I Only Have Eyes for You

Would you like to go on an adventure?

He struggled to wrap his brain around what he just saw. After quickly flipping through the small, black leather notebook, its pages clean and empty, he’d landed on the first page as the words materialized from nowhere, the curious red script almost indecipherable at first.

Brow crumpling in confusion, he closed it and looked up, raising it slightly in the air to catch the attention of the man and woman stationed at either end of the gurney from which it had fallen. “Shit. Fingerprints,” he lamented belatedly. “Pardon me! This fell off your…erm…” he trailed off. The medics looked in his general vicinity as though they heard him, but they didn’t appear to see him. They'd seemed rather apathetic as they bounced their subject unceremoniously down the single step from the restaurant as he walked up. Whatever was under the sheet, it wasn’t lying clean and flat. The sheet tented in several places, almost as though the thing - he struggled to avoid the word “body” - was stuck in a sitting position and had been laid out with knees and elbows still bent, hands slightly outstretched.

"I hate these ones," the man frowned.

“Rigor doesn’t usually bother me, but that face….” The woman shuddered visibly. “How did everything freeze in place so quickly? The restaurant owner said the guy had only been there 30 minutes. Nice suit, briefcase, muttered to himself but seemed polite enough. Sat down, ordered a drink, and then half an hour on he’s locked in place with no pulse and that damn rictus. It’s not physically possible.” She shook her head as if the movement would loose the image from her mind.

He didn’t hear their exchange. He slid the notebook into his pocket without noticing his own action and hurried away.

※

He went to his favorite bench in Berkeley Square. The small, narrow park nestled in the heart of the city was one of his favorite places. He reopened the notebook and, much to his surprise, the first page was again blank.

Voulez-vous être riche?

The phrase seemed to bleed red across the page like a wound cut into the parchment as it appeared. As soon as he’d read it, it melted away until the page was blank once more. “What the….would I like to be rich?” He examined the notebook more closely. The leather was odd. Incredibly soft and imbued with a barely perceptible, even darker faded design that seemed almost absorbed in material itself. He hadn’t noticed it before, and he realized that the color of the notebook had gotten ever so slightly lighter. “So you change colors and speak French now, too?” he mused to the book. An old woman shuffling down the thoroughfare glanced at him as he spoke aloud to no one, and he felt ever more the idiot. He offered up an embarrassed half smile and a shrug, but looked down too quickly to see the rot-toothed grin that she gave in return, or note that the eyes that examined him were pitch black.

كلنا لغات

He froze. It was not unusual for a man in his line of work to speak French. Virtually no one knew he spoke Arabic. “We are all languages,” he whispered as he read the sentence to himself. “Well, alright then. We seem to have no trouble communicating, and I like a good adventure and some money, so let’s do it. How much are we talking?”

Twenty Thousand US Dollars

He exhaled and did some quick math. Though he certainly wasn’t poor, an extra £14,500+ was nothing to turn one’s nose up at. “And how might I go about acquiring this?”

Follow the Hellow Brick Road

“Hellow?” he pondered, confused. Hellow brick road……brick road…..Brick Lane maybe? Hellow….hell?…….Brick Lane….From Hell! He was annoyed with himself for not recognizing the clue more quickly. An avid Ripper fan, he had encyclopedic knowledge of the serial killer’s history. He stood up, preparing to head to White Chapel. He looked down at the notebook and queried, “So where do I start?”

The End is the Beginning is the End

“The end is the beginning, eh? Must be the southern end then, right by Old Montag….” his thought trailed off as ice ran through his veins. He hadn’t been back there since the incident. He’d done such a good job of making himself forget it that his body hadn’t had that reaction since the night of her death. Is that the “end” the notebook was talking about? Did he want to revisit this, for any amount of money?

※

He was sitting in the back of a taxi. He couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there, but he was passing Temple Gardens so more time had elapsed than that which it would take to hail the cab, tell the driver the destination, and climb in. He felt light headed and was slightly nauseous from the aroma coming from the front. “Could you snuff that, mate?” he inquired toward the driver, finding it rather poor form that the man would be smoking while on duty. The acrid scent never relented, and the ride was nearly over before he realized that there was no smoke in the car. He glanced down at notebook and saw that it was lighter still. The design seemed familiar to him but he couldn’t place why. He was so lost in studying it that he didn’t initially register that the vehicle had stopped. He fished into his pocket to retrieve his wallet when a voice from the front seat growled, “It’s on the house. Pay it forward when you get what’s coming to you.” He could hear a grin in the voice, but the driver never turned to smile at him and in fact didn’t seem to move at all, even when speaking.

