I was on my eighth headache of the week when my boss finally made me make a doctor’s appointment. I’m a reporter, so the majority of my work is done on the computer-- it makes sense that my eyes might get a little strained.
I was nervous in the waiting room. One, because it was a new place—Kassel Optometry, in the southern quarter of Habitsville—and two, because it had been an embarrassingly long time since I had been in. I’m terrible about keeping up with appointments; and apparently, so is everyone else in Habitsville, seeing as it was a Monday morning, and the waiting room was completely empty.
That being said, the office seemed pleasant. Clean, non-threatening—I know that may be a strange quality to search for in an optometrist office, but you haven’t seen the things that I have. There were framed paintings around, idyllic scenes of the countryside, goats in a pasture, an apple tree. None of the weird eye diagrams you see in most places. Something about the small-town quaintness seemed to ease my nerves, and I wondered if they did that on purpose.
“Singer?”
That was me. A man stood in the doorway to the exam rooms, smiling at me with the normal, white-toothed grin of most doctors. He looked to be in his forties, with lightly tanned skin and an inconspicuously receding hairline. If you googled ‘doctor’, this is probably the guy that would show up, with the white lab coat and everything.
“Hello…Samuel,” he said, after checking his chart. “I’m Dr. Kassel. How are we doing today?” he asked as he led me farther into the other side of the building. It was strange—I had assumed that there would be at least one other person there, besides the two of us. But all that we passed by were darkened exam room after darkened exam room. The only sound was the air conditioner and our two sets of footsteps against the linoleum tile.
“Good,” I answered.
“Glad to hear it. Monday’s, am I right?” He laughed a clearly fake laugh, and I gave a weak chuckle in response.
We finally came across the room he was looking for. “After you,” he said, motioning with his clipboard to the dim doorway. I stepped into the blackness, feeling an increased amount of wariness that I knew was silly. Then, he stepped in behind me, flipped on the light, and closed the door.
“Take a seat,” he said, and I sat in the chair positioned in front of a blank, white wall. “What seems to be the problem?”
“Headaches,” I replied. “Just about every day. I work in front of a computer, so…”
“Gotcha,” he answered, scribbling on his clipboard. I watched him idly, the way his hand jotted across the paper in that classic doctor chicken scratch.
And then, I blinked.
There was a moment, as my eyes drifted past the pen and the clipboard, that I saw something on his chest. An odd bit of movement—not breathing, it wasn’t nearly so measured and smooth—it was as though a bird had given a single flap of its wing, underneath the fabric over his sternum.
I rubbed my eyes, blinked again, but I didn’t see the movement after that. I figured it was just a trick of the light, or just more proof that I probably needed glasses. “…that blue light can really put stress on the eyes.,” Dr. Kassel continued before clicking his pen closed. “Let’s go ahead and get you started with something easy: the eye chart.”
He turned down the lights, flipped a switch, and suddenly there was something projected on the blank expanse of wall in front of me. The familiar block letters I probably hadn’t seen since I was in elementary school. “Go ahead and read the first line.”
“E.”
“Good. And the second?”
“Y, E”
“Wonderful. And the third?”
“S,H,E.”
There was a pause this time. He cleared his throat. “Mhm. The fourth?”
“N, E, E, D.”
An even longer quiet. I stole a glance over at the doctor, and he was staring down at his clipboard, his pen frozen on the paper. I could see his nostrils flaring with every breath, a vein in his temple standing out disturbingly far. “Dr. Kassel, are you—” I began to ask.
“The fifth line, Samuel.”
Whatever came over him seemed to fade a bit, and he looked up at me with a smile. I uneasily turned back to the chart.
“P,L,E,A,S,E—”
I jumped in my chair as Dr. Kassel slammed his clipboard down onto the desk in the corner of the room. His breathing was heavy, and he flipped the lights back on without warning, causing me to wince. There was a moment, before my eyes had adjusted to the sudden exposure, when Dr. Kassel turned back towards me, and I saw it again.
That same fluttering movement beneath his shirt, directly in the center.
