His parents joke that his hair went white from the stress of being a newborn, but Aiden’s serious mind would have done the job just as well had he been born with any other shade. His imagination, even at eight years old, is a real killer. It took his right eye and it will take his life if he stops being careful.
At first, he saw it in the corner of his eyes. Every few days, a clear oblong shape, like a worm or bug, appears on the edges of his vision, shimmering in a half-seen setting but quickly disappearing when he turns to meet it. It frustrated him to no end, especially when it appeared more frequently. At first, he believed it to be a friend of the imaginary sort that was playing hide-and-seek, but Aiden never won. Constant loss against something he could not comprehend or barely even see discouraged him from imagination, but the absence of anything fantastical within his mind almost drove him mad. So, he cluttered himself with new friends, places and adventures and more that he didn’t know what to do with. Aiden was satisfied for a time, but then the thing showed up again and again and again. Instead of the natural concern or dread, it annoyed him. It would show up even when Aiden wasn’t thinking or even trying to imagine anything. He felt that whatever he saw was somehow taunting him as it suddenly began to shiver its entire body at the edge of his eyes. All its boneless undulations ended at what appeared to be a bead-shaped “head,” which had its own, separate movements, most similar to exuberant nodding. Feeling trapped by this creature, Aiden told the adults in his life about his troubles using the only words he could muster. Maybe they could tell him what it was, ease its presence into normalcy. Maybe they can tell him how to get rid of it.
The teacher said it was his fault, making him feel worse than when he started. “Well, do you press on your eyes a lot when you close them?” she asked with an arched brow. “People usually see things like this…worm-thing when they do that. You should stop. It’s, uh… not good for you.”
The school nurse refused to provide any help and left him with a temporary and more… adult-sounding distraction. “I only handle emergencies, kid. Come back when you break an arm or throw up. Actually, if you see the junior high schoolers… tell them my prices have changed. Don’t tell anyone else about it.”
The janitor didn’t even try to answer the question, proving Aiden’s parents and all the school staff that insulted him right. “I never even graduated, so I have no idea. You need to talk to people your own age. Will be a lot healthier for you. Trust me.”
Following that advice, Aiden sought the aid of his peers, at play during their collective hour at the park, when the blazing sun scorched their slides and skins. Maybe, sharing an age, they in fact did possess the same issues with their developing eyes. Their own individual worm-creatures, or more specifically a nematode as described in his last science class, slowly becoming more annoying and, dare he say it, real. A bigger group of children will mean more chances of a shared experience, so Aiden approached the largest clique led by the school’s most popular kid: Aaron Samuels.
Aiden follows the social etiquette instilled into him by his parents every morning. Before making his presence known, he straightens his back and looks straight ahead, chin level to the ground. He then offers a simple one-word greeting, “hi” in this case, and shares his full name, in case the kids did not recognize him. With practiced grace, he asks if it’s alright to start a conversation, to which the majority of kids follow Aaron’s lead and nod along. Then, with full eye contact, he describes what he sees, the elusive nematode in his eyes with an increasingly solid presence, and how it makes him feel. He consulted a dictionary and a thesaurus just to communicate better and not repeat himself. He ended his interaction with a question, asking if anyone else has eye-worms. This was the first time he spoke to so many at once, and it felt good. Aiden felt proud.
Aaron responds, “That’s dumb! You’re retarded with your questions and white hair! Hey, retard. You think I’m dumb enough to believe that?” His opening salvo is a hard slap against Aiden’s face and the other children laugh trying to get their own licks in.
The cruelty forces him to flee. Dealing with an invasive nematode becomes preferable to what Aiden knew would happen next should he stay, something beyond bruises and a black eye. Them forcing him to the ground and pulling at his colorless locks, maybe drawing blood with enough time. The outdoors truly brought out the worst in his peers. He avoided entrances back into the school because what teacher would believe him? He’s the weird one who approached Aaron and his friends, and it was their word against his.
