No Peeking

By Nolan Corbett

Cindy yelped, kicking back from the grasping hands. Pinning her hands to either side of the shadowed red tunnel, and bracing the soles of her shiny pink boots to either side, she clambered backwards barely keeping out of reach of the flailing limbs. Cindy’s arms trembled as the tunnel’s path grew steeper, slowing her accent. A tiny pink hand slammed down between her splayed legs and slowly began to trail towards her booted foot. She was caught. 

The loud crunch of hurried footfalls on gravel broke through the pounding of adrenaline in her ears and caused both Cindy and her pursuer to freeze before the high pitched squeal of “Floor is Lava!” came echoing up the slide. Katie, the lava monster, dove away from the slide to blindly chase down her new target. Cindy’s cheeks ballooned with a sigh of relief. Not caught yet. Slowly, and silently, she continued her climb up the red tube slide. Blinking the shadows from her eyes, Cindy emerged back into the glow of the early spring sun. From atop the rickety wooden playground, she surveyed the field of battle. 

Katie was halfway across the playground, eyes scrunched shut, jumping and giggling with glee, as Rebecca dragged her feet through the gravel, head hung low in defeat. Ahead of her, Cindy spotted three denim jackets, standing shoulder to shoulder. Thomas, Gloria, and Max stood outside the boundary, half smiles/half grimaces painted across their faces as they booed the monster who had taken yet another of their friends out of the game. Cindy was the only one left. 

Katie would come back to the slide. She’d come all the way back, away from the others because she knew Cindy had been there. That gave Cindy a chance. One big leap, a quick sprint, and another leap. She could get there. Tag them all back in. Win the game. 

Cindy squared her own denim-clad shoulder and tip-toed to the playground tower’s edge. Two deep breaths. A swing of her arms. She launched herself from the precipice, down towards the rope bridge of the second half of the playground. Soaring clear over the gap, she landed, both feet meeting a wooden beam of the bridge. A wooden beam that ripped from its supports, dropping from beneath her feet, bringing its opposite end hurtling into her shocked face. 

Crack!... 

...Woomf. 

The board hit Cindy, and Cindy hit the ground. Darkness consumed her vision as she lay in her crater. Slowly, light began to bleed back into sight, revealing the bright blue sky above her. But a sliver of black remained, a crack in the sky’s clear glass pane. A spear of black lightning hanging across the world. She blinked at the sundered sky for a moment more, before a warm body crashed onto her. Katie poked and prodded, babbling about broken necks and angry parents. Sweaty palms enveloped Cindy’s cheeks as Katie turned her head to face her. The black fault in the sky followed her vision to split her friend’s face, before finally fading away, like the kaleidoscope of coloured splotches she would see after staring at the sun.  

 Katie helped her brush the crushed grey stones from her long blonde curls and her crumpled jacket, taking Cindy’s terror and shock with it. The rest of the team arrived in a cacophony of awe and panic, taking their turn to play doctor as Katie had. Cindy dissuaded each of their concerns in turn, giving the group a twirl and a bow to show that no harm had been done. Soon the excitement of the failed escape died down as one by one the preteens checked their phones and made hasty retreats towards home. 

Checking her own phone, a sharp stab of white hot pain lanced through Cindy’s eyes. A shower of sparks saw the crack return, rending the world before her. She blinked. She shook her head. The crack remained. 

Smothering her concern with a salesman's smile, Cindy waved goodbye to Katie and the others, before darting off towards home. The crack bobbed and swayed with each frantic footfall, carving its way through trees, trails, cars, people. Her right eye began to sting, to bulge, like a stray lash or a splintered shard of wood was digging its way into her pupil. She clawed as she ran, wiping and pawing at her face, peeling back her eyelids and shacking her head like a dog. The crack widened. 

What had been a hairpin fracture in the universe deepened, broadened, subsuming the peripheral of her nose. Within the crack, behind it, the darkness moved. It crackled. It swayed. It reached. Biting back wails of terror, Cindy blasted through the door of a small convenience store, sending the little hanging bell dancing as she tore through the shop towards the coolers. Throwing the first frosted glass door open she grabbed a bottle of water in her quacking hands. Fumbling the cap off, she leaned back until her back ached, and dumped the bottle’s cold contents into her wide eyes. Cindy screamed. 

The crack vanished as white hot pain consumed her face. Heat, like a hot skillet swelled across her brow and temples, burning, searing, until the white static agony in her eyes stuttered and blinked out, to absolute black. The black of the crack, writhing and beckoning, became everything, and then it was gone. A metallic clang, like cutlery on cast iron saw the darkness disappear, and Cindy found herself on her back, staring at the plain white ceiling. Her screams died in her throat as she scanned the store, only to return a pitch higher as she caught sight of the figure rushing towards her. 

