I'm posting Beholder, a full story from my collection, Dark and Darker. After the story you will find links to where you can purchase the complete collection from your preferred online retailer.

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What is Beholder about?

Two police officers step inside a suspect's personal hell, and discover just how close they are to the real thing.

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Beholder

Walter Royce clawed his eyes out when he was nine. Then again when he was twelve. And a final time on the day he turned nineteen. After that he gave up and closed them.

He didn't open them again for ten years. Until the day the policemen came.

*  *  *

Cold case. It was a catchy moniker. Some detective somewhere had dropped the phrase into a random conversation and a whole industry was born. TV shows. Documentaries. Movies. Glamour. Triumph. Closure.

It wasn't like that, Rick Mellon knew. What Hollywood dreamed up was the exception, not the rule. The truth lay in the case folder on his lap. The demise of a college student told in clinical forms covered with the scrawls of an investigator who didn't have a clue what happened. Mellon flipped the folder open as his partner drove, turning to the last thing the investigator penned in the file ten years before—a question mark.

"You ever been on one this weird, Mellow?"

Mellow... It was a nick that had stuck since the academy. Nothing phased him. Well, nothing until he was paired with Eddie Gray. The guy was wound tight as a tick inside, just a thin skin no more stout than candy glass holding it all in. Usually the young ones had that tendency, a few years on the beat chasing bad guys through back yards and over fences convincing them they could throw the same bucket of adrenalin at a crime with a detective shield clipped to their belt. Piss, vinegar, and a Glock to the rescue.

That lasted a while, usually until the paperwork numbed them to the point that they started to act lobotomized. Usually.

Gray had somehow held onto the fire for twenty years, three more than Mellon had been wearing the badge. Sure, he knew how to play the part. Keep it cool. And if the unlucky soul he was questioning knew his or her place, and demonstrated such, all would stay cool. Gray liked to hear a lot of yessirs and nossirs from suspects. From everybody, really, because, as he liked to put it, 'Everybody's guilty of something.'

"Weird how?"

Gray kneaded the steering wheel and swung left through a stop sign, looking to his younger partner through the whole maneuver. "You're serious?" He straightened the car out, accelerating fast down the narrow side street. "You don't find this one weird."

Mellon slapped the folder shut on his lap and fixed his gaze ahead. "Nothing natural about anyone going missing."

That was hard to argue with. Gray decided to give it a go. "Seems to be damn natural for folks close to Walter Royce."

*  *  *

He should have listened to his mother when she said to never, ever, come out of the basement. And when the man from the school came to see why the new boy living with his aunt hadn't enrolled in Grayson Middle School, he should have kicked and screamed when the man reached to take his helmet off.

"He's painfully shy," Aunt Rose had explained to the man as she stepped from the small dining room to take the screaming teapot from the stove. Why did she have to leave? She should have just let it shriek and stayed with me. She continued the lie by crafting a story—that bore a grain of truth—about her husband turning an old football helmet into what the man saw now resting atop Walter's head, face shield turned solid, some sort of thin metal riveted to the structure beneath. The contraption, which enveloped Walter's head like a misshapen globe, gave him his 'peace', Aunt Rose told the man as she spun the burner to off.

When she came back into the dining room the man was gone.

*  *  *

Gray steered the car to the curb in front of the address they'd been given. Mellon reached to open the door but stopped, feeling his partner's stare. He turned back and saw those two black eyes zeroed in on him, inky pupils bleeding to where most people had splashes of green or blue or brown.

"Listen, Mellow, this is for show, all this cold case follow up crap they're dumping on us." He wasn't wrong. Mellon knew this was all about dollars. Some fed grant money to run down unsolved cases. Of course there'd be a skim left over for the department to buy new radios or fresh tile for a precinct. So you went through the motions, knocked on doors, interviewed old witnesses and persons of interest. Check the box and move on.

Except it seemed that Gray didn't embrace that concept. For all his faults, it could never be said he turned away from making bad guys pay. It seemed that, to his way of thinking, the man who lived in the house they'd just arrived at might be deserving of some justice that had been too long delayed.