I rubbed my eyes, black spots dancing in front of them. But just like before, once my eyes refocused, I couldn’t see the movement again.
“No sense in reading more, eh? Seems like you got far enough.” The doctor said hurriedly, his face flushed and agitated. He grabbed a tool, a strange baton with a flat black disc on the end. “Time for the cover test. Have you done this before?”
“Not that I can remember,” I answered. There was a feeling of unease in the pit of my stomach. I considered faking some sort of excuse and finding a reason to leave, but he was already rolling a stool in front of my chair, the piece of equipment held aloft.
“It’s simple,” he said with a smile that didn’t distract from the fact that his eyes were now slightly bloodshot. “I’ll hold this over one of your eyes, and you just look straight ahead. It’s just to make sure that each of your eyes are aligned properly. Easy peasy.”
I nodded. “Right eye first,” he said, before placing the device over my eye. “Go ahead and keep the covered one open and look forward as best you can.”
My right eye was shrouded in darkness, and for a moment, all I saw was the face of Dr. Kassel, as he gazed intently into my own.
And then, quite suddenly, I jumped back.
An icy chill crept down my spine and sweat broke out across my forehead. I felt sick. Dr. Kassel looked a bit taken aback. “Are you okay, Samuel?”
“Yeah,” I answered breathlessly, thought I was nothing of the sort. I almost told Dr. Kassel what I had seen, there in the darkness behind the shield of his equipment. But I thought better of it. Of course, that hadn’t really been there. My anxieties over the appointment were just manifesting into something… strange, that was all.
Dr. Kassel was peering at me now with a peculiar expression, one that I couldn’t quite place. It was as though we were both on the cusp of saying something truly bizarre, yet neither of us wanted to give in without the other doing so first.
“I’m sorry,” I said, clearing my throat and readjusting in my seat. “I just got a little bit dizzy.”
Dr. Kassel let out a quiet sigh of relief, but the tension I sensed within him hardly ebbed. He rolled his stool closer and held out the blinder. “No worries,” he said casually. “Let’s try that again.”
I took a deep breath and tried to relax. He pressed the cool plastic over my right eye, the darkness covered half my sight, and then—
Shhhh.
I leapt back again. There was no denying it that time.
There had been a girl.
She had been standing against the blackness like it was a room, one spot of paleness amongst the void. She was wearing a dress, neat and gray. Her hair was in braids, not mussed or dirty. She had those frilly socks with the little collars, and the polished shoes that buckled. Her hand was held to her face, one short plump finger extended up and pressed against her lips, directly below something that made my hair stand on end.
A single eye, of monstrous size, glistening with viscous wetness and framed by huge, fibrous lashes, in the very center of her face.
She blinked one, slow blink, and terrifyingly, I could hear the squelch as each eyelid moved to meet the other.
That was when I had pulled away, and sat doubled over on my chair, only slightly conscious of the look that my optometrist was giving me. I had no words, to explanation to give him for my actions. There was no way I could tell him what I had seen.
But, I didn’t have to.
“It was her, wasn’t it?”
My head shot in his direction, and I could see him, ashen and grave on his seat. He wasn’t looking back at me, only gazing down at the shield he had used, as though picturing the girl within the small black oval.
“You—you’ve seen her too?” I asked breathlessly. I was glad that he knew what had happened without me having to say it—but there was something else there too. A cold, dreadful recognition in his face.
He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers for a moment, then quickly got up from his chair. “I’m sorry, Samuel” he said in a low voice. The bright demeanor that he had when I first entered the office was gone.
“Sorry about what?” I asked.
There was a pause. My heart was beating fast and hard in my chest, one bead of sweat rolled down my temple as the pit of anxiety and fear in my stomach billowed up to my throat.
And then, he smiled, a tense, strange smile. “Sorry this appointment is taking so long. Luckily, there’s just one test left.”
Before I could process the sudden change in tone, he had wrapped a hand tight around my forearm—much too tight. “Wait—” I half said, but I was already being swung to the other side of the room and tossed into the reclined examination chair there.