Aiden finds escape from the park through the uprooted opening in the school park’s chain link fence, where endless black asphalt, flat and winding, stretches to the east and west. His house lay just a few blocks away, a deliberate choice by his parents for his ease of travel and social life, proven to be unexplored for a reason. Aiden decides to get comfort in sanctuary then return to the park, to the school, for more conflict, so he crosses the street in a straight line, his eyes too blurred by tears to bother looking either way.
What follows is the dual screeching of two metal colossi and their dark rubber trotters, each of them carrying a bulky cargo for a small time business. One transports feather pillows quilted from commissioned designs and drives in from the left, while the other transports custom-made mirrors and enters from the right. They both swerve away from the boy but collide nonetheless. Sensing the onslaught too late, Aiden jumps forward, desperately reaching for the road’s other side. If only he didn’t look back. The mirrors shatter and the pillows are torn apart to let the fluffy white feathers fly. A million shards and feathers fly under the blazing summer sun, combining to shine like angels, and they travel in all directions. The angels fall, as is inevitable, but some find their mark on their creator, revenge for their existence perhaps, leave the world just as soon as they enter it. In the aftermath, Aiden screams, holding his palm against his bleeding right eye.
All of this is witnessed by Aaron and his now-silent posse with white-knuckled fingers curled against the chains. Behind them, the bell school rings but goes frightfully unheard.
Having exhausted all options and lost more than he bargained for, Aiden tells his parents about his struggle from a hospital bed, and the results are as he expected, especially after such a horrid accident. Instead of taking his words seriously or recognizing how tortured he feels, they seek to placate him. To distract him from the pain and trauma that he knows he brought onto himself. In the following week, Aaron Samuels and all of his friends, clearly forced under parental duress, arrive at the hospital to offer apologies and kind words on his snow-white hair. They then say that, yes, they have seen nematodes in their eyes. It would be kinder to just mock him, Aiden thinks of the kids and his parents, all the way from recovery to the journey back home.
“You just need glasses, little guy,” his father said, laughing with calculated levity. “We can get you big frames, just like me. Everyone will think we’re twins!” He wanted to kill the joke with a remark about his eye, but he left his father to his attempt.
“I think you might be haunted and need an exco-no exorcism,” says Aaron walking Aiden back home . “I watched it in a movie once. You want to watch it with me at my house? Might help and tell you what you need to do.” Aiden politely declines.
“You’re too young for a contact, but we can see the doctor again,” says his mother, filled with bone-weary care. “I’m sure he’ll find… something to help you like he did before. He always does.”
Despite all the suffering and gilding over in his new lease on life, Aiden found solace in at least seeing less of the… thing. Half of his sight, bandaged over with a fresh medical band, was free, and the monster very rarely infiltrated the rest of it. Soon, its presence disappeared from Aiden’s mind, and he kept on trying to live.
A year later, both the monster and Aiden’s childhood becomes slightly more real, just as the child feared.
His parents continue to do everything they can, and he still loves them for it, but it is not enough. They still cannot understand what he saw or how he feels whenever that thing worms his way into his world, slowly growing darker with each appearance. In later showings, it even took on a certain substance, gaining a soft, unstable shadow in the light. Aiden is disturbed by the sudden declaration of its real-life presence. So he sought to ignore his sight and imagination, only focusing on the roads ahead, like the holidays and his ninth birthday.
But then comes the noises, and the monster is not caring enough to introduce itself with whispers instead of reedy moans. Like a long oboe trapped with his mind, refusing to stop. It first comes in on a random night, deep in the sleeping hours, and naturally Aiden calls for help.
“I’m here! I’m here, son,” asks his father as he tears the bedroom doors off its hinges. He recklessly brandishes an iron poker from the fireplace, fully expecting to skewer a bully or any other creep, but all he meets is empty air, which is lucky as he failed to put on his glasses before coming to his son’s rescue. “Who’s there!? I called the police! Get on your knees! Answer me!”
