Her Eyes

I did not kill my family.

Whatever they say, whatever evidence they think they have, I didn’t do it.

My wife…

My kids…

They were dead long before they say I killed them.

But I didn’t kill them!

I did kill…something…but whatever it was had already killed my family.

The trial is already over. They are going to kill me. There is nothing I can do about that now.

But they didn’t let me testify. They didn’t let me explain. I know it will sound crazy, but it’s the truth.

That’s why I escaped. That’s why I found this apartment with a computer. I have to record this.

The truth has to be told.

It happened when Sarah took that girl trip to Las Vegas. It was last summer. Her and Becky and the little quiet one from the law office. I can never remember her name. Judy! Her name was Judy.

It was the three of them. They’d been planning it for months. One week, no men folk, just the girls having a good time away from their jobs and their kids. I supported it. I was glad she got to go. She worked hard as a lawyer and still took care of our three kids.

They left on Thursday. She teased me about all the drunk texts I should expect through the next seven days. I had used some of my PTO so I could handle the kids while she was gone. The plant could pour concrete just fine without me for a while.

I know now that Thursday was the last time I saw my wife alive. Whatever came back from that trip… it wasn’t her.

Drunk texts rolled in Friday night and Saturday evening. Then it all stopped. I assumed she had forgotten to charge her phone again. I didn’t worry. I should have.

Oh god, what if I could have saved her from whatever happened? What if I had called and checked in and that somehow spared her?

What if…

No. I can’t think like that. It was out of my hands.

Sarah came home Sunday afternoon. There was no phone call, no text messages, or anything saying the trip had been cut short. She just showed up. She walked in the front door without her luggage and acted like nothing was wrong.

That’s not entirely true. She acted like something was wrong, but she did it in a way like she was trying to act like nothing was wrong.

She didn’t come in and complain about the trip ending soon. She wasn’t excited about the crazy stuff they had seen the last few days. She wasn’t happy to see me or the kids at all.

Nothing.

But she acted like none of that was weird. I asked her what happened, why she was home early, if everyone was okay.

“It’s fine. Nothing happened. They are still in Las Vegas. I just came home.”

That’s all she said about it. Then she just went about the house looking at things. Sometimes she would look at things like they were new to her.

I couldn’t figure out why Sarah was so calm and disinterested in things. She was just off.

The kids wanted to hug her and get her to tell them about her trip. She barely noticed them at first. Michael, our youngest, tripped over Sarah’s feet and bumped his head on the floor. He cried, of course, because he’s only three. She didn’t comfort him. She just stepped over him.

Then she looked at me and said, “Make it stop that noise.”

My wife would never, ever say that, let alone ignore her precious Michael when he was upset.

I called Becky and asked if she knew what was going on.

Becky was just relieved to know where Sarah was.

Apparently, sometime Saturday night, Sarah had just disappeared from the group. They expected that she had wandered off in her drunken stupor and would turn up by morning. Neither of the other women had been in much better condition, so tracking her down had been out of the question.

They looked all morning, they said. They didn’t call me because they didn’t want to worry me. They kept expecting her to turn up somewhere, just not at home in Tulsa twelve hundred miles away. She hadn’t said anything to them and had left all her things in the hotel room.

“At least she is safe,” Becky said.

If they had known what I know now, she wouldn’t have been so relieved.

I don’t know what came back from that trip, but my wife was dead and gone.

In the weeks that followed, she did very little. She went to work once and only when I prompted her about it. After that she just stopped going.

In fact, she stopped everything. She didn’t watch her favorite shows. She didn’t scroll through her phone looking for funny projects to do with the kids. In fact, she seemed to avoid technology whenever possible.

“The screens make too much noise.”

I could almost accept that. I have a cousin that is autistic who makes the same argument. This was different. She didn’t do anything else. She didn’t read or clean or cook. She didn’t play any games with the kids.

She walked.

Mostly around the house, but sometimes through the neighborhood. And not the fast-paced fitness walk she had used for 10 years since Mia was born. This was a slow stride. It was more of a… what’s the word… preamble? No, amble. She ambled.

Mostly she looked straight ahead, but sometimes she would stop and look at a neighbor’s house or a stray dog and just stare. Even if she kept walking, she was laser focused on whatever had caught her eye.

Her eyes. Oh God, her eyes.

I didn’t see it at first. Maybe if I had, I might have suspected sooner.

It was broad daylight the first time she looked my way and I actually looked in her eyes. There was something dead about them. They lacked life. Fully dilated in the afternoon sun.

More than that, there was the light.

In the back of those wide pupils, there was this glimmer of light. It wasn’t a reflection. I don’t care what my doctor says. There was a light shining from the back of the inside of her eyes. That’s when I knew something was terribly wrong.

She never acknowledged that I had seen it. If I tried to ask any questions about her behavior, she just told me everything was fine in this rehearsed monotone.

And names for things. She forgot the names of things and people. She started referring to the kids as “them”.

Them! Our darling Mia, little Abby, and her sweet, precious Michael. She had carefully chosen those names; especially Michael. He had been her little angel, so she named him after the greatest of all angels. Her Catholic grandmother had been proud of the sentiment after plucking our girls’ names from The Princess Diaries and NCIS.

Yet somehow Michael just became “the loud one”.

He was three! He cried. Normally she would scoop him up and pamper him.

