The view through the eyeholes was pretty limited and it took me a second to fully understand what I was looking at. The wall the chair was now facing was covered, from floor to ceiling, in eyes. Hundreds of human eyeballs, to be specific. I assumed this was simply a macabre form of decoration; trophies from each of Videohead’s victims. But then he moved to a small metal table in the corner of the room and the eyes turned to watch him.
Each pair of disembodied eyes seemed to move in tandem, tracking Videohead’s every motion as he retrieved an odd-looking device from the table (it had a thin handle and two clamps jutting from it that resembled those things girls use to curl their eyelashes) and slowly approached Brett. Videohead bent down so that he was at eye-level with Brett, giving me a nice long close-up of his gore-stained pock-marked face. And then Videohead jabbed the clamps into Brett’s eyes and yanked.
I was expecting the feed to cut as Videohead ripped out his eyes but it didn’t. If anything, Brett’s point of view became even clearer once it was pulled free of the helmet. The room spun as Videohead turned and pressed the device to a bare spot on the wall behind him, mounting the eyes in place and providing me one final wide-angle shot of his lair as Videohead grinned up at me, proudly surveying his work.
I hit a button on the remote and the TV switched off, which seemed to instantly depressurize the foreboding atmosphere that had enveloped my room. I set the remote down and let out a weary sigh. Did I feel guilty? Maybe. Relieved? Absolutely.
It was then, amid the slew of thoughts racing through my mind, that a single realization hit me: My mom was right. I needed to start reading more books. 