The Black Eyed Children

The movie had been forgettable. Brian Whitmore knew that even before the credits finished rolling, even before the lights came up and the last handful of other patrons shuffled out past him with their empty cups and their quiet, private thoughts. He had chosen the film the way he chose most things in those days — out of mild necessity rather than genuine interest — and he sat in the back row of the Rialto Theater with a notepad on his knee out of habit, though he had written nothing on it. The theater smelled of old carpet and spilled soda, and the particular sweetness of that smell followed him out into the corridor, through the glass doors, and into the night air of Abilene.

Outside, the evening had turned. The sky carried the weight of weather coming in from the west, the kind of thick, pressing stillness that preceded rain in West Texas, where the land was flat enough that storms announced themselves from a great distance and still somehow always arrived before you were ready for them. Brian stood for a moment under the marquee, breathing it in. The air had that particular metallic quality he had known since childhood, clean and slightly dangerous, like a wire sparking in the dark. He pulled his jacket tighter across his shoulders and fished in his pocket for his keys.

The parking lot was nearly empty. It was a Wednesday in October, well past ten o'clock, and the surrounding blocks of downtown Abilene had gone quiet in the way that small city downtown go quiet on a weekday night — not entirely still, but settled, the traffic on Pine Street reduced to the occasional slow sweep of headlights. Brian's Honda Civic sat near the far end of the lot, under a overhead lamp whose light flickered in a slow, irregular rhythm, as though it were breathing. He had parked there out of habit, away from the cluster of other cars, though those cars had since left. Now his was the last one.

He walked toward it across the cracked asphalt, his footsteps flat and even in the quiet. The notepad went back into his jacket pocket. He was thinking about the drive home, about whether there was anything in the refrigerator worth eating, about the agricultural board piece he still had to finish before Friday. These were the ordinary textures of his life at thirty-two, and he moved through them the way most people move through familiar rooms — without much looking.

He was ten feet from the car when he noticed them.

They were standing near the dumpster at the edge of the lot, in the narrow shadow between the theater's exterior wall and the alley beyond. Two figures, small, the kind of small that registered immediately as children. He stopped walking. His mind supplied the reasonable explanation first, the way minds always do: kids cutting through, teenagers looking for somewhere to be on a Wednesday night, a shortcut between streets. He had written enough small-town stories to know that children appear in unlikely places at unlikely hours and that this, in itself, means nothing.

But something had already changed in his body. It happened before his thoughts caught up — a tightening across his chest, a cold weight settling low in his gut, some older part of his nervous system registering a signal that the thinking part of him hadn't yet received. He stood with his keys in his hand and watched them.

They stepped forward together. Not quickly. Their movement had a measured, almost mechanical quality, as though each step were the same precise length as the last, and they crossed the distance between the dumpster and the edge of the lot's light in a way that Brian would spend years afterward trying to describe. It wasn't that they moved strangely, exactly. It was that they moved with a kind of uniformity that nothing alive quite manages. They stopped exactly ten feet away from him, in the same unconscious way that he had stopped, as though the distance between them were a rule both parties had agreed to without discussion.

They were wearing gray hoodies, both of them, oversized in the way children's clothes are often oversized when they belong to someone else. The hoods were down. The boy — the one slightly forward, the one closest to Brian — looked to be eleven or twelve, though there was something about the way he held himself that made assigning an age feel uncertain, like trying to date a photograph with no context. The girl stood a half-step behind and to his left, her palms turned slightly outward at her sides, fingers loose.

The boy's skin was the color of old candle wax. Brian noticed it the way you notice something wrong in a room before you can name what it is — a texture that didn't belong, a pallor that had nothing to do with the parking lot's bad light. There were patches on his forearms where the skin looked different still, flatter, as though it had stopped participating in whatever the rest of the surface was doing. Brian stared at the boy's forearms and felt his grip tighten around his keys.

Then the overhead lamp flickered.

It happened in the space of a second, that irregular, breathing stutter of the light, and in that second Brian got a clear look at the boy's face. At his eyes.

