A Study of Many Eyes

There are eyeballs watching me in my office. Many eyeballs, multitudes of eyeballs, eyeballs that blink and eye sockets that don’t. All attached to faceless creatures with spiderwebbed black lashes that watch and wait and watch some more. They never show themselves to me where I can see them in the clarity of daylight, but I can always catch them in the corner of my eye.

They always watch. As long as I’ve been awake, I’ve seen them watching me. They’ve broken  both my legs so I couldn’t run. Instead, I’ve been forcibly seated at my desk, laptop before me, the router’s cord slashed so I could only continue to write rather than do anything else on it. And they do only want me to write. Want me to keep churning out books upon books–gluttonous, hungry creatures that they are.

It’d all begun the day I made my grand debut. It took years, you know? So many years of hard work, marketing, publishing, refining my craft and polishing every word till it shone brighter than the stars. Stardom had followed, ruthless and demanding. The fans wanted more, my agent told me. They were starving for more. And if I wanted to keep going, wanted to make this a career, a life, ‘more’ is what I would have to give them.

But I didn’t have more to give. My writing didn’t like attaching itself to market trends and deadlines. It just…came. It seeded within me and then grew and grew until my skull would split open with the story screaming to be let out. That was how my art worked for me.

It didn’t work for everyone else though. Not the readers. Not the agents or the editors or the publishing house. And that landed me here, desperately churning out half-baked stories in an effort to be free.

They’re still watching.

It’d been a day into my writing isolation exercise. A bit of me-time, away from the noise of the city, to ‘find the story I want to tell now that the previous one’s succeeded’ (or so my agent had said). The publishing house (Observatory Press, and ain’t that a kicker?) had booked me a nice little mansion in the woods. Some eccentric had built it years ago, to ‘better focus on his art’, and somehow, it’d ended up in the house’s hands.

There hadn’t been any signs. Not really. The house was ancient, but well-maintained, with rich crimson walls on every floor. Windows of stained glass lined every storey with colors that reminded me of the sea underneath a setting sun. A brilliant menagerie of pink, purple, gold and blue. Thick sprawling flowers hung from the terrace, reaching from the third to the ground floor like some sort of all-natural climbing rope, dotted with purple flowers that smelled like the air before a thunderstorm. There were no bees, thankfully.

I assumed the house paid a fortune on maintenance (I was so stupid).

When I entered the house, nothing seemed amiss. Just a standard three-storey mansion (or what I thought a standard three-storey mansion would look like). There was a kitchen rife with the sort of amenities you’d find in Beverly Hills. About ten bedrooms, each with a king-sized bed and a distinct theme that I guessed was to better ‘focus the mind’. I’m a romantasy writer, so I picked the most heavily-adorned one, collapsing into the plush velvet mattress and silk covers.

I didn’t get any writing done that day. I was too tired from the trip. The house’s chauffeur had said he’d be back by the end of three months, or I could call someone if I needed to leave earlier.

That was two weeks ago. Those things smashed my fucking phone and fed it to a stray cat. I know because I saw it. A cat, nestled neatly on my chest when I awoke to the morning sun, covered in eyeballs that stared right into my soul while shards of glass and metal stuck out of that poor thing’s mouth. Its own eyes looked filled with blood, like all the blood vessels in them had exploded at once, while the eyeballs covering the rest of its body were hale and hearty. Perfect white sclerae. Blue eyes devoid of any feeling at all.

I screamed and flung it against the wall, rapidly searching for my phone before realizing that was what was in the cat’s mouth. I didn’t waste time, pulling on a coat and a pair of sneakers before sprinting down the stairs. I needed to get out, I needed to leave, what the absolute fuck was going–

And then I ended up here. At my desk in the mansion’s office, writing. Just…down the stairs, then somehow in the office.

The house wants me to write.

If I don’t do it, those…things do awful things to me. The first day, I hadn’t managed to write anything, too stuck on ideas and on quality. They’d clawed at my back till I screamed, before pulling off their own eyeballs and crushing them against my back. It’d been so cold. Like having a billion microscopic icicles stabbing your spine all at once.

I’m not keen on having a repeat of that, or whatever new torment they’ll cook up next. The cat and the nano-icicles were clear enough signs that there were no limits to their creativity. At least, with regards to torturing people.

Ever since then, I’ve been writing. Shorter stories, mostly, offshoots of my first successful novel. The house doesn’t have the patience for anything else. The things don’t really seem to care about quality, as long as I have something of a satisfactory length. I don’t know how it gets sent to the house (I can only write on Microsoft, since the internet’s cut), but it does, and they’ll send me a new assignment once the old one’s ‘processed’, whatever that means.

I’m tired.

I’m so, so goddamn tired.

It’s been two weeks. They said it’d be three months.

How long can someone go without sleep? These things bring me food and water, and shove it down my throat when I won’t eat it. But they don’t seem to realize I need sleep too. Or maybe they’re counting on it. Maybe they’re hoping I’ll go mad. What’s the difference between madness and greatness anyway, to a writer? The lines between creativity and insanity blur.

They’re blurring right now, in fact. I’m writing this, aren’t I? I don’t know if the house will kill me for doing this or what. I don’t think I’ll live to see month three anyway, so what does it matter?

I’m…so goddamn tired.