It Looks Back

Cosmic Horror Short

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

There are things in the depths of space that man was not meant to see.

Hidden mysteries and terrible secrets.

In the dark and empty void, if you look closely enough, there are things that look back.

Hungry things.

I don’t know if any of you will believe me, but I have to get this out to the world. I tried to alert NASA but couldn’t get through to anybody. I’m sure my email to them won’t do anything. Even called the cops, but they didn’t bother coming to my house to verify my story. My family is thinking of having me institutionalized. I’ve been grabbing random people I see on the street and telling them what I saw.

Nobody believes me.

They all think me some insane doomsday prophet.

And for that, we are all truly doomed.

So, here I am, posting this to the internet, in the vain hope that somebody somewhere will believe me and take action. If even one person can escape, I will be satisfied. After I’m done typing this out, I’ll be trying to find an underground bunker to survive in.

I suggest you do the same.

I’m not a scientist or even an amateur astronomer. I was a man who was bored and had some extra time and money on hand. So, I bought a telescope. No idea why I bought it; maybe it was some buried childhood dream of mine. To unfurl the scope and see past the confines of our world. To hope for a better place.

My wife had just left me. Took my whole social life with her, too. Apparently, I didn’t actually have any real friends. I’ve never been one to drink my problems away or run off to live some half-baked midlife crisis with a younger woman.

I was a man who escaped into fantasy. Books. Movies. Art.

And for some reason, getting a telescope seemed like a good escape at the time. A hobby that could distract me from the lonely nights.

I wish I had just gotten drunk like a normal person instead.

The package came to my house on a Tuesday morning. I was home all day, so I decided to set it up. It was just a normal everyday telescope, nothing really to note about it. I pieced it together and propped it up by my living room window. I live out in the country, so there were no neighboring houses or streetlights to worry about.

I don’t know what I expected to see. A tiny prince waving at me on the moon? A shooting star I could make a wish upon?

Night came, and all the stars poked through the veil of space. The moon was bright and lit up my lawn in silver light.

I sipped some hot chocolate—God, I sound like a child, don’t I?—and looked through the scope. It wasn’t especially powerful, but it did magnify the moon pretty good. I could see the craters and the shadows lining the mountainsides. No prince to be found.

I swiveled it over the stars. To be honest, even though it made everything bigger, it was basically the same as you’d see with your naked eye. The Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, other constellations I have no idea what they’re called.

It was all beautiful, though.

I thought that maybe life could be good again. Yeah, I was lonely. But it was quiet. Maybe there could have been some peace in that quiet.

I moved the telescope to look out into the black parts between the stars, into the depths of space.

That’s when I saw it.

At first, I thought it was a bug on the lens. A big shadow moving just out of sight. I looked at the front of the scope, but didn’t see any insects or smudges. Looked back through it. Nothing.

I scanned the sky and saw it again. A shadow that momentarily blotted out a handful of stars.

“Fucking moths,” I muttered to myself.

I looked around my living room. All the lights were off, so there wasn’t anything to attract any bugs. Couldn’t see any sign of a moth or whatever.

Looked back into the scope.

Pure blackness.

I stared into it.

Thought on how I left the scope looking at a cluster of stars. Did I move it by accident?

Then that blackness I was staring at moved to the left. Unveiled the stars it was covering.

Weird, I thought. Could be a cloud?

I tried to follow the shadow, and stopped when I was met by another patch of darkness, where the North Star should have been.

The shadow moved again, but didn’t completely disappear.

It sat there, to my left, looking like it was vibrating slightly.

I squinted my eyes at it.

“What are you?” I whispered.

It heard me.

The mass stopped moving. Darkness seemed to radiate from it like a black star, darker than the backdrop of space.

Then came the eye.

A single red eye swam in that sea of darkness and locked onto me.

My jaw hung slack, and I pressed the telescope too hard into my face so that my eye socket hurt.

The eye had no pupil. It was a bloody red orb that seemed to bleed out into the mass of radiating black. Like a cracked egg running across a frying pan.

Or, blood in water.

Then, it was gone.

I frantically searched the skies for it, but it didn’t show itself again.

I leaned back in my chair, staring at the window, wondering what the hell had just happened.

I convinced myself it was nothing. I imagined it. I saw it only for a few seconds, and couldn’t find it again, so it couldn’t have been real.

Right?

I went to bed shortly after but couldn’t sleep. Every time I shut my eyes, I saw it. Red eye in a writhing black mass.

Looking at me.

I was struck with this horrible sensation that it was up there, right at that moment, looking down on the roof of my house, trying to find me.