There were no whites. There was no iris, no color, no variation. The eyes were solid black from lid to lid, filling the entire visible socket, and they did not catch the light the way eyes catch light. They absorbed it. They were the flattest thing Brian had ever seen in a human face, and his mind refused the sight the first time, slid away from it, tried to reassemble something more familiar in its place. His mind failed at this. The eyes were still there when the lamp steadied again, and they were looking at him with a patience that had no bottom to it.

"We need a ride home," the boy said.

The voice was wrong in a way Brian could not immediately locate. The words themselves were ordinary — four words, a simple request, the kind a child makes without thinking. But the voice carrying them had no breath in it. There was no variation of pressure, no slight shift in register at the end of the sentence where a question would naturally rise or a statement would naturally fall. It was flat in a way that Brian would later describe as phonetic, as though someone had looked at the words written on a page and reproduced the sounds without ever having spoken them before. It was a recording of a voice. It was not a voice.

Brian did not move.

The cold had come up from somewhere. Not the weather, though the air was still carrying its electrical warning of rain. This was a cold with a center, a cold that seemed to originate in the space between him and the two children, and it settled into his chest and along the backs of his arms in a way that made breathing feel like an effort. He had been cold before. He had stood on the high plains in January and felt the wind come off the caprock like something deliberate. This was not that kind of cold. This had intent to it, or something that felt like intent, and the distinction between the two was a question he would still be asking himself a decade later.

"We just need to get home," the boy said again. The same cadence, the same flat mechanical reproduction. "You can let us in."

The urge was there before Brian understood where it had come from. It arrived not as a thought but as a physical sensation, a heaviness in his hands, a pull in the direction of the Civic's door handle, as though his hands had received different instructions than his mind. He looked down at his keys. The Honda key was between his index finger and thumb. He had been about to unlock the car. He could feel the logic of it in his muscles, the ordinary chain of events — unlock the car, open the door, get in — and something in the sequence had been quietly rearranged so that it included two more steps: open the back door, let them in.

He did not do it.

He couldn't have said, afterward, exactly what stopped him. The resistance didn't come from a decision, not the way decisions usually feel — deliberate, chosen, consciously assembled from available options. It came from somewhere below thought, from the same place the cold had reached, from whatever part of him had gone tense before his mind caught up. He took a step back instead of forward, and the heaviness in his hands did not disappear but it lost its direction, became just weight without a destination.

"No," he said.

His voice cracked on the word. He heard it, the crack, and it embarrassed him even then, in that parking lot with those eyes on him, in the way that involuntary sounds embarrass you regardless of the circumstances that produce them. He cleared his throat. He said it again.

"No. I'm not giving you a ride."

The children did not react. This was the thing he would return to most often in the years that followed, the thing that would keep him sitting at his desk at three in the morning with every light in the apartment on: they did not react. A normal child who refused would show something. Disappointment, irritation, surprise, the small shifting expressions that cross a face when an expectation goes unmet. These two showed nothing. The boy's face remained arranged in the same configuration it had been in since they stepped into the light, and the girl's face, which Brian had barely looked at directly, held the same quality of patient, absolute stillness.

They simply stood there. Palms out, ten feet away, and they waited.

Brian walked to the driver's side door. His legs worked correctly but without confidence, the way legs work when the body is uncertain about the ground beneath them. He got the key in the lock on the second try. He opened the door and sat down and pulled it shut behind him and pressed the lock down with his palm, and then he sat in the dark interior of his Civic with his hands on the steering wheel and his keys still in his left hand and he looked through the windshield.

They hadn't moved.

They were still in the same position, ten feet away, in the same angle relative to the lamp, and they were looking at the car with the same bottomless patience they had looked at him with. The lamp flickered again and Brian turned the key and the Civic's engine caught on the first try, which was not always guaranteed, and he backed out of the parking space with more speed than was sensible. The tires found a seam in the asphalt and the car shuddered, and Brian corrected, and he turned onto the exit row too sharply and then he was on the street and driving.

He did not look in the rearview mirror for two full blocks. When he finally did, the parking lot was behind him and dark and empty, and the light over the space where he had been parked was flickering in its slow, irregular rhythm, and there was nothing there.

