Three more weeks I stayed at Granny’s house, spending most of my time outside. Eventually I coaxed the pale horse near enough to the barbed wire, offering it a red apple. I petted its soft nose as it ate the fruit. Granny seemed proud of me, though she warned me not to cross the fence into the horse’s running ground.
In the evenings I watched cartoons on her big, floor-model television set, while she went about the house hanging strands of herbs, or painting odd symbols on the windows. She sang odd little songs to herself in the old tongue as she hung talismans and bone charms along the roof of the porch. These were the behaviors that caused the children who lived on neighboring farms to call my Granny a witch.
Sometimes I played with these kids on top of the green hills surrounding the farm, but they wouldn’t come down into the witch’s realm. I tried to tell them how nice she was, tried to bribe them with promises of candy and cookies, but none of them would visit me in my grandmother’s house. I had to go up to meet them if I wanted to play. Eventually I decided, with the simple wisdom of a child, to let them think what they wanted to think about her. But I never believed it. Even after I saw the eyes, I never believed it.
When my mother came to pick me up, I cried. I would miss Granny, her wonderful meals, her willingness to indulge me, the wide playground of the lazy farm. I’d miss the pale horse, who I had named Dancer. But it was time to go. That year I entered third grade, and I soon learned once again to enjoy life in the city. I saw Granny one more time before she died, though. I was eleven.
The farm looked very different than I remembered, now that winter had claimed it. The hills were white, covered in a shroud of pristine snow. The horse was gone, sold three years prior along with the rest of the cattle. The trees were barren, grotesque giants bending ice-gloved claws toward the earth. The creek was a silver pathway of ice winding through the colorless landscape.
Granny’s house sat unchanged beneath its snow-crowned roof, with a black coil of smoke rising from its chimney. My mother and I had come to visit her for the holidays, probably the only ones who cared to do so. But she didn’t come out to greet us. I carried her present, wrapped in a crimson bow, up to the door. Our knocks went unanswered, but the door was unlocked. Although the house was warm, and fresh pastries lay along the dinner table, Granny was nowhere to be found.
“I’ll check out back,” my mother said. “See if she’s in the attic.”
At once I remembered that alcove where I had seen the eyes. I didn’t want to go up there. But I was older now, and reluctant to tell my mother about my fear. So I walked up the creaking set of stairs into the fog of Granny’s candle-smoke. The iron pot bubbled with some noxious brew, but where was my grandmother? I called out her name. She had to be here somewhere. I avoided looking toward the back of the attic until I heard footsteps.
Granny pushed back the dark curtain, walking out of the alcove, out of the infinite darkness. She squinted at me through the gloom. “Stefan?”
“Merry Christmas, Granny,” I said, full of improvised cheer. She smiled and came toward me. But as the curtain fell across the darkness, I found my own eyes drawn to that black pit — I expected to see those evil eyes glaring back at me. I almost screamed. But there was only darkness, thick and invulnerable to vision. Then the curtain hid even that from me. Granny hugged me, and I helped her down the stairs where we celebrated the holiday and enjoyed one of her immaculate dinners.
I always regretted not visiting her again, but we lived so far away. Once I entered high school I stayed busy with sports, clubs and academics. Then I attended State College, earning a degree in English. Soon I was teaching middle-school and my next goal was to find a woman worthy of marriage. So I spent most of my time working or trying to please a seemingly endless procession of vapid, self-centered women.
My mother eventually got remarried and took a job up north. I stayed in the city where I had grown up, and was perfectly happy to spend the rest of my life there, looking for an ideal mate and teaching kids to read. But the recent news of Granny Armaya’s death took me once again into the country.
It wasn’t really a funeral, since I was the only mourner present. It seems all of Granny’s progeny had vanished, like my father. The pastor said a few words and the undertaker lowered her coffin into the ground of the local cemetery. It rained. Granny had left me the tiny farm and her old house, but the estate taxes and burial expenses had to be paid. Only by arranging to sell everything could I avoid going into debt. I decided to visit the old farmhouse one last time, to salvage what I could for posterity before I sold it.
Fall was in full swing when I drove down the winding road, still unpaved after all these years. A swirl of saffron leaves filled the air behind my car as I approached Granny’s house. It was quiet as death on the farm, ruled now by the trees that wept dying leaves across the earth. No smoke rose from the chimney, and the porch had caved in on the east side. I noticed one of the living room windows was broken, and as I neared the front door a black raven flew out of the shattered pane, startling me. Remembering the Poe poem, I smiled grimly.
The power had been shut off so I brought a flashlight from my car. Inside the house, the smells of a half-forgotten childhood filled my nostrils, the lingering scents of sugary baked goods, homemade candy, and charred firewood. Beneath it all, the barely perceptible tang of Granny’s medicine. It appeared the house had been looted, the couch and chairs were overturned and ripped as if with a hunting knife. Anything of value had been taken. I found an old photo album laying on the floor of Granny’s shattered bedroom, that was all. On my way back to the living room, I passed the door to the attic.
Even as an adult, I did not want to climb those stairs. But I remembered the treasures Granny used to keep up there, and I knew it might be the only way to gather momentos of any worth, sentimental or otherwise. Dismissing my childhood terrors, I ascended. The attic was largely unmolested. Granny’s implements of supposed witchery lay scattered across the floor, or hung from the peeling walls. All the dead candles were burned to stubs, and the iron pot lay cold and bare, turned on its side.
Like steel drawn to a magnet, I walked toward the back of the room. The purple curtain still hung there. I forced myself to stand before the alcove, trying to get up the nerve to move that fabric aside and shine my flashlight into that interminable darkness. I reached for the curtain. My fingers trembled. I tore it aside and a battery-powered ray of light sliced through the darkness.
The alcove was lined with dozens of shelves, each one loaded with glass jars of various sizes. Exhaling, I entered the tiny space, holding my flashlight before me like a crucifix. Its light shone through the dusty glass of the containers, and my flesh crawled like it did when I was six. Within each jar lay a pair of round objects. There must have been hundreds of them, glistening like pallid marbles dotted with ruby, sapphire, or onyx. A vast collection of preserved human eyeballs.
Some of them were dry and yellowed, while many retained a perfect whiteness surrounding the prismatic irises. They seemed to stare at me, uninterested, lifeless, unconcerned. Entombed behind dirty glass. Granny had hidden her bizarre collection from me, no doubt for good reason. I remembered the eyes I had seen as a child, glaring out at me from this room. Just as I knew for a certainty that these were all human eyes, I knew that those feral things were not.
The batteries of my flashlight gave out. The light fluttered once, then died completely. Darkness fell over me like a smothering blanket. My breath caught in my throat, and I no longer knew the way out of this room. I could see nothing; or nothing was all that I could see.