#people should just have eyes like that. you can have icy blue someone unlock fiery gold

[patrickztump]

i understand the point of the yellow eyes is to show that he is no longer himself, he's been brainwashed, possessed by evil forces beyond his control, all that. but they didn't have to make his eyes so mesmerizingly pretty, beautiful even, in this scene to emphasize that

[spookyspaghettisundae]

What Was the Mountain, What Heralds the Calamity

Therapy had been tough in the months following the incident. Daily life had turned into a blur ever since.

Heidi stood in front of the mirror and only registered with delay what sound reached her ears. The hollow snap, a release of pressure around her waist, and the rattle of cheap imitation metal accompanying the flaccid flopping of a broken belt as it drooped from the loops on her pants.

Almost as if in a trance, it took her several moments to register that all the stress-eating and weight gain had caused her oldest and favorite belt to break. She held the buckle and studied how its prong had cleanly snapped in half because of material fatigue and the physical strain of her belly’s size increasing.

It was not like she really needed the belt anyway because her pants had gotten a bit too tight ever since she witnessed the murder-suicide at college. Heidi thought of Krissy for some reason.

Before long, she found herself in another haze: the distant droning radio hits looping the same one-hour track list of pop music in the background, while she explored the brightly lit maze of a cramped clothing store, shopping around for a new belt. She felt seen in an uncomfortable way and avoided eye contact with every single person that got even remotely near her.

Unless she needed to, she never went outside anymore.

Navigating the narrow aisles and beginning to feel nauseous from the cocktails of perfumed scents all tactically spread throughout the retail hellscape, she even tried to avoid physical closeness to any other of the shoppers.

This made it harder to get to wherever the hell the damned belts were in this store. Instead of locking eyes with other people, Heidi stared at a camera stuck overhead in a corner, observing how it slowly panned back and forth and a tiny red light on its blocky little body blinked rhythmically. Seeing her own tiny reflection in the camera lens made her feel uneasy, like she saw someone else in there.

Faceless mannequins wrapped in stylish garb loomed high above her everywhere, looking down on her like disapproving deities; divine idols of fashion that saw without eyes but judged her with cold and absolute cruelty.

The moment she heard familiar voices, she darted into an aisle she had no business in and kept her head down. With a sinking feeling, she wondered what she hated more: the bright and garish colors and neo-hippie designs of the articles that flanked her on both sides, or that she was so afraid of human contact that this was who she was now.

Alone and adrift in a sea of empty masks, engulfed in a suffocating fog of uncertainty and countless little fears.

“Do you think this’ll go better with my blue bolero jacket, or do the colors clash a bit too much? What do you think?” Krissy asked.

Heidi recognized her fellow college colleague’s voice through the white noise of store music, cash register beeps, and other voices softly blending. Somewhat sharp, regularly rising in tone as if to pose several questions before posing the actual question.

“I dunno, babe. You might wanna try the darker blue instead. You know, instead of such a radically different color?” Jacob asked back. Krissy’s boyfriend.

The aisles being what they were in this store, it was not like they offered ample opportunities to hide from prying eyes without ducking down in between them—the nature of such a temple of commerce lured everybody in to see its ample buffet of products, rendering its neon-colored reduced-price signs visible from every corner of the store.

Krissy clicked her tongue. Without even seeing her, Heidi could practically hear her shake her head for emphasis.

“Nah, because I’m really thinking of it going with my favorite jeans, and if it ends up all looking like different shades of blue, it kinda sucks,” Krissy said.

With little opportunity to hide without making herself look even more like a freak, Heidi kept her head down and did what she had been conditioning herself to do for months now: pretend like she did not exist and pray that nobody noticed.

Despite her best efforts, she gawked at Jacob’s face. His eyes stole a furtive glance at Heidi which made her stomach knot. Despite how clipped and short it was, and him focusing all his attention on Krissy, Heidi clearly glimpsed the flash of recognition in his eyes.

She wondered if he had stopped giving her adulterously flirtatious looks because of her bloated figure or because of the thousand-mile stare that haunted Heidi’s mien. The moment she sensed her thoughts drifting in that direction, she shook her head and chastised herself for thinking anything like that.

