Around a month ago, I lost my left eye in a snowboarding accident. Well, most of it. Eighty percent, according to the doctors. Without telling you the entire story, let’s just say that I tried to get fancy on a big jump.
Anyways, I get rushed off the slopes and to the hospital and without anybody needing to tell me, I start getting the sense that any vision I had in that eye is basically done for. As I was lying in the emergency room, I had tried covering my right eye while keeping the left one open in order to find out the extent of the damage.
And it was bad. Muted shapes, blurred colors, impossible to decipher anything. And getting worse by the minute.
By the time that they broke the news to me, I had already steeled myself for the outcome, almost feeling numb as the doctors rattled off what I guess was the standard procedure for these things. A bunch of medical lingo as well as my options moving forward.
They ended up having to remove the eye in its entirety. The thing was unsalvageable. It was strange staring at myself in the mirror afterwards. It wasn’t so much that I was horribly bothered by the way that I now looked, but at the same time, I dreaded the inevitability of having to explain it in future conversations.
So, I decided to get a prosthetic, something that looked at least somewhat close to the real thing, enough to fool anybody who might get curious.
I called the local clinics that the hospital had recommended and settled on the place offering the cheapest services after realizing that my insurance wasn’t going to cover 100% of the cost.
I scheduled an appointment with them, expecting to hear that the entire thing was going to take around three months or something.
But surprisingly, they were able to schedule me early the next week.
So the day of the appointment rolls around, and I make the drive over.
From what it looked like, there were only two people working in the entire place, the receptionist and one other guy I’d assumed was a surgeon or something. I thought it was a bit strange and I brought it up jokingly, almost in passing. The receptionist laughed and told me that all the other staff members were off that day due to a scheduling issue.
I just smiled and nodded. Sure.
The process ended up being quick and painless. The surgeon led me into one of the rooms, did some tests and some measurements and perhaps this was the moment I should’ve started questioning things more. They told me that they just happened to have a prosthetic lying around that would fit me perfectly. The eye color wasn’t quite right, but they said that was something that could easily be adjusted, and they could have it ready for me within an hour.
Looking back on it, the red flags were rather glaring. At the time though, I’d just assumed that it was an insane stroke of luck.
When they finally brought it out to me, I couldn’t believe how real it looked, and even more, how comfortable it felt sitting inside the socket. I was so over the moon about it that any reservations or doubts I might’ve had kind of just melted into the ether.
Of course, it did take some time to get used to only being able to see out of one eye. I can’t even count how many times I stumbled or nearly ran into a wall during the first few days.
Still, I was able to avoid some very annoying conversations, meaning that the thing was fulfilling its intended purpose.
Within a few weeks I was beginning to settle into it. But that all took a turn when I started seeing him.
The man in the distance. It’s a bizarre thing. A figure standing perfectly still maybe a mile away, looking my way. I know it sounds like I’m overreacting but just think about it. Have you ever been walking down an empty street and after a while you begin to focus on something in the distance? You can’t quite tell what it is and so you squint and eventually you realize that it’s somebody standing eerily still, positioned as if they’re looking straight at you. Even worse is when you get the feeling that it’s always the same person and that they’re always getting closer and closer.
And then there’s the doors, and I’ll try to explain this as simply as possible. Imagine one day you wake up in your home or apartment or whatever. You walk over to your bathroom to take your morning piss and in your groggy state you notice that there’s a door in your hallway that you’ve never seen before, one that would seem out of place in any residence. It looks to be made from a dense metal and has strange symbols carved into in a seemingly haphazard manner.
You close your eyes, thinking that you’ve gone insane and when you open them back up, the door has suddenly disappeared.
Well, these are pretty much play-by-play recollections of the things I’ve been seeing, and ever since the first few instances, it’s been happening more and more, almost exponentially so. They’re everywhere as well. Restaurants, the gym, other people’s houses. Hell, I even saw one of the doors while I was out on a hike. In the ground, right in the middle of the path.
And as always, whenever I try and get closer in order to investigate, it’ll disappear.
Now here’s the thing. Unlike the man, it’s never the same two doors and I know this is true because of two factors, being color and size. I’ve seen ones that were chrome grey, along with ones that have been pitch black. I’ve seen ones so small that I wouldn’t have even been able to squeeze through them and there have been ones large enough to accommodate a truck.
Of course, I tried to rationalize these things. Maybe hallucinations were a temporary symptom of losing one of your eyes. Maybe I had developed some obscure brain disease. But these trains of thought were short-lived. This was not normal. It didn’t make sense.
The straw that broke the camel’s back came the evening when I started to realize that my vision was actually coming back. My full range of vision. It was a simple thing to test out. Close my right eye while keeping the left prosthetic open, expecting absolute darkness.
