shredded it, wiped the servers, and destroyed every publicly available copy that she could. That was a very smart and kind thing of her to do, probably the most important thing she or anyone else in this building has ever done. And you never answered my question. Was all of that stuff really just research?”

“Yes,” I said. “Do you really think I’m some kind of devil worshipper?”

“I didn’t see his face anywhere in those books or in those glass jars. But there were others.”

“They’re just things,” I answered icily. “I have to break things up and rearrange them to make new, unknown and frightening things. The more authentic the building blocks, the better the end product. So I start with folklore, and mythology, old, new, obscure, common. I bring it all together in the hope I can make something new with all the parts.”

“It would just be a heavy dose of irony,” he said. “For all of this to happen to a horror writer.”

“That’s not irony,” I said. “It’d be irony if it happened to a children’s author, or a true crime writer. My job is to seek these things out, to show them off and try to make a quick buck.”

“But you can’t see it, can you?” He asked, a dark mirthless smirk spreading across his face. “Out of everyone alive, you’ll never get to bring it into the light. So I think that is irony, actually, Mr Rittle.” He stopped and gestured to an open door. “This way, please.”

Unlike before, most of the procedure of an eye test was left behind. Instead we went straight to an examination with the doctor switching off the lights and hesitantly opening my eyelids as he leaned forward. I waited anxiously as he leered into my eye with breathy clumsiness until a peculiar stillness came over him. For some reason in that silence the scratching in my head was almost deafening, and as soon as he released his grip and turned away I cringed from the pain, soothing my head with cold hands. In less than a second I was overcome with an intense need to fall on my knees, somehow communicated to me through the deafening hiss of my migraine.

I pushed myself out of my chair with my eyes screwed shut, feeling something cold and hard slash my cheek as I collapsed. As soon as my knees touched the floor the pain left me, and I opened my eyes to see Doctor Sutton standing there with a bloodied scalpel clutched in his fist. Touching my cheek I realised he must have attacked me, narrowly missing my eye as I fell.

“I’m doing you a favour,” he said before lunging towards me with terrifying glee. “It has to be excised,” he cried out, his frantic attack sending me scrambling backwards. I tried to crab-crawl away, but it was useless in the dark. And the doctor, who towered over me with a blinding light, closed the distance easily. “If you could see it,” he said, getting ready to attack once more, “you’d be begging for this.”

“Wait!” I cried out. “Okay, okay, I get it. I understand. Just, just let me sit up. You can’t do it in the dark! Please, take a moment. Think. Clearly.”

The doctor hesitated, his face pained, before leaning down to reach out to me. Expecting the worst, I closed my eyes and cried out in terror when I felt his hand on my shoulder, but a moment later he was pulling me up. He didn’t speak, but once I stood up he leaned against me and began to cry. Gradually, he went limp until he would have slid to the floor without my support, quietly crying in my arms. After a prolonged silence he looked up at me with bloody and teary eyes and looked as if he was about to speak. Scared for my life, I took it as a sign of his distraction and seized the moment, shoving him with all my strength. I didn’t have much of a plan at this stage, aside from fleeing, but thankfully the doctor slipped as he scrambled to stay on his fee and struck his head on a nearby counter. When he slumped to the ground, streaking blood down the side of cabinet doors, I waited for a second to see if he’d move. When he didn’t, I let out a breath I didn’t even know I was holding, and then finally took a moment to collect myself.

It was hard, getting him out of there. I’m not a strong man but luckily there was no one around to see me. Despite the fact I managed to wheel him out of the building, hastily propped up in a desk chair, it was still a tense and nervous experience. The clinical halls of the research facility were painted in anxiety inducing pastels, and the sterile echoey office space gave off the sense that someone, nearby, was watching me. The stale air hummed menacingly with the sound of distant AC fans and running computers, and as I struggled down the long corridors I caught sight of even more strange corpses. One was hanging from an overhead pipe, another had shattered the side of their skull with a hammer they still held loosely in their pale hand, and one had somehow drowned themselves in a hand-washing station.

Another one I saw had somehow swallowed their own fist up to the forearm and fallen to their knees where they remained, frozen, eyes bulging, their throat distended, and their skin partially flayed by their own desperate effort to commit suicide. They looked like some kind of pilgrim on worship. I stared at them, panting to catch my breath, but was startled when their head slowly turned in my direction. So close to the exit, I simply looked away and sprinted the last few metres out of the door where my car awaited. I quickly bungled the doctor into the backseat and drove away as quickly as I could. I did momentarily consider taking the doctor to the hospital, but a few minutes into the drive he groaned and shifted his head. While he remained passed out for the duration of the drive, I was still confident he would be okay.