My immediate instinct was to get up, to leave the room and the Kassel Optometry office altogether—but that plan was cut off with the same force that my air was, as a thick metal band suddenly clamped around my windpipe. I gasped and pulled at it, but my fingers clawed uselessly against the cold steel.
I lay there, wheezing, as Dr. Kassel rolled over the machine.
“Now this is called a phoropter, Samuel,” Dr. Kassel said with an eerie calm in his voice. He placed it in front of my face, and I tried to pull away, but the band around my throat kept me locked in place. “All you have to do is look through it and tell me when you can see the image the clearest.”
“Please—stop--” I tried to say, but the air it took to form even this single word was too much and sent me gasping. The oxygen-deprivation was making my head spin, and I didn’t have the strength to fight as the binocular-like limb of the machine was pressed over my eyes.
At first, I didn’t see anything.
“How’s this?” Dr. Kassel drifted, his voice steady.
I tried my best to shake my head, knowing that the edge of metal against the soft of my neck was going to leave bruises.
“Hmm,” the man said. Then, I heard a switch. “How about this?”
A spasm of fear ripped through me, as I pulled against my bonds. I was coughing violently, my eyes watering, but I could still see the shape in front of me. It was completely dark, a flat black spaciousness unlike anything I had ever seen.
And there she was, standing in the center.
The same pale translucence and neat appearance, same shine to her shoes, same hair in braids tied with ribbons at the ends. She was standing far away, her hands clasped behind her back, as though waiting.
The same single blue eye in the center of her head, staring back at me.
“Still not clear enough?” I heard Dr. Kassel ask somewhere to my right. “How’s this?”
Another switch and I lurched again, my head swimming rom the pressure on my trachea, kept conscious only by the intense terror I was feeling.
With whatever adjustment Dr. Kassel had made on the phoropter, the girl had moved closer. She stood only a few feet away now. I could see her eye water, could hear the wet sound of the blink so clearly it made my stomach turn. She tilted slightly on her heels, back and forth, like an antsy child about to ask for a favor.
“Please,” I hacked again, the only word that could escape my lips one of desperation. The blood was now tight in my head, and my ears rang with the pressure. I wondered what would get me first—this slow, aching strangulation, or whatever the girl would do to me once she got close enough.
“One more, you think?” I heard Dr. Kassel call from the from the room outside of the void. I tried to say no, to scream into the empty office, something. But no sound came out.
Click.
I closed my eyes, bracing myself for some unknown terror to take hold of me.
But, nothing happened.
I opened my eyes, and there was nothing before me—a flat expanse of black, completely empty. The girl and the globous orb that was her eye, were gone.
The machine was pulled away from my face, and soon the image of the office replaced it. My pulse was strained, my vision cloudy, and though it seemed the ordeal with the girl was over, the tightness around my throat didn’t lessen. I half raised an arm to my neck, and out of the corner of my eye, I could see Dr. Kassel shake his head with pity.
“Sorry, Samuel. Your test isn’t quite over.” He sighed. “I had hoped that it wouldn’t come to this—that I had given enough—but I’m afraid sacrifices have to be made.”
I didn’t understand what he meant, and I didn’t have the energy to ask any of the questions that were racing through my mind. Then, Dr. Kassel reached over, and gently held my chin with his fingers. With an almost tender push, he let my head fall to the left.
There she was.
Standing in the left corner of the room, as still as could be, was the girl. She was pale, mottled flesh, no longer a nightmarish vision in the blackened box of the eye examination. And her eye—her eye. It glistened under the fluorescents with a sickening sheen. I could see every eyelash down to the follicle, could see the pink edges touch ever so slightly in the center as she blinked.
And then she brought her hands out from behind her back, and what little breath I had stopped dead.
Her left hand was empty. But in her right, was another.
An identical little girl, in an identical dress, with identical braids, holding hands with the girl I had seen twice prior, tiny fingers intertwined.
The only difference?
Instead of a huge, glistening eye in the center of the second girl’s face, there was only a gaping hole. It was red and raw, purple around the edges where it blended into her sickly skin. The largest open wound I had ever seen.