But that’s not what happened. To my shock, I could still see. Granted, the extent of the vision was blurry to the point where I wouldn’t have been able to function with it alone, but the fact that anything was there at all kinda spat in the face of logic.
As soon as I realized this, I went to the bathroom in order to try and take it out. I’d done it once before and at the time it’d been a seamless process, but that was all the way back during the first week I’d gotten it.
But when I tried it this time around, I managed to get it out halfway before giving up. It hurt like hell, as if it were something never meant to be removed.
Immediately I got into my car and began to speed over to the clinic, my heart pounding the entire time. At some point during the drive, I took a glance at the rear-view mirror, and something seemed off about the car driving behind me.
I kept glancing at it, trying to understand what the issue was. There was a young woman in the driver’s seat. Fine. No issue there. But there was somebody else sitting in the back seat while the passenger’s seat remained empty.
I switched lanes, slowing down while I let her pass. When I went to look again, she was the only person in the car.
I shook my head, trying to quell my nerves as I continued to drive, though the scene that I saw upon pulling into the clinic’s parking lot certainly didn’t help with that. There was police tape everywhere, and it looked as if the place had been ransacked or something. The windows had been smashed and broken glass littered the pavement, and from what I could tell, the inside had been completely trashed.
There was one other car in the lot, a police vehicle with a tired-looking cop sitting inside. I parked, got out of my car and knocked on his window.
The cop eyed me warily before rolling it down.
“Yeah?” he said. “What do you need?”
“I was just… just wondering what happened here,” I said.
He stared at me for a while before responding. “Can’t say. It’s an ongoing investigation.”
Then he paused before asking:
“Why do you want to know?”
I wasn’t quite prepared for the question and after stumbling through a few sentences, I ended up telling him that I’d gotten a prosthetic eye from the clinic but was starting to have issues with it. Which was basically true.
“That’s it?” the cop said. “An issue with the eye? Nothing else?”
His tone was strange, as if for whatever reason he knew that I wanted to tell him more, which in turn indicated to me that he was itching to do the same.
After a bout of awkward silence, I nodded my head.
“Yeah. Nothing else.”
The cop just stared at me with this incredulous look on his face, and I suppose that was ultimately the reaction I was looking for. A confirmation that we were indeed on the same page.
He opened his glove compartment and pulled out a notepad and began to write something down. A phone number. Then he handed it to me.
“We can’t talk right now,” he said. “But if things escalate… then give me a call.”
Then he gestured for me to lean in and so I did.
“Listen to me,” he said, barely above a whisper. “If he starts getting close, I mean real close… then you know what you have to do. Right?”
“I don’t think I understand.”
He focused in on the left side of my face. “Let me guess. You’ve tried taking it out. But it hurts, doesn’t it? Well, it’s going to hurt no matter what you do. There’s no easy way out of this.”
I shook my head. “What the fuck are you saying?”
The cop sighed, his eyes darting around. Suddenly he seemed nervous.
“Look,” he said. “Just give me a call. And one more thing. If can you help it, try your best not to look at him.”
He turned away and began to roll up the window.
“Wait,” I said. “What about the doors?”
When he didn’t respond, I slammed on the glass. “What about the fucking doors?”
The cop just stared ahead as if I were no longer there. I backed away, getting angrier by the moment until I was overcome by the feeling that we were being watched. I cursed under my breath and headed back to my car, looking around the entire time. Looking for him.
When I got back home, I poured myself a glass of vodka. Three glasses later and I’d managed to stave off the impending panic attack, but now I was out, and I knew that I was going to need more.
I grabbed my keys and prepared to head to the liquor store near my place and in my partially drunken state, I nearly failed to notice it.
My front door had changed. It was the color that had thrown me off, the same light grey that I was accustomed to seeing on a day-to-day basis.
But then I saw the symbols, the metallic glint. I moved away from it, expecting it to revert back to what it should’ve been after a few blinks.
And when that didn’t happen, I closed my eyes, counted to thirty seconds and then opened them back up.
Still no change.
Then I tried something else. I kept my right eye open while keeping the prosthetic closed.
It worked, but only for a moment. My normal apartment door, the one that always should’ve been there, flashed back into existence. I reached for the knob, but just as soon as I did, it had disappeared, replaced by a large, rusted handle.
I cursed and then stepped back. It was a different door this time, one more ominous in nature than any that had come before.
It was dark brown and huge, reaching close to the top of my ceiling and spanning six or seven feet wide. The standard symbols were etched across it but were barely visible against the large blotches of orange-reddish rust.
It quite literally looked like the entrance to hell, with the worst part being that no matter how long I stared at it, how many times I’d close and open my eyes, it was still there. After a while I reached out and tried to touch it, half-expecting to feel wood, for the illusion to finally break.
What I felt instead was cold, rusted metal.
I sure as hell wasn’t going to try and open it, but I also lived on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building.
