Silver Eye

Scott groaned as he slowly woke up, his body throbbing from the hangover he’d induced from his night of binge drinking. This had been his first night alone in his grandfather’s house, and he’d chosen to get as drunk as possible to remember the old man, and thank him for the ancestral family home.

Old and colonial, the former plantation sat on the banks of the Everson River, overgrown fields that once grew tobacco now only held a harvest of weeds and shrubs. Rolling over, Scott grunted in agony as he found the he couldn’t move. Cracking an eyelid open, he looked over and around himself, growing more terrified by the second that he was strung up by thick fishing line, looped around nails that had been hammered into the wood around him.

His entire body was pinned to the ground, his face angled up staring at the ceiling. Hearing the slight scuttling and the tipping of a glass bottle, he thrashed against his bindings.

“Help!” He bellowed, his voice hoarse and his head pounding.

“Help! Help!” Cackled a dozen squeaky voices, mocking him as they circled around his prone form.

“Who’s there? What do you want from me? I don’t have any money, I swear, but there’s some fine silver in the den that you can take, it’s worth a small fortune.” He cried, growing more and more terrified at the sounds he heard all around him.

“Oh we know about the silver.” One voice piped up, chuckling.

“We used it to kill the old man, remember?” Another chimed in, from Scott’s right.

“He had such lovely eyes… just like yours.” Yet another voice said lovingly, a furry paw running down the side of his ankle as it spoke.

“No! It’s my turn this time! You can have the next ones, me and Quitikil have waited long enough!” Chimed a high pitched voice, claws digging in to the side of Scott’s face. Staring his eyes, he could just make out the blurry form of… a rat?”

Before he could say anything, he felt two rats climb atop his chest, a third climbing atop his stomach. Stretching against the fishing line cutting into his body, Scott struggled to look his captors in the eyes.

He screamed when he saw them.

Tiny, patchy little vermin with yellowed skin and brown, moldering fur, they resembled tiny humans that had crossbred with rats. In their long fingered paws they held silver spoons, the kind used for eating grapefruit, with jagged edges. What was worst of all was the two that stood on his chest; in the middle of their skulls was a gaping orifice, about the size of a grape, through which you could see a beating purple organ. No visible eyes on the two slowly moving forward, but on the one on his stomach…

… it stared back with th single cyclopean eye of his grandfather, a green orb that was bloodshot and dry. It held a olive fork in one hand, which it twirled back and forth.

“Hold still now, or you’ll make us miss!” One of the wretched little beasts commanded as they crawled up his neck to his face.

Scott closed his eyes as tight as he could, fighting against his bonds and cursing God for allowing this to happen. A sudden stabbing pain in his stomach pulled another scream past his lips, his eyes flashing open as he stared down at the green-eyed creature, wriggling the silver fork into his soft stomach.

He screamed even louder as the jagged edges of the spoon slipped into the side of his eye, sliding along its soft pulpy contours and severing the cord behind it, popping the white orb free from the socket. The other beast scooped up the eye, shoving it into its gaping orifice with a look of unabashed glee marking its face. The eye rolled until the green pupil was now staring down at Scott.

“Okay, just one more,” The other eyeless creature said.