Heidi turned away and gained distance as quickly as she could without running, far away enough to not have to overhear those other two talking. She stifled a sigh of relief when she finally chanced upon a rack of belts in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

Taking less than a minute to scan the massive assortment, Heidi gazed upon one that really struck her fancy. Two big silver rings adorned the black leather belt and framed the buckle. It looked a bit pricey, but she was willing to pay extra if it was made of authentic metal and leather.

Disappointment followed when she realized it was a size too small.

In a seldom burst of defiance, she looked around. A store clerk was hovering nearby, busy sorting jackets by size on a ring-shaped stand.

Heidi dithered, owed to her mind going in circles and struggling to overcome the part of her that felt anxious in approaching and talking to a stranger. But the store employee was small and unassuming, which helped give Heidi that final push.

Instead of clearing her throat as she had envisioned to catch the girl’s attention, Heidi spoke up, “Uhm, excuse me?”

The shop assistant slowly turned and looked up at her. The nametag read “Jenn” and it only briefly distracted from vaguely disheveled hair and black rings of exhaustion under Jenn’s eyes.

“Hello,” Jenn said in a mousy little voice to match her appearance. “How can I help?”

Out of fear of breaking out in a cold sweat, Heidi embraced her newfound momentum and nodded. She held up the belt like a trophy and felt the blood rushing into her face as she spoke with much less vigor than she felt, “Do you have this in one size bigger?”

Jenn’s eyes went from belt to Heidi and back to the belt.

She said, “If there aren’t any out there, that's—”

The sentence died in Jenn’s mouth and she nodded. The faint semblance of a smile twitched around the corners of her lips, genuine and heartfelt.

“You know, I’ll check. We might have one,” she said. And with a sudden dash of melody to her voice, she added, “I’ll be right back!”

Jenn walked away with a bounce to her step.

Heidi hesitated, wondering if she should wait there or follow Jenn to wherever she was going. The thought that she could spare the girl the extra walk to get back to her drove Heidi to follow, several steps behind and struggling to keep pace. Jenn may have looked small and exhausted but hell, she was fast.

This brought them to a door bearing a label in big black letters emblazoned on its surface, reading:

EMPLOYEES ONLY

Keys jingled as Jenn pulled out a tangle of the little metal objects and unlocked the door. She stepped inside and paused, looking over her shoulder and noticing that Heidi had followed her. She gave her another smile, both feeble and warm.

“Please wait here, I’ll find it in no time. Or maybe not find it. Uhm, I hope I find it? Uh, you know what I mean,” she babbled at Heidi.

She radiated a disarming energy. It melted away the icy barrier of Heidi’s many fears. Seconds later, Heidi found it hard to believe that she had felt the pull of facial muscles she had not flexed in a while—she had returned a smile of her own at Jenn.

The girl disappeared into the eerie twilight of whatever storage lay beyond the threshold. Jenn had left the door ajar, giving Heidi ample time to absorb hints of the secret world behind it.

Contrasting the warm eggshell color of the floors in the store area, the concrete grounds of the back area looked coarse and slate-colored, radiating something cold and unforgiving. Racks of naked steel beams held up all sorts of things wrapped in layers of plastic or piles of cardboard boxes.

Although a cool light emanated from fluorescent tubes above the storage space, the ceilings in there were higher than in the store and it felt like some of them were off. One of the lights even occasionally flickered, lending the otherworld that Jenn had stepped into an almost eerie air that reminded Heidi of a cheesy horror movie.

Seconds flowed into minutes as she waited. She resisted the temptation to look around, felt a stronger need not to make any eye contact anymore. The warmth of smiles exchanged between her and Jenn already felt like it was a million miles away.

Just before any impatience could bubble up to the surface, a loud sound crashed in the storage space. Something big and heavy must have fallen, with a loud sloshing on the hells of the impact.

Heidi’s heart raced. Thundered. She wanted to check. Worried that something had happened to Jenn.

But that icy barrier of fears had fully frozen back into a solid shell, causing her heartbeat to shoot through the roof. Paralyzed, she dreaded the idea of looking like an idiot by calling out for Jenn, only to find out that everything was fine. Or to trespass beyond that ominous threshold of the ajar door and get into any trouble.

