“Her Eyes in the Dark” by Curtis Hayden Hill

1

Almost daylight. Or so the deep fog that settles across your brow tells you. The cramps in your body. The murmuring heart that pumps prickled blood through your limbs. You wait. Listen to the last sounds of night and of a living house, the bones of which ache with blight and whispers. It waits as you do for the blackest hour before dawn. Your grandmother will be home soon. Your grandmother goes out in the dark.

What will it be tonight? What theatre will your grandmother bring home? Your grandmother’s assaults on your slumber are frequent. Not nightly, but recurrent enough that every sound, every complaint of the house, can make sleep seem like its own dream. Some nights your grandmother spares you. Sometimes she won’t disturb you at all. Still you don’t sleep. This is her game, her nocturnal roulette. 

It used to be that her dramas were small acts designed to tease the hairs on the back of your neck: the breathing, the scratching on your walls, the low gurgle as she laughed through the crack beneath your bedroom door. But recently you came of age, whatever that might mean. That night it all changed.

The shadow-play behind your eyes relays your grandmother’s first night of divergence. Back and forth it goes until you are unsure if it even happened at all. Tucked up in cold night, you listened as the window opened, the one down the hall. Limbs clambered in and two old feet landed on floorboards. Your grandmother’s wheezing breath moved closer and closer to your bedroom door. It creaked open, just enough for one eye to stare at you from the dark. An insect-like rhythm danced through the air as her blue hand crept around the doorframe and long fingers tap-tap-tapped on the wood. You lay still and held your breath. Watched through slitted eyes as your grandmother fell to all fours and crawled blood-drunk across the floor. She slid beneath your bed and panted like a dog. Her breath was the smell of gasoline. Your grandmother scratched her nails against the board beneath your mattress and whispered your name. Over and over she said it. When your grandmother speaks, it sounds like her lungs are full of spiders.

The next day, as you emerged from sheets, bleary-eyed and bones riddled with winter morning, you found the birthday card beneath your bed. It was sticky and filthy and soaked with age. You opened it. Tried to decipher the names erased beneath fierce slashes of black ink. In the corner there was a crude drawing of a smiling hangman, your grandmother’s idea of a joke. You realised then that another year had passed. You looked at your hands, pulled at the skin of your cheeks. You had forgotten that bodies are meant to age, that experience is meant to accumulate. Perhaps this is what your grandmother was trying to tell you, in her own peculiar way. Her actions are her words. Her words are few and far between. You do your best to interpret them. All you can offer is disappointment. You can see it in her eyes. 

How long will your grandmother tolerate you living in her home? How long will she allow this mongrel aspersion to continue living at all? Sometimes the shadows echo your grandmother’s loathing. In the hours of night, they swarm around your bed and call you names; they call you an insult to an ageless legacy. You knew some of these shadows in life. Their death has made them cruel and thirsty for your sorrow. 

The shadows are one of the many things that haunt your grandmother’s home. The space has bent to the shape of her soul. By day, the house is flat and grey. At night, the walls sink through time and light. The halls stretch and contort and bathe in red radiance. The wallpaper peels away. The carpets disappear and the furniture twists into shapes you do not understand. You know you should not be afraid. You know these things are your heritage, that you are not like others. And yet half of you, the half that makes your grandmother sick, cannot help but win in the war of you.

You pull the sheets over your head and wait. And wait some more.

Your grandmother comes home. You hear her slide through the window and her body, giddy and full of belly, flops to the floor. Your heart stops. Your breath stops. And nothing. No visit tonight. You hear her bedroom door close. The creak of her mattress springs. The satisfied groan as her nourished body sinks into slumber and readies itself to dream and wake and begin the hunt once more. 

2

A jaundiced dawn smears the horizon. As your grandmother sleeps, you make the long walk through town, your feet aching in broken shoes from the stony dirt and shattered pavement. The smell of rotten eggs is everywhere. Grey-faced and worry-wrinkled bodies move from one dark door to another or lie beneath makeshift shelter or stand around small flames and stare into them as if to find some answer for how it all went so wrong. Everything is the same wherever it is. Dark tower blocks loom like sunken monoliths. Boarded shops. Haunted cul-de-sacs. Glacial violence.

In one of their gentler moments, the shadows told you this town once had purpose. Then the chemical mill blew and the slow disaster set in. It polluted the water and the air began to burn the lungs. The nights lasted forever and the dark clouds spat rain that turned skin red with rash. Everything closed its doors. The factories that line the horizon like broken teeth stand as desolate mausoleums, great shells of industry the purpose of which you never truly knew. If you listen hard, the distant sounds of the factories disturb the landscape still. The deep rumbling, the hammering, the churn of machinery. The taunting drum of a failed future.