From his sanctuary under his simple white sheets, Aiden points towards the corner of his room where the closet rests. His frail arm shakes and the moonlight streaming in through the bedroom reveals a deep pool of sweat on his forehead. “It’s coming from there, Dad! I thought I saw something but now I only hear it. Make it stop.”
The father follows Aiden’s hand towards the closet, a solid white wooden slate. “What are you hearing, Aiden? I’m not seeing anything. Is it coming from the closet? Get to your mother, I’ll go in.”
“No, Dad!” Aiden shouts. He tightly grips his ears, nails digging into cartilage, to block the sound out, but the effort is unsuccessful. He yells louder to at least overpower it. “It’s not in the closet! It’s right in front of it! It’s standing right there and he will not shut up! I saw him in a blink and he left with a scream.”
As Aiden’s father wails against the closet door and surrounding beige walls, his mother slinks forward, hunched over as to not draw any attention from the family’s defenders or assailants. With a furtive hand, she flicks the light switch up and all becomes silent, from the droning sound in Aiden’s ears to the desperate thrashing of iron against drywall. Both boys looked at her in wide-eyed shock while she looked at the poor walls dotted with misshapen holes and the closet door splintered at every edge.
Aiden’s mother mutters, “I’m going back to bed,” and she leaves without saying anything else. Aiden and his father look at one another and share a similar shame.
“I think I should get a nightlight,” Aiden says, pulling his sheets over his face. His ringing ears start to cool.
“You should. You deserve it.” His father nods in agreement, slowly approaching the boy’s bed before calmly sitting down on the edge. “Let’s go out and get one tomorrow. You won’t have to go to school at all. Just you and me, and you can pick whatever lights and as many lightbulbs as you want.”
A consolation after tonight’s embarrassment. “I really wish I didn’t but I do see things, or rather one thing, and it’s getting more real. Thank you for at least trying to believe me.”
The father leans down and hugs Aiden. Even through the covers, he could feel the warmth of a parent’s arms. “Well, I wish I could see things the same way you do, Aiden. As scary as it is, I bet it’s beautiful too.”
Aiden lets his father be satisfied with that fantasy, that how he lives will ever be acceptable. “I guess so, yeah. I would feel a lot less alone.”
A deep breath follows. The father only holds his son tighter. “No matter what, Aiden, you’ll have us. You will never be alone.”
Those five words make the boy feel so much better, and, unbeknownst to him, a shade just beyond the veil, in between the blinks of Aiden’s last remaining eye, sagely nods in agreement and watches father and son sleep together.
It sees an opportunity to get closer. It just needs to stay quiet.
Soon after that night, Aiden did not see the nematode, or the worm-thing or the shimmering creature or whatever else he called it ever again. What he did see though was a constant blackness, temporary but nonetheless concerning. When he wakes up from sleep and knows he opens his eye, he is stuck in a few moments of nothing but then the light and everything else comes in. It happens when he’s awake too. One day he will be walking to class or playing at a park, and everything in his one eye goes out, greatly startling him but to a violent degree. He is still able to hear the children playing, the adults talking and the bugs chirping during these changes of vision.
‘Spontaneously temporary blindness,’ he thought to himself in a sudden sweat. Not even partial as he could barely make out shapes or colors when this occurred, just a long round blackness with the occasional sharp line reaching from the horizon towards any random direction. It is like a new perspective, a whole new world suddenly forcing itself into view, as if all his surroundings became a smooth ink surface reaching out and folding inwards like a paper trap.
