October 14, 1907
My guide was waiting at the base of the stairs, calling up for me. I couldn’t breathe. I was locked in place looking out the window of the house. For at least two hours I stood there gawking at the blurry lines of the window frame, slowly seeing more and more details. Another call from below. Everything was still hazy, the focus was off, but there in the faint glow of the sunrise I could truly see. The light poured down the street, the sky was dark with clouds, but the sun rose and I could see.
My heart raced as the guide began his ascent up the stairs to check on me.
“I’m coming.” I shouted. Too loud, but my mind was racing, modulating my voice was hard. I could hear the waver in my words, my guide would inevitably hear it.
“Harold, are you in distress?”
“No, sorry. You roused me from sleeping is all.”
“Sorry to wake you, sir. It’s a half past 7, shall we begin our walk?”
“Yes, of course.”
I shuffled over to my dresser. The clothes looked pale, tattered. Like we’d been scrubbing them too hard and the dye had faded. I held my shirt close to my eyes and saw it for the first time. It was one that was provided to me after the Great Blindness overcame us all. I had only known its texture, its weight. It was a gentle auburn, like it was originally red but had since been covered in mud and washed with no great care.
I tried to regain my composure before Rupert reached my room in the small house. I’d never seen this room. I’d never seen so many things that were new to me. Now here I stood, fumbling for things I used to reach for instinctively. I closed my eyes. Everything went much smoother for a moment, blissful ignorance I suppose.
Rupert knocked on frame of the door, devoid of an actual door as privacy was trivial now. We lost so many people in the year following the Great Blindness, this house was given to me by one of the guides. The guides themselves were people that were blind before the cataclysmic night in early 1905. They acted as guides to those of us new to the darkness. As rewards for their service we provided everything we they needed to survive, working in tandem to plant the fields and tend to the animals.
Resources were so scarce, our small town of only a few dozen families was ravished by famine as people could not adjust to their lack of sight. A few passed due to consuming poisonous berries or rotten food, the latter of which made sense to me much more than trusting strange fruit. But as time went on and the stores of food diminished before a particularly harsh winter there had been a rash of passings took place. Whole families decided, or were forced to decide, to take their own lives. Spring came late the next year, what few crops were planted yielded low returns and another rash of passings took place again as hopelessness set upon us.
I was fortunate that I was able to have ingratiated myself in with the farmers of our community. I was previously an architect, so I helped them design tools, repaired their equipment, and generally maintained the elements of our small community that weren’t man or beast. But as I looked out the window one last time I saw the buildings I’d helped design and build, adorned with warnings, “Don’t tell them you can see” and “Tell no one what you see”. Every available surface was covered.
Rupert knocked again. “Having a difficult go of it today, sir?”
I turned around to finally face him, his gaze idling on the floor. His eyes were empty of color. I couldn’t help but gasp. He turned his face to the side to allow his ear to hear me with more clarity. In profile I could now see that his pupils had nearly been completely covered by the whites, no iris, only a faint pinhole of a pupil. My mouth hung open. “I… I don’t know. Yes, of course. Sorry.”
“I understand,” he bemoaned, “Winter is already upon us again. It feels earlier this year, no?”
I closed my eyes. The information was too much to mull through when there was work to do.
“True, we’re in mid-October and yet it feels as though we’re mid-November, perhaps even December weather. The farmer’s must be fretting.”
“They are, I was sent by the Bradfords. They were expecting you and grew worried when you failed to show.”
“I just can’t seem to get my wits about me today, but we can carry on. We must. Shall we?”
I tried to keep my voice steady. Hopefully Rupert would assume that I was having one of my “episodes”. I’d fallen into a great sadness since the blindness descended. My wife was taken by the consumption several years back and my two children had moved to a nearby city not long before the event took place.
I hadn’t been able to get word to them, hope was lost that they’d survived as word from them never arrived. I had bartered deals with two guides who had promised to look for my daughters in the city, if they were able to make it. Only one guide returned, reporting that they were attacked along the way. We were isolated here, insulated from the violence that had pervaded the more populous areas.
As I shuffled through the hallway I ventured another glance at my surroundings. I stopped in my tracks. Even in here the text was splattered across the walls, warning against revealing that my sight had returned after these long, painful two years. Rupert stopped a moment later, tilting his head so I saw his profile again, listening intently.
“I’m sorry to rush you, sir, but Mr. Bradford is in great need.”
“I…” I couldn’t say anything. I just started walking again. “Yes, let’s carry on.”
We walked slowly down the stairs, both of us letting a hand drift gently down the bannister. I couldn’t help but think back on my time in this house. Someone came to repair the house and I remember smelling that old familiar scent of paint. I must discover what’s happening.
