The Gaze

In the dim glow of the tavern, where shadows clung to the walls like cobwebs spun from the void, James leaned closer to Barbara. The air was thick with the scent of stale ale and something else, something acrid, unplaceable–as if the universe had exhaled a warning.

Barbara was a vision–her dress a cascade of midnight velvet, her open-toe sandals revealing delicate feet. Her laughter was a melody, sharp and fleeting, and her eyes, twin pools of starless black drinking in the light, held him.

He was charming her, or so he thought, weaving words with the confidence of a man who believed he could tame the night. His gaze drifted downward, drawn to the elegant curve of her foot, where the nail on the big toe of her right foot gleamed under the flickering lamplight.

It wasn’t a nail at all, he realized with a jolt, but an eye—a single, unblinking eye with a blue iris that shimmered like a dying star. At first, he dismissed it as a trick, a painted curiosity, some avant-garde artifice.

Then it blinked, or perhaps it winked. The motion was slow and deliberate, and James recoiled.

“Something wrong, James?” her voice was silk, but there was an edge, a resonance that vibrated in his bones.

Her lips curled into a smile, but her eyes—those on her face—remained fixed, unyielding, as if they were not hers at all but windows to something vast and ancient.

He stammered, his charm unraveling. “Your… your toe… it’s looking at me.”

She tilted her head, and the air grew colder, the tavern’s murmurs fading into a suffocating silence.

“Oh, that,” she said, her tone almost playful yet laced with a hunger that made his skin crawl. “It sees what I cannot. It knows what you are.”

The eye on her toe blinked again, its pupil dilating, and James felt a pull as if his soul were dragging toward it. The blue iris pulsed, and in its depths, he glimpsed something–a writhing, formless mass of tentacles and voids, a cosmic entity that churned in a realm beyond stars, beyond time.

It was not merely watching him; it was knowing him, peeling back the layers of his existence until he was nothing but a fleeting thought in its incomprehensible mind. He tried to look away, but the eye held him, its gaze a chain forged in the heart of a dying galaxy.

Barbara leaned closer, her breath cold as the void.

“You thought you were the hunter, didn’t you?” she whispered her voice no longer hers but a chorus of dissonant tones, as if a thousand mouths spoke from beyond the veil. “But you are the prey, James. You always were.”

The tavern dissolved, its walls melting into a starless expanse. The floor was no longer wood but a pulsing, fleshy surface writhing beneath his feet.

Barbara’s form shimmered, her body stretching and twisting, her limbs elongating into tendrils that reached for the heavens—or whatever lay beyond them. The eye on her toe grew, consuming her foot and leg, until it was all that remained–a single, massive orb floating in the void, its blue iris fixed on him, unblinking, eternal.

James screamed, but no sound came. His body was unraveling, his thoughts scattering like dust in a cosmic wind.

The eye saw him, knew him, and in its gaze, he was nothing–a fleeting spark in the infinite hunger of the cosmos. And as the last of his consciousness dissolved, he heard Barbara’s laughter, or perhaps the laughter of the thing that wore her skin, echoing through the endless dark.

In the tavern, the lamplight flickered. A woman in midnight velvet sipped her drink, her sandals gleaming.

The space across from her was empty. It was as if no one had ever stood there. And on her toe, an eye blinked, or perhaps it winked, searching for the next soul to claim.