Supernatural Noir

——

A few months later, my parents were surprised when I declined to have a false eye fitted into my empty socket. What I had understood, what they would never understand, was that there was still an eye of sorts there, one that saw exceedingly well, but just not in the fashion other eyes saw.

At first, I kept my socket blinkered, covered by the patch, hoping not to see the creature I had seen before. But one night, afflicted with curiosity, I lifted the patch.

I was alone in my room, one lamp burning fitfully in the corner, shadows dancing along the wall. I wanted to see if the shadows themselves were something more, thinking that if they were I would turn the lamp up and drive them away. There was nothing there. Or nothing in the shadows, rather. But when I looked down, I saw a thin, smoky, long arm grasping my waist. A face that was a parody of my own floated just inches away, staring into my empty socket.

I shuddered. A gleam came into the creature’s eye, but just as quickly faded, though it continued to regard me with what might be described as curiosity. It opened its mouth and I watched its lips and tongue, such as they were, operate in a semblance of speech.

I could not hear words, but I tried to follow the movements of its lips. “You can see me,” I believe it must have said, or else it was, “You can’t be me,” unless it was something else. I quickly lowered the patch so as to blot it out. There immediately followed a tightness in my throat that I tried to see as natural, that I tried to ignore, and then I found myself briefly choking. I ignored this until I felt a stabbing pain in my chest, and lifted the patch to find the creature had insinuated its hand beneath my ribs, had its fingers apparently wrapped around my heart. When it saw that I was looking, it let go and smiled.

“What is it?” I asked. “What do you want?”

It pointed languidly to its ear, then pointed to my own, then said something that I could not hear. When I did not respond, it did this again, and again, until finally, not knowing what else to do, I nodded as if I had understood. Its smile grew wider. Slowly it wriggled its way up my torso until its head was just beside my own. And then it stabbed its finger deep into my ear again and again until I screamed in pain and lost consciousness.

—

II

For fifteen years they kept me confined—for my own protection, they claimed. My parents, alerted by my screams, had climbed the stairs to find me writhing on the floor, blood leaking from one of my ears. Though they could not find the needle or pencil or other implement that I had used to pierce my own eardrum, they did not doubt that I had done this to myself. I only worsened matters by trying to be honest first with them and then with the medical profession, but after all I was young. At the time I hardly knew that the world does not operate through directness and honesty but by way of falsehood and deception. Thus I remained adamant and insistent about what had happened, describing the creature and what it had done to me, not realizing how I was tightening the noose around my own neck.

In the place of my ruined eardrum there grew another sort of ear, one that could hear that which could not, properly speaking, be heard. The creature that clung to me began to speak to me as well, its voice not a voice exactly, but a kind of whispery echo, not always easy to make out, more a suggestion of a voice than a voice itself.

At first I resisted the creature, tried to ignore it, tried to pay no attention as it squeezed my heart or upset my belly or bore down on my lungs. I would hold out as long as I dared, keeping the patch over my eye and stopping my ear with whatever came to hand—a scrap of wet fabric, chewed paper, bits and scraps of food—but it persisted. Eventually I could feel its fingers stroke the fibers of my brain, exciting them into a kind of panic that brought the orderlies ru

With the additional confusion of the injections and shock treatments and straitjacketings, it took the creature and me years to settle into an uneasy sort of truce. For one thing I learned that though it could cause me pain, though it could excite me, it could not do much more, could not kill or damage me permanently without my permission, and as time went on I learned to control my responses to it. For another, I realized that when my ear was unplugged I could hear not only its whispers, but beneath them, lower and farther away, other sounds humans could not hear.

It was this that finally got me spending a few hours of the day with my patch rolled higher up on my forehead, peering through my empty socket. What I saw at first surprised me, though it should not have. I had long assumed that the smoky creature that had come to me had been the same creature I had seen torturing the doctor, that it was one of a kind, and that it had, by leaving the doctor and coming to me, begun to take on my own characteristics. But what I saw now was a similar creature clinging to each person around me, a whole world of trailing ghosts. They assumed all postures, some of them simply clinging loosely to the bodies of their hosts, others coiled murkily around them. With some of the mad, the creatures seemed malicious, their smiles unholy and their fingers wedged deep into their host’s brains. With others, the creatures seemed to be wailing and crying, trying as well as they could to extricate themselves from the person to whom they were attached. But as they worked one part of themselves free, another smoky strand would form and attach. The orderlies had them as well, though their creatures were generally calmer, though perhaps more inclined to enjoy violence when it did happen. The doctors had them too. Indeed, I began to realize, these creatures perhaps had no choice but to be with us. They were in some sense imprisoned. We were part of them and they were part of us.

This was a terrible thing to know and I fought it as long as I could. I finally got used to it because there was no other choice, at least not one that I could see. I was like everyone else, with one exception: I knew.

—

III

And then, late in my confinement, I found myself awoken by a slow, steady whispering. Friend, it said. Get up, friend. Friend, get up. It repeated the same words over and over again, and kept at it until, finally, I arose.

“What is it?” I asked, but in the dark my double could not read lips. And so I stood and switched on the light, then lifted my eye patch and repeated my question.

The creature curling around me seemed anxious, though I could not understand why. It regarded me as I spoke again and then nodded curtly. Out the door, it said. When I stood waiting, it repeated its command again, adding, in a more gentle whisper, Friend, I will lead you.

And indeed it did. The door, I was surprised to find, was unlocked. We went out the door, and then down the hall and past a sleeping orderly whose own creature had its fumid hands plunged deep within the man’s skull, and who nodded and broke into a saurian smile as we passed. Another turning and then another, and then to the door of another inmate’s room. This too, I was surprised to discover, was unlocked.