Well, relatively okay.

When he awoke that evening, he was understandably a little confused to find himself back in my home. Before leaving the research facility I had taken the opportunity to grab a laptop I’d assumed was his and hoped to high heaven that it might contain the photo I was looking for. My intention was to get the password out of him before letting him go, but given his state of mind some precautions for my own safety had to be taken. When he first awoke, I expected he might be confused as to why he was handcuffed to a radiator, but strangely he did no such thing. He merely looked at me, started to cry, and then lay back down on the ground and stared at the ceiling.

Nothing I said could elicit a verbal response from him. I pleaded with him for a password, for a hint, for anything. I even held my eyelids open and moved towards him, as if I could somehow leverage his fear of my eye to get a response. But it was like he was a gibbering wreck, quivering in the corner like an abused dog. The only time he ever spoke was right at the very end. Having pulled up a chair to sit opposite him, I’d spent hours speaking my thoughts aloud until, eventually, I struck a nerve.

“I think I could figure out that little machine,” I said, and his eyes widened. “It’s hooked up to a desktop. What do you need to do? Turn it on, mess around with some software? Come to think of it, the one in your office had the software still open didn’t it? I bet it’s not too hard to figure out.”

“No,” he stammered, and for the first time I realised that his difficulty speaking might not be from brain injury or stubbornness. But rather, a glance at his tongue showed a strange cracked bluish colour, swollen and filling his mouth so that when he did open it, yellowing drool ran down his chin.

“I could take the photo and put it on the internet. Or, you could just tell me where to find the original and then I’ll delete it? It’s just, this thing… it’s inside me. Don’t I have the right to see for myself?”

“No,” he whined, more piss-coloured froth running from his misshapen mouth.

“Fine then,” I hissed. “I’m going back to the lab.”

“Waitsh,” he cried, reaching out and grabbing my trousers. Quivering, he pointed to his mouth. “Kill me,” he hissed. “It hurtsh. Pleashe. No one hash gone thish long. Itsh not right.”

I gave it a moment’s thought.

“No,” I said. “Not until I have the photo.”

I expected him to wail in defiance, but he didn’t, instead he slumped back down like a terminally ill patient and stared up at the ceiling. Standing just out of his line of sight, I watched him for a quiet moment, noticing how oddly swollen his throat was and how strange the blood was that clotted around his head wound. It shimmered in the dark and for just a moment it felt like looking into a starry sky.

I quickly looked away, ignoring the sound of buzzing flies that filled my ears, and left. I drove quickly and not as safely as I ought to have, coming afoul of a cop not too far from my destination. I cursed myself as I pulled over, reeling from the anxiety-inducing scratch that had begun to blare as soon as I decided to stop the car. By the time the policeman was knocking on my window I was clutching my head like it was about to explode, and it took every ounce of my willpower to roll the window down.

“Officer,” I said, trying to smile while ignoring the taste of blood in my mouth. “Is there anything I can help you with?” I turned to stare at them hoping I didn’t look as bad as I felt. For a moment the policeman looked down at me with the expression of a disappointed teacher, a breathalyser held in his hand. In less than a second his eyes flicked over my face and my clothes and the look on his face was replaced with concern.

“Sir,” he said, “I’m going to need you to—”

And just like that, he made eye contact—true proper eye-to-eye contact—for the first time. Now the expression on his face was anything but that of a teacher, now it was that of a student in trouble. Or even worse, a toddler coming to terms with the death of their mother. It was awful. It racked the heart just to see every ounce of authority and strength drain out of his face only to be replaced with uncertainty and fear. He opened his mouth, I think perhaps to try and finish his sentence, as if he could somehow reverse what he’d just seen and carry on as normal, but nothing came out except a quiet croak.

“It’s not real,” I stammered, trying desperately to rescue the situation. I reached out and grabbed the his wrist and smiled up at him. “It’s fake,” I said. “It’s just… special effects. It’s for a film. It’s not real. It’s okay!”

When he looked back at me there was anger in his eyes, the defiant frustration of loss and grief rolled into one.

“How are you supposed to know?” he hissed, before walking away. Feeling the rush of events overtaking me, I restarted my car engine and drove away as quickly as I could, cringing momentarily at the sound of a gunshot ringing out from the stationary police car.