These are the towns your grandmother likes. She can smell the spoil from miles away and can taste the tangible atmosphere of shattered, desperate lives. For lengths of time you cannot comprehend, she has sought them out, driven by the scent on the wind. She brings with her the blight that makes plants die and animals turn thin and scared. It warps wood and brick and strips the sun from the sky and makes people’s minds turn tender with apathy. Woes on top of woes. That’s what your grandmother brings. This old woman, a prospector of pain.

Towards the edge of town, beyond the fire-bombed church and the park now wild with brittle grass and dead trees like charcoal drawings, there is the school. It is where you go when your grandmother sleeps because that is what you are supposed to do at your age. Something normal. Structure, they used to say. You walk through the doors, avoiding the eyes of the other children. You think some of them may live here. Sleeping bags and empty packets of instant noodles and sweet wrappers litter the locker area. Perhaps they all have their own monsters in their lives. More than once you have considered joining them here. 

None of them will speak to you. You hear them whisper and laugh but when you look at them the tears stream down their cheeks. You used to have a friend but then she went away. Children vanish all the time. Some get the black cough and their skin turns grey. Their yellow eyes roll into the back of their head and they fall to the floor and are dragged away by adults whose eyes are as ashen as the children’s cheeks. Others are simply there one day and then they are not. No one says anything at all, as if their names never existed to begin with. Everyone is complicit in the things that go away.

You find your classroom. Sit alone and wait for someone to arrive and offer guidance. Anything at all will do. There are still teachers here. Or people who say they are.  

Faded crayon pictures flutter in a wind from nowhere. Footsteps. You ready yourself for a face in the doorway, but the steps keep going and vanish down the hall. You sigh and rest your head in your folded arms. You used to like being here. Not now. The blight spoils all small pleasures. You have never said this out loud but your grandmother knows because your grandmother can smell your troubles. She will drink them up through flared nostrils and fill her belly. Sometimes your grandmother’s eyes will eclipse to black and she will shiver with excitement and she will ask you if there is anyone at school that hurts you. Sometimes your grandmother asks you if there is anyone at school you would like her to hurt. Your grandmother is always hungry.

There was one day, not so long ago, when the school still had some kind of notion of its purpose. That day your teacher, the one who knew your name, kept you behind and sat you down beside her desk. Your teacher asked you if there was anything you would like to tell her. She said the world can be a cruel place. She tilted her head to the side. Her lips were moist with a gloss that seemed to shimmer in the low afternoon light. Her hair, the most beautiful hair you had ever seen, fell to one side of her face and her hand swept it back in moments that felt tensile and bathed in cotton. You swam in her mellifluous words. You stared into the catchlights of her eyes and there, somewhere so close you wanted to reach to her face and claw it out, was a future. There were people with smiles and hands in hands. You swam past them on a lovely street beneath a rainbow and there was grass and there was a sun that settled on your skin and chased away the cold. Someone was standing in the doorway of a pretty house surrounded by prettier flowers. The person, a woman, waved and smiled and you ran towards them, your grin splitting your face in two. The colours were so bright they seemed to burn your eyes. You were living in a picture book, the one you found caked in red and dust beneath the sofa in your grandmother’s living room. A dream. Another life. Something for you.

You said nothing to your teacher because anything you said would be a desecration of this precious moment. You nodded and you think maybe you smiled. Your teacher nodded and said she would see you on Monday. To take care and that she was always here to talk. 

Your teacher touched your hand. Your teacher smiled. Your teacher is missing. 

Days later, after the headmaster sent everyone home early, after he had drunkenly stumbled onto the stage in front of the dwindling assembly and stared at you all with glassy eyes and delivered the news through quivering lips, you came home and found a wet brown paper bag on your bed. You peeled the paper apart and stared at the teeth and torn bloody scalp. You have a new teacher now. Your new teacher won’t look at you.

3

One month ago, the night after your grandmother first lay beneath your bed and whispered your name, you were dragged out of sleep and pushed into an armchair in the living room. Your grandmother wheeled the television to your eyeline and showed you videos, one after the other. You recognised the shrieking and twisted faces. You knew these people’s voices from their cries. They were once your neighbours. A child from school. In the sick light of an old lamp, your grandmother’s hands were brilliant red and her creased floral dress was damp with sweat and gore. She pointed angrily at the television set and told you this, this right here, this is who you are. She watched the videos and drooled and her hand moved to her crotch. She rubbed so fast you thought her hand might catch fire. The shadows swarmed the open door behind you and looked on. They watched you watch the videos. They snickered when you touched your groin. They revelled while you felt nothing.