He drove home in seventeen minutes. He knew the time because he looked at the clock when he turned out of the lot and again when he pulled into the space outside his apartment building, and the numbers were the only concrete thing he felt capable of holding onto during the drive. His shoulders were up around his ears. He noticed this when he parked, the way a person sometimes notices physical tension only once the immediate cause of it has passed, and he sat with his hands still gripping the steering wheel and made a deliberate effort to lower his shoulders and breathe.

The rain arrived while he was still sitting in the car. It came without warning in the way West Texas rain sometimes does, even when the air has been telegraphing it for an hour. One moment the windshield was clear and the next, it was covered, drops hitting the glass in a dense, disorganized rush, and Brian sat and listened to it and kept his hands on the wheel long after there was any reason to keep them there.

He was a journalist. He had covered fires and drownings and one particularly grim stretch of winter storms that had taken out three grain elevators in two counties. He had sat with grieving parents and with men who had lost their livelihoods and with local officials who were either lying to him or had already convinced themselves that the lies were true. He had looked at difficult things and written about them with the even-handed precision that his training had shaped in him over a decade. He did not startle easily. He was not, as a rule, a man who sat in parking lots or in his own car in the rain and felt his hands shaking.

But his hands were shaking.

He noticed them when he finally pulled the key from the ignition. The shaking was fine and shallow, the kind that comes from adrenaline rather than fear, or from the particular compound of both that the body produces when it has been asked to process something it doesn't have a category for. Brian pressed his palms flat on his thighs and held them there until they steadied. The rain hammered the roof of the Civic with a sound like static.

He thought about the eyes. He didn't want to, but they were there regardless, present in the dark behind his thoughts the way certain images lodge themselves after you've looked at them too directly. Solid black. Not the black of dilated pupils in a dark space, not the black of a color contact lens, not any black that belonged to the anatomy of a human face. The black of something that was not built for light and did not pretend otherwise. He had looked into them for no more than three seconds and the impression they left was as clean and total as a burn.

He also thought about his hand. The way it had moved toward the door handle without consulting him. He turned this over carefully, the way he turned evidence over when he was working a story, looking at it from different angles, testing it. He was a journalist, and journalists were trained in the discipline of not concluding more than the evidence supported. The reasonable explanation was that he had simply been in the process of getting into his car and the motion had been interrupted. The reasonable explanation was that his hand had continued a gesture already in progress. This was possible. He considered it seriously.

He did not believe it.

He went upstairs. He made coffee he didn't drink. He sat at the kitchen table under the overhead light and listened to the rain against the window and tried to decide what to do with what had happened, and found that he had no framework for it. His apartment was small and familiar and smelled of the cleaning product he used on the linoleum and of the particular staleness that single-occupant apartments develop over time, and he was grateful for all of it, for the ordinariness of the surfaces and the predictability of the shadows and the fact that the door was locked and the lock was a thing he had chosen and engaged himself.

He thought about calling someone. He went through the list in his head — his editor at the regional paper, a couple of friends from his Baylor days, his mother in Lubbock — and discarded each option in turn, because there was no version of the conversation he could imagine in which the telling didn't make him sound like a man who had been frightened by children in a parking lot and needed to talk about it. And maybe that was all it was. Maybe the eyes had been a trick of the lamp, a flicker at the wrong moment, a shadow falling in an unexpected angle across a face that was ordinary and he had simply been tired and startled and the mind, when startled, sometimes produces its own additions to the available evidence.

He sat with this for a while.

Then he got up and found a legal pad in the drawer beside the refrigerator, the one he kept for grocery lists and phone numbers, and he sat back down at the table and wrote the date at the top of the first page — October 16, 1996 — and below it he wrote everything he could remember. Not in the shaped, organized prose he used for articles, but in the raw, sequential order that the details had arrived in, because he had been trained that the first account was always the truest, that the story a witness told before they had time to arrange it was the one worth capturing. He wrote about the lamp and the gray hoodies and the candle-wax skin and the dead patches on the forearms. He wrote about the voice that had no breath in it. He wrote about the eyes.

He paused for a long time before writing about his hand. Then he wrote about it anyway.

He wrote: felt compelled to open the door. Not thought about it — felt it. Like gravity with a direction.

