The Third Eye pt III

 The Third Eye: Pt III 

Ralph chased the prints revealed by the eye in his forehead. A white hand beckoned him on. Tears streamed down his face until his eyelids turned red and swelled shut. The agony of the eye in his head felt like the eye was attached to a stake getting pounded into his skull. He saw the naked women dancing in the fire.

He arrived at the burned church, the Eye throbbed when it saw the ruins. Yellow tape. Heaps of brick. The floor still covered in soot. The eye came wide open. When he closed his regular eyes, the wrecked chimney disappeared. The charred beams sank. White walls. Curtains on the window. The beams back up against the rafters. Fresh patched roof with straw and mud sealed the gaps. Footsteps paced on dirt. 

Torches lit the nave. Hands set down candles. They burned in tight rows against stone shelves. 

Rings of candles were lit one at a time. The shoulder of a fur cloak appeared between two flames. Their hands carried the candles. Hoods and veils bounced under the light. A dozen candles lit, then another dozen. 

Ralph thought “No wonder this place burned down.”

Then he got a look out the front door. There were no buildings outside, no roads. Just wagons, horses, and moonlight. The dark of night pressed the land like a trash compactor. 

Out of the dark came a silver fire. A hideous man came inside through the front door. Bald, large nose, wrinkled forehead, one eye sealed shut by scar tissue, gray skin, black lips, he reeked of goat urine. At first Ralph thought he wore black gloves but the silver light got nearer. He saw that a layer of filth covered his hands all the way down to his elbows. Big droopy eyes. Thick veins ran down his face. When he got to the altar he set the silver torch down, and spoke in language Ralph never heard before. The floor opened up before the silver torch. All the people in veils rose from their seats and lined up, and descended into the chamber below. 

Ralph moved closer to the sanctuary below to give the third eye a better look. It pulsed and twisted so hard when the trap door opened that he figured whatever it wanted to see must be down there. The strange preacher no longer held the silver torch, but the emblem of the red mark.

Ralph started to get nervous. He saw the same red mark in the flame of the candles. But he couldn’t get the eye to look at anything else.

A panel in the floor slid open, and veiled worshipers went down. They undressed and stood naked before a crack in a black stone. The crack began to glow red, like the mark. The red mark got brighter until even the walls of the chamber shined red rays back at the pale, shivering folk. 

Ralph watched the red mark intensify, condense, intensify again, seeming to come to the brink of transforming into an entirely new color, as if sucking all other colors out of the room. 

The third eye extended from the socket Ralph had never felt it stretch so far from his skull. Far enough that he could no longer see his own arms and legs. Far enough that it just caught a glimpse of the red mark. It almost focused. Ralph stepped down the stairs. 

“Please dont…” he thought.

The Third Eye turned red.  

The red mark glowed in the basement. Ralph lowered his head and shut his forward eyes. The red mark glowed brighter than any fire above ground, and when its light touched the faces of the folk, it focused a laser on them and reduced them to bones in milliseconds.

But Ralph was safe. The eye was safe. It looked deeply at the red mark. The pupil constricted, and the eye at last focused completely. 

It was a peaceful moment for Ralph. The head pain stopped pulling his skull apart into plates. 

“You must not ignore the red mark.” A voice uttered.

Ralph turned around. The strange preacher stood in the red light beside him. 

The eye stayed focused on the red mark. When it finally flashed, Ralph felt the eyes of everyone in town on him. Everyone who had crossed a red mark, whether they saw it or not, now entered Ralph’s brain through his vision. It hurt so much that he fell to the ground in a paralysed mess. Both hands bent upwards, his wrists twisted, both palms open under his eyes. 

The strange preacher dragged him upstairs and laid him on the altar. Hooded men arrived. The same hooded men that the eye behind Mrs. Slugger.

The hooded men threw flaming glass at the floor and dumped accelerants on the walls. The place went up in flames. When the fire reached the ceiling the walls began to bend. The rafters above him crumbled and collapsed on top. 

The strange preacher threw a shroud with the red mark over the eye, walked through the fire, and vanished into the fog of night. 

Ralph awoke once more, the eye tight in its socket, resting in its blanket of orbital fat. He was laying in the soot. The ruins of the church towered over him. The strange preacher was there. He lay where the floor once was. A pitchfork was stuck in his chest. 

“Dont ignore the red mark.” Ralph remembered him saying. 

A pool of blood sat beneath him. 

The air smelled like smoke. Ralph got up, looked around. He could hear car horns blasting, 0people shouting, breaking glass, even a gunshot. He rushed to town to get home.qq He kept his hat low but it didn’t work. A truck sped down the street and came to a sharp stop.

“That's him” someone inside said.

Ralph turned down and alley and ran through so many backyards. A car collided into another car coming through an intersection. The sound of sirens grew louder. More and more alarms joined in. He saw the red mark on every house. Some people stared into them and screamed. Others didn’t seem to notice them at all.