The door said it was for employees only, after all.

Then she remembered how she once walked towards danger. Towards the sound of gunshots. Towards whimpering. Towards that horrid scene that had wrought all the therapy of recent months.

Instead of impatience, cold dread bubbled to the surface. She did not want to remember the words of the phone call that followed the murder-suicide she had witnessed.

And then, something else bubbled up. Fiery, and searing. It sliced through the icy shell with something she had forgotten.

Something that felt like hope.

All she had done was witness. But now, perhaps, she could make a difference.

The cold sweat erupted from her pores, after several of her steps taking her through that door, pushing through, looking around for Jenn.

Two forces clashed in the thunder of her beating heart. The fire of courage and the ice of her dread. The need to do the right thing, and the fear of consequences.

Something like claustrophobia began to bear down on her as she paced through the narrow corridors of the storage shelves. While the ceilings were high, so were the racks and piles of boxes all around. Heidi had left one maze and entered another.

“Jenn?” she said. Timid, at first. Assertive on repeat, as she called out again, “Jenn?”

Something metal scraped against the concrete floors, grinding. It also sounded wet.

The moment she turned around, the shadows around her grew. The darkness engulfed her, and a tower fell. A mountain fell upon her. It was too fast for her to react, too sudden to realize what even was happening. Just enough time to know that one of those long metal shelves bent and toppled and fell, and piles of boxes came crashing down upon her.

She instinctively flailed about with her arms to fight herself free from being buried alive under a mountain of boxes, but as her eyes fluttered, nothing was the same anymore. Nothing was as it should be.

Distant and incredible, but all real. All too real. Terribly real.

A stinging smell of salt hung heavy in the air. The taste of rust clung to her tongue in a bitter film. The gray floors had made way to a different color of gray, blending into mist all around, shrouding the dark silhouette of a mountain in the distance.

Heidi’s hands were different. Thinner, not pudgy anymore.

Her body, everything. Like she had lost all the excess weight, and then some. And dressed differently. Dried blood stained her leg, and she had a bright orange life jacket hugging her upper body.

Heidi was no longer Heidi. She was now Krissy.

The world swayed and ocean waves lapped at the edges of an inflatable rubber raft. Jacob slumped where he sat, his head hanging down so far that his hair concealed his face, and his head bobbed up and down as he sat across from her in the raft. Like he was unconscious. Or sleeping.

But Heidi—no, Krissy—knew he was not sleeping.

He was also not Jacob anymore, even if he looked like him.

Even if he now raised his head, looking up until their eyes met, and dread welled up inside of her, making her stomach knot and cutting off air as she held her breath.

He stared. His eyes carried a cutting cold that rivaled the sea’s air. Something other than Jacob peered through them, piercing the darkness between the stars, and wriggling its way forth, like a worm burrowing through the void, trying to emerge into the light, to break through the glint of Krissy’s own horrified visage reflected in those orbs of lifeless jelly.

Like someone watching through a screen, displaying a camera feed.

Krissy hoped Jenn was okay and wanted to wake up. To become Heidi again.

But this was no dream.

And that was not Jacob.

“Who are you?” she croaked. The question landed on wings of a dehydrated rasp.

Jacob’s limbs twitched as the entity tried to move, but they were all long twisted in ways that had caused bones to break and muscles to snap, leaving him stranded in the boat and immobilized. His body shuddered and wiggled for a moment, suggesting that he might have lurched forward. Or lunged at her.

“I am Sorrowglade, a Sheen of the Interlocking Oil Walls. You look thirsty. You should drink,” came the words from Jacob’s chapped lips.

Sorrowglade nodded Jacob’s head towards a bottle of water within Krissy’s reach.

It rolled back and forth, courtesy of the ocean rocking their raft. The water in the bottle sloshed around, out of tact, and a violet tint permeated it. For whatever reason, she knew poison had tainted the liquid.

Tears welled up in Krissy’s eyes. She had no hopes of finding Jacob. Either he was long dead or Sorrowglade had absorbed him. The worries about a belt in a clothing store or any anxieties welling up now lay far behind her, even though they had troubled her mind mere moments ago.

