THE EYE LIARS

Bending over the corpse, leaning against the cold steel table on which the body rested, Dan squeezed the black spots at the corner of the rotting eye. The blackness oozed out of the pores. It collected in the basin of the temple, pooling as it drained, then evaporating into a black mist. It rose into the air around us, circling the lamp hanging low over the workstation.

“Don’t breathe, Greg,” Dan said.

The swirling shadow dissipated as it rose, spreading to the dark corners of the ceiling, deepening the shadows. The air tasted sharp and bitter, like dad’s batteries we used to lick in the garage when we were kids.

Dan breathed first.

Looking down at the dead man between us, there were more dark spots, pinprick-sized swellings, reservoirs of foul ink collected under the skin.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

Dan turned to his tray of tools, waving his gloved hands over them, divining which to use.

“I’m not really sure,” he said, rotating the scalpel in front of his face, examining an edge too fine to see. “My guess would be that it’s a waste product of some undocumented parasite. It’s always around the eyes, presents as liquid-filled black spots—but the substance vaporizes almost instantly. It’s organic, but I haven’t been able to collect enough to run any real substantive tests. Once it’s vapor, it doesn’t test as anything. Nothing.”

I rubbed my forehead. The film of sweat had started to cool in the damp basement. I shivered.

“It’s just . . . dark air,” he said.

He bent back over the body. His face tensed. He always looked ten years older when he cut, like the focus drained the life from him. He looked more like Dad than me, then, but maybe that was the grey lab coat, him holding Dad’s tools, bent over Dad’s table.

He removed an eye and placed it on a small steel tray. His hand barely moved, but when he straightened, the eye lay open, unfolded between us, a cloudy marble nested in layers of waxy wet tissue. He looked up at me, smiling.

My tongue curled inside my mouth and my throat tightened. The muscles at the back of my knees turned to turbulent water. I tasted bile, felt it burning through my chest, at the back of my throat.

“You don’t have to look,” he said. He always said. I never wanted to look but I always did, always watched, first Dad, then Dan. He held the tray out, tapping the bottom of my chin with its cold edge, the eyes sliding across its stained surface.

“Why did you need me here for this?”

“I want you to know what to look for. I need research subjects.”

“Dan, that’s not really okay. I can’t just do that—there are rules.”

“Check the dementia patients first—anyone who might be exhibiting visual hallucinations or delusions. Ones who reach a crisis in their condition, then present a few hours of lucidity right before death. The spots start appearing then, during that brief lucid state. I need you to watch them. And bring me the bodies.”

He pulled the caps off of glass vials and lined them up, rattling them against the tray, drowning out my protestations.

“Dan, I don’t get to decide where—”

“Hold your breath.”

I slapped a hand to my mouth. I tasted the powdery residue of the latex gloves I’d been wearing.

He squeezed a black spot against the rim of a vial, collecting the trickle of ink and ramming the cap in place before the plasma turned to smoke.

He exhaled. I didn’t.

He held the vial up between our faces. The dark liquid inside sucked light from the room. He swirled the glass tube. The ooze coated the glass, sliding back down it in writhing swirls.

“Whatever this is, it’s killing people, Greg. I can’t stop it if I can’t research it.”

“Dad didn’t leave you this place so you could play mad scientist.”

“Dad didn’t leave you this place at all,” he said, picking up an eye and rolling it in his palm.

“You’re supposed to be taking care of these people, for their loved ones. And you’re supposed to be taking care of the business.” I swept my hand toward a section of crumbling wall, groundwater seeping in through the cracks in the cinderblocks.

“Greg, this stuff’s contagious. I don’t know how, yet, but it is. Who gives a shit about upselling casket hardware when people are seeing things that aren’t there? People are hallucinating, tearing each other apart, dropping dead, and you don’t want to help?” He tossed the eye back onto the steel tray. It splashed and rolled, leaving a trail of humor.

“Well, talk to their doctors, put it in your reports.”

“No one is going to look twice if I don’t bring examples. I need data before I can make a claim like this.”

“Your data are people, Dan.”

“Dead people. And if you don’t bring me what bodies you do have, we’ll end up with more data than we’ll know what to do with.” His eyes narrowed like the tip of his scalpel, cut into me.

I sighed and stared at the ooze. “Where does it come from?”

“How should I know? That’s the point. Where do fleas come from, or rats? It’s just the fucking circle of life.” He picked up the corpse’s arm and shook the limp hand at me.

I stepped back, stumbling over my foot. “Well, someone else has to have seen it; it can’t just be here.”