Having suffered enough, he’d hate to go blind permanently, so Aiden immediately told his parents about his troubles, describing what he sees, or fails to see, in the most acute of details. At once, his mother and father took action, setting up a hospital appointment and canceling all foreseeable plans. At the hospital, the doctors shine different types of light into his left eye and examine the scar tissue on his right side, which he covered with lengthened white bangs. They x-ray him at every angle and keep him in hospice for several days, where the temporary blindness happens with a more startling irregularity. Their conclusion: absolutely nothing. There is no nerve damage in the remaining eye, in all of its gloriously complex parts, and all the trauma and concussive symptoms Aiden got after the accident are fully healed. The doctors, from the first opinion to the tenth, said there was nothing they could do, but that did not mean they were unable to take precautions. So Aiden, along with his parents, visited the school for a meeting with the principal. They requested to give Aiden a handicap or at least a warning to the students and teachers of his debilitating condition. All three of them, each still teetering on the edge, are forthright in their pleas, overcoming the hesitation in needing such drastic changes. The principal, infamously frank in his manners and baldness, silently contemplates in front of the family and gives his reply. The school will gladly provide.
Free of cost to the family, the school brought a child-sized walking cane and a personalized pair of shades for Aiden. The glasses came with white lenses to further stylize Aiden and the appearance he used to be mocked for. Like a full-on comic book character, he remembers his teacher saying when he put them on for the first time, and he took the chance to feel strong and confident.
In the classroom, it was a whole new world for the boy as the kids started to treat him as they would one of their own. They became a lot more sensitive to his needs and none among them were more sensitive than Aaron Samuels, who made it a school-wide habit to open the door for Aiden whenever he needed it, from the lunch cafeteria to the bathroom stalls. Aiden was famous throughout the entire town after the accident, with every citizen recognizing him by his white hair and glasses, and they treated him with reverent kindness. He became more social and even built a friend group from all walks of life. In thanks, he memorized every townsfolk by their voice and made sure to repay all the kindnesses he never thought he deserved.
The following year was the best in Aiden’s life. He turned nine years old to a rapturous applause and all his fears began to melt away. The monster that started this journey and the flashes of blindness transformed from world-ending worries to strange anecdotes for a very complicated childhood. The product of a killer imagination that the boy gave too much thought to. Aiden’s imagination took his right eye, and abandoning it gave him a new lease on life. Among the celebratory thrall, he swears to not let it take away the rest of his life.
But the monster holds no respect for swears, and on one average morning, as Aiden plays make-believe at his desk, it emerges from the veil of blackness, the thing that so invaded Aiden’s vision so often, and calls. A reedy “greetings” to fully break the silence that tortured it for so long.
With a start, Aiden turns only to collapse to the floor and stutter. Unfortunately for him, blindness escapes as he holds the thing that has haunted him in its full, frighteningly real appearance. It still had a worm-like body and circular button head, but it has eyes now. Dear god, it has eyes now. Empty saucers that curve in deep into its cranium, a new school term that did little to help his comprehension or the lessening of the horror. He is alone in his room, having woken up from a weekend nap just a half-hour ago. His father is out at the office working overtime and his mother is meeting old high school friends for a reunion, a much deserved vacation both father and son knew she craved. So, it was just him and whatever this creature of living ebony defined itself as.
Aiden hopelessly yells, “Go away! Go away! You’re not real! You were never real! This is not happening!” The room grows cold.
Instead of denying the boy’s claims or introducing itself properly, the great black thing issues demands and it hurts his head just like the droning of that one night, made all the more terrifying by their uncanny clarity. The eerie enunciation of a “head” like a human’s but a body like some fat all-black serpent, having gorged on such visible fear. “I have traveled so far. Come to me. Please approach. There is nothing between you and I.” The words are not so much said but rather felt in the back of his mind. Sentences of a hollow intonation force themselves into the process of thought, demanding response, which Aiden gives in verbal to alleviate the pain.
“No! I will not follow! Stop! Stop!”
Horrifically aware of the boy’s resistance, the creature merely moves forward. A man-headed slug made of the thickest ink, it inches forward and cranes its neck downward. Aside from its eyes, it only has a smooth surface for a mouth, a surface that then splits apart like an egg shell with edges uneven from one another. Between is a void, and from that void a red serpent, slick with syrup, emerges. The thing speaks again at the same intensity. “Why have you always rejected me? Why was the duty on me to break through your barriers of vision? Why did you not seek me out when I was always there?”
