Copyright © 2008 by Gerald C. Matics
Henry Crane isn't a bad teacher, but he's still the kind of guy you don't want around your young daughter. But Henry's about to learn a lesson of his own — is it too late for him to see the light?
Henry Crane exited the hospital into dazzling sunshine that forced him to squint — and sent a cold shudder through him at what he saw with his left eye.
Henry pawed sunglasses from his shirt pocket and fumbled them on as he lurched into the parking lot on legs gone pliable. An elderly woman helping her husband onto his walker paused a moment to gawp at him, but he paid her scant attention. He knew what he must look like — a harried, haggard man approaching middle age who, at the moment, wore the aspect of a cat flung onto a griddle — but he was quite sure she didn’t know what she looked like to him.
He searched for his car, trying to ignore images that were . . . disturbing.
Floaters, Dr. Chessler had called them after his thorough eye exam had revealed no evidence of glaucoma, no macular degeneration, no retinal abnormalities, no sign of half a hundred other optical disorders. A mild case of presbyopia, but any man on the north slope of forty can expect a certain degree of need to move the printed page farther from his face; nevertheless, Chessler was the only one laughing at his joke about getting Henry longer arms for Christmas.
Floaters. Tiny cellular deposits in the vitreous, the clear jelly that comprises the main part of the eyeball, casting shadows on his retina, appearing like specks of dirt or cobwebs that jumped around his field of vision. He’d already learned what floaters were when Dr. Wilson, his family physician, had made the same stab in the dark a couple of days ago. Henry had had to all but twist Wilson’s arm behind his back before he would refer him to a specialist, and the man would not budge about sending him to a neurologist, but Chessler was supposedly among the finest ophthalmologists in his field, and Henry supposed he should look at it as a step along the way.
Could it be floaters after all? he wondered. Something so simple, so mundane, so harmless? He wanted to believe that, even to the point of deluding himself. By nature he tried to reduce things to their simplest terms, like the algebraic equations he put on the blackboard for his tenth-graders to work through. Solving for x, that’s all he was doing; if, say, 3x = 21, you simply divide both sides by three to isolate the variable, and once you do that, the solution is plain.
But when x is a great big whopper of an unknown — what then?
The apparitions he saw were not floaters. Henry’s knowledge of physiology was limited, but he didn’t think any physiological explanation was possible for the horrific vignettes playing out before his left eye. He hadn’t really thought there was one; he was simply trying to isolate the variable. Seeing Chessler was a grab at a straw, but at least Chessler had set up an EEG and an MRI for next week; the trick now was lasting until then....
At last Henry spotted his beat-up Dodge Dart, a heap that could be called a classic only out of charity, and he lunged for it with something like gratitude. When he plopped in the driver’s seat and turned the motor over, he heaved a great sigh and pondered his next move. The air in the car had grown stuffy in the hour or so he was in the hospital — the spring day was tepid but the cloudless sky did nothing to block the sun — so he slid the window down and leaned back against the headrest.
Movement outside the passenger door caught his attention, and he turned toward it without thinking. As his head swung around he saw what it was in an instant: another car had slid into an empty space a few slots away, and a slender, pretty woman of about thirty was exiting. Her sleeveless pink floral sundress had ridden up a bit when she’d shifted in her seat to swing her well-shaped legs out, and the outside of her right calf bore a small, tasteful tattoo that he couldn’t quite make out. She stood and reached behind the driver’s seat to rummage for her handbag, and from Henry’s angle he could see the rim of her aqua-colored bra peeking from beneath her arm.
Then his left eye came to bear, and the mildly arousing scene morphed into a split-screen Bosch nightmare.
His right eye sent him exactly the same images as before, but through his left eye he saw a shrew who was not simply thin but skeletal. Instead of a car, she stood next to some kind of pack animal that was dead or dying. Her hair was all but gone; what remained was a ratty, tangled mess that looked like shower-drain refuse. The sundress hung on her frame like a tent and was itself threadbare and torn; he could see clear inside through the armhole, and below the bra — now an ashy gravestone hue, with rips to match the garment covering it — he counted her bare ribs. Below the dress her legs resembled polo mallets in their gaunt aspect.
Perhaps the worst was the tattoo, which was quite clearly alive. Henry could see now it was something like a serpent with legs, or maybe a centipede with reptilian overtones. It twitched a couple of times, then made a full circuit around her calf before slithering up the inside of one emaciated thigh until mercy hid it from sight under the dress. Still he saw its outline as it cleaved to the flat area where a moment before had been a firm and supple derriere, and just before she straightened up it disappeared; judging from its last location, Henry was sure it had bolted into her anus.
He gaped at her in stereo, one eye seeing her smooth her dress around her legs and the other watching her tear a hole in one side to reveal a stick-leg that wasn’t just unshaven but actually furry. Then she shut the car door, slung her bag over her shoulder, and started toward the hospital building; she caught him looking and tossed him a diffident smile alongside a death rictus; one half of her face seemed to be melting away, the flesh sliding down her cheekbone and dripping from her chin.
Her smile faded as she got a better look at his expression, and she hurried past. He felt a sliver of relief as she moved away.
Then he saw in her wake the puddles of pink skin that had run from her face, roiling and bubbling and writhing on the ground. It almost seemed they were trying to follow her.
Henry locked his door, rolled up his window, and screamed his throat raw. . . .