By the time I pulled up back outside the facility it was dark, and I was subconsciously muttering “fuck” over and over and over. I was overtaken by a strange sense of urgency and rushed towards the front doors only to be stopped by the sight of the building in darkness. The open doors were much as I’d left them earlier, and the lobby looked undisturbed, but at night there was a threatening ambience to its façade that made me hesitate out on the pavement. I nearly turned back, except the buzzing in my head grew stronger at the suggestion.

I needed to see what was driving everyone insane, and in that moment the burning desire steeled my nerves and I marched onwards into the facility stopping only once to look into the pilgrim’s room. I shuddered at the sight of the disturbed pool of blood, noticing the total absence of the kneeling corpse. Somewhere in that building, I realised, that poor twisted individual was stalking the dark corridors. And, I also realised that, given the size of the place, it was unlikely they were the only ones who’d somehow survived.

Still, I made it back to Sutton’s office without delay and firmly locked the door behind me. As I expected, the machine used to take retinal photos wasn’t exactly the simplest thing to operate, but it wasn’t rocket science either. It took around an hour to get it working, and another hour to move things around so that I could take the picture myself while still looking inside the eyepiece. Meanwhile, I often found strange shadows passing beyond the door as if someone was outside roaming the halls aimlessly. But whoever it was, I figured that they were paying me no attention, so I ignored them. Eventually, after much messing around, I finally got into position and used my foot to press the button and take a photo.

I looked up, almost vibrating with anticipation, only to find the computer monitor a garbled mess of text and colourful lines. After some jagged artefacts ran across the screen it suddenly fizzed and blacked out, and the computer tower itself gave a loud bang and crack. Suddenly, the only light source in the room died out. I swore, profusely, as I made my way to a nearby light switch, ready to get some light and then spend all night, if necessary, fixing the damn thing.

Except, once switched on, I couldn’t help but notice a quiet sort of chittering. It was hard to hear over the sound in my ears, but it was there. Frightened, I slowly panned around the room and noticed nothing out of the ordinary. I held my breath, trying my best to silence every sound in my body, and eventually even the scratching behind my eyes quietened and I managed to hear the chittering more clearly. It was close, almost close enough to touch, I realised, when something wet dripped onto my hand.

I looked up and saw the pilgrim looming over me from an open ceiling tile. They eyes were grotesque, like marbles gripped by a ring of pallid flesh, and they had somehow snapped their arm off at the elbow and left their hand and forearm lodged deep in their throat. It dangled from their distended mouth and rugose neck—the skin now thick and scaly like an elephant’s hide—and, to my horror, I saw that teeth had started to form around the bloody stump of their severed, half-eaten arm. With its eyes on me, the makeshift mouth began to chitter, and the pilgrim threw themselves at me

Somehow, I managed to step back and wrench the door open, hitting it as just as it landed on the very spot where I’d been standing. The blow was hard and sent the thing sprawling across the floor. I rushed out of that room and into the empty hallway where I ran, my feet stampeding down those echoey hallways as that thing scuttled after me like an insect. It was hard to get a proper look at it, but a quick glance over my shoulder saw it loping after me on three misshapen limbs, its remaining arm having extended further into a sort of cloven foot that it awkwardly used as a crutch to pick up speed. It was fast, able to outpace me in a straight line, but otherwise struggling with corners. Whenever I turned one it would carry on, gibbering hysterically (like it was cackling at a joke) before running headfirst into a wall with a loud crunch. It would then stop to shake itself clean before pursuing me once more.

Using the twisting corridors, I managed to put enough distance between that thing and myself that I finally reached the lobby. Unfortunately, the way out was one long straight run to the open doors. I knew it would easily catch up to me on the way, but knew I otherwise had no choice. I barrelled down the long hallway, propelling myself as fast as I could, when a loud crack came from behind. I did not stop until I reached the outside where I turned to see the pilgrim impaled on a sharp spike that had emerged from a random door. Slowly, the spike curled around the pilgrim like a spider’s leg and dragged its sobbing victim back into the dark. Seconds later a fountain of blood erupted from the doorway, accompanied by the sound of crunching bone and tearing flesh.

On the verge of total panic, I threw myself into my car and left. It was dreadful. After everything I still didn’t have the photo, and even worse the scratching in my head was worse. At one point I grabbed my rear view mirror and forcefully angled it to face me instead of the road, but somehow I found I could not see my own eyes. It was like the aura of a migraine, or our natural blind spot. No matter how I angled my head, I couldn’t see my own face; it was just blank, a total absence of vision.