Mellon opened the door and stepped out as Gray did, each looking to the small house across the street, window shades drawn and a NO SOLICITOR sign on the fence that racetracked the narrow property. A BEWARE OF DOG sign was tacked to a post that mostly held the roof over the leaning porch, and just to the right of the steps an alarm company placard was staked into the ground.

"Someone doesn't like visitors," Gray said, and they headed across the street.

*  *  *

He screamed—she never did. She was just gone.

He ran back down to the basement and collapsed to the floor, screaming that he was sorry. Promising through sobs that he'd never leave the basement again, just like his mommy had warned him.

But he knew that promising wasn't enough. He wasn't a baby. Sometimes he could hear the kids next door talk about not being 'kindygartners' anymore, and though he had no idea what a 'kindygartner' was he was sure he was not one, just like the outside kids. He was nine. Nine! And nine year olds had to do the right thing. They did. And he knew what that was.

It hurt. A lot. And he cried. Tears mixing with blood as he dug his fingers into the socket around his right eye and pulled. Something that felt far back inside his head popped and the eyeball detached, slipping through his fingers and dropping to the basement floor. Walter watched it with his remaining eye as it rolled a few inches.

Then he went to work on the left one.

He fell asleep on the floor of the basement knowing that it was over. All the bad he did. But when he woke his eyelids fluttered open and he could see light sneaking in past the boarded up windows. He held his hand out in front and could easily see the red-stained fingers. And past it, on the floor where they had dropped, his eyes lay in a shared puddle of slimy blood.

They were back.

Walter sat up and stared at his eyes as the phone upstairs rang and rang. Stared at his eyes as his aunt and uncle pounded on the back door a few hours later. Stared at them until his mother's sister and her husband broke through a side window and everything went black as something thick was wrapped around his head.

*  *  *

They entered with hands on their holstered pistols after the man who confirmed he was Walter Royce unlocked the half dozen latches on his front door and stepped clear. Mellon saw him first, wispy thin and shoeless, a couple yards away in what would be the living room in any other house, but here was filled with a single chair and stacks of books and magazines, and a computer powered down on a small folding table in the corner. But not a single lamp to cut through the forced twilight within.

"Mr. Royce, just for everyone's safety, can we see your hands, please?" Mellon was glad he had said it. Coming from Gray it would have been an order barked to scare the man shitless.

Walter was facing away from the policemen, but he did what was requested and eased his hands away from his sides. They were empty.

"Turn around, sir," Mellon instructed, and Walter did. Gray took a small flashlight from his pocket and directed the beam at the man, illuminating a near skeletal form, tee shirt and pajama bottoms hanging from bony shoulders and jutting hips.

"What the..." Gray uttered the puzzlement softly as he shifted his light upward, to Walter's head, revealing an angular, emaciated face, eyes hidden behind a pair of welding goggles, the darkened lenses covered by layers of tape and a thick substance reminiscent of roofing tar.

"Mr. Royce, we'd like to talk to you about Donna Weston," Mellon said, easing his hand from his pistol.

Walter said nothing. Just nodded.

*  *  *

She wouldn't go away.

"Please, Walter, I want to see you."

Her voice wasn't quite pleading, but close. A desperation in it that he could plainly understand, though his was a hundred fold what hers was. He wanted to let her in, beyond the door and really in. In to everything about him. But he couldn't. He knew that.

"I'm not leaving until you let me in," Donna said through the closed door, Walter standing inches away within, turned away, oversized sunglasses anchored on his face. He stood there, listening to her, wanting her, and wanting her to leave.

"I have to see you," she did plead now. "I have to know—is this true?"

This. He'd somehow allowed the possibility that contact with the world was possible, if only in one direction, so he'd enrolled in an online course at a local college. Then another. And finally one where a requirement was submission of a poem.

Born of the downstairs man

Cursed by the touch of his hand

She was crying now, beyond the door. He listened to her soft sobs until they receded, porch steps creaking beneath her and gate swinging shut behind as she fled. Gone in the good way.

