I ran to the door, swung it wide open and nearly dropped my gun as the man's death cry echoed through the house and my mind struggled to take in the scene before me.
About a dozen corpses lay strewn about the room. Aside from a few scraps and bruises, most of them appeared to be uninjured... other than the fact that all of them were missing their eyes.
The eyeball in the bag and the two eyeless corpses I had seen in our apartment came back to my mind, and my legs started to buckle beneath me. I always assumed the sadist or one of its puppets had killed the people in our apartment... but if there were so many corpses here killed in the same grisly way, did that mean that something else did it? Or was there more than one sadist? Dear God... I hoped not.
Wait. The shock of the corpses had actually made me forget my current situation. The scream came from here. Whatever had done this... was definitely in this room right now. My eyes darted frantically around every inch of the house, and rested on a slight movement I caught behind an island in the middle of the kitchen.
I could see... half of a corpse poking out from behind the island.
Undoubtedly, this was the man who had screamed in terror not even a minute ago. One of his eye sockets was empty, blood slowly seeping out of it, while the other eye... was in the process of being removed.
A long, spindly, bug-like appendage that ended on a claw, a claw that reminded me of the claw from one of those machines with the stuffed animals, dug into the corpse's eye socket and grabbed around the eye. With a disgusting plopping noise, the eye popped out of the socket. But... the eye was still attached to the socket by the optic nerve. The appendage tugged at it greedily, like it was frustrated that it was having difficulty getting the eye out. The wet tearing sound of the nerve snapping sent shivers through my body, and made me imagine the pain as if it were happening to my own eyes. Slowly, I managed to start backing out of the house, but before I even took three steps back, the thing behind the island lifted itself up enough so that I could see the top of it. One massive singular eye, around four feet across in total, stared down at the eye it had just removed. It was completely bloodshot, with hundreds of blood red veins covering most of its surface, reminding me of the thick branches of a dead, rotting tree. The eye was attached to a huge optic nerve that pulsed and throbbed, possibly connecting to its body that was hidden behind the island. So it was the eye-thing we had caught a glimpse of before we met Sarah... It had done this. But wait, what about the dozens of smaller eyes I had seen? I took one more step back, nearly falling over. Luckily, it hadn't noticed me yet. It twirled the eye around in its claw, like it was inspecting it and rating its quality or something.
Stolen novel; please report.
I tried not to make any noise as I inched backwards, when Sarah's words finally came back to me through my rattled mind. The thing was deaf. It couldn't hear anything, it could only see.
So I didn't have to worry about making any noise, I had to get the fuck out of here right now!
But I had remembered too late. The thing seemed to nod its eye, then it lurched forward over the corpse it had just deprived of eyes, coming out from behind the island and revealing its entire horrific form.
Under its eye head, where the huge optic nerve connected, was a slug-like body which looked like it was made of festering pus and blood. Pierced through that body were what appeared to be long metal spikes. I couldn't tell if they were jutting out of its body or if they were actually impaled through it. There were dozens of them, maybe even up to a couple hundred, riddling its entire body and making it look like a pincushion. At the end of most of those spikes were... eyes.
At first, I thought they were attached to the spikes, like some weird sort of eye-stalk. That wasn't it, though.
As the thing stopped twirling around the eye it was holding, and impaled it onto one of the spikes, I realized that all of them had originally belonged to another living being. Despite the fact that all of the eyes were probably taken from dead humans, and that there was no possible way they should have been able to move... they all turned to stare directly at me.
My body trembled uncontrollably and as it did the creature shuddered with realization as all of the eyes noticed me, realizing that I was a living human. Realizing that I too, had eyes it could take.