Don't Blink

“You look empty.”

“Sorry?”

“You look empty,” she said, gesturing to my cup with the pot of coffee in her hand.

“Oh, yeah, I’d love some more. Thanks,” I said.

There was a plate in front of me, sitting on a scratched linoleum table, heavy with a healthy serving of bacon and scrambled eggs.

Scrambled eggs? I hate scrambled eggs.

I looked up from the plate and saw that I was under the humming fluorescent lights of a greasy diner, in a booth up against a window. The window looked out over an empty street. There were no people, no cars, no movement.

The white vinyl of my seat gently squeaked as I shifted my weight to look around the diner. The other booths, the counter, the kitchen were all empty. I was the only customer.

Where am I?

“You’re not from around here.”

The woman stood above me, pouring coffee into my cup. She wore a yellow polo shirt with a name tag that read “Lily,” and had pale skin with black hair pulled into a ponytail. Above her right eye was a scar, half an inch wide, that ran upwards to her hairline, splitting her eyebrow in half.

She smiled at me and kept pouring, waiting for my answer to her non-question.

“Um, no, I’m not. Just passing through,” I mumbled.

“That’s not true,” she said, without breaking eye contact.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re here because your wife left you,” she said, “and now you can’t stand to be alone in your own house, it feels too empty. So, you’re staying with your best friend, David, and his family. You walked here to get out of his way while he got his kids ready for school.”

“How do you know—”

“Because I know you,” she said, exasperated. “You’re empty. You’ve been dried up and scooped out, like an old gourd. One that's cracked and covered in warts.”

“Who are you?” I asked, my voice wavering.

She ignored me and continued talking, “The sad thing is that there won’t be anything to fill you ever again. You will try and try and try, but nothing will work. That’s how it’ll be until it’s over,” she said.

“Until what’s over?” I whispered.

She didn’t give an answer, just smiled at me while coffee poured endlessly out of the pot in her hand. My mug began overflowing, coffee covered the table, streamed into my lap and onto the floor.

I heard a hiss, like rushing air. It started softly but quickly grew louder. Her smile began to grow. The corners of her mouth moved towards her ears, pulling back a curtain on an impossible number of teeth.

At this sight, I recoiled into the corner of the booth, pressed myself up against the window to get as far away from her as I could. Yet, I couldn't look away as her smile continued to widen. Her jaw popped then hung limp, opening her mouth, unwrapping rows of teeth. She remained unfazed and continued to stare back at me.

All the while, the hiss had been growing, it now drowned out the hum of the lights, the coffee, my heavy breathing, I could hear nothing else. My eyes darted around the diner trying to find the source of the hiss. It came from everywhere, from nowhere, filling the room.

The hiss started oscillating, rising and falling in a pattern I couldn’t understand. Waves of sound crashed against me, the expanding and contracting noise made words of an ancient and horrible language.

The frequency resonated in my skull, my teeth, my eyes. I became a tuning fork for the noise, my vision blurring with each cycle. The pressure of the hiss pushed down on every inch of me, pressing my skin flat against my bones. The force increased beyond what my body could handle, I was going to implode.

I stood up on the seat and her head followed me. Her limp jaw dug backwards into her neck as it attempted to keep pace with the growing smile. The corners of her mouth went so far back they hid behind her cheeks.

I was trapped. Fight beat out flight and I lunged at her, grabbing her by the collar. She lifted easily in my hands, as if she was filled with air, hollow. I pulled her up towards my face, her feet dangled off the ground.

“WHO ARE YOU?” I shouted above the roar.

She didn’t answer, just smiled at me, her face inches from mine. The scar tissue above her eye reflected the fluorescent lights as I shook her, her loose jaw wobbled back and forth. She stared at me, unblinking, as her smile continued its march to split her head in half.

As I held her by the collar, the hiss was building, working up to a crescendo, threatening to burst my eardrums. I didn’t know what would happen when the noise reached its peak, but something deep in my chest told me it would be bad, it would hurt.

I was prey, hunted by the noise, by the pressure, by her. Somehow I knew I couldn’t stop them. They were inevitable.

I blinked.

Where my hands had been holding her collar they now held the cloth-bound cover of a large book. I stood in front of a tall bookshelf made of dark wood, built into a wall. A warm, orange glow replaced the sterile white light of the diner. I was breathing heavily, my ears still ringing from the hiss.

A loud pop sounded behind me and I whipped around.

It had come from a burning fireplace on the far wall, the only light in the dark room.

I looked around and saw bookshelves lining each wall of the room except one. That wall was covered in floor-to-ceiling windows.

A uniform matte black covered each window, nothing was visible out of them. No trees, no sky, not even reflections of the fire. As if the windows absorbed everything that tried to pass through them.

On the far end of the room, two armchairs faced the fireplace with a small table between them. On that table sat two thin-stemmed wine glasses.

I looked up at a vaulted ceiling, criss-crossed by thick rafters, so tall I could barely make out the top of the ceiling in the low light.

Where am I?

I set the book down and walked towards the fire, the hardwood floor creaking beneath my shoes. Light from the fireplace danced on the walls, threw shadows across the endless bookshelves and up into the rafters.

As I approached, I noticed a lipstick smudge on one of the wine glasses. In the chair next to the smudged glass, the top of someone's head peeked up over the back. I slowly rounded the occupied chair, turning my back to the fireplace.

In the chair was a woman, asleep and wrapped in a blanket. Her head rested against the back of the chair with the blanket pulled up so far I could only see the top half of her head. The flickering from the glow behind me danced over her pale skin and black hair. I caught the reflection of a thick scar on her forehead. It ran from the top of her right eye to her hairline, splitting her eyebrow in half.