*  *  *

The policemen said he could sit, so Walter did.

"We're following up on Donna Weston's disappearance ten years ago," Mellon said, waiting for Walter to react in some way. He didn't. "You were the last person to see her. You told the investigator back then..." He opened the file and found the old notes. "'She stopped by, we talked, and she left.'" The file closed with a soft slap in his hand. "That's still how you remember it?"

Walter did react now. Confirmed the lie with a nod.

*  *  *

He was dreaming. Hours after Donna had fled, weeping, he drifted to sleep, wanting visions of her to dance through his slumber.

'The man upstairs will not have you!' It was his mother screaming amidst the sound of breaking glass, not Donna laughing and holding him on some preternatural island paradise. 'The man downstairs will take you back to his fire if you know your true self!' More glass breaking. In the bathroom. In her bedroom. Something small from her bureau drawer smashed.

Walter...

It was Donna's voice. Invading his dream, he thought.

He was wrong.

"Walter..."

She'd come back. And found a way in. He felt the bed shift as she sat next to him, and before his rational self could crawl up from sleep, his eyes opened, and he saw her, a dark beauty just an instant, before a microsecond of terror washed over her and she was gone.

Walter reached out to embrace her but grasped only air and a misty wisp of sulfur. He rolled off the bed to the floor, slamming his fists against the hard wood until they were bloody. After a moment he rocked back on his heels and sat against the bed, thinking through tears, his hands coming up after a minute and, like he had after beholding his mother when he was nine, and the man from the school when he was twelve, pressed his fingers into the sockets of his eyes and gouged them out.

*  *  *

"Do you mind if I look around, Mr. Royce?" Mellon asked, and Walter's head angled toward him, shrouded eyes seeming to fix on him without seeing.

"Go ahead."

Mellon glanced to Gray and headed down the hallway, his partner stepping close to Walter and running fingers over the books stacked around his chair. Tiny bumps lived in groups upon each.

"Braille," Gray observed, moving behind the chair. He glanced at the computer and saw an odd keyboard and tactile reader sitting where a monitor would normally be. "Nothing in your file about being blind."

Walter felt the detective circle him and begged whatever power might hold pity over the man to please let this come to a conclusion quickly. If engaging his inquisitor would help that along... "I was born with a condition."

"Fraser something." Gray recalled it from the file.

"Fraser syndrome," Walter explained. "My eyelids were sealed."

"Hmm." Gray picked up a book, ran his fingers over the pimply upward dents. "You told the other investigator about that." He dropped the book back onto its stack. SMACK. Walter shuddered in his chair, startled. "You told him something else. Didn't you?"

Walter nodded.

*  *  *

Mellon waded through the rooms, every space dark, windows shaded heavily. Some covered fully with flats of plywood hammered to the frames. He swept his flashlight through bathroom and kitchen and bedroom, recalling from the file that this was the house Royce had grown up in. He'd lived with his aunt and uncle for a while, but returned to the vacant property when he turned eighteen. Why he would want to do that was beyond the detective to comprehend.

This was the place where Walter's father had slit his eyelids with a straight razor when the boy was five. Some form of home surgery to correct a birth defect. The act seemed too much for the man, since he up and left after that, never to be heard from again.

And Walter chose to come back. To that sort of memory.

Mellon paused just outside the bathroom and directed his light in against the wall over the sink. There was no mirror, just the faded outline on the wall where one had been. He returned to the back bedroom and shifted the beam to a bureau across from the bed, its antique luster muted in the harsh white light playing over it. A large, oval frame rose from the back of the solid piece of furniture, the kind which would be expected to hold a mirror. This one did not.

He puzzled over this and flipped the file open, reading the investigator's notes by flashlight. The missing mirrors were noted, but no explanation given. The idiot hadn't even asked Royce about the oddity. All the other t's were crossed and i's dotted—no trace evidence belonging to Donna Weston was found. Blood was found near the bed on the floor, identified as belonging to Royce, who explained it as the result of a cut. Both of his hands had shown signs of abrasions. He'd pounded the floor in a fit of melancholy after a dream about his mother.

