The Man with Silver Eyes (Short Story; Horror)

(Note form the Author: I was watching The Machinist last night. It was cold, raining. I could hear the wind scratching at the windows, and next to me, the cycle of Amy's breath. My dog was sleeping at my feet, and I found myself wondering what it would be like to lose my mind. Worse, what it would be like to discover that madness held a certain truth, and the world was only a societal delusion, hiding beneath it older, truer things. I got up with the intention of correcting my novel, and spat this out instead.)


On the first night without sleep, Braddock sat in his dead mother’s chair. Time had chewed holes through the fabric, and decay clouded in the air every time he shifted his weight. He spent the four hours of Alaskan summer darkness wondering how many parasites had exhausted their lives tilling the cotton fibers, proliferating in reckless parentage to things that would likewise die without breaching the universe contained beneath his warming body.

On the second night Braddock picked his nails, losing himself in a moon too shy to rise above the horizon, the trees a jaw of jagged evergreens half-smiling at the frozen sky. He imagined what it would be like if the secret were a true secret; if the stranger he'd met in the Frontier Tavern was not a drunken one-legged fool (as the barmaid had intimated, after the man's hobbling exit); if the stranger had truly seen.

Braddock remembered the man’s chrome eyes--not gray, but the polished alloy of new machinery--the webbed crows feet giving them the appearance of tungsten pearls buried in cracked desert clay; the way the stranger's mouth had no need to move for Braddock to hear his words: 

Would you like to know what I’ve seen? Seven nights, boy. A sacrifice. Then the world will be brittle and meaningless. And all of this… the man had motioned to the room, and the land, and the lands beyond it, with a tick of his mirrored-steel eyes, will be nothing to you anymore.

On the third night Braddock laughed until his throat tasted of blood, and no liquid save liquor would soothe its rawness. He paced through his dead mother’s house, her clothes still in her bedroom, her faintly medicinal smell still saturated in every carpet fiber, so that his dragging feet stirred her from the rugs, and he imagined her hunched and crippled form trailing behind him, warning him of the world, its dangers, the fools who called themselves leaders, the fools who needed smart lads like him to use, chew up, discard, and forget.

“I won’t believe them,” he told the dust-wraith of his mother, “I never have. I’ve stayed here, like I promised. Watched your things. Held the fort. It’s ours, Mother. Still ours.” Braddock felt the tears slip down his cheeks, but by the time he reached to wipe them, he was laughing again.

On the fourth night he almost fell asleep, and so on the fifth, he stripped naked and walked into the Alaskan gloaming, slapping himself with a sapling branch every time his lids narrowed against the wind. He watched the aurora borealis, and read its messages, the poetry writ by God, a staircase wrought in color, breathed by sun, compressed by darkness, bellowed by the conductor that hid between them, a universal rhythm unacknowledged by men and the fools that led them. 

Twice he saw his mother’s face within the greens and pinks and jasmines, first youthful, then rotted and peeled to the bone. He didn’t cry or laugh. He shivered, and trembled, and clicked his teeth until the eternal sun pushed its belly above the mountains.

Braddock went back inside; and though he had no way of knowing it, there had been no Aurora Borealis in the sky that night.

By the sixth night of his vigil, Braddock was starving, and his body had taken to ticking. He stood before the mirror with a kerosene lantern held below his swollen abdomen, unsure if the stirrings of its sweat-slick surface were only shadows … or something else. He licked his lips, held his palm to the flesh, and marveled at the dueling rhythm he felt in challenge to his heart. It fell silent after a time. When he looked at the clock, an hour had passed.

The old man's voice rose in his mind: Then the world will be brittle and meaningless.

“Yes,” agreed Braddock, “Brittle and meaningless, brittle and meaningless...” 

Over and over, the mantra echoed in the hall as he stirred his mother from the carpet, and stumbled to the far, far room, removing the plaster board that covered the doorway, pulling the keys from the chain around his neck to unlock the four padlocks, two deadbolts, and floor-bolt that kept this most secret door closed. It took time with his hands trembling, and when it was done, Braddock froze, still nude, still starving, a hesitant palm upon the knob.

The sun rose faster than his nerve, and with the light shining around the tar-papered windows, that eater of secret moments and places, he refastened the locks and put the plaster board back, fancying the heavy pound of some restless monstrosity pacing the inner darkness of the room.

By the seventh night, his face was bruised. His arms flopped without warning, and the muscles of his legs shivered in constant palsy. His lips were smeared with blood, and though he had no way of knowing the neighbor’s dog was missing, he was no longer hungry. 

He walked the small house on Cragtree Lane, speaking to people who weren’t there, men with faces of cut deli-meat, women with torsos half-crushed by tire tread, old natives with noose-wizened necks and bullet holes that bubbled as they spoke and laughed and danced through his empty living room. After a time, Braddock danced with them, and before the sun rose to consummate the end of the seventh night, he heard the oiled snick of bolts, the clatter of four dropping padlocks, and the final fwump of the plaster board falling to the carpet behind him.

Braddock turned so quickly the forms he had been dancing with disappeared … and there, in the hallway's black throat, was the truest dust-reckoning of his dead mother yet. Only this time, when she walked, wet patches of flesh clung to the rug. 

She clutched a woodsaw with an Alaskan mountainside oil-brushed along its toothy length, dragging herself step by step, her eyes a blinding chrome; and when her dripping face was close enough to chew off Braddock’s nose, and he was gagging from the stench, his dead mother spoke a single word.

It had been two weeks since anyone had seen the hermit Braddock leave his leaning wooden nest at the top of Cragtree Lane. The barmaid almost gasped when the door pushed in, and from the blustery night, a scarf around his neck, an arm slung to his chest, Braddock stepped into the bar. It was not until he neared that the barmaid noticed the reduced nub cradled in Braddock's sling. She didn’t want to be rude, and offered one on the house. 

Braddock shuffled closer, impervious of the silence, the bearded, assaying faces, all watching him with the dangerous fascination reserved for wild beasts. He wore thick black goggles, and when he took them off—

The barmaid dropped her sop-rag and leaned across the bar, convinced she was hallucinating. 

It was the strangest thing. The way the light hit his eyes in here, why, they looked silver. And staring, she glimpsed things incomprehensible to her mind, animal things that reveled and cavorted up from oily pockets of forgotten evolution, dragging their teeth along her ribs. She felt encouraged, emboldened, a bit dangerous, herself, and so she asked. 

“What happened to your arm?”

It’s just an arm, the hermit Braddock said, fixing her in his gaze. Would you like to know what I’ve seen? 

The barmaid nodded, swimming in his eyes, feeling the cold metallic foam rush up and over her. She watched as a child at the foot a magician's stage, ignoring the customers, the note of worry in their voices. With the conversation through, Braddock tipped his hat, downed his draft, and shuffled back into the howling wind.

She stood still for a long time, thinking seven nights, a sacrifice, thinking, could it be true? And though she had no way of knowing it, the hermit Braddock had never moved his lips. 

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