’Twas the eye, you see? The infernal, bewitching eye, a stygian nightmare made real—the source of my blight and bleeding sanity—cast exclusively to eat away at my perspicacity. How else to explain the knife in my unpenned hand, murderous intent in my heart. It watches, even now, hurrying me toward this missive’s conclusion to do its bidding, all reluctance on my behalf evaporated.

Henceforth, my name besmirched, I seek only a single seed from which to propagate a tree of truth. Do not eat its fruit; it may prove bitter, or worse, poisoned as I now am. Believe instead, the succulence of the words herein written, any motive for obfuscation absent.

An unremarkable day, I walked towards no objective, a circumstantial glance to my left stopping my momentum, for there, behind a plate-glass window, I beheld—or, more appropriately, was mesmerized by—a large, misshapen eye staring back, oozing blue droplets from its corner and centered in a rust-colored circle which, in turn, was encircled by runes of an unknown origin.

’Twould be a falsehood to state how long I stood so enrapt, time having had lost all consequence as it drew me ever deeper into the mystery deep within the iris, discovering a multi-colored panorama changing color with each recognition of its predecessor—recognizing red, it was immediately blue and recognizing blue, it was then, of a sudden, yellow, and so on. Swearing upon all sacred powers the world knows to be true, all the tethers ’twixt me and the life I have lived at once rent, feeling my very soul being pulled from my body, swimming away through air into this infernal image, lost in a place of non-coordinal existence— no here nor there—much as I imagine God’s expansive kingdom to be designed. Except nothing was further from God than this place into which I was inexorably and very really drawn—its very antithesis, in fact.

Some resilient part of me, one which identity keeps itself secret and would render me unable to call upon consciously, suddenly shrieked the journey’s abatement so loudly I heard it reverberating in my eardrum though the air outside remained soundless. As though pulled taut and then released with great tension, my life’s energy rebounded into me, knocking me down upon the sidewalk, my head striking the ground without injury (thankfully) and leaving me to look upon the Maker’s firmament that filled my sight in its entirety. Were it not for that, I would have been unable to disengage myself from this hypnotizing, soul-sucking aberration. Rising, I shielded my eyes with my hand to avoid its repetition and hurried home.

As dusk threatened, I, restless with dread, dared another journey to the place of my injury, knife in hand, to shred into unrecognizability this devil-spawned rendition before it could claim any more victims. Arriving again, my heart pressing my ribcage to pain, I approached warily and there discovered, in the stead of a painting, a round mirror, rust-fringed, the same runes etched into its frame as earlier the eye had been.

So stunned, my return to my abode passed without any recollection of my having done so, no memory of unlatching my door. And so, this fog-misted morning, this tale nearly done, I head back again. If, on this new sojourn, I find the painting I saw in my first encounter, I shall indeed shred it to tatters, inured to the proprietor’s objection. If, on the other hand, it is, in fact, a mirror, then I have seen my demented soul, and shall imbed the blade deep into my chest, for I am the aberration incarnate.