The walked towards me slowly, hand in hand. I stared back at them weakly as the one with sight led the other. She stood in front of me, her face close to mine. No breath seemed to flow from her slightly open mouth. I could see each vein in the eye’s whites, the liquid of her iris jiggling as she moved. She tilted her head to the side, as though she were curious about something.
Then she reached out a finger, and gently touched my face. Her cold-cement skin felt wrong against mine, and I made a gurgle of protest as she put a finger on each of my eyelids. She spread them wide, peering inside. Then she turned and looked back at the other girl. Then, back at eye.
And then, as the horrific child stared deeply into my exposed cornea, I realized what was happening.
It was a fitting.
I still don’t know how I understood them, the mannerisms of this otherworldly child in front of me. But I could see it—a calculation taking place in her mind, an effort she was making to find a replacement for the eye that was taken from the other, a way to give her sight once more.
I was weak then, unconsciousness seeping into my frame of vision around the edges like a vignette in a photograph. The urge to simply drift into the blackness was powerful, especially if it meant I was going to miss whatever would surely take place soon.
Then, the girl’s fingertips slipped past the eyelid painfully, and tried to get a grip on my eyeball itself.
That was what did it. That action, so disturbing and alien, sparked the last bit of adrenaline in my body to flow into my veins. I raised my arms and brought them down as hard as I could, flailing wildly. The girls both backed away from me, as I gasped and struggled. “LET. ME. GO.” I hissed through clenched teeth.
I could feel blood prick from my neck as the metal ground against my skin as I shook violently, a last-ditch effort to free myself. But soon I felt a hand on my right arm, and I turned my head.
There was Dr. Kassel, holding my arm in place.
“Samuel, you need to let them take it. It’s the only thing that will keep them away, at least for a little while.”
I stared at this man, his desperate expression, the way his knuckles shone white with how tightly he was holding down my arm. Like whatever these girls were doing, he needed it to happen. For his own sake.
And then I saw it again. That quick, bird-wing flutter movement below the fabric of his shirt, in the very center of his chest.
I waited a second more, then let the effort in my arm ebb. I let my head fall limply against my shoulder, my eyes fall close, my breathing slow, then stop.
The doctor paused a moment, then I felt his hands leave my arm.
“Go ahead,” I heard him tell the girl. After a second, I felt the cold tingle of her fingers brush my eyelid.
That was when my eyes flashed open. I picked my arm up one last time, clawed outward until I felt fabric. Then I pulled with all my might, every ounce of strength that I had left.
Then I heard a rip, and the clinking sound of a few buttons hitting the floor.
There was dead silence.
Dr. Kassel stood frozen next to my head, though he wasn’t looking at me. Instead, he stared at the girl, who’s wide blue eye was fixed on him, it’s expression wide and surprised.
There, embedded in the center of Dr. Kassel’s chest like a stone set in a ring, was a monstrous blue eye. It blinked, only once.
I couldn’t see what happened, because once the girl lunged forward and pushed Dr. Kassel to the ground, they were beyond my field of vision. Instead, I stared at the other girl, with the gaping hole in her head, as we both listened to the grunts and screams and scuffling of the two on the floor. There was a guttural yell, a sound like a cork being pulled from a bottle, and then, silence.
The other girl walked back into my vision, scraped with claw marks and splattered with blood. In her hands like a basketball, reddened around one edge by a long scratch, was the other eye.
She held the blind girl’s hand and squeezed. Then, with a push, the other eye popped into the other girl’s head.
There was a moment, where it spun slightly, as though she wasn’t in control of it. Then, it settled, and soon, both girls were staring at me. I was too tired to feel fear any longer.
Then, they both blinked, and they were gone.
There was another click in the stillness of the exam room—the band of metal releasing from my throat. I choked and coughed a bit, and once I could breathe, I was able to sit up in the chair.
I made my way out of the room, out of the Kassel Optometry office, careful not to look at what was left of the doctor as I went.
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