Beneath your feet, beneath the living room, the basement wept. You used to think there was no one in the house but you, the shadows and your grandmother. But then you realised you were not alone. People are living below stairs. You can hear them moving. You can feel them listening. You think they would like you to go down and see them. You think they would like to be seen. Sometimes your grandmother goes down to the basement and the voices subtract by one. 

You have a memory, or maybe a dream. You pushed open the basement door and descended so far down you thought you could bask in the hearth of the earth. In that room, there was a hole. You lit a candle and stepped down the makeshift wooden stairs. The darkness swallowed the light but somehow you could still see. You stopped when you saw the bodies that hung from chains. A number among them were limp and lifeless. Others were alive and tried to speak through lips sewn shut with black twine. Their bodies were anatomical studies, bones on display, eyes pitted, genitals hanging like rotten fruit. Your grandmother was there with a knife in her hand. She cut slowly. She wounded, not to consume, but for cruelty. These were her toys, too far gone, too spoiled to satiate her hunger. Good only to beguile the blood that flushed her cheeks.

Your heart paralysed when she looked over her shoulder at you. Her eyes caught fire as she moved up and down the gathered assembly and with brisk precision released the binds over their lips. One by one their sirens filled the air. You clamped your hands to your ears but those deliberate gaps between your fingers were wide enough to allow the wretchedness to sieve through. You fought it at first. But you settled in. You bathed in agony’s incandescence. You could not deny those sounds they made, that desperate clinging, did something to you. For you. Your guts turned like wheels. Something in your veins began to burn. The threnody of their suffering became the air itself. Their screams carried upstairs to the house and the wind in the walls howled in harmony.

4

You stare at the images in your picture book. There must be something in here. Some kind of guide to life, otherwise why would history have placed it in your hands? You stop at one picture. You don’t know why. 

A child and a woman. The child – a boy, you think – throws his arms around his mother’s waist. There is a small plaster on his forehead. His mother smiles, her face framed by perfect yellow hair. She looks down at the child, her hand cupping the back of his head. 

‘There, there,’ she says, her words lassoed in a speech bubble. ‘All better now. So brave. So brave.’

You wrap your arms around yourself. You think you would like to be hugged. If you have ever been embraced you have forgotten. You wonder if anyone has put their arms around you and held you to their warmth. Thoughts like this make you ask questions you shouldn’t. One day you asked your grandmother to show you a picture of your mother and father. Your grandmother leapt across the kitchen table and bit your shoulder so hard you screamed and cried. She locked you in your room and played music that scared you.

Moments like this are frequent. You are confused. Sometimes you think you are sad. You would like to please your grandmother, to make her proud, but the diluted dark that runs in your veins is a heresy to the generations before that salivated beneath moon’s light. There are pictures scattered around the house. Faces the colour of damp. Sometimes you take them off their shelves and run your thumb against the glass. You will attempt to call to them, to make their spirits bleed from years vanished into yours and whisper in your ear the secrets that so effortlessly soaked through their skin within the necrotic womb of their pure progenitrix. But the air of the house is silent. The ghosts lie still within their distant aeons. You are always alone with your thoughts and your knowledge that you may never gratify the ward that stalks. You are not pure because your faceless mother was impure. It is all you know of her. It is all you need to know. All that matters is that one half of history is not history enough.

The kitchen. You stare into the refrigerator. The light bathes your face in curdled yellow. Mould-infested bread, a spoiled onion, a tin with no label, something that was once maybe fruit but is now a bloody mud. Your stomach churns. In your earliest days, when you were crowbarred into your grandmother’s life by the circumstance of her dying son — the one who betrayed the blood, the one who fucked outside the lines — she took you in, despite the handicap of your heritage, and brought back food looted from people who would have no further need. She would dump the items on the table and stare at them as if they were alien objects fallen from space, so long had it been that such things had passed her lips. That was then. This is now. There have been no such gifts in recent times. Your grandmother’s patience is now as expired as the food in the refrigerator. You have tried, tried so very hard to be more like your grandmother. 