“Some old anthropologists in Asia mention something like it, and in other places where they don’t embalm or bury or burn the dead. They called them evil spirits, and started burning the people alive at the faintest hint of hallucination.

“We soak our dead in chemicals, infuse them with toxins, and stick them in the ground—hardly ever get to see what grows when we leave well enough alone.” He squeezed the man’s jaw and pulled down on his chin. The scent of raw meat and blood rose from the pale mouth.

“Damn,” Dan said. “He didn’t just bite his tongue off, he chewed it. Look.” He wrenched the neck, aiming the blank face at me. A thin black line of old blood trailed from the corner of the mouth, running over Dan’s thumb and dripping onto the table.

***

I drove back to The Village, hands shaking on the wheel, pressing my chin to my chest to get a better view through the narrow tunnel of my vision. My scrubs stuck to the sweat on my back and legs. My skin secreted a slippery puddle in the vinyl seat of the van. The plan to stop for lunch on my way back was trashed. I couldn’t get out of the van like this. It’d look like I’d wet myself.

The van’s parking space sat close to the back entrance of the clinic. I could sneak into the locker room and change, grab lunch in the dining room with Miss Bessley, who could tell me, again, about the dog she’d had when she was eight.

As my sneakers squeaked across the white tile threshold, Tracy walked by, her slate hair pulled back in a braid, the edge of her clipboard pressed against her stomach as she read and walked. The walkie-talkie velcroed to the shoulder of her scrub jacket crackled and beeped, her left eye flinching each time, deepening the grooves that branched across her temple.

“Tracy.” She stopped and looked up. Looked me over. I’d forgotten about the wet. “Do you know when those school kids are coming back—the ones with the dogs? Do you remember if they have a collie, like Miss Bessley’s?”

“Who? What are you talking about?” She looked back to her notes, scribbling across charts.

“The group with the therapy animals, are they coming back soon? Miss Bessley’s been lonely, and I thought—” I picked at the damp fabric clinging to my chest, chafing my neck.

“I wouldn’t know, ask the desk.” She drew her eyebrows down. “But change your clothes first.” She hurried away, her braid swaying, slapping each hip in turn.

In the locker room, I stripped off my damp scrubs and dropped them in the canvas laundry bag, and held my underwear under the blow dryer.

There were no XL scrubs left. Stuffing my legs into an L, my balance wavered when the floor nurse called a code grey over the intercom. I pulled on my shoes, grabbed my badge lanyard, and sprinted for the stairwell door.

Floor 3, suite H—Mr. Brunner.

The ruckus echoed down the yellow-painted brick stairwell. I scanned my ID at the top landing, pushed the bar, leaning against the heavy door.

A breeze whipped against my exposed ankles, and the scrub seams strained against my thighs as I ran past the row of closed doors to the source of the noise.

“I’ll kill you for this, you bitch!” Mr. Brunner had Tracy by her braid, feebly swinging it. “Give it back!”

My hand covered Mr. Brunner’s, prying his fingers from Tracy’s hair. His hand came away webbed with extracted strands.

“Can I help you find something, Mr. Brunner?” I asked, pushing his wrists down.

“That whore took my lamp. I can’t read here in the dark without my lamp!” Sweat collected in the deep lines of his face, beading and dripping from his hairless pate. The loose skin at his neck shook, scattering droplets.

Holding his wrists to his sides, I nodded toward the bedside table. “Is your lamp blue, Mr. Brunner? I see a blue lamp over there—maybe we moved it when we cleaned? Or let me get you settled by that nice bright window.”

“No—the leather one, with the brass. It was my father’s, from the war. It’s very valuable, and she took it.” He threw himself against me. I wrapped my long arms around him, careful not to squeeze.

The nurse raced into the room, blue gloves in place, flipping a syringe. I tightened my grip as she came up behind the old man and gave him the Ativan.

He writhed against my chest. My shirt split between my shoulders. He went limp. Squatting to scoop up his legs, the seams on my pants gave.

“For chrissakes,” Tracy said.

I carried Mr. Brunner to his bed and laid him down.

“Go home and do some laundry. Come back for second shift to make up the hours.” Tracy straightened her hair and picked up her clipboard. Her left eye twitched, her cheeks flushed. She flipped to a fresh incident report sheet and turned her back.

Back in the locker room, I pulled on my street clothes. I grabbed the canvas laundry bag on my way out.

The tattered too-small scrubs fluttered into the dumpster in the parking lot. No need to fill out a material damage report—Tracy would mention it in hers.