So he said.

*  *  *

Gray came fully around the chair now and stood facing Walter where he sat.

"Pop slices your eyes open and, poof, he hits the road." Gray let that have a second to get under the man's skin. The first step in a guided trip down memory lane. "A few years later mom up and disappears. Then a truant officer stops by your aunt's house and is never heard from again." He leaned forward, close to Walter. "Then Donna stops by one night and joins the rest of them in great bye bye."

Walter's head dipped as the detective straightened, standing over him like judge and executioner. Just skip the jury altogether.

"Was it something Donna said that set you off? Something from that last e-mail she sent you?"

He tried not to react, but the tell was clear, his chin rising a bit before he caught himself.

"Bingo," Gray said.

*  *  *

She'd read the poem three dozen times at least. Once or twice would be the norm for a piece of writing she'd been assigned to critique from a 'satellite student' (hermit, troll, and leper were the more common unofficial brands given those unable to participate in person on campus), but something about Walter Royce's stumbling, rhythmic piece had touched her.

Beholder Blind

By Walter Royce

Told I am one

Not meant to see the sun

Or the Son

Born of the downstairs man

Cursed by the touch of his hand

Beholder I am

Leave this earth one way

Some day

Too far away

Part of the plan

Made by the downstairs man

Beholder I am

Buried in the poetry was something that did more than touch Donna. One word spurred a memory. A concept buried deep, planted the previous year from readings she'd completed for a class on Lore. Beholder.

She'd dredged that recollection from where it might have drown in saturated synapses had Walter's poem not been assigned to her. Now in the library she spent an hour pouring through a dozen books until she found the one of consequence. Its title chilled and thrilled her as she pulled it from the stacks—The Devil's Seeds. A thickish volume of legend and lore born of beliefs that Satan touches the living world in many ways, through many beings begotten of his relations with mortals.

Beholder. Two paragraphs related that term. Explained it. A child of the devil, spawned to send souls to its master with nothing more than a look. Destined to return to its father when it knows its true self.

Donna closed the book. Her hands were trembling. Heart thudding. A warmth building within.

*  *  *

His mother sat behind him on the floor of the basement, his eyes taped shut and black strapping wrapped around his head, telling him a story. Or what he thought was a story. It was about a woman who had a son with a special father. The son was supposed to do bad things, but God stepped in and made it so the son could not do those bad things. That was a sign, the woman realized.

But her husband thought the son's destiny to do bad things might bring power and riches, so he decided to cut away what God had done and let the boy be what he was supposed to be. The mother warned him, but the husband did not listen, and so he was the first soul taken.

His mother told Walter that the son must never look at himself, or he would be sent to sit with his father in the fires that burned for the damned.

Later Walter realized this was the story of his life that his mother told him. He was five.

*  *  *

Mellon sat on the edge of the bed and flipped back through the file, stopping on the last documented communication between Walter and Donna. An e-mail she'd sent him from a computer in the college library. One of many. Straightforward at first, then spinning off to probing. Even suggestive. On her part, at least. He never responded to her innuendo. Never took the bait. Didn't agree to the hinted liaisons she seemed to be using to lure him from his refuge.

He turned away from that last e-mail briefly, to look at the photo of Donna Weston included in the file. She was a pale vision painted goth black, pierced lips, lids, and nose, innocence the canvas and defiance the art upon it. Like other kids Mellon had encountered embracing an alternative appearance and lifestyle, she had that look in her eyes. The look of a seeker. Wanting that something which would allow the inner self to match the outer veneer.

Dreaming of a darkness that might be real.

*  *  *

Gray chuckled lightly. "What was it she said? 'I want to know that it's real. I want to know his strength.'" Walter's head angled up now, hidden eyes aimed at the detective. "Crazy come-on line, I guess. But expected. She thought you were some...monster." The chuckle again, not so light this time. "Some beast in human form."

