[Short] Eyes in the Dark

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The axe was heavy in his hands. The early snow stung his feet as he wandered around the house in the dark windy night. His wife called to him, but he ignored her. He knew what he saw. Those eyes. Ten years ago, he'd seen those same eyes. His feet began to numb, and after circling the house twice, he reluctantly returned inside. His wife and daughter asked what was wrong, but he couldn't say. He mustn't. Said it was nothing, that he just thought he saw something.

A cool breeze from outside whipped through the house as he woke the next morning. The sun had baked most of the snow off of the brown and red leaves, and his wife was making breakfast by the opened kitchen window. Upon the sill, the wife noticed a cat, probably having smelled the food she was cooking. Beautiful jade eyes and inky black fur. It watched and purred happily as she cooked. Their daughter went outside with the cat in tow to play.

They ran through the leaves into the thick behind the house, where tall trees were beginning to look bare from the fall. Golds and reds swirled in the wind and sunshine in the brief moment of warm weather. She would explore the fallen trees and the cat would follow, slinking through the branches and over the limbs. After a time, they heard a cracking of branches, and a figure moving about in the dark as dusk began to form. A loud hiss could be heard, but when she looked the cat was gone, only darkness. From the trees her father emerged, grabbing her by the arm and taking her home. He grumbled about the animals having diseases, and that she should be careful because she was only seven.

That night her father laid in bed, unable to sleep. He remembered when it happened. How they'd betrayed them. He'd gotten up in the dead of night, and found them about to leave. That was behind him, now. Nobody was there to see. That would remain buried, along with the house. But those eyes. Those terrible eyes. They saw him, from the tree when the deed was done. He saw the pair of eyes vanish into the night.

The wind whipped through the night, and they a tree had crashed against the front of the cabin, squeezing it shut with a mass of branches and logs. He turned but realized his wife and daughter were outside. Running to the kitchen window he could see their daughter dashing off into the woods, her mother shouting and chasing after her. He yelled but couldn't get their attention. He pushed his arms through the small window, but his frame was much to big to even painfully fit. Hearing a crash, he turned to see an oil lamp had turned over, and fire licked the smaller branches protruding into the home.

He began to kick at the growing fire, but a scream pulled him back to the window. Somewhere in the distance he heard a scream. Before he could look, he fell over backwards as a cat pounced into the window frame. He kicked his legs and crawled back as the green eyes began to bore into him. He could barely exclaim "You" over the fear struck in his heart. He knew why it was here, and he knew what it meant.

Ten years ago a wife and son, who'd sought to run away after he'd berated them, were stumbled upon in the act. He bloodied his hands nailing the homestead shut, and cast a bottle of kerosene inside in the dead of night as he shouted and screamed. Nobody could hear them in the river valley, for miles and miles. The cat was there. The first wife had found it in the cold and nursed it back from the brink of death. He had never found its remains.

The fire grew and grew, and nobody was around to hear the roar of the flames, or the crackle of the bones inside. Nobody for miles and miles.