RIP YOUR EYES OUT
By Urte Karvelyte
The box hits the pavement. The final one. It is a quite time-demanding task, but now you are done with moving everything in. Your newly bought house towers before you. A two-story brick house, squished between a couple of others, residing on the outskirts of town. With a small garden in the front, you can see a new start for you. Finally
It is a strange town you have come to realise. Rural and compact, with a small town centre and few utility buildings indicating some kind of authority existing here. Rows of houses surrounding it make the town centre appear lens-shaped, with pointed corners. A peculiar shape for a communal area. What is strange about it was not the houses or the streets It was the people. At first, it didn’t register – in such a compact town you would think to have met a resident or two. But you do not recall ever spotting even a glimpse of life as if everyone is trying to avoid you. Still, who are you to judge?
You have your little habit of going outside into the town’s centre almost every day. Sitting down, reading a book or doing some minuscule task. A Simple, yet productive routine, built up from repetition. You sit on the bench in the middle of the square, under the shadows. It helps you to collect your thoughts, and of course, increases the chance to meet townsfolk, which is also quite tempting. You have started to see glimpses, but none of them approached you yet.
One of those days, while on your ritual outing, you start to feel Them.
Their gaze makes your body unconsciously shudder, your hair stands up and a shiver passes through the whole length of your spine. You turn around. But no one is there.
You feel that piercing gaze follow you, reading into you, dissecting you piece by piece. But as hard as you try to find the culprit, you cannot. There is no one in the streets or alleyways between the houses. Even curtains are still in all windows you can observe. That day you take more urgent steps home. Only inside you feel that you can take a breather. Finally, you were truly alone, no staring, no stalking – only you and yourself – right?
Right?
The nightmares started. You are stared at in your dreams, invisible eyes following you, Their gaze like hot knives, cutting your skin open, exposing your insides and leaving you bare in the spotlight. There are so many stares, but you are all alone.
You wake up with vigour, not registering where you are. But one thing is clear to you, the watcher is here. In your room. The invisible stares trap you in their web – like a fly, pointlessly struggling to escape the spider’s many eyes.
Every uneven seam, the pattern on the curtain, wallpaper or couch comforter bore Their gazes straight into you, eyes piercing, ripping, caging you in your home. The pace you previously felt safe and protected in is now a cage.
In a panicked daze, you fling the doors open and crawl out outside like a rabbit trying to run out of the wolf’s den. Primal instinct is taking over, you run far, as far as you can. From Them.
Passing houses shift in your peripheral, their windows follow you, their walls bending to take a look into who is running, who is this poor soul, trying to outrun Their watching. You can feel Them closing in, surrounding you, almost succeeding in keeping you pinned under their gaze, like a butterfly with a nail through its body on the wall of an entomologist’s study. Your feverish body jerks and keeps fighting to get away, even if your mind is no longer present.
Just another square, another house, another meter, another step…!
Your body staggers back from a sudden impact. The shock momentarily brings you back into the scene. A figure, a man’s back, covered in an old-fashioned tweed jacket. You start spurting apologies, frantically trying to get away from the situation. The man turns around and smiles, although you are reluctant to meet his gaze. His hand falls on your shoulder shaking you out of your spiral. Your eyes shoot up to meet his.
But there is nothing to meet. His eyes. There are none. Jagged, old, blistered scars are covering the eye line of his face. It looks like a past burn destroyed any leftover tissue of his eyeballs, melting skin together into a perturbing mess of scar tissue and half-healed burns. But only his eyes are covered, other parts of the face left untouched – a horrifyingly specific view.
You consciously start to back away. He is still smiling. Nothing is stopping him from doing so. Your limbs are locked, almost unmovable, screaming to stop. But you cannot. “Go away!” Your mind screams. The stares are still here. You turn around and try to book down the street, towards the centre, away from that man. You do not notice another figure in front of you and stumble. Breathing erratic, you move your head to glance behind you.
A kid. A small, twelve-year-old kid. His soft-looking blond hair is covering half of his face while the boy is fussing with the dirt on his hands. The embarrassment from your crazed actions comes flushing in as you extend a hand for the boy to take. He only smiles and with a quiet ‘thank you pulls himself up.
White-eyes. The boy has white eyes. Cloudy, vacant, dead eyes. He can’t see you, but you swear on your life, the pupils follow you like a hungry predator. His hands are still holding yours while you try to pull away. But this child’s hands are surprisingly persistent to hold onto you. His smile widens, it grows to form a friendly, childish, innocent grin.