Eventually, I passed out and fell asleep.

I woke up at noon with an icy dread in my stomach. Fragments of a nightmare lingered on in my mind. None of the details made any sense. There was a barren valley made of rock. Two moons and red stars in the sky. Flashes of some kind of creature moving under the rocks. Tendrils and teeth and eyes. Red eyes.

I was exhausted, but I work from home, thankfully, so I spent a few hours hammering out reports on my computer, trying to forget the previous night. The nightmare and what I saw in the telescope never left me. It was there, hiding behind the monotony of my job and the list of chores I tried piling up in my brain as a defense.

As soon as I finished work, around five thirty, so with about an hour until sunset, I raced out to the grocery store to buy dinner. Even though by then I had convinced myself I didn’t see the eye, I didn’t want to be outside at night.

I came home, cooked up some pasta, and watched TV until ten.

None of those things kept my mind from going back to the red eye. It was then that I really wished I did drink.

I was about to go to sleep when I glanced over at the telescope. There was this pull inside my gut. Some kind of magnetic force drawing me towards the scope like a meteor towards a planet.

I could have just gone to bed. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I was also afraid of that nightmare coming back.

I reasoned that if I looked through the telescope again and saw nothing, that could calm my mind.

I sat in the chair and peered into it.

It was there. As clear as the moon was bright.

The black mass but no eye. It was covering half of the Big Dipper from view. It looked… bigger than it did last night. Like it was getting closer…

My heart seemed to stop, and I held my breath.

“Not possible,” I let out.

And again, it responded to me.

That red eye swam to the surface of the dark star. I took my eyes from the scope and saw red light filling the window from the sky. I wanted to run. But something pulled my face back to the scope. Not being metaphorical here, I was literally pulled back to it against my will.

The mass was bigger than it had been just seconds ago. The red eye stared right into my right eye. I felt something in my mind, almost like there was an intruder in my thoughts. I can’t explain that well because there’s no feeling like it to compare it with.

I think I peed myself. My face was being pulled into the scope hard, and I felt something wet dripping down from my right eyebrow. The light made me wince. Like staring into the sun. But I couldn’t blink. It wouldn’t let me look away!

I screamed and kicked my legs, but I couldn’t pull myself away from the scope.

It was in my mind now. I could feel it flipping through my memories. I saw my first dog, Rusk, when I was five. I saw my parents fighting in the kitchen. I saw my first kiss with Jules at Mazes Park. I saw our last fight in the living room and the subsequent divorce.

It saw all of me.

And I could see it.

I saw an alien world full of life. Purple trees like octopus tentacles. Strange armadillo-like creatures scurrying through silver grass. Beehive-looking structures that could have been buildings. The intelligent inhabitants with their see-through skin, the patchwork of dark veins visible from the outside, their proboscis mouths.

I saw them look up at the pink sky in what must have been their own form of terror. They screeched and flew away, clutching little ones to their abdomens.

I saw the dark star descending on that world. All lights going out.

Tendrils and living darkness spilled out from it as it devoured the inhabitants. Trees burned and mountains fell to pieces. The mass ate everything. Devoured animals, trees, water, even dirt. Dissolved them all in its tarry embrace. All that it left in its wake turned to that rocky plain I saw in my nightmare.

Then came the eye.

Like a bloody sunrise on that valley bereft of life.

Floating in the center of its mass.

Staring directly at me as I stood on the surface of that world.

It made its desire known to me then. Not in words or images. But in a pure and undiluted hunger that seized me.

It was coming here, to Earth.

To feed.

The magnetic hold let go of me, and I pulled myself away from the telescope. I couldn’t see my room. All I could see was the eye. Even when I shut my eyes. The eye stared back. I stumbled into the kitchen and splashed water from the sink on my face. The eye faded from my vision, but not entirely.

This happened two days ago.

And I still see it. It’s a faded image, almost imperceptible, but always there, lurking, staring at me through the faces of strangers, the walls in my room, even through the blue sky.

It is coming. For us. To devour and destroy.

Did I call its attention that night? Did my just being aware of its existence bring its focus on our planet?

Nobody believes me. They all think I’m insane.

Maybe I am. You might not understand me, but last night I looked through that telescope again. There’s an undeniable need in me to know.

It wasn’t there.

So, maybe I am nuts.

But I still see the eye wherever I go. I still dream of that barren rock and those gnashing teeth.

I know it is coming. I don’t know when, but I feel it has to be soon.

And there is nothing we can do.

I’m sorry.