The Peephole

Darkness creeps slowly over the room as night falls, and envelopes the interior of my flat. Idly wandering round, I draw the curtains shut in each room, secure the lock on the front door, attach the chain and, out of habit, aim a brief glance through the peephole. For a split second, pressing my face up against the door to squint through the tiny concave lens, my entire line of vision consists of the limited, warped length of the corridor stretching beyond my front door. Dimly lit by a flickering ceiling light, the grey stone pathway, flanked by equally grey, cracked, looming walls that curve outwardly at the extreme edges of the circular view, veers towards itself as it reaches a stairwell at the end, which disappears downstairs and out of sight.

By turns the blinking light, emitting a low static hum of electricity, illuminates the scene before plunging it again into darkness. Contained within the entirety of the moment's glance, shadows and ethereal images stalk and weave their way around the granite canvas in the intervening minutiae of time before the next uncertain shimmer of light sends them scuttling back, only to be reborn yet again a split second later, flitting and wavering in the oscillating gleam.

Drawing my eye away and closing the shutter, I make my way back through the gloomy semi-darkness of my own flat to my bed, clamber gratefully into it, and pull the covers up around me to guard against the chill. As I close my eyes the image of the dank corridor, as it is visible within the tiny circular universe of the peephole, pervades my mind and lingers, its grey walls crawling with spectral figures and grotesque caricatures, barely formed limbs and distorted appendages clawing at the edges of reality as the light, that troublesome light, burns now searingly bright, then obselete, now blazing incandescent and furious, flames writhing in the corners of my single retina as it is clamped, wired to the tiny godforsaken hole in the door...

It was then I heard a knock. A single, definitive, door-splintering, reverberating crunch that shakes me from my reverie and sends waves of confusion and paranoia convulsing through my body. I wait, sat bolt upright. Just as swiftly as it had been broken, silence again descends, and there were no further knocks. Grabbing a candle from my bedside I rise and venture hesitantly to the door, treading as lightly as my body allows me. With equal quietude I slide aside the shutter and once again, pressing my face against the cold wood of the door, I peer with trepidation through the glass dot of my peephole.

The corridor stretches into the distance again, curving at the edges, the light quivers against the grey walls, the shadows briefly dance, but they are uninterrupted by anybody or anything.

Turning again from the door and making to go back, the swiftness of my movement causes the light of the candle to extinguish. Groping blindly for the walls, I advance several steps before the silence is again shattered by a single crunching knock, a hammer blow wrought with intent upon my front door.

'Stay!' I shout, vexed now and fraught with angst, 'Why do you knock upon my door so?'

With no reply forthcoming, in the pitch dark I hurriedly palm my way across the wall, grasping blindly at the door until my fingers detect the peephole, and I thrust my eye upon it once more. Nothing but more inky, vague dark. That cursed stretch of corridor, shrouded in gloomy night! I linger, peering fruitlessly at the wall of shade, attempting to ascertain any movement, any sign of my torturer.

Then, a blaze of light from that faulty lamp overhead, and suddenly all that was visible through the miniscule porthole, filling the circle of it in an instant, was an eye! A huge human eye! Bulbous, bloodshot and hideous, glaring furiously back at my own!

External concepts dissolve around me, my body impulsively wishes to reel backwards but instead my own eye remains welded, unflinching, to the glass. The space and reality behind my eyeball are, for that passage of time, constructions of my mind, projections of my own engrained perceptions, and all of existence is now that horrid, penetrating, scrutinous, piercing pupil surrounded by a convoluted, disgusting web of decaying, sleep-deprived red lines, its relentless gaze transmitting unending rage and fury, unending loss and despair, unending malevolence and hate.

The flickering light that illuminates it again briefly bursts into life, uncontrollably, blindingly bright, and then is gone. The following flicker casts light on the corridor as it was, and always is, dank, grey and eternally empty, yet still I remain, my eye pressed fervently against the peephole, my pupil darting everywhere, scouring the world through it. It is my own.