There was the girl, the one she brought to you and tied to a chair. Your grandmother carved off a piece of her thigh and laughed as the girl screamed and went still with faint. You sniffed the morsel. Licked it. Your grandmother grinned wide and her eyes looked like feral moons. You knew what she wanted, what she expected: the honour of the act. You stared at the girl, whose half-open eyes shimmered and swam like oil on water. The skin of your palms began to cloud with damp. Your heart raced and the room began to turn upside down. You didn’t feel the meat drop from your hand. You didn’t feel your legs carry you away to the nest of your bedroom. Your grandmother barked, a strangled whooping cough that hunted you. You pressed yourself to your door and you listened as your grandmother stomped back to the killing room and howled and screamed, her favourite trick to marinate the flesh with horror.

‘Why wouldn’t you do it?’ the girl says now. ‘What was so wrong with me?’

Her shadow whispers in your ear.

‘Did I not look tasty? Did I not suffer enough for your liking? Was I unclean?’

‘I don’t know,’ you say. ‘I couldn’t. She doesn’t understand. I’m not like her. I could be. But I don’t know how.’

‘Maybe it wasn’t the part of me you wanted to taste.’

You swat over your shoulder as if such a limp act could banish phantoms. 

‘I wanted to. I still do.’

‘Too late. Too late for that. She ate me up and made me watch. Now there is nothing left of me but what you see.’

‘Help me,’ you say. Your cheeks flush red with shame. ‘Help me make her happy.’

‘No,’ the shadow says. And it screams with glee.

Your stomach seethes. You press your fists to your eyes and hiss through the fence of your teeth. You hear the sounds from the basement. Chains rattle and wounded mouths wail. Your grandmother’s videos pulse behind your eyelids. The wind in the walls gathers with pressure so fierce you have to crouch on your haunches and press your palms to your temples. You try to choke yourself. You hammer your arm on the leg of a table until you see stars; pinch yourself until the skin becomes an angry red welt.

The shadows gather and laugh. They pierce you with their sharp eyes and tell you this, this right here, this is who you are. Lost and desolate. Hungry. Empty. No more. 

5

You thought you knew cold. Then you met this night. You squeeze your arms around yourself and move out into the street. The night is clear — such a rare sight — and the moon lights your way as you step into silence. You stop. Turn back to your grandmother’s house. Walk on. Back again. The two sides of you rend one another with bloody teeth. You use all you have inside to force your legs further from the house.

You are terrified. Do you know what you want? And what will you do once you have it? But this is it. Tonight has to be it. You smell the night, sensing nothing but the acrid air that forever haunts this town. The shadows beckon — they have followed you here — and suddenly you are on all fours. You have never seen your grandmother hunt so your body becomes the guide of itself. It doesn’t come naturally. A stumble and fall. A grazed knee and chin. The shadows are amused. You press your finger against the wound, try to tease out the blood as some kind of aperitif. But your blood is your own. Nothing there for you at all. 

Unknown avenues vanish beneath your hands and feet. You do not know these parts of town. Buildings and faded billboards promise much but deliver nothing. Then in the distance you see it, just shy of the railway bridge: the dull glow of a window. You glide towards it and stop some yards from the invitation. The shop’s sign is indecipherable. What it once was cannot be said but what it is now is a vessel, a gift box, a cage.

Stand and breathe, close your eyes and let the night swim in your veins. The moon pulses and baptises with its silver waters. You take the knife from your waistband and grip it tight. The mind calls to the hunger within and the shadows mock and sneer. You spit. Tell them to quiet down. None of you notice the door open, the man’s approach, nor the way he moves with bent knees so he may stalk through the cover of silence. Unlike you, he understands the methods of the hunt. Your eyes flick open and there he is. He grins down at you. A wolf. A man. A false predator. Grey beard and teeth. Greasy and pungent. 

‘Late,’ he says, a voice burned crisp with tobacco and moonshine. You take a step back, your body forgets to breathe. ‘Late to be out. Must be cold for you out here. By yourself are you, child?’

His head darts left to right.

‘Come inside,’ he says, gesturing with a soiled hand toward the open door. ‘Come inside with me and get warm. Nice in there. With me. Tell me your name.’

No sound leaves your lips. The world feels off-kilter. You spread your feet just to remain upright.

‘Dangerous out here,’ the man says, edging forward. ‘Little thing like you. Monsters around. Scary ones. Not like me. I kill monsters. Eat them for breakfast. Dinner maybe.’

His head moves up and down your body. It takes a while for him to notice the knife in your hand. He can see the tremor of the blade, the moonlight dancing against its sharp silver tongue. The man rakes his long nails through the forest of his beard. 

‘You’ve brought protection,’ he says. ‘Smart. Let me have it, eh? Don’t want you hurting yourself. Wouldn’t want that. People out here can smell blood a mile away. Let me have it.’