He looked at what he'd written. He had covered about two-thirds of the legal pad's first page, his handwriting smaller and more compressed than usual in the way it got when he was working something out rather than recording. He was aware that what he had written was not a story. It was not evidence of anything except that he had had an unusual experience in a parking lot, that he had been frightened, and that his hands had done something he found difficult to explain. A reasonable editor would look at this and see a reporter who had been startled by a couple of kids at ten o'clock on a Wednesday and needed a good night's sleep.

He put the legal pad face down on the table. He turned off the kitchen light and went to bed and lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and listened to the rain, which had settled into a steadier rhythm now, and he did not sleep for a very long time.

When he finally did, he dreamed of nothing, which was its own kind of relief.

In the morning, the rain was gone and the air outside had that washed, temporary clearness that follows West Texas weather, and Brian made fresh coffee and stood at his kitchen window and looked out at the street below, where the gutters were still running with the previous night's water. The legal pad was still on the table, face-down. He did not turn it over. He showered and dressed and made himself eat a piece of toast and spent the morning working on the agricultural board piece, which was dull and necessary and required exactly the kind of focused, technical attention that left no room for anything else.

He filed it just after noon and sat back in his desk chair and became aware, in the way that suppressed things eventually make themselves known, that his shoulders were up around his ears again.

He picked up the legal pad.

He read through what he'd written, slowly, and when he finished reading he turned to the second page and wrote: the request required permission. They asked. They waited for an answer. They did not approach the car. He underlined the last sentence. It had not struck him in the parking lot, not in any conscious way, but it was there in the account: they had stopped. Ten feet away. They had stopped and they had asked. And when he refused, they had not moved.

He wrote: why not move closer?

He didn't have an answer. But the question sat on the page with a weight that felt like a beginning.

The days after the Rialto encounter had a different texture than the days before them. This was the only way Brian could describe it, to himself and eventually to others — not that the world looked different, but that it felt different to move through it. He walked to his car in the morning with his keys already in his hand. He sat with his back to walls in restaurants. He found himself watching the edges of parking lots the way he had never watched them before, scanning the shadows near dumpsters and the gaps between parked vehicles with a low-grade alertness that he recognized, professionally, as the behavior of someone who had been shaken and hadn't yet recovered.

He recognized it and could not stop it.

He went back to the Rialto on Friday, in the afternoon, when the lot was half-full and the light was good. He walked the perimeter of the lot, which took about four minutes, and he stood in the space near the dumpster where the children had been standing and looked at the ground. There was nothing to see. Asphalt, a few cigarette butts, the ordinary debris of a commercial parking area. He looked at the overhead lamp, which was off in the daylight and showed its age in the rust along its housing, and he looked at the place where he had been standing when he noticed them, and he measured the distance with his eyes. Ten feet. Maybe a little more. He had written ten feet on the legal pad and ten feet was what it looked like.

He drove home and sat at his desk and looked at the legal pad for a long time.

Then he opened a new file on his computer and typed the date at the top — October 16, 1996 — and began to type.

He was not sure, at that point, what he was writing. It wasn't a story, not in the editorial sense, not yet. It was what he had always done with things that didn't resolve themselves on their own: he put them into language, because language was the system he trusted most, and because the act of organizing an experience into sentences imposed a kind of structure on it that thinking alone could not. Documentation is a form of control. He had said this to a younger reporter once, years ago, and meant it in the practical sense — keep your notes, keep your records, build a paper trail. Now he meant it in a different sense, a more personal one, and the difference made him slightly uncomfortable.

He typed for two hours. When he finished, he had four pages of single-spaced text, which covered the events of the parking lot in more detail than the legal pad had, and which included a section of observations organized under a heading that simply read: what I noticed. The birch-bark quality of the skin. The dead patches on the forearms. The specific flatness of the voice, which he spent three full paragraphs trying to describe accurately and still felt he had not quite gotten right. The way both of them stood with their palms slightly outward, as though demonstrating that their hands were empty. The metronomic quality of their stillness, the sense that they were not standing the way a person stands — adjusting, shifting, blinking, breathing with any visible regularity — but were arranged in place, like objects that had been set down.

He saved the file under a name that wasn't descriptive. He closed the laptop.