After a month of Sarah ignoring him, Michael was distraught. He tugged at her arm one night while she sat staring out the window. He wanted snuggles and a bedtime story. She ignored him again. So he cried.

“He misses you, hon,” I had told her.

She looked at me, her face blank and that tiny unnatural glimmer in her eyes.

“Does it ever stop making noise?”

I should have just taken Michael and the girls and left right then. I wanted to yell, to rage. I wanted to beg for some answer as to what was going on, even as I had the first inklings that this was not Sarah anymore. I wrestled with control.

“Maybe you can try putting him to bed yourself?”

It was all I could manage that sounded safe to say out loud. God, I wish I hadn’t.

I know why I said it. I hoped that something familiar like taking her boy to bed would snap her out of this madness.

She ignored me and Michael both for a moment and just stared back out the window. I had just about given up and gone to take Michael myself when she stood up. It wasn’t abrupt for a normal person, but for the way she had been moving it felt shockingly sudden.

“I will take him.”

That was all she said and then she picked up Michael, who immediately stopped crying. He looked over her shoulder at me as they walked away, his tiny face beaming with triumph.

I wish I had known that was the last time I would see him alive.

The house was quiet for a while. Twenty minutes later she had come out of Michael’s room and sat back down at the window as if nothing had happened.

Some instinct told me to check on him, but I found him asleep in bed. If I had known…

The next day, Michael didn’t make a sound. He got up and got dressed and then followed Sarah around quietly and mechanically all day. I didn’t think much of it in the morning before work, but when I got home, it struck me as unsettling.

After a year of wondering if Michael was ADD, he was suddenly a silent shadow. If Sarah walked, he walked with her. If Sarah sat and stared, then Michael did the same.

I suddenly wanted him away from her. I crouched down and turned him to me. I was asking him if he wanted to go to the park and play before it got too dark, but I never finished the question.

When he turned to look at me, I saw his eyes. Once bold and blue like his mother’s, they were now ominous black circles trimmed in faded blue. That same awful haunting light shone in the back of his eyes.

Whatever had happened to Sarah, she had done it to him.

I panicked. I tried to take him with me, but he easily brushed off my grip and returned to Sarah’s side.

I ran to the girls’ room. I told them to pack an overnight bag and then I went to grab a few things of my own. I suddenly realized they weren’t making any noise. They hadn’t questioned the weird request.

I went back. I called to them both by name twice before they responded.

In eerie sync with each other, they slowly turned and looked at me. Once again, there it was. The taunting light from deep inside dead eyes.

I think I screamed out loud.

I ran from the house and drove. I had no idea where to go, but I drove.

My whole family was gone.

That’s the part that the courtroom and the lawyers and the judge aren’t listening to.

They were gone!

They moved and acted alive, but they were dead. My whole life was consumed by some corpse light that made no sense.

I don’t know what I expected to find when I went back to the house late that night. I hadn’t spoken to anyone about what I had seen, except Sarah and my doctor soon after she returned from Vegas.

I couldn’t believe me, so why should anyone else?

I went inside and found them all standing in the living room just watching the door. They could have been some creepy Halloween decoration.

Those eyes… God, all of them just staring at me with those eyes.

“What are you?”

It was the only thing I could think to say.

“You need not know,” was all she said.

She never touched me, but I know she threw me against the wall somehow. That’s where the “signs of struggle” came from. It was Sarah just staring at me as something unseen grabbed me and dragged me through the house.

It was after I slammed my back into the kitchen doorway and fell to the floor that I almost blacked out. I struggled to stay awake until I saw my children just staring at me. Something about that moment left me so terrified it jarred me awake just in time to see that Sarah had walked over to where I lay bleeding on the floor.

With one hand, she effortlessly moved me to a sitting position and then sat on my lap. Her face, those eyes, were right in front of me.

She made eye contact. He held my face to her so I couldn’t look away. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t. All I could do was stare back into those haunting eyes.

I felt it then. Something reached out at me. Not physically. In my mind. Through my eyes.

Through her eyes.

That damned light was piercing my brain. It burned and whispered and hissed and yowled. I felt something. I don’t know what it was, except that it was malice and evil.

And all I could see was those lights that had haunted me.

I don’t know where I found the strength to move, much less grab Sarah’s hair and pull her head back, but I did. The moment her eyes were no longer boring into my soul, I felt I could move. She tried to lock eyes with me again, but I drove my forehead into her chin and tossed her aside.

None of the children reacted.

That was it. That was the moment. I knew then with God as my witness that my family was all dead. They had been taken by that damned light into some kind of walking Hell. I would not go into the light with them.

While Sarah pulled herself slowly to her feet, I moved against my bruised body and scrambled into the kitchen. Her grandmother’s cast iron skillet was sitting right there.

I just…

I had to…

Those eyes were gone after that.

The children were huddled on the floor. They cried, dear God, they cried, but I knew it had to be a trick. I had seen that light in their dead eyes. I had to make sure I would never see it again.

That’s why I had to do it. I don’t know what evil the light wanted to bring into this world, but I have done all of you a service. You will kill me for it, but now that I have recorded this, I can be at peace with that.

No! I still have to figure out the upload.

Stay away from me!

I will go quietly if you will just let me finish, damn you!

I have to finish the upload.

No! Don’t delete that!

Don’t–

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