My friend Jose's vacant eyes

The fire in Jose's house had an echo in every corner of the village. It happened in December and, of course, the culprit was a small brazier under the table. What my friend experienced and felt that morning I did not know, but fortunately both he and his mother survived. And that was all I cared about... until recently.

Jose was in the hospital for a week with first- and second-degree burns. His mother had taken the brunt of it, with third-degree burns on her arms, chest and legs.

So, the son left the hospital before the mother and moved into his grandmother's house to continue his studies.

That same afternoon I went to see him with a bag of jelly beans and my best smile. I knocked on the door five times, reproducing that melodic rhythm that characterized my visits. I immediately began to hear the rhythmic footsteps of my friend approaching the door. He stopped behind it, possibly to look through the peephole.

-Jose, it's me. Open up.

There was no response, either physical or verbal.

- Jose, it's Antonio. Open up. I insisted.

Finally, he opened, giving the necessary margin to let himself be seen without allowing me to pass.

-Hello," he mused, "I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you properly and hardly recognized your voice.

I frowned in amazement at the explanation. I assumed it was a side effect of the medication, or perhaps a symptom of the shock I had suffered. I preferred not to comment.

-Can I come in? -I asked.

My friend opened his eyes wide and nodded energetically, as if my question had triggered a sudden chain reaction in his body. He opened the door and turned away to let me in.

We made ourselves comfortable in the room, and I left the bag of jelly beans on the table. He sat down in front of me with his head down, looking at his feet. I found it abrupt to meet Jose in this way, for he was characterized by his sympathy and his lip, and now he had turned his face away from me.

I was encouraged by the thought that everything would return to normal after a while.

Under the light that flooded the room I could also check his physical condition. There were visible signs on his face, very faint ones, which furrowed the periphery of his face, running from his forehead to his chin. Dark circles under the eyes had obscured his gaze, and small roughness had been born on his forehead. He looked paler, and his skin had lost the glow and evenness typical of youth. He looked older now.

We exchanged three poorly counted sentences; he did not seem very willing to have a conversation with me at the time. His grandmother arrived, coming from shopping, and reproached Jose for not offering me a glass of water. So, I looked at that detail. Where had my friend's hospitality gone?

The next few days passed in such an unusual atmosphere that my level of bewilderment only increased. Jose attended school normally, was punctual and said hello when he came in. However, his behaviour was atypical and unbecoming. He simply sat in his chair, resting his hands on the desk and interlacing his fingers, waiting for the class to begin, with his eyes fixed on the teacher. There were no complicit glances for anyone, not even for me. During the breaks, he would clear his table and begin to trace imaginary shapes with his index finger on the wood, while his empty and inexpressive gaze unconsciously drove away anyone who had thought to approach him.

I asked him every day about his condition. He answered that everything was fine, that I didn't worry. But I knew it wasn't. Perhaps there was a heavy blow to the head during the fire that no one had told me about. Something wasn't working normally in his brain, that was clear.

Nor did he wait for me at the end of school, when before the accident there was no day that he would leave without me. I decided to follow him and saw, to my astonishment, that he was turning onto the road leading out of town, towards the swamp. The first time I thought he would go for a walk, eager to be alone and calm, but when that habit began to repeat itself day after day, it went from worldly to abnormal.

I was beginning to obsess. Instability began to take hold of my mind the moment the unlikely ideas appeared in my dreams and thoughts. That wasn't Jose.

My parents tried to play down the situation, claiming that my friend was going through a difficult phase, that he would get well and go back to his old self.

One day I decided to go directly to his grandmother's house when I left school, intending to wait for him to return from that routine walk in the swamp. I was grateful that I took a snack with me because he didn't show up until midnight. What had he been doing there for so many hours? I hid when he arrived. I didn't want to run into his eyes. I had become afraid of his empty eyes.

During the weekend I didn't call him, I didn't look for him, I didn't want to know anything about him. But on Sunday afternoon, I took my bike and pedalled to the swamp, following the path he took every day. This led me to an area where there was a small abandoned pier. I hid behind some bushes and waited for him to appear. I would finally find out what he was doing there.

It began to get dark. Everything was quiet. I could hear the water murmuring and the hooting of an owl. A rabbit crossed the road. But there was no sign of my friend.

"Fuck it," I thought indignantly. "You didn't feel like walking today?"

I stayed in the same place for a while longer, until my stomach started to rumble, and I took the pack of cookies out of my backpack. I started to eat, trying not to make too much noise while chewing. I was already at the eighth cookie, looking lost in the water somewhere while I was chewing, when a cold and strange sensation shook the back of my neck and ran through my body, making my hair stand up. I turned abruptly and felt my heart trying to leave my throat. There was Jose, right behind me, squatting, stinging my pupils with his. The terror of the moment made me squeeze my hand around the package of cookies, crushing them.

-Tell me," he mused, "what do you expect to find?

His presence made me very uncomfortable. It could be my imagination, but it seemed to give off a muddy, withered, nauseating essence... Suddenly I was aware that I wanted to vomit. I wanted with all my being to stay away from him. I jumped to my feet and stood back. He did the same, without lowering his eyes, without cutting that visual link we had established. The chills took their toll on my body, again and again. I was shaking. What was happening? I was unable to articulate any words, my vocal cords had frozen. I looked for my bike with my eyes, where had I hidden it? I wanted to run away, I regretted having waited for him. I hated him. I wanted him miles away from my living space.

-Get out! -I screamed as I went along trying to find the bike.