“Lily?” I whispered.

Suddenly, I heard a noise above me. I flinched and stepped backwards towards the fire. I looked up and saw a bird flapping around the rafters.

After a few moments in air, it landed on the beam closest to me. The small bird had speckled brown feathers and long black hairs jutting out around its beak.

Were those whiskers?

It stared down at me and tilted its head back and forth, hopping around the beam to get a better angle on me. The bird’s large black eyes reflected the firelight behind me.

I heard a muffled sound, rhythmic, but not loud enough to make out. It sounded like it was coming from the bird, trapped inside that small body, beating against it, trying to break out.

The bird froze. The sound stopped.

The bird’s beak snapped open and a mechanical click-click-click-click-click started echoing out of its mouth and into the room. The clicks bounced off bookshelves and windows, crossed over themselves, crashing into new clicks, creating a feedback loop.

Behind the bird I saw the ceiling pulling back. The dark above me deepened as the ceiling rushed away, pulling a vacuum with its retreat. Air rushed upwards, following the growing void, and my heels lifted off the floor as it began to reel me in. I looked around the room for something to grab onto, to keep me from flying upwards. I looked to her.

Her eyes were now open and locked on me. As she stood up from the chair, the blanket around her fell. Before it could touch the ground it was sucked upwards, flapping past the rafters and out of sight. With the blanket gone I could see her face. She smiled and her teeth wrapped around her head, extending past her ears, splitting her head into two hemispheres. Completely unaffected by the pull above us, she slowly walked towards me.

She gently laid one hand flat against my left shoulder, the other on my waist. In an instant she slammed me against the wall, knocking the wind out of me. I tried to pry her hands off of me but they wouldn't budge as they dug deeper into my flesh.

The pull was growing, but she matched its force to keep me up against the wall, my shoulder and waist were in agony under her hands. I gritted my teeth against the pain as my vision began to narrow. The void escalated the fight to take me, but she continued to push, not letting me yield to the pull above.

Her face was inches from mine, that tree of scar tissue on her forehead so close I could make out every root and branch. I felt her breath leaking out from between her endless teeth. She started at me, into me, through me. She blinked and her eyes were replaced with the bird's eyes, huge and black. I saw my terror reflected in them.

The eternity above us was sucking everything out of the room, books and chairs tumbled up into the rafters and out of sight. The windows creaked against the vacuum, then splintered in place, throwing spider webs of cracks. The force of the pull was building, the floor rumbled as the foundation began to lift, the whole room threatening to fold in on itself.

I tried to scream, but I couldn’t push my voice out against the pressure of her hands. My arms and legs were whipping back and forth like a rag doll, desperate to fly up and away into the black hole above, held back by her.

I had crossed the event horizon. I was being atomized, the skin at my shoulders and hips stretched and ripped as the unrelenting force above dragged me towards it. She could push all she wanted, but the pull would bring me in, piece by piece if necessary.

I blinked.

I was in a car, in the drivers seat. The windshield was black, with a few strands of grass pushed up against the cracked glass. I dangled in my seat, suspended by the seatbelt digging into my left shoulder and waist as gravity tried to pull me towards the roof of the car.

White vinyl airbags hung deflated from the steering wheel and side pillars. The turn signal was on, making a repetitive click-click-click-click-click.

My vision swam in and out of focus, I was fighting the tide to stay awake.

In a lucid moment, I saw that the center section of the steering wheel had hinged upwards when the airbag deployed. I pushed it down over the deflated airbag and saw a plastic Ford logo. The top right of the logo was chipped.

My car.

I turned to the passenger seat, but there was no one there. Craning my neck, I looked in the back seat, also empty.

Lily?

I slipped back into the rising tide of unconsciousness, nothingness, black.

I re-entered the world when I heard sirens, distant, but getting closer. Soon red and blue and white lights were reflecting off the pavement and into the car, dancing off deployed airbags and scattered glass.

I heard shouting, then someone was yanking on the driver's side door. They shook the whole car with each pull, but the door wouldn’t budge. More shouting, and moments later I heard a mechanical screech as the car door ripped open. A white light was on my face, and I raised my hands up, weakly, to shield my eyes.

“He’s alive,” a voice shouted.

More voices shouted back, and footsteps approached the car. The voices gave commands, asked questions, some directed to me, but I couldn’t answer. My mind bobbed on the waves, floating in and out of consciousness.

“It’s okay, we’re going to get you out of here.”

I grunted in approval.

A plastic orange board entered the car, scraping along the roof below me. Hands reached out to hold me, as others cut my seatbelt and gently lowered me onto the board.

They slid me out out of the car on the board, then strapped my head and body down so tight I could only move my eyes. I stared up at the stars as they picked me up and hauled me over to the waiting red and white lights.

They laid the board on top of a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. I heard the doors slam shut, and the board shifted on the stretcher as we immediately accelerated. I heard the siren of the ambulance and voices giving stern commands, asking more questions. I could only see the bare metal ceiling of the ambulance above me. Shoulders and hands entered and left my vision as I felt them cut my shirt and pants.

Suddenly, a bright light shone into my eyes. I squinted, trying to see beyond the light, but I could only make out the black silhouette of a head. The light moved away, but the head stayed hovering above me, frozen, no longer reacting to the shouts and commands of the voices.

As my vision slowly returned, the face above me came into focus. I saw a surgical mask covering pale skin.

Above the mask was an eyebrow, split in half by that scar.

On both sides of the mask, I saw teeth.

I blinked.