The detective was enjoying this, Walter sensed. Mocking and dismissing in the same breath. Just go, please. Open the door and go.

"What was that thing she said in the e-mail?" Gray asked, feigned interest dripping with derision. "About dear old dad?"

*  *  *

'I want to know your father...' Mellon read the girl's words softly. 'You can send me to him. You can do anything. No one can hurt you. You're not like us. You're immortal.'

Immortal. Mellon closed the file. There was a bucket of delusion in there. He glanced around the room, one space in a dungeon Walter Royce had made for himself, thinking that a fair amount of crazy lived here as well.

He stood and left the bedroom, moved down the hallway and into the kitchen, hearing his partner's faint, measured haranguing of Royce. Gray was wired for this exact interaction, probing for buttons and then pushing them relentlessly. He was living up to his nature. Or down to it.

Donna Weston had thought Walter some child of Satan because of a poem and a book and a deficit in the self image department. Her world, Gray's, Walter's, each was a shade of fucked-up they were willing to live with.

From the front room Mellon heard his partner tell Royce to stand up. He might flip him face first to the wall and frisk him, hard hands leaving a few choice bruises during the pat down. He'd let Gray have his fun harassing the man a while longer before returning from his walk-through to brand the place clean and suggest they head out.

First, he wanted to give the kitchen a once over. Considering the original investigator's apparent lack of follow through, not to mention his piss poor questioning as laid out in the reports, Mellon could not completely discount the possibility that Donna Weston's frozen head might be in the freezer behind half a leftover Thanksgiving turkey.

That possibility, however unlikely, evaporated the second he opened the ancient refrigerator, its warm interior empty. Checking the freezer he found the same. He turned to the cabinets, opening them one by one, expecting to find cans of chili and boxes of cereal. What he found were empty shelves and a stack of plates webbed over by some spider after years (decades?) of non use.

'You're not like us.' The words from Donna's last e-mail to Walter flashed in Mellon's thoughts. He shook off the oddity and spun the faucet—no water came out. Next he tried the stove—it hissed a last gasp of gas trapped in its pipes for years, then went silent. He looked for a trash can, where certainly there would be Subway wrappers and pizza boxes. There was none.

'No one can hurt you.' The words of the missing girl again echoed in Mellon's head, some part of him appending an unsolicited addendum...

You can't even hurt yourself...

*  *  *

Gray didn't spin Walter Royce toward the wall for a rough frisking. Where was the flair in that considering the freak before him? He simply made him stand and stepped close, reaching a hand toward the goggles hiding the man's eyes from the world.

"No." It was a clear act of defiance, the motion of Walter's own hand in concert with the word, wiry fingers clamping around Gray's wrist.

The detective moved fast, his free hand—his gun hand—drawing his pistol and pressing the muzzle to the soft skin under Walter's chin. He added no warning, no direction. If any was necessary, Gray knew, he'd simply pull the trigger and it would be written up as a suspect going for his gun.

Walter eased his grip. Withdrew his hold from the detective's wrist. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. He breathed out, wishing it could be his last.

"That's a good boy, Walter," Gray said, patronizing off the scale. He brought his pistol down, but kept it aimed at Walter's midsection, free hand gripping the roughened frame of the goggles now. "Let's see what daddy did."

Walter felt the goggles pull away and slammed his eyelids shut, the jagged skin that edged them letting light bleed in, and shadow, the shape of the detective blotting out what limited brightness there was. He rolled his eyes down, not wanting to see. Not wanting to behold the man before him.

"Daddy was no surgeon, was he?" Gray taunted.

He wasn't my daddy.

"Open those eyes and let's see what—"

He could have resisted. Could have spun his head away like when the man from the school took his helmet off, only to have his slick, thin fingers guide his gaze back to the front. Here, too, he would be made to look, so he did.

It happened in less than the blink of an eye, just time enough for Gray to sense his end. All about him sizzled, from head to toe, his essence seeming to dissolve to vapor. A pungent mist which swirled like a cyclone into Walter's eyes, the detective's form being consumed from head to toe, no time to resist. Only an instinctual reaction possible, Gray's finger squeezing the trigger and sending a bullet slamming into Walter's stomach.