I went out onto my balcony, tried yelling for my neighbors. When nobody responded, I looked over the railing and down at the streets, watching the people walking below, eventually focusing in on somebody standing still in between two parked cars.
Somebody looking right up at me.
I backed away, locking the balcony door out of a kind of fear that I couldn’t even understand. For a while I just sat on the couch, feeling the panic beginning to overwhelm everything else.
I searched around in my pockets, pulling out the piece of paper that the cop from the parking lot had written his number down on. Immediately I called it, hearing the line ring twice before somebody picked it up.
But they didn’t talk, opting to breath heavily right into the speaker instead. It sounded like they were out of breath, and somewhere in the background I could hear a low moaning.
I hung up, tossed my phone onto the couch. I was starting to feel light-headed, the skin on my face becoming hot to the touch and so I walked over to the bathroom and doused my face with cold water. It helped slightly, but whatever reprieve it brought me was wiped away as soon as I walked back into the living room.
I could just barely see it out of the corner of my eye. Somebody standing on my balcony, face pressed tightly against the window. Their skin was pale, and they were dressed in what appeared to be a sweeping black robe.
Remembering what the cop had told me, I didn’t look at it directly, keeping it at the edge of my vision in order to give myself peace of mind, to make sure that it didn’t move.
I inched towards my couch and picked up my phone where I had left it and dialed 911. I told them that somebody was on my balcony, trying to break in, that they needed to send somebody ASAP. The operator told me that they would, but that in the meantime I’d be better off leaving my apartment.
I told them that I couldn’t do that and when asked why, I had no answer.
This seemed to confuse them, but they told me stay on the line, which I did.
By now I was actively trying to stop myself from hyperventilating and in my fear I walked backwards into my kitchen and grabbed hold of steak knife.
I must have looked away from the balcony for a split-second because now the figure was gone. I held my breath and soon enough I could hear something coming from the hallway behind me, what sounded like rough, animalistic exhales.
“It’s inside,” I whispered into the phone. “It’s behind me.”
I could hear the operator saying something, but at that point I was too stunned to listen.
You know what you have to do. Right?
I looked down at the knife in my hand.
The last things I remembered before everything went fuzzy was the door slowly creaking open and something cold brushing against the back of my neck.
When I woke up however many hours later, I was lying in a hospital bed, a fierce stinging swathing the entire left side of my face.
I reached up and felt around, my fingers skimming across layers of thick bandages. Given the facts at hand, I had a pretty good idea what had happened, but I still asked the nurses in order to confirm things.
When the cops had found me, I’d been lying on the floor, the back of my head submerged in a pool of my own blood, my fingers still wrapped around the handle of the knife. Apparently, I had carved the prosthetic straight out of my socket, and I had done a piss-poor job.
After the nurses had left, two plain-looking men in suits approached the side of my bed and began to ask me questions. At first I thought they were state-appointed psychiatrists or something, sent to determine whether or not I was a harm to myself and others.
But the tone of their voices and the way they conducted themselves didn’t quite align with that. They were very matter of fact with their questioning, more like detectives than anything else.
While they seemed prepared and almost eager to believe whatever I had to say, speaking to them proved to be an uneasy thing and so I ended up dancing around the more surreal details of what had actually happened. I’m not sure why. It just felt like I had to.
But even so, I could tell that they knew that I was lying.
After realizing that they weren’t going to be able to get anything out of me, one of the suits just smiled, telling me that they’d “stay in touch” before they left.
A strange encounter, but by that point I was too relieved to care. It was over. This fucked up nightmare had finally run its course.
I nearly drifted back to sleep when I heard somebody else enter the room. I opened my eyes, sat up. It was a cop. He began to approach me nervously, and I asked him what he wanted.
“I’m just curious,” he said. “What happened in there?”
I just stared at him. “What do you mean?”
“In your apartment. What the hell was going on?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I had a manic episode or something.”
“No,” the cop said. “No, there was something else happening. Something fucked up.”
I shook my head. “And how would you know?”
He leaned down, getting uncomfortably close to my face.
“Did they not tell you? When we got there, your door was gone. You know the front door to your apartment? It wasn’t there. We had to break down the fucking wall to get inside.”
He paused, his eyes growing wide as if some fear of his had just been validated.
“Why the fuck wouldn’t it be there?”
Suddenly a hand appeared on his shoulder. I looked up, seeing one of the suits from earlier. He was staring down at the cop and smiling, the malice behind the expression just barely concealed.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the suit said. “Let him rest.”
The cop stared back at him, matching the hostility in his gaze as he stood straight and began to back away. Once he was out of sight, the suit looked down at me, the grin lingering as he gave me a nod.
Then he walked out of the room and when he shut the door behind him, it was not the same one that had been there earlier.
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Credits
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