He stepped onto the street and was nearly run down by a cyclist. He twisted to avoid the crash and lost his balance, landing splayed out on the ground on his left side. He hollered in the direction of the bike, but his outburst went unacknowledged. Even the passersby seemed unaffected by the near miss.

From his vantage point on the ground, he ended up facing the direction of the incident. Memories he thought he’d scrubbed out that night with cold scotch and a scorching shower came flooding back. Except that he could see her. Like, really see her, as though she were alive. Plain as day, but looking like she did just after it had happened, her hair matted with blood, her features misshapen from the impact. She set a small briefcase down on the corner, staring directly at him with eyes black as ink, then turned to walk away. Nauseated by the idea that a black-eyed dead woman was leaving him a mystery briefcase, he looked down at the notebook as though it held the answers to all the questions in the world.

Keep Your Eyes as the Prize

“Eyes on the prize, eh? Pretty sound advice,” he mumbled. She clearly didn’t seem to be hanging around, so apparently she wasn’t haunting him - not that he believed such nonsense anyway. Although he was communicating with a color changing, multilingual notebook, he paused to consider.

He had never spoken of that night to anyone, and no one had ever come knocking. He’d briefly thought about turning himself in, but to what consequence? She was dead, nothing could bring her back, and no one else had gotten hurt. He’d gotten away with it and had decided that the only life ruined past that point would be his. He looked around now but didn’t notice anything else out of sorts, and whatever she was was completely out of sight. He pushed himself up and dusted off his clothes, quickly cutting across traffic to snatch up the briefcase. He ducked around the corner and into a restaurant so as to not draw attention to himself, sliding into a quiet corner booth.

“Good afternoon, sir, might I get you something to drink?”

“Oban 14 neat, if you have it.” He was entirely focused on the briefcase and didn’t look at the server.

“Of course, sir,” she said. He looked up as she sauntered off, catching a waft of what he thought was perfume as she turned. A sickly thick and herbaceous scent. Chrysanthemums, he thought curiously.

“Moment of truth, eh?” he said to the notebook.

He that has a Choice has Trouble

He hadn’t noticed that the notebook had lightened enough so that the pattern was completely discernible now. He re-read the most recent phrase from the page, not understanding it and deciding that he’d address it later. Impatience winning out, he glanced around the restaurant. Feeling confident that no one was watching, he popped the latches on either side of the briefcase and lifted the lid slightly. Laid out in neat rows were piles of American dollar bills. He broke out into a huge smile and rested his hands on the table. Just as his chest relaxed, he felt a sharp twinge of pain in his right shoulder. At the same time, the notebook began to glow gently. Significantly lighter in color now, he looked down to see that it had taken on the shade and texture of human skin. Staring back up at him from the cover of the notebook was a bird - a raven, to be exact. The design wrapped around the binding and onto the back cover, and he felt a gnawing sensation in his stomach. He didn’t need to turn it over to know what was on the back, but it was as though his hands picked up the notebook without the permission of his brain. He flipped it over and confirmed that the remaining half of the bird’s body was on the back cover, perched atop a human skull. It wasn’t a design. It was a tattoo. His tattoo, from his right shoulder.

“What the hell?” he muttered.

“Indeed,” a woman’s voice confirmed.

He looked up into cavernous black eyes. They belonged the stranger he’d accidentally killed.

“What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

“Just that. Hell,” she responded brightly. She initially appeared to be smiling a too-wide grin, but the flesh on her face began to melt, destroying her features as it fell. “You could have avoided this, but you didn’t read carefully enough,” she said, her voice warping into a hiss. “You could have chosen differently. Kept your eyes as the prize.”

“NOW YOU LISTEN TO-” he began, before registering her phrasing - eyes as the prize. As he rose from the booth in rage, he noted that the action felt wrong. It was as though he didn’t need to lift his body weight in order to stand. In an effort to get his bearings, he glanced around and saw himself, seated in the booth, a macabre rictus etched onto the face of his apparently dead body. He whipped back around to the creature. Two huge appendages with scythe-like ends reached out to pull him forward and as he screamed, his pupils slowly expanded outward.

※

The waitress shrieked and dropped the glass. She’d left to get his scotch and when she returned he was completely frozen with a severe, too-wide grin locked into place. “Call the police!” she yelled to her manager, who’d rounded the corner when she’d first cried out.

As she turned back she noticed a faint luminosity on the table. The small, black, leather-bound notebook seemed to glow, but she knew that couldn’t be possible. She thought she’d seen a briefcase, too, but there wasn’t one so she must’ve imagined it. She reached out, unconscious of her movement, and picked up the notebook, opening it to the first page. Something began to materialize on the parchment.

Would you like to go on an adventure?

※