A grotesque image can make you shut your eyes. Like the image of a spider slowly wrapping its prey in an unescapable cocoon of silky death. The hundreds of eyes filled with hunger, just for you. The slow and constant tightening of your body, so that you can’t move, and you have an itch on your nose from the smell that you can’t scratch, and the webs are slowly covering up your eyes and the last thing that you see are those thousands of eyes. Hungry eyes.
You can look away from the screen. You can lock your phone. You can close the book.
You can’t stop listening.
The spider eating its prey can shock you into sleepless nights for weeks. The sound of the chalk screeching on the blackboard? It sends chills down your spine. Your mind stops working for just one, eternal, second. You want the sound to stop. Oh you hate that sound from the bottom of your very soul. But you can’t…
You can’t stop listening
Have you ever washed under your kitchen sink? Our family was poor, so we did not own those fancy gloves.
We used cloth covered hands.
We were very careful, but mistakes were made. Green-black-grey mass of unidentified goo used to stick to our hands. We never knew what it was made of. Insects that were dead? Digested? Food so rotten even the roaches won’t eat them?
Blood?
We never knew.
But… we could wash our hands.
We could never stop listening.
When you live in a family, you have a certain reaction to horror.
You wish to stay close to everyone else, and you wished for ‘it’ to get you first.
Selfishly selfless, I liked to think of it.
You can never think of losing anyone else. The mother is so sweet and loving and caring. The father is so honest and what would we eat without the money? And the little sister deserves more years to her life and the older brother really likes that girl and he should live to marry her. You get left out, rather conveniently.
But when you’re alone, you do not have anyone to save.
You don’t have to stand guard at the door thinking that you’ll let the others escape.
No, you have to save your bloody life.
And you do not know how.
And so you switch on the lights, because horrors only lurk in the dark, silly, and you cover yourself with a blanket, and you switch on the bathroom lights too, just in case, and you come back to be– did you leave the closet door open? Of course you did, silly you, and so you close the door firmly, and look around, and you look under your bed, just to be sure, and you finally lay down in bed. You keep looking at the closet as your eyes drift back to sleep.
Krrrrrrrrrrt skrrrrrrrrt.
You wake up with a start. It’s some branches dragging across the grill outside your window.
You try going back to sleep. But you cannot. Because you keep hearing those irregularities. Those subtly different sounds each and every time.
And suddenly the wind dies down.
It’s quiet.
A bit too quiet.
You want to turn around, and you don’t want to turn around. You’re sure that there’s nothing on the other side. You’re sure that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing on the other side and you’re perfectly safe.
It’s too quiet.
You don’t want to turn around. ‘It’ could be there. Watching. Whiling.
Waiting.
Without turning around, you try to go to sleep. But it is too bright. Your eyes hurt.
Your hand reaches out to the switch board and flicks the switch with practiced ease.
You still cant sleep.
It is too damned quiet.
You grab your phone and start scrolling through your notifications.
Oh that looks interesting.
Huh.
And slowly but surely, your eyes adjust to the brightness of the screen.
And when you look away from the screen, for just a brief moment, you see nothing. Your eyes quickly scramble to the safety of the screen, where they don’t have to stare into the unknown.
You dim the light of the screen, to ease the burden on your eyes. You can now see your reflection in your phone.
And that’s when you see them. Those eyes. In the reflection of the phone. Staring at you.
You shut your eyes. You try to convince yourself that it was some sort of optical illusion. Perhaps it was just picture on the screen. Yeah, that’s right. A picture. Yes. Definately a pic–
You hear someone breathe. It’s not you.
It's me.
For you see, you can stop seeing, touching, focusing, or even thinking. But you can’t stop listening.