It was the clerk, it had been the clerk. She had seen the older boy’s eye-roll-scowl and gelled helmet of strawberry blonde hair upon her entrance, but she could only see the latter now. His eyes were now hidden, masked behind a sheet of metal that curved back at his temples before burrowing into his scalp above his ears. The metal stood out, drawing the eye, like a bare gun barrel in a crowded room, too real to exist. 

The man skid to a stop upon the renewal of Cindy’s siren wail, raising his hands in what could have been a non-threatening posture, if not for his gunmetal visor. He spoke, but the words arrived garbled to Cindy’s ears. A chorus of concern and apathy coursed from the man’s flat lipped half-face in an unintelligible tangle of syllables. 

Spinning over to all-fours, ready to run, Cindy found her palm pressed to a jagged shard of metal, metal that gave the same dull gleam as the man’s visor. Stuffing the shard into her pocket, Cindy pounced away from the clerk, tearing around a display of chips and sweets with bestial terror. Without looking back she sprinted across the store and back out the heavy glass door, ripping through the curtains on the other side. The curtains that had not been there on the way in. 

Spinning on her heels, Cindy took in the sway of tendrils hanging down across the store front. They sprouted from what had been an old neon sign and hung limp to the ground, swaying like the tentacles of a sea anemone. They drifted in the still air as if caught in the sway of undersea current, colourless and aimless. 

One tendril hung over her stone-still shoulder, caught on her jacket from her frantic escape. Slowly, it slid back towards the shop, the tip twisting towards her brow before flinching back as if in pain. Stepping back, Cindy turned towards the street to find a sea of the alien grey fronds. They sprouted from street signs and window displays, hung from street lights and electrical wires, and erupted from the pockets of passers-by. Passers-by who each wore the same ingrained metal blindfold as the clerk. 

Tears clung to her lashes as Cindy fled through the jungle of swaying tentacles, slack, eyeless faces flashing past, dragging their own with them. She nearly collided with a woman in white joggers, a torrent of tendrils coating her left arm, from her wrist to her visor and back. Staggered from the near miss and grasping for air, Cindy watched another dangling cilia reach out to the woman’s watch and face. The clusters met, but did not tighten. Did not pull. Did not claw or snare or trap, but simply touch. A lover’s touch of impossible fingers. A matronly caress of a steel suffused cheek. 

Reeling away from the entangled figure, Cindy found herself the centre of a slowly forming circle of blank faces. A crowd began to form about her, but it was filled with not but slack lips, and the dead stare of the gunmetal masks. Cindy spun amidst the emotionless hoard as they droned back at her in fear laced monotone distortion, until she caught his eye.

An eye, a single pale blue eye sat in a plump pink face at the back of the crowd. Its pair sat behind another sheen of iron, a monocle of metal, but the other sat free, and bore into her own. The eye belonged to a large balding man, with a well greased moustache. He wore a crisp grey suit that accentuated his third chin and bulging shoulder. A moment of hope, a fleeting glimmer of comradery flashed through Cindy, until she watched the man’s thin lips quirk downwards as he raised a frond filled fist to his face, and spoke silently into his phone. 

A shriek, like static through a loudspeaker, instantly filled the air, parting the crowd and sending Cindy to her knees. Clutching her ears, she peered through the blinding cacophony to see two more figures approaching from a featureless grey block on wheels. They marched like soldiers, knees and elbows locked, spine ridged. Tendrils encompassed them from shoulders to toes, swaying with their jagged movements. But it was their faces that sent ice through Cindy’s veins. Unlike the others, they wore no visors to obscure their eyes, as there were no eyes to cover. No mouth, no nose, no ears, like store-front mannequins made of metal. 

Cindy wailed as the figures scooped her from the ground, tendrils tensing as they neared her face, but their arms stayed firm. She struggled. She screamed. She cried out to the crowd, but they didn’t see. They were unaware, blissfully ignorant of the invasion of her person, of her skin. Of their person. Of their skin. They all were. Cindy had been. But now she wasn’t, and now she was furious. 

Twisting to face the one-eyed man once more, Cindy reached down within herself, past the terror-filled squeal of fright from the shop, down to her deepest depths, to pull forth a roar of anguish and hate. She howled at the streets, the cars, the tentacles, and the people. She cried for them to look, to see, to feel. She screamed until all went black.

A concussion. A brain bleed. Delusion. That’s what the doctors told her. That’s what her parents told her. That’s what she told herself, for days, for weeks. She told herself the same again as she lay in her warm, pink, anemone-free room. It hadn’t been real. It couldn’t be real. But she remembered. She remembered the cold metal blinds, the emotionless faces, and the delicate caress of the pale grey tendrils. She remembered the people, the apathy smothering their care, and she remembered the one eyed man’s face, and the way his lips slid into a smile as all went black. She remembered her fury, and she remembered the shard.

Cindy leapt from her bed, tearing through drawers and shelves. Shredding shirts and pitching shoes across the room, she hunted for her denim jacket. She hunted for the jagged lump of cold iron that would be in its pocket. She hunted for the crack in the sky.

By Nolan Corbett