He Saw Me

“The worst kind of fear isn’t being chased—it’s knowing someone looked at you and decided they didn’t have to.”

The colours from the portal danced on the ground like spilled lightning.

Not the safe, distant lightning of storms viewed from bedroom windows. Not the tame, contained lightning of television screens or science experiments. This was raw power bleeding into our world, painting the dust and rocks and concrete in impossible shades that had no names in any language I knew. Colours that shouldn't exist. Colours that hurt to look at but were impossible to turn away from.

They didn't light the man's face fully — not like the moon would have — but they touched it. Slipping across his features like curious fingers, revealing fleeting glimpses before retreating back into shadow. Enough for me to see the outline of his cheek, the smoothness of his jaw, the faint shadow beneath his eyes. His skin looked pale. Washed out. Like paper left too long in the sun. Like something bleached of all pigment, all life, all humanity.

He didn't move right away.

He just stood there, one hand still at his side, the other hanging loose near the device now clipped at his side. The colours pulsed behind him, bathing him in its unearthly glow, turning him into a silhouette carved from darkness and rimmed with light. A shape that seemed both solid and insubstantial at the same time.

The girl at his feet made no sound. No whimper, no plea, not even the rasp of laboured breathing. She could have been dead for all the life she showed, her body collapsed like a discarded doll.

The swirling light crackled and shimmered behind him, pulsing softly against the metal wall, but he didn't turn to it. Not yet. Not toward the impossible doorway he had summoned from nothing, the tear in reality that defied everything I had ever been taught about how the world worked.

He turned toward us instead.

At first, I thought he was just glancing around — checking the landscape, making sure the world was still quiet and alone. A casual survey of territory he considered his own. His head moved slowly, methodically, like a security camera panning across an empty room.

But then his head stopped moving.

His chin tilted slightly upward.

And his gaze settled on our wall. On our window. On me.

My breath caught.

Not because of what he did.

But because of what he didn't do.

He didn't blink in surprise. He didn't frown or smile or tilt his head in curiosity. He didn't startle or jerk back or call out.

He just… looked.

Straight into the crack I was peering from, as if the rusted metal and shadows and distance meant nothing. As if the wall between us wasn’t there at all. His eyes found mine with no searching — like he’d already known exactly where I was.

And for one long second, I saw them.

They weren’t dark. They weren’t warm. They didn’t blink.

They were pale — not just light, but almost colourless, like bleached glass. Cold. Focused. Not wide and mad like in scary movies, but calm. Still. Watching without blinking. Like the looking wasn’t being done by a person at all, but by something using a body.

Like eyes that didn’t just see you — but understood something about you that you didn’t even know yet.

They didn’t hold anger, or joy, or curiosity. Just that flat, vacant certainty — as if what he saw didn’t surprise him because he had already accounted for it. As if we were part of a story he’d read before.

And something behind them — or maybe the absence of something — made the back of my neck prickle. Made my skin tighten, like it was shrinking to get away from my bones.

Not like a doll. Not like a statue.

Like a man who had learned exactly how to wear a face… but not how to mean it.

But aware.

Terribly, completely aware.

They didn't flicker. Didn't widen. Didn't narrow. Didn't show any of the tiny, unconscious adjustments that eyes make when they're connected to a living brain, a living soul.

He wasn't surprised to find someone watching.

He had already known.

Maybe he had always known.

Maybe he had known before we did that we would be here, in this place, at this time, watching something we could never un-see.

My whole body went still.

Not the stillness of sleep or rest or peace. The stillness of prey that knows it has been spotted by a predator. The absolute, frozen immobility that comes from the deepest, most primitive part of the brain. The part that knows, without words or thought or reason, that movement means death.

Ribbons slipped slightly in my grip, and I didn't even notice. My arms felt far away, disconnected from my body, as if they belonged to someone else entirely. My heartbeat was loud — not like a thump, but like a drum underwater. Deep and slow and too big for my chest. Each pulse stretched out, elongated, as if time itself had begun to warp and distort under the weight of that gaze.

Mack still had his hand on my wrist, but it felt small now — a tiny thing, like the hand of someone who didn't matter. Who couldn't possibly matter in the face of what we were seeing. His grip, which had been an anchor, a comfort, now seemed as insubstantial as a cobweb. What protection could a brother offer against something like this?

Because that man was looking through me.

Not like I was a child. Not like I was a witness. Not like I was a person at all.

But like I was an object.

Like a thing on the shelf of a room he'd already measured. Like something he had chosen not to reach for. Not because he couldn't. Not because he was afraid. But because I wasn't worth the effort.

He held my gaze longer than anyone ever had before.

Ten seconds. Maybe more. Long enough for me to think, this is it.

Not because he would run. Not because he would chase. But because he could, if he wanted to.

And he didn't.

And that was worse.

Because it meant I was already accounted for. Already factored into whatever calculations he had made. Already dismissed as insignificant, unworthy of concern. A witness who would not be believed. A child whose testimony would be discounted as imagination or nightmare or confusion.

His disinterest was more terrifying than any threat could have been. It said: You have seen me, and it doesn't matter. Nothing you can do matters.

Then, just as silently as he'd turned, he turned back again.

No hurry. No concern. Just the deliberate movement of someone who has all the time in the world, who operates according to a schedule only he can perceive.

One step forward. Then another.

The portal's light intensified as he approached, the colours spinning faster, more urgently, as if responding to his presence. As if greeting something familiar.

He walked into the colours — into that swirling, impossible rip in the world — as if it were nothing more than a doorway in a hallway he knew by heart. As if stepping between realities was as ordinary as crossing a street or entering a room.

His coat flared slightly in the current of the portal's light, the fabric rippling like water disturbed by a passing fish. For just a moment, his outline seemed to blur, to lose definition, as if the boundary between his body and the colours was permeable, negotiable.

His shoulders never hunched. His head never dropped. His posture remained perfect, inhuman in its precision, as the colours began to consume him. As reality itself bent and folded around him, accepting him as if he belonged more to that impossible elsewhere than he ever had to our world.

And then he was gone.

Swallowed by light that should not exist, gone to a place that had no name or location I could comprehend.

The colours kept spinning for a few seconds more.

The girl, still slumped, didn’t move. She didn't rise gracefully or with purpose. She simply... froze.

But I didn't watch her.

I couldn't.

Because even though he had left, even though the space where he'd stood was now empty…

…his eyes were still on me.

Not in a real way.

Not physically.

Not as if he were still standing there, still looking through the crack in the wall, still boring into my soul with that empty silver gaze.

But in that deep, cold corner of myself where you know a thing has seen you.

Has marked you.

Has catalogued you and filed you away for future reference.

And that knowing is forever.

It burrows into you like a splinter too deep to remove. It lives under your skin, in your bones, behind your eyes. It waits for you in dreams, in the moments before sleep, in the sudden starts of waking in the darkest hours of night.

The knowledge that something impossible knows you exist.

And might, someday, remember that fact.