Folding myself into my Civic, I headed home, rubbing at the dark shapes floating across my tired eyes.

***

The new scrubs were itchy, starched for store-freshness and smelling like dust. I sat in the dark clinic room, watching the blipping lights of Mr. Brunner’s monitors, feeling the “do not resuscitate” orders clipped to the foot of the bed stare back at me. The new lamp I’d picked up sat in its box at my feet.

Rubbing my neck, trying to push the soreness out, warm blood rushed into the muscle behind the pressure of my fingers. Thirty minutes left. Then home, sleep for six hours, and come back.

I squeezed a tight muscle in my shoulder. Bright lights flashed in front of my eyes, then the negative, dark spots filling my vision. I pressed my fists to my eyes, opening them to solid dark. Undulating, freezing black clouds rolled around me, and a sharp ringing lanced my ears. Shrill sounds drove through me like knives as the dark wave turned me upside down.

My face hit the cold tile floor, jarring my vision back with a white-hot burst of light. Shoes pounded in front of my eyes, smelling like wet rubber and disinfectant. My hands slipped in my sweat as I pushed myself off the floor.

People filled the room, their backs to me. Above their heads, the monitor broadcasted Mr. Brunner’s distress signal, emitting the shrill alarms that had cut through me. Squeezing my eyes shut, I rubbed my hands over my face, painting it with salty wet that stung my dry lips. I backed out, watching them do next to nothing, making him comfortable as he passed.

At home, I spent the rest of the night apologizing to the shadow whispering behind my bedroom door.

***

I studied Mr. Brunner’s face. Leaning over him, staring closely at his temples and the bridge of his nose, I reached out and smoothed the cold wrinkles, inspecting the depths of the crow’s feet. There was one, two—another on the other side. I texted Dan and then zipped up the bag and rolled Mr. Brunner to the parking lot.

I strapped him down and loaded him up, securing the gurney to the van. Climbing into the driver’s seat, my coffee sloshed out of the spout of my travel mug.

Dan’s funeral home sat just down the road, built close enough to The Village for convenience, but not so close as to be suggestive. Dan waited for me outside, wringing his hands. A cigarette butt smoked on the crumbling pavement at his feet, torching the parched weeds growing up from the cracks.

“What took you so long?” He tugged at the back door, pulling the gurney down as I got out. “Hurry, get him downstairs.”

In the dark basement lab, leaning in, shining a light in Mr. Brunner’s face, we counted spots. Dan pushed and pulled at the skin.

“Gentle,” I said.

“What?” The corner of Dan’s mouth twitched. “Why, exactly?”

“I know him,” I said.

“Not anymore.” Dan prepared his vials and blades.

I smoothed the sheet over Mr. Brunner’s chest, brushed his hair back from his cool forehead. I could hear his voice, whispering about the things his dad had done in the war, asking if I could sneak him another Bond DVD from the office, promising he wouldn’t tell Tracy if I watched it with him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Dan pushed my hand away and moved in with a vial.

“He doesn’t have as many spots as Alan did.”

“Who?”

“The guy from yesterday.”

“Oh, no. He hasn’t been dead as long. There will be more tomorrow. This is good, really good—I can watch them develop.”

I looked away and held my breath as Dan held the vial to Mr. Brunner’s eye.

Another body lay stretched out on the next table: a young woman, naked, her eyes removed, barely visible through the darkness. Walking closer, I saw her eyes sitting on a tray next to her head, milky black. The skin around the eye sockets swelled with black pustules.

My breath forced itself out with a moan.

“That’s after five days,” Dan said. He had sealed his vial.

“She’s been lying here for five days?” Her hair fell around her empty face, dark and soft, dry leaves caught in its tangles. The bruises on her throat and thighs were as dark as the shadows where her eyes should have been. The skin along her jaw was red and blue, distended around a small oval with a cross in it.

“No one’s waiting for her. I can take my time and get the data I need. I haven’t had the chance to observe them this long before—to see what they do when left alone.”

“I hope it doesn’t hurt. What’s this mark here?”

“That’s nothing, leave it. And of course it doesn’t hurt, she’s dead.” He shook his head.

“That looks like—”

“I said leave it.”

“Is that Dad’s ring? Fuck, Dan, did you hit this girl?”

“She already had the spots, Greg, she was as good as dead already. I needed her to come to the lab. She was raving, she wouldn’t listen.”

“So you killed her?”

“I brought her here to watch her die, to see how it happened.”

“You’re sick. She’s lying here in Dad’s room with Dad’s ring punched into her face, and you can’t even see how sick this is.”