Her head weighed a ton and she felt sick. That metallic taste reached far down her throat and a pain in her jaw flared up. The plane’s crash into the ocean had miraculously done almost nothing to her.

“We are the shining light that gleams from the cracks between the walls,” said Sorrowglade, still borrowing Jacob’s vocal cords. His eyes still dead, but awake, and wary.

Studying her features with curiosity. Like a fascinated child.

The lifeboat drifted closer towards the mountain. Panic budded in Krissy’s body, starting as a tingling in her digits and spreading everywhere else until it erupted into a nauseating dizziness, making the world spin around her.

“We are here to guard you from the jovial pudding of the laughing coin kings,” continued Sorrowglade. “From the false promises of freedom. From the lies that the stone walkers cloaked in hairless shadow utter.”

Krissy’s stomach churned. She fought against the urge to throw up while her hands pawed at the paddle nearby, gripping it tightly as she stared at Sorrowglade, expecting Jacob’s broken body to suddenly defy its injuries and jump at her like a hungry beast.

But Sorrowglade only stared at her from the helpless body of her boyfriend.

“They will devour if you let them near,” he said. No—they—they said. Speaking in one voice, but many who spoke at once, “We, on the other hand, we offer salvation.”

Krissy could barely see through the unsteady blur of tears as she pried her gaze from Jacob’s body, and she paddled with all her might. Tried to gain distance from that growing, looming shadow of a mountain. A distance that shrank far too quickly.

“We are golden light that shines upon true ways.”

Krissy forced herself not to sob when she realized the raft spun around. She doubled her efforts to alternate sides as she paddled, harder, with crushing despair taking root in every fiber of her body already wracked with panic.

“We have traveled from far to find you, and we are the conclusion that all your roads lead to.”

Silently, inwardly, Krissy pleaded for something to happen, to rip her out of this and bring her back to where she was. To be Heidi again, to find Jenn in the store, and go home with a new belt. But she was Krissy now, and her world had gone to hell.

“When you close your eyes, you taste us. When you taste the grit of dirt crunching between your teeth, you hear our arrival.”

Krissy paddled, and paddled, and paddled. Looking over her shoulder only turned her dizziness into something worse. The mountain grew larger by the second. Looming behind Jacob like a sinister and shadowy patron. Like the ocean waters carried the raft there no matter how hard she tried.

The metallic taste made way to something far more bitter and caustic and before she knew it, she retched and heaved as she vomited off the side of the boat. Chunks of lunch had gotten stuck in her hair and her mouth burned.

“Lay down your ten thousand nightmares. Abandon all the pain and the guilt,” Sorrowglade said in the same dull monotone, a mockery of Jacob’s pleasant voice as it delivered all these strange words.

Everything he said kept riding on the tone of an invitation. But all she could hear were secret threats.

At least the dizziness waned a little bit. And although her arms wobbled, she found new strength and paddled with all her might.

Doom emanated from that mountain. Slithering in between the scent of sea salt, something putrid and rotten reached her nostrils, almost made Krissy hurl again.

“Why embrace this suffering any longer? Why do some of you resist so?”

Krissy did her best to ignore Sorrowglade, but it was impossible not to listen. His voice kept cutting through the sloshing of ocean waves, infiltrating her ears and mind and thoughts, like tendrils snaking their way forth, smooth, and slow and steady and certain—

“I can make him whole again. I can end his suffering and restore your happiness.”

A gasp almost escaped her lips, but she fought back against it, even harder than she paddled. A part of her wanted to take Sorrowglade up on their offer, but she remembered the words from that call Heidi had taken from the dying man.

Not in a monotone, but a growl, she replied. She repeated those words from the mysterious call as she watched the life fade from the eyes of the man who had committed the murder-suicide at her college, “When the ascetic glimpses gold outside the gloom, he is blinded and strays from his path.”

Something grabbed at the paddle and because she had turned around halfway to face Not-Jacob and address this Sorrowglade, she never saw what yanked that paddle away from her, dragging it underwater and letting the darkness beneath the ocean surface swallow it whole.

Having reached the peaks of her panic, it made no difference anymore.

