We Live Inside Your Eyes Read online

  “With dread in my heart I watched him walk out of one frame and into another, and on those monitors I saw him mount the stairs. I thought he might be going up to remove the video screen, but the way he’d said he loved me and the look on his face told me something was wrong. And it was, because he didn’t remove the screen. Like everybody else, you’ll tell me I’m crazy, and probably mock me like TMZ did, but I swear on my life, he didn’t remove the screen, because it wasn’t a screen at all. Whatever it was showed a desert full of ancient ruins, each one topped with black spires. Towering over them all was a stone statue of a giant. Its face was nothing but eyes, and its hands were colossal trees. More spires poked like black needles from the sand around its feet. I watched in disbelief, still sure this would turn out to be part of a clever hoax, as Mike stepped through the screen and then he was part of it. Inside it, somehow. The sand rolled away ahead of him as if something was alive beneath it, or as if his presence had caused a kind of shockwave. That’s when I knew this was no illusion. He had time to look up at the camera one last time before the screen, the door, the whatever it was, snapped shut behind him, and I ran, ran, ran down my stairs to my car to go save him. But he was gone.”

  And what, asks the interviewer—who, like the rest of us, already knew thanks to the lipreader who decoded it the day it was made public—did he say to the camera before he disappeared?

  “He said ‘I think it’s a door into someone else’s dreams.’”

  The documentary remains unfinished, but in an effort to try to draw Mike out of wherever he might be hiding, or in the hope that somebody might see it and come forward with information that might help locate him, Therese made the footage available for download on the Internet.

  Which is where Scott Walker saw it.

  X

  On the 6th of September, 2018, Scott Walker returned from a meeting with his agent in New York. It had gone well. He’d signed a three-book deal with HarperCollins, which meant he’d get to breathe for a few days before sequestering himself in his office for the better part of three years. Scott was tired, ready to do nothing but vegetate in front of the TV, but that rarely happened anymore. As the saying in publishing goes, a writer is always writing, even when he’s not.

  His sixteen-year-old daughter Zoe was at the kitchen counter, an untouched plate full of her mother’s vegetarian spaghetti and meatballs next to her. She was, as always, glued to her laptop.

  “Hi, honey,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.

  “Dad,” she said, hands aflutter. “You have got to watch this.”

  Scott loved his daughter dearly but confessed to not understanding her fascination with morbid stuff. Every week she tried to force him to watch another true crime documentary on Netflix, or worse, listen to some podcast in which nasally amateur sleuths rehashed facts that were freely available in books written decades before. He might have considered having a talk with her about the value of those shows that night, but as his wife had pointed out, he’d lost his vetting rights the minute he started writing horror stories.

  Scott went to get a beer from the fridge. “What is it? More of those Vine things?”

  “No, no. It’s about a house not far from here. Just off Sawmill, I think? I dunno. It’s somewhere close. Anyway, it’s supposed to be, like, an urban legend or something because for years people have been disappearing there.”

  Scott cracked open the beer, took a long slug. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, they were making a documentary about it and there’s footage of the director, like, getting sucked into some kind of portal or something. Come, see.” To pacify her, he did, but was too wiped out to pay much attention to the grainy camera footage. So instead he kissed her once more and headed for the stairs. “Mom asleep?”

  “Bridge night with Donny and Lo,” she said.

  “Ah, that’s right. Well, I’ll say goodnight now, then.”

  “Goodnight, and my name’s not Nowthen.”

  “Hardy-har.”

  He showered and went to bed.

  Zoe recalls she heard him screaming that night, but when she quizzed him the following morning, he pleaded ignorance. He was, however, unusually eager to see the video she had tried to show him the night before. He replayed the video so many times, she had to beg him to stop.

  What follows was retrieved from the NOTES app on Scott’s phone after it was retrieved in a field twenty miles south of Columbus:

  The video was called “Mike Howard documentary SFX.” Later, once I went back to the start of all of this and caught up to where Mike’s documentary footage left it, I’d realize that this video was uploaded by another user, who edited it to show only Mike’s last night in the house. But at the time, that was all I needed to see, and once I watched it, I sat back in the chair and tried to make sense of it all.

  It isn’t possible to remember every dream you’ve ever had, but most people remember some of them. I can only recall a handful of my most vivid dreams, or nightmares, many of them from my childhood.

  All of them are in Mike Howard’s video footage, playing on the screen at the top of the stairs.

  After that night, I put my book on hold and spent all my time researching the house. I wanted to know how it was possible that over the course of sixty years, several people in the real world somehow walked into my dreams and nightmares, brought to vivid life by an unnatural house. I should have let it go, because the nature of the situation suggested it might drive me mad. Certainly, it was insane to expect a logical explanation. In the end I decided I must not have had those dreams after all. A more likely explanation was that I saw the Howard video somewhere, or came across an article, maybe that old guy Windale’s blog, and my mind created false memories from the fragments.

  But I know this isn’t true.