We started down the lane, hemmed in by the ropes tied to the lampposts of our main street. I kept my eyes shut as we then navigated the deep ruts of paths traveled daily by foot, keeping us heading towards the right house. Maybe out of rote habit, having spent months trying to see again only to give up last year when it seemed inevitable that it was pointless. So many days and nights with my eyes closed. When I knew we were sufficiently outside of town, away from… Maybe prying eyes wasn’t the right phrase? Either way, when we were outside town I finally opened my eyes to see the landscape surrounding our town.
Once again, I stopped dead in my tracks, mouth open as wide as my eyes. There in the sky were huge structures. No, mountains? It had to be a structure, but it filled so much of the sky! The sunlight I saw earlier was about to set on an inverted second horizon just above the natural horizon. A terror struck me as I suddenly felt as if the inky underbelly of this structure would fall at any moment. As the sun moved higher the poles and protuberances on the bottom of this object stretched long across the irregular surface facing us.
Were it not for the haze of the atmosphere I would think this were a model of a city, but it must be far above the planet as the fade of sky blurred the details and washed out the colors, like viewing a large mountain from miles away. A fresh shadow began to fall on me as the sun hid behind the structure. Had this always been there? Was the lack of sunlight, so warm and welcome, caused by this massive object? We had thought it to be the changes in the weather, the clouds blocking the sun, but now I feared that all along there was this massive thing covering the ground in darkness. A shadow so large and so dark that the weather itself gave way.
I had spent so long looking up that Rupert had stopped ahead. “The clouds must be moving in. Did you feel it too?”
I hurried for words where there were none. “I suppose…”
“My friend, you seem so lost in your head today. Are you sure you don’t need to see Doctor Hofstadter?”
I couldn’t seem to compose myself. I saw the faint curve of another object to the west. I whipped my head around to the east, another. Like curved coins covering the earth.
I closed my eyes. “I suppose I should.”
We had a devil of a time returning home. The cold was soaking into us with each mile. Our coats, our furs, had all worn thin over the long, hard winters. With no hunting available we were only able to get a few traps set, but it still only provided a few wayward creatures. It seems the animals were unaffected by the Great Blindness.
When I finally returned home we carefully started a fire in the pit I’d dug that first year. We couldn’t risk having fires indoors any longer and had instead dissembled a gazebo, using the planks for wood. It was the only injury I sustained during the blindness, climbing that damn gazebo to undo the work I’d done on the roof so the smoke could escape but kept the fire from getting wet. I tumbled off the roof and Hofstadter had to be called. Fortunately it was mostly superficial damage, but it was a reminder to work slowly.
I opened my eyes again while we prepared the fire, curious as to how safe we’d been in preparing the space. I felt a shock of pride as I looked into the pit, looking around at the various mis-matched chairs surrounding it. My eyes finally stopped on the wood columns holding aloft the roof of the gazebo. Even here, in this communal space, there was writing in red paint, scribbled in haste it would seem. “Don’t let anyone see you with your eyes open.” “Trust no one.” “They are among us.”
The remaining community gathered around the fire, drawn to it by the sound, yearning for the warmth. I did as the writing said, I kept my eyes closed. Normal discussions sparked up around, talk of the weather, the crops, and our stores for the winter that we knew wasn’t approaching but had already set upon us.
I heard a voice I recognized amongst the crowd, a quiet, rarely hear voice of one of the younger members of the community. Ernest, I believe. My memory for sounds had grown quite acute as the years passed, but I tried to think of what it was that I’d tied to the memory of his voice. What was his role, how could he be of service.
In a flash I remembered, he was the boy that had done the “repairs” that came with the smell of paint! I had to speak to him. I couldn’t risk discovery so as the gathering waned I shuffled over to the chair nearest him. I asked after him and his mother, offering to walk with him on his way home. We lived in the same direction, it made sense, no one would suspect anything. He was roughly my daughters’ age, so conversation came easy as we walked. When we arrived at my place I offered some of my stash of crackers, found in the house, left hidden by some clever resident before the madness.
We sat down in the living room, which I now realize is in fact a study, full of empty shelves. So many books were burned for warmth that first winter. Tomes we could no longer read served no purpose to us but as kindling. We gathered the blankets and as I looked around in the near absolute darkness I knew we were alone. I leaned in and blew on his eyelashes. Startled he opened his eyes and for the first time in so long we met another’s gaze.
“NO.” He whispered loudly. “You can’t even show me. You can’t trust anyone!” His breath was ragged with fear in no more time than it took for him to open his eyes.
TO BE CONTINUED… maybe