Out of the corner of my eye, I checked that it didn't move. He was still static in the same place I left him, now his back was turned. I continued my visual sweep of the area, desperate. Where was the damn bike? Then, a loud splash made me spin automatically on my heels, feeling my heart beating exorbitantly in my chest.

When I looked back, I saw that Jose was gone, and the water on the shore was swirling violently, as if a large stone had crashed into its surface. I felt the terror running through my veins. All I could hear was my agitated breathing and the sound of the water returning to its natural state of calm. Had he really plunged into the swamp? I no longer knew if what I was experiencing was real or, on the contrary, I was going crazy. That's when it happened. I began to sense the movement of the water and how something was coming out of it. I heard it one, two, three, four and even five more times before I turned around. Five solid shapes had just emerged from the swamp and I didn't have the strength to look at them again. Then I noticed one of the wheels of my bike on the ground, behind a tree. I ran towards it while listening clearly to the water making its way between the extremities (or whatever) of those lumps that were walking with great strides towards the shore. When I grabbed the bike and sat down on the saddle, I gathered the courage to look back. And it was the worst thing I could do in my life.

Five tall, very tall silhouettes, about three meters, were approaching me with a determined step. Their bodies resembled a stout human figure, yet there was something very strange about them. Their arms and legs were disproportionately long, and their head was certainly larger than a human head. I did not spend any more time analyzing these beings, since I put my feet in the dust on the road, pedaling as fast as possible in the direction of the village. When I got home I found that I had peed myself.

The next day I didn't go to the institute. I woke up burning up and nauseous. I wanted to stay home, I felt safe there. I wanted to be away from Jose and erase from my mind what I had seen in the swamp. I had a hard-on about remembering him. Two days passed and I didn't leave the house. I got a serious physical illness that I didn't have so that my parents wouldn't force me to go out.

However, in the afternoon, a previously buried courage woke me up and made me go to Jose's grandmother's house.

I would find him and get the truth. I wouldn't leave there without knowing what was going on. It was enough to hide under the covers.

Around 7:00, I rang his doorbell. No one answered. I jumped the gate and looked for an open window. I thought that his grandmother would be very scared if she saw me acting like this, but it was necessary. The little window in the bathroom was open and I slid in. Lucky I was thin. I landed on the white tiles. There was no sound to disturb the calm that reigned in the home. I cautiously walked through the living room, the kitchen, the garage... nothing. I decided to investigate the bedrooms when a guttural, muffled sound caught my attention. It was coming from Grandma's room. The closer I got, the more audible it became.

-Hello? -I called. No one answered.

My body began to tremble. I reached the door, which was ajar, and put my hand on the doorknob. Gently I started to push it. I wasn't sure I wanted to see what was behind it. And then my eyes got bigger and my skin turned pale.

In the half-light I could see Jose's grandmother, who was lying on the bed, panting with a palpable absence of life energy, as if she were struggling between life and death.

-Madam! -Are you all right?

I flicked the light switch and froze. A very long scar ran across his face, from his forehead to his chin. I looked down and saw that there was another scar from his neck to his index finger, and from his thigh to his toes. A nightgown covered her, but I sensed that those scars would continue on the rest of her body. The woman was flailing about on the sheets like a fish out of water. The shaking became violent and I watched in horror as she dug her nails into the mattress.

I took out my mobile phone to call the emergency services. My hands were shaking and the phone fell on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and a sharp blow to the roof took my breath away. I ran into the living room and hid behind the couch. I could clearly make out the sound of rough footsteps on my head. Whatever it was, I was walking on the roof. I tried to relax and get some air. I was dizzy. The footsteps stopped, but were followed by another thud on the driveway pavement. I had jumped and was right outside the door. And then he came in. He was approaching, I could hear his footsteps. He stopped at the door of the hall. He knew I was there, for sure.

He was waiting for me like a poacher. But I wouldn't give it another go. I came out of hiding. Jose analyzed me from the entrance of the hall.

-What did you do to your grandmother? -I don't know. —. I reproached him with a trembling voice, squeezing what little courage I had left.

He turned on the light and walked to the centre of the room, right under the lamp. I noticed that the marks on his face, which I had thought were burns, now looked like scars. He took his fingers to her and dug them into the flesh, one hand on each side of the mark, and began to pull on opposite sides. The scar began to open. I was speechless, I held back the urge to scream. He continued to open the wound, which gradually tore away towards the forehead and chin, until it was completely detached. He held the skin and pulled it forward. But I did not see a sheet of muscle and blood, as I expected. Instead, there was a whitish, translucent, shiny skin. He continued to peel off all the skin from the face and continued with the rest of his body. It ended up peeling off the flesh as if it were coming out of a disguise. That translucent skin figure in the shape of a human began to stretch when he released the flesh of my friend, which fell like an old sack to the ground. A being ten feet tall stood before me, watching me from the height. The most traumatic thing was its eyes, for they were still those of my friend Jose, only they did not fit into that inhuman face, with its enormous head. The thin line that was the lip opened, revealing a toothless mouth through which a long, thin tongue slipped.

A voice echoed in my mind. No one was uttering it, but I could hear it perfectly. It spoke to me, mind to mind.

"It's started already," he whispered. "Your body is eagerly awaited by mine. Be proud, for you are going to take part, like your friend, in something so great that you would never understand. It is time. Millions of years in the depths of this planet and now, it's our turn.

Grandma peeked out in the hall. Like Jose before her, she had lost the humanity in her eyes.

I looked at the being again, knowing that the end had come. The atmosphere turned white. A faint smell of smoke entered my nose. The heat began to heat the room and everything turned red.

Only they remained in my field of vision and were the last thing I saw before I vanished: those empty eyes of my friend Jose.

The Chapter Hunter