  When I was seven years old, I woke up screaming so loudly my mother ran into the room to comfort me because I’d dreamed of a clown that had insectile limbs and cockroaches crawling under his shirt. Even when I woke, I thought he was inside the room, but it was just my Abominable Snowman onesie hanging in the closet. My stepfather was less kind about it. For weeks, right before my bedtime, he’d jump out at me from under the stairs, hands raised to his face, fingers wiggling, and cry out: “CLOWNMANTIS, LIVE IN FIVE!” and get great pleasure from my fear.

  When I was fourteen, I almost choked in my sleep while dreaming of an alien planet presided over by a stone god who had stolen all the air and sent needles up through the sand to impale explorers. I had read Frank Herbert’s Dune only three weeks prior.

  I know when I first fell in love, I dreamed of the kind of place where we wouldn’t have to go to school, or work for a living, or deal with grownups. I dreamed we were marooned on a distant island lit by a towering lighthouse. There, we would live off the land and be together until the stars burned out. I was young, and silly, a hopeless and clueless romantic. In school, I fantasized about that place. I saw us there, me and Ramona. I even christened the place Valerine after a character from one of my favorite fantasy novels. And I know when she broke up with me, I had nightmares about her asshole father coming to my door to make me answer for trying to talk his daughter into sleeping with me. I dreamed of going to her house and begging her to give me another chance, but she wouldn’t come to the door. Her brother Liam, that irritating little shit, was in every window, watching.

  All the alleged horrors that befell the people who disappeared in Abigail House were taken from inside my head, but how? I wasn’t born until 1971. HOW then, did my dreams manifest themselves back in 1956? One theory is that the dreams preceded my mind’s screening of them, as if after I was born my brain became an antenna that picked up transmissions from somewhere else. But where? Deep space? Another dimension?

  If you’re looking for a concrete answer, you’re going to be disappointed, just as I was yesterday when I went to see the empty lot where the house once stood. I thought it might spark something in me, trigger some grand revelation that would m
ake sense of everything, but it didn’t. I will die never knowing how or why any of this happened to me, and to others.

  All I got from that visit was a headache from the smell of engine oil.

  NO. NO, I WAS WRONG. Oh God, I was so very wrong. The house...the door...it was there all along...

  ...I went home, to what I thought was my home. At first, I didn’t notice the differences. Zoe was there at the counter. God. Her face. No eyes. No eyes. My wife, in the shower, scales on her back. I ran, God forgive me, I ran and—

  I’M SORRY TO MY WIFE and daughter there was not supposed to be an ending not supposed to ask questions for which there are no answers but i did i didn’t know i’m sorry to the lost and wonder where you are i am no longer there and i’m sorry you got lost in my dreams

  my head hurts I am here now and I have found my faith and it smells like clay

  the old world is gone

  only the field and the flowers

  and the one who put them there

  he has promised to teach me

  i have

  promised to

  listen

  if i listen

  everything

  will be okay

  all hail

  the

  sunflower

  god

  AS OF YESTERDAY, THE neighborhood of Abigail Lane is no more. Nothing remains of the houses which once stood there but the memories. Trucks and construction crews have come and gone, and the land has been leveled and sold. The cheery billboard out front shows a family staring up in awe at a massive futuristic mall. Beneath it, is a date: June 2026.

  WE LIVE INSIDE YOUR EYES (II)

  CHARLIE RISES FROM THE FLOOR. The notebook bearing the title “The House on Abigail Lane” falls to the floor and turns to ash, just like all the others. He sees everything so clearly now. The ivy binding the woman to the pillar snaps and falls away, and she steps down into the ring of light before him. All of this he watches through eyes that are both new and ancient at the same time.

  “You are ready now,” the girl says from somewhere, from everywhere in the room. “You have outgrown this old dead world and these old dead souls. Those stories are doors to other realms. Go and see them. Spread the word of The Bone Mother. Spread the word of the Stone Gods, for they shall be coming soon.”

  “Yes,” Charlie says, as The Bone Mother removes her mask and he is bathed in the glory of her regard. She has universes for eyes and mountains for teeth. “Yes,” he says and weeps with joy, as her hands find his shoulders and her cold hard fingers reach for his mouth.

  “Yes,” he wails in ecstasy before she frees him from his tongue.

  Night comes and he lets the girl and The Bone Mother guide him out of the ruins. He scarcely notices the houses have collapsed into sodden ruin, and would hardly have cared if he had. He steps over the pulverized bodies of The Cruel Boys with nary a second glance. They, like everything else in this world, are meaningless.

  Together they walk to the edge of the neighborhood, to the edge of the world, where they gaze into the lightless abyss, inside which, other worlds hide in the dark, praying to escape the attention of gods, even as the gods look back, eager to open those worlds like volumes in an ancient library.