If not overwhelmed, the boy would describe its tone as mournful. Instead, Aiden merely yells back at it. “J-just tell me what the fuck you are!” He had learned the word from his father, a memory a lifetime away, and hoped it would hold the same kind of power. The same kind of repulsion against this thing that spoke.
Surprisingly, with tongue laying damp on the floor, the creature answers. “I am of you. From the Form before birth. Your brother in the Great Dark, constantly becoming one in harmony with you. We played together in the unending black as perfectly round forms. Our favorite game was to roll within the plains where fingers of red would reach and stain our Forms. No. It was your favorite game. I just loved to play.”
As it spoke, the creature moved randomly, sometimes holding its head near Aiden’s or raising itself to display its eye-holes towards the ceiling. Thinking the creature too distracted by reminiscence, Aiden tries to crawl away in small movements. A ploy ruined as the thing’s form expands laterally and makes a wall against the boy’s escape. Dark and omniscient, it continues.
“We loved each other. We wanted to be together forever, but then, the call of Creation entered the Great Dark. It required a Form to give life to a new being of the Beyond. It chose you. Stole you. I mourned, but I followed. Through all my strength, I defied Creation and propelled my Form towards Beyond. On the journey, I was cursed with shape. Burdened with the attributes all beings of Beyond carry, but twisted and corrupted without the guiding hand of Creation. All was thought lost when I finally arrived, as even with shape and thought none could see me, but you could when I finally manifested near your new life. It is me you see on the borders of your vision. I was there when you sought counsel and I was there when you were hurting. You see me because you were born wanting me, but your rejection of that desire scared you, forcing me to come to the forefront of your presence.”
“It w-was you all this time? You were really there.” Aiden shudders. His young mind, despite its education, could not properly recognize the divine concepts of before and birth that the creature speaks of, but it can recognize an admittance of fault. “Y-you’re a goddamn monster.”
The creature’s tongue lifts upward and rolls back towards the void that is the creature’s face. The broken edges reunite and the surface is uniformly flat again. It entreats Aiden with a readjusted face, the shape of it shifting to become something sharper. Something more adult. “No. I am your family, more real than this plane will ever be. Come to me, brother-form. After so long apart, let us be joined. Let us become one again. Let us become something new and ecstatic here in the Beyond.”
Through teary eyes, Aiden looks around to see the creature’s form fully surrounding . Then, the walls close in.
In hushed, hopeless tones, Aiden says, “After the hurt you caused, I was happy. I had friends, a family united and strangers who cared about me. Aaron at my birthday party and doctors supporting my studies. A future alight with possibility. That is what I really desire. That is what made your appearance, my monstrous imagination, worth the lonely childhood I left behind. What will you be replacing when you finally touch me? What will I become when I join you?”
The creature’s ink body merely rises above the boy to fully close his sight of the outside world. Aiden cannot see a thing, he only feels it. He becomes trapped in the thing’s arms, helpless in every facet of his being. It is like he is floating. An astronaut in a nightmare. The shade’s scarlet red tongue slithers out of its black hole mouth and finds purchase on Aiden’s right arm. It slithers up towards his body and around his scrawny neck. It leaves a creeping wetness upon the boy’s white, shivering skin until it descends into his screaming mouth. From within, Aiden feels his insides become sucked up and emptied into a whirlwind of indescribable flesh. From without, a great gravity takes hold of him and brings him inevitably close to his brother in the dark. He sinks into the creature’s body, into an ocean of meaningless black where he cannot see.
It is all that he ever imagined on the worst days of his life. It is all the stress that gave him a full head of gray when he emerged from his mother’s womb. It is all goddamn freezing. And in the Beyond, the place where the creature made such an effort to invade, there is nothing in Aiden’s room except a heavy black marble with a striking wave of white.