“That still bothering you, Greggy? That Dad didn’t want his ring pawned for booze? You think you should have it now you’re cleaned up?” He pulled it from his finger and held it out. I smacked it out of his hand. It bounced, ringing, rolling into the glue trap in the far corner.

“Wouldn’t fit you anyway,” he said, bending back to his work. “There was no saving her, but I could learn from her. It’s for the greater good, Greg.” He pulled one side of his mouth back in a crooked smile.

My fingers flexed. I could feel my heartbeat in my temples. My tongue scraped the dry roof of my mouth, sticking to my clenched teeth. I counted and breathed. Thirty to one, a breath every five seconds. I can’t change this, I can’t change him.

“Did you run more tests? On Alan?” I asked.

“Who?”

“Alan!” Another ten seconds, another two breaths.

“Right. Yes, look.” He went to a cupboard and pulled out a tray of black vials. No. Vials filled with black. “The liquid samples have turned to gas. It appears that the lack of oxygen in the vials slows the reaction, but it doesn’t stop it. However, there’s no increased pressure in the tube. The reaction doesn’t seem to have released any energy.” He held the tray under my nose, his eyes rolling with excitement.

“So . . . ”

“That’s not possible. All reactions have some sort of energy exchange involved. You can’t go from a liquid to a gas without it—this is outside the laws of chemistry.” Saliva collected at the corners of his mouth as he spoke faster, fogging the glass vials with his rapid breath.

I took a step back, tearing my eyes from the tray of dark tubes, and looked for the clock. It perched hidden in the shadows, high up on the wall.

“I need to get back to work. I can’t be late again.”

Dan lowered the tray, sneering. “Or what? Another job you can’t hold down?”

“No. I promised Miss Bessley lunch today.”

Dan shook his head, turning to put his tray of dark vials away.

Collecting The Village body bag, folding it, I watched the girl on the table. “What was her name?”

“Don’t know,” Dan said.

***

Alice Stowe ate three pounds of gravel from the garden. Sometime in the early hours, she left her room in her best dress and hat, sat in the gazebo, and ate rocks from a chocolate box. She died that evening, without a single tooth left.

I clocked out, changed, and went to the clinic. She was there, in the cooler, in one of my black bags. I rolled her out and unzipped the bag.

The spots were already there—huge, this time, and swollen. The skin felt cold and taut under my fingertip.

It ruptured. The dark liquid spilled over my finger, filling the space under my nail and pooling in my cuticle. It felt like my finger had been encased in ice. The black smoked off my finger with a soft hiss, the vapors sucking in toward my mouth and billowing on my breath.

I slapped my other hand over my mouth and ran, slipping over the waxed tiles to the sink. Cranking the hot water lever as far as it would go, I held my hand under the steaming stream. The inky shadow mixed with the steam, one swirling around the other, a cyclone of hot and cold. The heat returned to my skin in an agony of needles as vessels rapidly dilated and burst.

When all the black had washed away or turned to smoke, I breathed again, panting through my tight throat, a high whine echoing off of the sterile walls and steel cabinets. The battery taste of the toxic smoke mixed with the chlorine cleanliness of the clinic.

My fingertip swelled white like a maggot soaked in water. The back of my hand blistered with red, angry burns.

I groped the darkness. The air swarmed thick with shadows that flowed and eddied on unseen currents. My stomach burned as I swallowed the acrid cloud. Black smoke poured from Alice’s face, billowing up as if from a chimney, burning the fuel of the darkness inside her.

With my good hand, I grasped the bar of the gurney and shoved her back in the cooler, slamming the door shut.

I swept my hand in front of my face, trying to clear a path through the shadow. It sighed as my hand cut through it, swirling back in to fill the space, caressing my cheek and whispering.

My legs crashed though steel carts of equipment on my way to the back door. I pushed out into the air. The daylight split through me, savaging my eyes, the setting sun hot on my burned hand. Lying on the pavement, I coughed shadow from my lungs.

I pulled my phone from my pocket to call the front desk and tell them to seal the clinic.

There was a text message from Dan, from that morning.

Not waste, eggs. Faces are spawning. Get me out. Nine hours ago.

I rolled over, forced myself up, and rushed to the clinic van. It was just a mile down the road—a mile and nine hours too late.

***

Darkness filled the windows of the funeral home. Pulling up to the back entrance, I turned the headlights on bright and pulled a flashlight from the glove box, using it to break the grimy window by the back door. Wisps of shadow licked the jagged edges of broken glass. Reaching in, my injured fingers fumbled to unlock the door latch, my armpit scraping against the sharp glass.

