They loved forcing Alan into his dark room, and then locking the door. They would go outside and scratch at the windows of the room, deforming their faces against the glass while uttering strange guttural cries and curses at him. They were his brothers and sisters, and they were scary little bastards. Sometimes they startled him out of a deep, troubled sleep, and he would try to flee his nightmare before he quite realized he was awake, running into a wall, or into a piece of furniture - or worse, his stepfather. He would be beaten if he woke his parents, and have to go to school bruised and aching
The streetlight outside shed a little pale light into the room; just enough to merge the outlines of various objects into new contours. The streetlight made vague suggestions itself, and imagination filled in the details. After being confined by his siblings in the dark of his room, Alan trembled before incomprehensible beasts and people whose legs were the legs of desks and chairs.
Alan’s pupils adjusted to the dark. The beat of his heart gradually slowed. A moth flew into his ear canal. He smelled the dust lying dormant, heard the house settling with a creak. He vaguely perceived footsteps elsewhere in the house. A cat cried out for milk in the kitchen. Water protested the confines of its plumbing. Cars hissed by on the street outside. The television gradually succumbed to static. Clocks softly chattered, imperceptibly falling out of sync with one another as night fell.
Exotic foliage grew and withered upon the inner surfaces of Alan’s eyelids, and he tensed in the dark, and plunged into the jungle. He saw things that can only be described as miraculous, and others he really didn’t want to look at; but he kept his eyes open, out of stubbornness. And then someone very odd looking thrust a steaming cup of tea in his hand with a welcoming smile.
The tea was strong. It had a few bits of leaf floating in it. It filled the house with its perfume as it boiled on the gas burner. It dyed everyone’s teeth its own shade of tanin brown. It left a residue inside the pan it was boiled in, and it summoned the Big Eye.
The Big Eye was a perpetual threat: Alan’s mother had warned him of the possibility of losing sleep to it. He had envisioned it as a large eyeball, staring at him from the ceiling directly over his bed; the Big Eye, observer of all juvenile iniquities: the avenging optical organ, omniscient and merciless; judgmental and bloodshot. It would be hard to get to sleep, knowing you were being watched.
A lady from church visited one day. She was a big woman with thick lenses in her glasses. She was wearing sandles, and some of her toes were fused. The rose blossoms which decorated her frock hinted at bloodstains and verdigris. She accepted a glass of tea from Alan, without sugar, evidently unacquainted with the Big Eye. She patted the top of Alan’s head affectionately and told him to go to bed.
He did, but then his brothers and sisters were peering in at the darkness of the room again, faces melting down the windowpanes. Alan sat up and watched. He laughed in the dark, and then after a while he went back to sleep.
