The Eyes That Serve the Cause of Darkness. Carlos del Puente Stories

In the crooked house at the end of Moribund Street, where the walls breathed and the floorboards whispered secrets to the rats, the Vexworth family thrived in a dysfunction of glorious biases. The patriarch, Hannibal Lecter was a gourmet chef with peculiar tastes, who spent too much time watching the neighbors while sharpening his knives with theatrical precision. His wife, Norma Bates, spoke to her dead mother through the hallway mirrors, and sometimes her reflection answered with a voice that wasn't hers. Their children, the twins Damien and Damien - yes, both named Damien, a decision made in a state of parental negligence and distortion - had developed, since they began to speak, a language composed of clicks, hums and occasionally blood-curdling screams. No one understood them. No one wanted to.

The twins' sisters, Carrie and Regan, were no less disturbing. Carrie could move objects with her mind, but only when she was furious (which was always), and Regan spoke exclusively in inverted Latin, of medieval demonology, which turned parent-teacher conferences into a nightmare. The uncles and aunts were a circus of dysfunctions: Uncle Pinhead, collector of puzzle boxes that he sometimes solved with his own flesh; Aunt Annie, who baked pies with questionable ingredients; and Cousin Patrick, an elegant young man who liked to dissect living beings to see how they worked. The grandparents, both in-law and biological, were a chorus of disapproval, each convinced the family was doomed, though they disagreed on whether the cause was moral decay, poor financial management or the fact that the house itself seemed to be alive and possibly malevolent.

The neighbors, of course, hated them. Mrs. Lovelock next door had filed seventeen noise complaints, all justified, though the police stopped responding after Officer Clarice Starling disappeared during a routine visit. Coworkers - Hannibal at the butcher shop, Norma at the motel, the twins at the circus (where their act, The Whispering Damien Brothers, was a hit among the clinically insane) - muttered about the Vexworths in hushed tones, crossing themselves when they thought no one was watching.

And then there were the eyes. Not the ones in their sockets - those were quite normal, except for Damien the Second's left pupil, which was keyhole-shaped - but those watching from the darkness. Those that blinked in room corners, that spied through keyholes, that floated in the soup when no one was looking. They belonged to no one and everyone at once, and they served, as all eyes in darkness must, the cause of darkness itself.

The central conflict arose when Damien the First, in one of his rare moments of lucidity within the family's delirious reality, announced that the eyes were benevolent. That they were guides, not watchers. That they wanted to help.

Damien the Second, predictably, disagreed. Their private language became a battlefield of guttural sounds and furious gestures, their debates escalating until the walls shook and furniture rearranged itself in protest. Carrie, in a fit of rage, threw a grandfather clock through the window. Regan began reciting an exorcism backwards. Hannibal sighed and set the table for six, ignoring the seventh place setting that always appeared no matter how many he removed.

Meanwhile, the eyes multiplied. They appeared in breakfast toast, in shower steam, in the static of the television that only broadcast images of the family's past misdeeds. They watched, unblinking, as the Vexworths unraveled further, as neighbors began disappearing one by one, as the police - now represented by weary Detective Rust Cohle, who had seen too much and understood too little - began to suspect the family wasn't a group of people but a localized apocalypse.

The climax came one night when the moon was a sickle and the wind smelled of burning hymns. The twins were in the attic, surrounded by their invented alphabet scribbled in what they swore was red ink, and Damien the First reached out to touch one of the eyes floating in the air. The eye blinked. And then screamed with an eye's scream, of course. The sound wasn't a sound but the absence of one, a void that literally swallowed the entire house. When it ended, the Vexworths were gone. Not dead, not missing - simply erased, as if they had never existed. The neighbors, now free of their tormentors, celebrated exactly one night before realizing, with growing horror, that the eyes hadn't left with the family. Now they were everywhere. Watching. Waiting.

And the cause of darkness, as always, advanced.

By Carlos del Puente relatos