He made dinner. He ate it at the kitchen table. He watched the news until the news became the same three stories cycling through a fourth time, and then he turned it off. He sat in the quiet of his apartment, which was a very familiar kind of quiet, and he thought about what he had put into the file, and he thought about the weight that had been in his hand in the parking lot, and he thought about the voice that had no breath in it, and eventually he got up and went to the window and looked out at the street below, which was empty and lit by the ordinary amber of the streetlamps, and he stood there for a while without thinking anything in particular.

The window glass was cool against his palm when he rested it there. The street stayed empty. The lamps held their ordinary light without flickering. He was aware that he was watching the street in the same way he had watched the parking lot perimeter on Friday afternoon, with that low, searching alertness, and he was aware that this was going to be a difficult habit to break, if it could be broken at all.

He had been frightened before. He had covered a gas explosion in a small town south of Abilene and stood close enough to the remains of a building to feel the heat still coming off the rubble. He had talked to people in the immediate aftermath of terrible things and absorbed some portion of what those things had left on them. He knew what fear felt like in the body, the particular chemical signature of it, the way it metabolized differently depending on its source. What he had felt in the Rialto parking lot was not exactly fear, or it was not only fear. It was something adjacent to fear, something that fear was a component of but did not entirely account for.

It was the specific quality of wrongness. The sense of encountering a thing that did not belong in the category it was presenting itself as belonging to. The children looked like children. They were the right size, the right proportions, the right relative scale to each other and to the parking lot and to Brian himself. But they were not children, or they were not only children, or something about them occupied a space that the word children did not adequately describe, and his body had known this before his eyes found the eyes, which was the part he kept returning to.

He had known before he looked.

He went back to the laptop. He opened the file and added a note at the bottom of the fourth page: the recognition preceded the evidence. I was afraid before I saw the eyes. Something else was transmitting the information.

He stared at this for a moment and then typed: what does that mean?

He didn't answer the question that night. He closed the laptop again and went to bed and this time he slept, though not well, and in the morning the file was still there and the question was still unanswered and the October light came through his bedroom window with its ordinary indifference to everything that had happened in the past four days.

He made coffee. He looked out the window. He thought about the voice that had said you can let us in.

He thought about the fact that it had said let us in rather than let us ride or give us a ride — that the second request had shifted from the specific to the general, from a ride to an entry, as though the destination had never been the point. He had not noted this on the legal pad. He had not included it in the computer file. He had not consciously registered it in the parking lot. But it was there in his memory, sitting in the account he had given himself of the evening, and when he pulled it out and looked at it in the morning light, it had the quality of a detail that mattered.

He went back to the desk and opened the file and added it.

Then he sat for a while longer, his coffee cooling at his elbow, looking at the screen and thinking about the difference between a journalist who had been startled by something strange and a journalist who was starting to take the strange thing seriously. The line between those two things was not as clear as he would have liked it to be. He was not sure he was on the right side of it. He was not entirely sure there was a right side.

But the file was open. The details were accumulating. And the question he had typed at the bottom of the fourth page was still there, still unanswered, still waiting for him to be honest about what he already half-suspected: that what he had encountered in the Rialto parking lot was not something he was going to be able to file away under strange coincidence or fatigue or low light and an overactive mind.

He had spent a decade writing about the world as it was. He had been good at it. He had been good at the flat, factual rendering of events, at finding the true shape of a story by removing everything that didn't belong to it. He knew what evidence looked like and he knew what the absence of evidence looked like, and what he had in the parking lot was neither one. What he had was an experience, sitting in his memory with the unambiguous solidity of something real, and the experience said: those eyes were not human, and your hand moved toward the door without you, and the cold came from them, not from the weather.

The experience did not care whether he was ready to believe it.

He saved the file. He closed the laptop. He picked up his coffee, which had gone cold while he was sitting there, and he drank it anyway, and outside his window the October morning continued without him, ordinary and unhurried, carrying its own weather and its own light and its own complete indifference to the thing that had happened to Brian Whitmore in a parking lot on a Wednesday night, and to the fact that he was, slowly and with great reluctance, beginning to believe that it had happened exactly as he remembered it.