He leans forward. 

Every moment that ever was is right now. Every footstep. Every breath. Every beat of your conflicted heart. The night is a vacuum. Silent and cold. Nothing very much at all.

The shadows whisper. The shadows implore. Their eyes glisten beneath the stars. 

You do what the man says. 

You let him have it. 

The blade flies through the air towards him.

And then it hangs there. 

The world around you decompresses, a violent and deafening discharge of expectation.

The wolf holds your wrist in his hand. His skin on your skin. You stare at it and the man stares at you. You do not understand. The man’s mouth falls. His eyes become wild.

‘Think you’re a monster? Yeah?’

He laughs and clamps a hand on your shoulder.

‘Here be monsters.’

He drags you towards the building and bends your wrist to make you drop the knife but you hold on with strength you did not know you possessed. His hand moves from your shoulder to your neck and squeezes so tight the world turns blue. You try to gag but the vise on your throat is too tight. Every cell screams and commands you to fight. Your body acts of its own volition. It bends and contorts and in moments you are both on the ground, rolling and yelling. A fist connects with your side and you feel something crack. You tie yourselves in impossible knots, so close it is as if your bodies are ravenous for this violent matrimony. You cry out. And then…

His body goes slack. The world fades out and slowly returns. The man’s head bobs above you, so close your eyes cannot focus. The wet. The warm. It paints your lips red. The wolf falls away to reveal a dazzling backdrop of a star-speckled sky. 

The man’s legs tremor. You roll on your side, one hand ready in anticipatory defence. You let it drop when you see the man gurgle and his hands move to his neck. The blade in his jugular glows. The man looks at you, his eyes flooding with desperate beseeching. You crawl closer. Study. Smell. Your heart should be beating faster than it has ever beaten before and yet it canters. A pleasant warmth spreads through you. Your fingers dance the man’s skin. He tries to pull away but the fight has shifted to his desperate clinging to life.

You wait no longer. 

You twist the knife in his neck and drink his crowing screams. The knife slips out easily and drops to the floor. The man’s eyes fade and his body becomes inert. No longer a man. An object. A shell. 

This, this right here, this is who you are. You lock your lips to the wound and suck. Your tongue pistons in and out of the hole. His life fills your cheeks and the taste is sweet, not bitter or tangy as you had always imagined. The blood flushes down your throat and your belly screams.

You pull away and let yourself breathe, gasping in your post-coital fatigue. The night draws a breath. The moon and stars hold static and wait. You lie still. Soon your body will begin the evacuation. The sickness and retching. 

But no. The guts hoard their spoils and purr. There is no sickness. Something else instead.

Your body stretches and you feel the velvet in your veins. Your skin is like polished glass. The taste of life blossoms, not just in your mouth but everywhere. The blood of a person you will never know and yet with whom you have so intimately communed spreads like a swarm through every part of you. You are alight with rapture and the feeling is good. You let it take you. Your body arches with a soft violence — a pleasure you think, you hope, will never end. The world burns with a brilliant glow. The night is an ocean overflowing with sublime mystery. The spectrum is overwhelming. You are one with it all. 

It takes some time for your body to still. You lift yourself to your feet. Every part of you is made of mist. Soon the black smoke begins to bleed from the body at your feet. It flows from the man’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. It swims into the air and its stygian tendrils become the diffused shape of the man you met so briefly. It looks down at you with confused eyes. A mouth opens and shuts. It will soon find its voice. The other shadows watch on. They sink to the floor and say nothing. 

Above you, a sound. The roof of a small building. Your grandmother rests on all fours and you stare into one another’s eyes. Moments pass. Your grandmother’s tongue clicks and her throat chirrups. You watch her cautiously as she descends the shop’s exterior like a spider and crouches before you, her nostrils flared and filled with the scent of the kill. Neither of you speak. Neither of you need say anything at all. And then she is off, into the night and you follow some distance behind. You leave the body — a waste, but you’re young — and you run through the streets, the smudge of your grandmother always in sight. Your stomach grumbles, hungry again. Your face aches from your smile. Heart and soul sing with the night and the shadows and stars. 

In no time, your grandmother stops dead. She peers over her shoulder with her eyes of flame. You see the school lurching forward in the moonlight. The faint light that bleeds from shrouded windows. Your grandmother waits. The shadows wait. Past her you go on hands and feet, your limbs and joints well-oiled by the kill. A bedraggled someone loiters at the building’s open door. You do not know them. Who they are could not matter less. They see you and wail and fall to the floor.