The Black Gaze

- The Black Gaze -

         Dave awoke to the familiar surrounds of his garage, not feeling awake in the slightest. Had he blacked out again? No. This was different. He hadn’t so much as woken, as remembered where he was.

Before him, the scene was normal enough. His gritty lounge suite, torn and tattered. The couple of short round tables littered with used longnecks. The poorly laid carpet under the pool table. His fridge burbled in the corner suddenly, as if to remind Dave it was there. Visually, everything was as it should be. Nothing was outwardly wrong, though something surely was.

His head resounded a constant scream that echoed painfully in his ears, and he started when a thick bead of sweat dripped from his brow. He felt like he’d run a marathon. Even stranger still, more so than the unrecognizable odour, almost metallic in his nostrils, was his lack of recollection of the last five minutes. If indeed that was all the time that had past in his lapse.

It wasn’t the first time darkness had inexplicably taken Dave in recent months. An over-abuse of pot and alcohol was all he’d attributed it to. He glanced at the table nearest to him, where amongst the beer bottles there was no bong – or no pipe – to be seen. What else was he missing? Where had this sense of foreboding stemmed from?

It was a weight in his right hand that provided an answer… and a million more questions. He held a steel hammer with a black rubber grip. It was dripping with blood.

Reality surged back like a dull blow to the head, leaving him suddenly breathless, his chest tight. The hammer dropped with a dull thud to the carpet. For some reason, the menial idea that it was a new hammer felt horribly important.

That’s because it is new. I’d been showing it to somebody. I’d been showing it to Mike… He sat back against an odd bulk that gave a little under his weight like a cushion. He twisted without rising to see what it was.

Like a man sucked under a speeding truck, so was Michael spread across the couch. Blood was everywhere. It oozed from his collapsed skull, dripped to the floor and spread like a stain. Dave screamed in absolute terror, louder than he had ever screamed before. He wanted to vomit, to empty himself and never eat again. Then, like a torrent of water laced with shards of glass, the last five minutes surged back.

He saw Mike’s horrified expression, saw his eyes roll back into his head as the hammer came down again and again. He recalled the impact in his wrists when thick skull fractured for the first time. And the feeling! He could not deny the exultation he had genuinely felt. For that period, he had basked in his own murderous howl. The thought was insane! He wanted to tear the memories like pages from a book.

Something moved, just outside his field of view. Not really there, a black haze that coursed on the edge of his vision like rolling clouds in the fiercest of thunderstorms. Something in his head called to him, in shrill voices that were calming and maddening at the same time, in menacing alien tongue. Dave felt himself torn between the guilt of what he had done and the power that, he knew, the black gaze offered him.

A sharp rap on the garage door startled him, but he didn’t get up, didn’t try to run. There was no escaping the last five minutes. There was certainly no taking them back, either. Instead, he reached out and pressed the button that would grant entry to the macabre scene. The mechanics whirred, and the garage door lurched upward.

Dave was defeated. He briefly toyed with the idea of killing himself, but it was useless with just a hammer.

Dave waited for the inevitable scream, or cry for help or police, keeping his gaze on the ground between his feet. For more than a minute the person, if there was indeed someone there, stood silent as a ghost. Not so much as a whimper. Dave could see the black haze subside, leaving him feeling inexplicably lighter. There was a brief sense of calm. Of clarity. Then the person - a balding man - did scream. A scream so raw, so primal, that Dave had to turn and see.

The man leapt onto the pool table suddenly, clawing maniacally at the felt like a starving, rabid beast toward him. White-knuckles gripped a heavy black torch, the kind policemen today still use. Even as he hit the floor and stumbled, scrambling forward despite all obstacles, his eyes did not leave Dave’s for an instant. His gaze was wide and unblinking, and blacker than tar.

There would be no reprisal, Dave knew. No more sorrow or shame. When this was over he would look just like poor Michael. It was only seconds now. He closed his eyes.

The End
Nick Gellatly