sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you, too.
“But it saw me full on. It’s jealous of… of its place, and there I was peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbor through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.
“It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.
“It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.
“For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now… the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”
She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.
“That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.
“It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman’s jumper and in the detail of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing… baying.
“I had to shut my eyes quick.
“I groped my way home.
“And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.”
There was silence for a time.
“See, there was always the easy way, that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,” she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. “I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I could’ve gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favors, have them do the job without pain.
“But you know I never… really… reckoned… that’s what I’d do,” she said thoughtfully. “What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you’d already put out your eyes? You’d feel such a fool, wouldn’t you?
“And as you know it wouldn’t be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that’s the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way… they look like something coming for you. That’s a doorway.
“It’s… unbearable… having sight, but trapping it like that.
“I’m not giving up. See…” Her voice lowered, and she spoke conspiratorially. “I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I can unlearn. I’m looking for ways. I want to see a wall as… as bricks again. Nothing more. That’s why you read for me,” she said. “Research. Can’t look at it myself of course, too many edges and lines and so on on a printed page, so you do it for me. And you’re a good boy to do it.”
I’ve thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no sense to me. The books I read to Mrs. Miller were school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the information she sought was buried very cleverly in the banal prose I faltered through.
“In the meantime, there’s another way of surviving,” she said slyly. “Leave the eyes where they are, but don’t give them any details.
“That… thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what’s there. That’s how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn’t even bear thinking about! A million million little bloody edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of damn anything out of them, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t take any effort at all for the thing to make me notice it. The damn lurker. Or in a gravel