You trip. The force you applied to get yourself free is miscalculated and you cannot hold your balance. You hit the pavement and struggle to get away. The gravel and glass shards dig into your hands, drawing blood in some places, but you cannot see it. Your eyes are locked in front of you. The boy is no longer alone. Kids are coming to stand beside him. Adults towering over them in the back. It looks like the whole town came here to see you. Although maybe ‘see’ is wrong to say. None of them, as far as you can observe, can see. Burns, scars, scratches, stitches, blindfolds, bandages – all the eyes of the people being covered with them. But they all are smiling like they have been waiting for this since you arrived.
You back away. Get out, get out, you need to get out! But the mass of people is closing in. They are not in a hurry; their relaxed posture tells you that they already know you are unable to escape.
Your back hits the wall. You freeze and can’t move your eyes from the enclosing townsfolk. Your body is shaking, tremors both making your body move and locking it away from your control. You are like a ball thrown in the sea of nails, wondering when one of them gets a lucky shot. They are all here, circling you, trapping you in the makeshift, half-moon shaped human cage. As your last-ditch effort, you try to dash into the mass, desperately trying to get away. They all know that they have you pinned, you are trapped.
The disembodied stares, the rough hands pinning you down, the feeling of being encased in a mass of bodies makes you panic more. Two small hands hold your face. Everything freezes. You can not register anything else but the boy in front of you and his hands on your cheeks. He traces them up to your cheekbones and rests them to the sides of your eyelids. His face seemed morbidly fascinated. You try to get his grip to release. He just holds it even tighter to keep you still.
“Don’t worry! I will help you see soon!”
A childish, joy-filled voice rang through the crowd. What does that mean?
Small fingers plunge into your eye sockets, grabbing your eyeballs and, with a swift motion, ripping them away. Hot white pain spikes through your head and thick metallic liquid spurts down your face filling your gaping mouth. You are probably screaming.
If you had been conscious at that moment, you would have been able to feel how the disembodied stares moved from you to the hands of the child.
You open your eyelids. Darkness. You cannot see anything. But you do not need to. You can still see through Them. Gaze, observe, witness. See them.
A few houses away boxes are dropped on the porch of a newly purchased estate.
Ideas of “Rip your eyes out”
Surveillance is a big part of our society in current times. CCTV cameras can be found all over the neighbourhoods, signs are put up to enforce the belief of being always observed. People feel safe knowing they are looked after. But what if the ‘looking after’ could turn into more invasive practice?
I based my short story on the concept of the Panopticon – prison concept, where cellmates can’t ever know when the guard is watching or not. “The Panopticon Writings” (Bentham and Božovič, 1995) and “Theorizing Surveillance” (Lyon, 2006), both works look how the prospect of the Panopticon can change a person’s behaviour by enforcing person to fear the punishment. Accordingly, “Discipline and Punish” (Foucault, 1975) and “What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance?” (McMullan, 2015) express the point about surveillance making people bury their individualism while behaving ‘correctly’ to not stand out in the crowd.
The story setting of the town is shown deserted, devoid of life. But the stares are obvious. The protagonist is the one who feels Them. Even the narrator talks in the second person to identify as a watcher. It is a town controlled by one mind hive with one imposter. And that imposter slowly being pulled in the mass until They become the part of a whole. “The Magnus Archives”(2016), a horror podcast written by Jonathan Sims, explores the concept of people submitting to their greatest fears and sacrificing themselves to become fear’s prophets, avatars. These creatures are no longer human and they have only one goal – to do their patron’s bidding.
The action of ripping eyes out is the sacrifice of individualism. Different eyes, different perspectives. If everyone has only one perspective, it becomes a mass. This concept is the driving force of “Rip your eyes out”. Town people blinding each other to show them “the truth”, the hive mind they all follow. There is no opposition if everyone believes the same truth.
References
Bentham, J. and Božovič, M. (1995). The Panopticon Writings. second edition. [online] Google Books. Verso Books. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=lt&lr=&id=VbpvDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=panopticon&ots=X2HckqmERJ&sig=ujy53_21vAVex8URkjjR2S-XJjQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=panopticon&f=false [Accessed 11 May 2021].
Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin Books Ltd.
Lyon, D. (2006). Theorizing Surveillance. [online] Routledge. Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t_J8AgAAQBAJ&lpg=PA23&ots=gT9SAZhkF9&dq=panopticon&lr&hl=lt&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q=panopticon&f=false [Accessed 11 May 2021].
McMullan, T. (2015). What does the panopticon mean in the age of digital surveillance? [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham [Accessed 11 May 2021].
Shackleton, C. (2021). Fear Itself. [online] Vimeo. Available at: https://vimeo.com/142058424 [Accessed 12 May 2021].
Sims, J. and Newall, A. J. (2016) The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quil Available at: https://rustyquill.com/the-magnus-archives/ [Accessed 12 May 2021].