Worryingly, at one point when I stopped at some red lights, I glanced over at a car to my right and they looked over at me. It was only in passing, of course, and at first I thought the look had meant nothing. And yet as soon as the light turned green the car beside me veered off the road and ploughed through the front of a glass-fronted office building. Shaking, I drove on and tried to act as if nothing had happened, doing everything I could to avert my gaze from any passers-by or other drivers.

When I finally got home I felt an immense sense of relief, stopping at my door to catch my breath. Unfortunately, it lasted only a few moments when beyond the threshold I heard something muttering and cry. That’s when I remembered Sutton and thinking of the pilgrim and whatever had eaten it, I started to wonder if Sutton would be the same as I’d left him. My question was answered as soon as I opened the door only to find it torn from my grip and something pulling me inside with terrible force.

“Reeee-shurch,” the voice giggled, its owner a blurring pale shape as I was thrown clear across my room. Slowly, I rolled off my back and started to stand up, carefully making sure I hadn’t broken anything. In the darkness something clicked, and the room filled with light and there stood the poor misshapen doctor. Using one of his strange, metre-long arms, he gestured to the walls around me, even stopping to stroke one of my jars.

“Hish fashe,” he said. “Devilsh fashe.”

“Other faces,” I replied. “More interesting ones.”

“What have shou done?” he asked, his face perfectly still, and the crescent moon grin fixed in place like a ventriloquist dummy’s. Instead, the mouth on his neck did all the talking. The effect was quite uncanny, and I watched as he plucked a single book from one of my shelves. I recognised it instantly, irritated he’d somehow singled it out. It was a tome that contained hundreds of pages dedicated to the wisdom and power of eyes, specifically the pursuit of truth. Slowly, Sutton gestured first to the book, then to the esoteric materials I had arranged on my desk. “Wishdom,” he hissed, mocking me with stilted laughter. “You know lesh than any of ushhhh. You alwaysh will”

“Yes,” I said with a grimace. “Knowledge was promised, just not necessarily to me. I should have read the fine print.”

“Truth?” Sutton laughed.

“Yes,” I replied. “I was looking for the truth.”

“Itsh in your eye.”

“I know.”

“I musht exshize,” he said. “Truth did… thish.” He swept his arm down his broken torso, demonstrating exactly what he meant. “Awful, awful, truth. Musht be hidden.”

“I’m leaving,” I said, firmly.

“No.”

“Look,” I said, taking my car keys out of my pocket and pushing the flat edge of the ignition key against the jelly of my eye. “If you come even one step closer, I will pop it out like a fucking zit.”

Sutton hissed, drawing air into his tree like throat through several slit-like openings. “Yes,” I added. “You wouldn’t want it to be let out, would you?”

“You don’t even know what it ishhhh,” he growled.

“I know enough that it’s better off inside me than out in the world..” To emphasise my point I pushed the key further into my socket, sliding it gently between my eyeball and the surrounding tissue. The pain was immense, but I imagined it was better than what Sutton had in store for me.

“Shtop!” Sutton cried. “You musht let me take it out”

“You can fuck right off,” I replied, slowly backing towards the door.

“Othersh will shee.”

“I’ll wear sunglasses,” I growled, and backed further away until I was clean through the door.

“No!” Sutton roared, and I slammed the door shut as hard as I could and ran away even faster fleeing madly into the night, my only real regret being the total loss of my library collection.

Since then, I’ve waited patiently for some kind of news but as far as I can tell the spate of suicides was attributed to a kind of anomaly. It could be a cover up for all I know, but nor do I particularly care. I am, at least, aware that Sutton escaped his flat. I’ve gone through my share of hiding places in the interim, and all too often I find his wretched light-bulb shaped head leering at me from distant corners, sometimes peaking out from under passing cars, or clutching harmlessly to the top of a lamppost. He’s patient, I’ll give him that. He only needs to catch me when I’m asleep or even just unaware.

But even then, there are the others, the remnants from the lab, new freaks that I create with every slip and mishap. I’m getting better at remembering the glasses, but it is hard I can’t even see my own face. Sometimes I wonder if any wisdom promised by that damned book wasn’t meant for me, but perhaps the thing inside me, since it seems to learn more about this world with every day. I can feel it, watching through me. And more and more I feel as if my actions are not my own. Even now I look back and try to wonder if the courage to stand up to Sutton even came from me, or something else. Something I can never see, or even know.

But one day, if you're out of luck, you just might...