The high beams penetrated three feet into the darkness and hit a moving wall of shadows. Shapes appeared in the shifting darkness. Faces and shoulders and hands and thighs emerged from the cloud, beckoning. I walked into the middle of it all.

It stung like jumping into a deep lake at midnight in February. The shadow clung to me, sliding across the surface of my eyes, dragging itself over my skin. Whispers started in one ear and finished in the other, too many of them, fading in and out, incomprehensible. I held out my hands and walked toward the basement door. My knees knocked into a stack of caskets, sending the tower crashing, lids flying open. I dropped to the floor, dodging corpses, digging my fingernails into the carpet fibers, tracking the familiar geometric patterns of my childhood. I followed its diamond floral maze to the back wall, sliding my fingers along the chair rail, searching for the door.

I found it. When I pulled it open, the whispers turned to moans.

Clinging to the banister, I felt the edge of each splintered step with my toes.

Halfway down, the thick cloud broke. Above my head, a cumulous of shadow roiled. I thundered down the remaining stairs.

“Dan?”

He wasn’t there. Alan, Mr. Brunner, and the young girl were lined up on tables: their faces concave, drained, covered in black ash. I walked over to the girl. No one would ever recognize her now. It was as if her face had been dead weeks before the rest of her. I turned, gagging.

There. The window of the walk-in freezer gleamed black, opaque as a submarine porthole. Dan’s face pressed against the glass. The skin around his eyes was torn apart by erupting fonts of shadow, his eyelids flayed back. His jaw hung open, askew.

I retched. Fell to my knees and puked. Choking, coughing up gobs of tar. Moans rolled out of me, building deep within my center, rattling my bones. I pushed myself back from the caustic puddle, away from the window. The back of my head banged against the edge of Mr. Brunner’s steel table.

Mr. Brunner? I forgot to tell The Village.

The cloud on the stairs had risen further, concentrating itself in the highest reaches of the house. I pressed through the thickness of it, feeling cold fingers rake my skin, malevolent hissing in my ears.

The headlights hit me like a hurricane wave. I swam through the light and climbed in the van.

A mile back and too late again.

The Village seethed, a pit of hell. Each lost in their own shadow world, they ripped each other apart—some already bursting at the face, filling the air with spawning smoke.

I took a long roll of plastic wrap from the kitchen.

I held their frail frames as they ranted nonsense and I wrapped their heads in plastic, sealing in the darkness, stemming the flow of shadow. Their eyes pressed against the clear film, rolling in their sockets, spilling ink into the folds of membrane.

I wrapped them up and zipped them into my black bags, dragging them to the clinic, piling them up in a squirming heap.

Tracy stood at the nurse’s station, naked, writing notes across her stomach. Her hair hung loose, crimped from the tight braid. The twitch-line by her eye flowed like a river delta of liquid evil. I wrapped her up—all of her, in case the darkness found another way out.

I closed the clinic door and taped around the edges. I poured out the bottles of ethyl alcohol and rolled the carts of oxygen tanks from the gas storage and barricaded the door with them. Down the hall in the kitchen, I lit the burners on the stove, turned on the oven and left it open.

I ran. The air, already dark from those that burst before, swarmed me, raking at my skin with icy fangs. The shadow slithered up through the bowels of the building, collecting on the third floor, a writhing mass of nightmare. Moans echoed down the stairwell.

Walking out into the night, backing away from the building, I watched smoke surge from the chimney, streaming into the sky, obscuring the stars. Out of the corner of my eye, every shadow moved. Black tears ran in smoky tracks down my aching face.

I turned my back and walked, a mile down the road and too late. The ground concussed, a gold light spreading, casting my shadow at my feet. A hot wind flew up behind me, pushing the shadows ahead. I chased them.

Sirens ripped through me, scattering red lights cutting through the dark. They streaked past me, toward the gold glow.

I stumbled into the back door of Dad’s mortuary, Dan’s, mine. I shuffled down the stairs, to the corner of the basement, and pulled the ring from the dusty, sticky glue. I pressed it onto my little finger, forcing it over the knuckle, twisting it into the groove at the bottom joint.

I pulled open the freezer door, catching Dan’s body as it fell. He hardly weighed a thing with the evil boiled off. I carried him to a table and laid him out.

I took my knife from the tray. Just like Dad, like Dan. From each shoulder to the base of the manubrium and down to the navel, I cut him open, separating the ribs from the breastbone, laying wide the chest cavity. I pulled the heart from its place and weighed it.