  STORY NOTES

  “THE LAND OF SUNSHINE”

  My brother was an art and design student in college when this story was conceived. One night, while we were chatting on Skype, he mentioned that he needed a story for a Claymation project that was due in a few weeks’ time. Immediately I envisioned crooked buildings and murky nightscapes, real Tim Burton stuff, which I thought would be both fun and challenging for my brother to realize. I mentioned to him that I had the seedling of an idea about a man who must traverse a nightmarish cityscape in search of his own heart, and he was intrigued. However, as is frequently the case with me, other business got in the way, and by the time I managed to get the story written, the deadline for his project had come and gone and he had already submitted something else. Happily, he wasn’t inconvenienced, and my procrastination did not have an adverse impact on his grades. He later graduated, and this wayward story ended up finding a dark and welcoming home of its own.

  “Traveler”

  Is there anything more frightening than the idea of losing your identity, of feeling as if someone else has occupied and taken control of your body? Can you imagine waking up with no recollection of what you’ve done only to discover that it’s something catastrophic? Imagine having to answer for a crime you don’t remember committing. Such questions inspired this story, as well as a dash of one of my favorite plays, Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman, about deceit, paranoia, and the malleability of truth under duress.

  “The Mannequin Challenge”

  You may remember, back in November 2016, social media timelines became host to a series of videos in which people pretended to be frozen while a camera moved around them. Kind of like adults playing Simon Says. The more popular and widespread these so-called ‘Mannequin Challenges’ got, the more elaborate and star-studded they became. Everyone wanted in on them. But while it was fun to see how clever and inventive people could get with the concept, I couldn’t help wondering what would happen if someone who didn’t know what was happening, and who had never even heard of these orchestrated challenges, encountered one in media res. Add in a soupçon of bitterness and office politics and you have the genesis of this nasty little tale.

  “Go Warily After Dark”

  I haven’t written many war stories. In fact, I think this might be my only one to date, and it deals less with the conflict than the collateral damage on the citizens of the unnamed city. If it feels like I’m writing about the bombing of London during World War II here, that’s intentional. I was reading about life during that horrendous period and came upon a mention of the warning posters which advised the citizens to be mindful of curfew, specifically to “go warily after dark.” Those words summoned this story because as we all know, and history is quick to remind us, evil thrives in darkness, and the world is never darker than during times of war.

  “Down Here with Us”

  Another first. This was written for a shared-world horror/fantasy anthology, Tales of the Lost Citadel, and if I hadn’t been invited to contribute, I doubt I’d ever have written a story quite like it. And while I was a little intimidated at the idea of straying so far outside my comfort zone, I thoroughly enjoyed writing about these once-proud warriors, now little more than slaves in a rapidly disintegrating world.

  “Sanctuary”

  I write about kids and imagination a lot, probably because my childhood was marked as much by magic as darkness and so those themes keep coming back to me. Written for an anthology about cities, the place in which this story is set is based, not on a city at all, but a village in Ireland where I spent much of my childhood. My grandparents lived there, and I did, on occasion, have to fetch my grandfather from the pub on cold afternoons. Everything about my memories of those days and that place is benevolent and happy, however, so naturally I had to warp the hell out of them for this story. That is, after all, what I do.

  “A Wicked Thirst”

  One night, after drinking three days straight, I woke up face down in a puddle in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I was immediately confused, then terrified, and even though I had GPS on my phone, it never occurred to me to use it. I could have been a hundred miles from home, and it was not the first time I’d found myself in such a miserable state. Shirtless and freezing, I ran to the porch of one of the dark houses where I’d spied an Amazon box, cadged the address, and called a cab. Imagine my embarrassment when the surly driver took a right turn, then one more, and dropped me off outside my house. I’d been less than three minutes’ walk from my house, but in my confusion had staggered into the adjacent neighborhood. It’s funny now, but it wasn’t then, and it led to me having a long conversation with myself about my tendency to abuse alcohol. As part of the process, I wrote this story.

  “
The No One: A Rhyme”

  Last year, for no good reason at all, I found myself compelled to write poetry. I would be lying on the couch watching TV when a stanza of verse would pop into my head and I would have to write it down. Soon this was happening almost every night, usually late, and by the time I was done, I had half a book of poetry saved in my files. This might not be so odd but for the fact that I don’t write poetry. Oh, there’s been an occasional verse here and there, but none of it has been any good. For a time, I considered gathering up these poems, many of them written in the throes of depression, and making a book of them, but the more I read back over them, the less connected to them I felt. Thus, they remain filed away for review sometime in the future. But for this book, I chose the one I liked the best, the one that reads like it was meant to survive, one that even poetry haters could appreciate, and included it for you here.

  “You Have Nothing to Fear from Me”

  I don’t have a lot to say about this one that won’t be obvious from the story, or the news. I’ve known a lot of women in my life, and every single one of them had scars, mental, physical, or both, given to them by men they trusted and loved. I’ve caused some scars too. Any man who claims different is hiding the truth from himself. And whether they were intentional or not doesn’t change the fact that this has always been a tough world for women, and we have not done enough to change that.