“These are not my final moments,” she finished. And despite her voice trembling, every syllable emerged with force, riding on waves of defiance.

Sorrowglade continued to stare at her through Jacob’s deadened eyes. They waited for more, but Krissy had said her part. Gave as little as possible, because she sensed how they did not understand one another, even if they spoke the same language and could comprehend the individual words.

“We may be delayed today,” said Sorrowglade. With no anger nor emotion. “The awakening comes eventually, like your sun always rises and always sets.”

The silhouette of the mountain moved. Not because of the boat’s steady rocking amidst the ocean waves, or Krissy’s sight being affected by that motion.

“A celestial body that you see in ways it is not, believe it behaves in ways that it does not.”

No. The mountain moved. Its shape changed as limbs parted from it. Monolithic and towering, one such limb reached out towards them, creeping closer and closer. A low baritone rumbling accompanied its arrival, like a nearing earthquake, heralding how the ocean waves turned more violent, now splashing higher and higher against the malleable sides of the raft.

Something oily and dark and glistening pierced the veil of mists and closed in quickly on Krissy.

As she screamed and clamped her eyes shut, the searing pain flared up in her every limb. Everything hurt.

A string of profanities, panting gasps, the sound of panic weighing heavily on Jenn’s voice as she apologized profusely, both to Heidi and to an imaginary mountain of oppression that haunted her every working moment.

Jenn helped remove the many heavy boxes under which Heidi had been buried alive, and Heidi groaned in pain.

Nothing serious. Nothing had harmed her. The pile of boxes had miraculously did nothing tangible to hurt her.

Krissy was not Krissy any longer, but Heidi again. Heidi hoisted herself up onto her side and her skin tingled as she felt Jenn’s wispy hands gently touching her while she tried to help her up onto her feet.

Trembling from the shock, Heidi’s knees buckled for a moment, but Jenn helped her stand up straight. They stumbled their way out of the sea of boxes and bags that now littered the narrow corridor of the storage space.

The mountain had almost gotten Krissy. Luckily, she was now Heidi.

“Oh my gosh,” Jenn whispered. “Are you okay? I’m so sorry!”

Heidi shook her head and took Jenn’s hands, grasping them firmly and giving them a shake for emphasis, not letting go.

“No, look, don’t worry about it. S'all good. I, uh, I shouldn’t have been here—uh, back here—to begin with. I was just gonna. I was just, uh—there was a sound, and I was just, I wanted to check on you,” Heidi finally said, struggling to find the right words and omit the deluge of wrong ones and not sound like she had lost her mind.

Trying not to talk about her time as Krissy, after a plane crash, talking to the Sorrowglade that had possessed her half-dead boyfriend’s body.

Because none of that made sense. She had turned into another person and back again.

And almost as if to confirm the sheer insanity of it all, the moment the two women emerged from the storage room into the warmer light of the clothing store, Heidi saw Krissy and Jacob standing in the aisles of the shop. Although well out of earshot to hear whatever they were talking about, Krissy’s animated movements suggested she was berating Jacob for some fashion faux pas he had just committed in commenting on her most recent choice in attire to try on.

Jenn’s continued apologies barely pierced the haze of Heidi’s mind, still drifting back to that gloomy ocean, that mist, and that mountain. Its oily, tentacle-shaped something that reached out—that almost reached her.

Almost touched her.

Its agent, Sorrowglade, having almost convinced her.

Almost.

Yet more harrowing things she could not speak of in therapy. For all of this was real.

All of this suggested the invasion of that cold thing, hailing from the darkness between the stars, from far away. From distant worlds, from devoured husks, reaching out and trying to find more connections here, in our world.

Heidi smiled at Jenn and assured her everything was fine. What a beautiful lie.

“Did you find the belt? In my size?” she interrupted the clerk.

Jenn’s eyes went wide, and she burst out laughing.

All the anxiety blown away; it was almost like old Heidi was back. The one from before the incident.

Almost.

In truth, she only wore a mask.

Deep down, she felt sick to her stomach. Wondered what she could do to prevent the coming calamity. Wondered if she could even do anything.

Nobody would believe her if she told them.

She struggled to believe it herself.

—Submitted by Wratts