*  *  *

The unmistakable sound cut through the house like thunder. Mellon was out of the kitchen and in the hall while the sharp crack was still echoing toward the back of the house. He drew his pistol and advanced rapidly toward the living room, beam of the flashlight in his free hand cutting the dark ahead, sweeping back and forth, searching for his partner.

"Eddie?" he called out sharply, getting no response as he leaned his way around the last corner and lit up the living room. Walter stood across the space from him, turned away, an odd cloud of vapor dissipating next to him. "SHOW ME YOUR HANDS!"

The command was stark and threatening. Walter could almost feel the angry breath behind it from across the room. But he did not immediately comply, keeping his hands over the spot where the bullet from the detective's gun had punched into him. He glanced down and could see the flow of blood slowing as it trickled past his fingers. Could feel the wound within already beginning to heal.

"Eddie where are you?!" Mellon listened, creeping to the side to look past Walter. His partner had to be over there somewhere. On the floor, maybe, down and shot. Right? He had to be. "Eddie!"

"He's gone," Walter said, glimpsing the small puddle of blood at his feet, scattered beam of the flashlight reflecting off of it.

Reflecting...

Mellon set his flashlight on a stack of Braille books and took the radio from his belt. "Ten David, ten thirty three, officer down! Fifteen zero one Sycamore!" He clipped the radio back and slid past the lone chair. "Where is he?!"

Walter eased his hands away from the wound, just an inch or so. The red gush had stopped completely.

No...

"Dammit, where is my partner?!" Mellon demanded, the first sirens screaming now in the distance.

Walter heard the shrill warbling as it drew nearer and nearer. A flood of people would be here in a minute. A supply of souls.

It had to end. He took a step backward toward the remaining detective.

"Show me your hands!"

Another step.

Mellon fired twice. BAM! BAM!

Walter felt the rounds of hot copper and lead drill clean through him, from front to back, twin gouts of blood spilling from both sides. He stepped back yet again.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Three more holes. More blood pooling wide on the floor at his feet.

Yes...

Mellon recoiled a step. He'd put five rounds into the sonofabitch, all with hardly a flinch from him. 'No one can hurt you.'

BAM! BAM! Mellon called bullshit on Donna Weston's claim with two more rounds. Walter stopped backing toward him and went to his knees. Went, not fell, lowering himself gently as if assuming a position to pray.

Sirens howled from every direction, tires screeching. Walter knew he was out of time. He eased forward, placing his hands in the glistening pool so he was on all fours. For a moment he took in the sounds, the last of this life he would sample, then with a breath deep and sweet and free he tipped his head toward the floor and opened his eyes wide to see his image reflected in the wet red sheen. The sensation tore through him, one of welcomed dread, as his body and soul turned to a wash of putrid smoke that spun downward in a vortex, disappearing into the image of his eyes mirrored in the skim of blood left behind.

The gun slipped from Mellon's hand and thudded to the floor. What he had just witnessed could not be. Walter Royce was there, and then gone. For a moment he stood frozen as fast footsteps raced up the walkway outside, then he took a step toward the pool of blood. And another. Until he was standing over it, looking down at the image of Walter Royce, eyes closed, receding into the crimson darkness below.

Gone.

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Three other stories are included in Dark and Darker.

Creation... What is art? Derek Devine thinks he knows. But a visit from a dangerous stranger, who looks uncannily like a subject in one of Derek's older paintings, leads the young artist to a place where the line between life and art seems not to exist at all.

The Key... Jason Riley's wife was brutally murdered. When he comes across evidence that the police missed, he plans his own unique brand of justice for the killer.

Shark... A lawyer learns there are consequences to winning in court when he accepts a dinner invitation from the party he successfully sued.

The full collection can be purchased for just .99 from the following online retailers:

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I hope you enjoyed the sample and will give the full collection a look.

Thank you!