It is said that the man with the burning eyes emerged from the sea on a night of the new moon, when only the sparks of stars illuminate the crests of the waves, and the surf genuinely shines wine-dark, here in our little city, where the night is as humid as the day, and we are surrounded by gelatinous air without wind, the mosaic of lights from the seaside hotels and the blossoming skyscrapers the only sign of the rocky coast, passed by a thousand and two thousand years of ships, and people walk slowly and move slowly at night, embracing in sweltering apartments, bringing them closer to the tectonic plates and incendiary darkness.
The man was not seen in the sea, however, for he preferred shady groves and darkened alleys, shadowy corners of tree-lined streets, flowered nocturnal gardens, and the stately rounded buildings and white stone archways of the architecture of our little city, built by the exiles who could build nowhere else, their bare and curvaceous exteriors circumnavigating the strange spaces, entrances and archways, with their cobblestone squares rounded by night flowers and bats, all other things sleeping, except for those that do not sleep, but seek other times, places, and pleasures on those eldritch romantic evenings in which darkness seems to harbor bulging fruits and dripping nectar, unconsumed but odiferous in the black atmosphere.
The man was described as a figure in shadow, obsidian in form, tall and thin, limbs long and fluid, moving in languid convolutions, as if his body possessed no corners, with arms and legs that turned, squirmed, and contorted themselves into the most insidious yet seductive configurations, becoming and emerging out of the shadows of which he appeared to be constituted.
Most striking, of course, were the red eyes, seemingly too large for such a long and narrow face, whose other features could not be seen in the vermillion glare, which was illuminated as if from within, a powerful radiance that, in the night, created a figure that was mere silhouette, and only the eyes held the spectator’s illimitable fascination, so that the shadow body fell away into the darkness.
All those who encountered the man remembered nothing but the sight of him, even though many noted the passage of considerable time, after which they would awake to the man’s sudden absence, and all they recalled was the eyes.
The initial reports were few and far between, passed by word of mouth and thus dismissed as tricks of the light or hallucinations, though as the rumors spread through the great crowds of our little city, it came to be said that no one had actually encountered the man and it was all an urban legend, a thing that no one had really seen but had been heard about from someone who had heard about it from someone, the trail leading back to a void that indicated it had never happened in the first place.
People were disabused of this as more and more of them had their own encounters with the man, all of them in the liminal spaces of deserted shopping malls, abandoned railroad stations—the tracks of which the resistance had destroyed decades ago—empty swimming pools and lonely street corners, bus stations in the small hours, the concrete-block brutalist towers that concealed themselves behind blind corners, the labyrinth of walkways and bridges crossing the great highways demarcating the borders of our little city, even occasionally outside restaurants and bars emptied of customers in the early hours of the morning—wherever there was night, silence, and solitude.
Some even began to go out in search of the man, haunting the nocturnal streets, glancing into dark places on moonless nights in hopes of a glimpse of the apparition, and no doubt many of them succeeded, though I was not among them, as I did not wish to take part in the search, because I did not want to see him, and events proved me wise and prudent.
It was a month after the first appearance of the man that those who had seen him began to sicken, so that people who had once been sanguine and friendly became angry and choleric, rude to friends and family, violent toward children, hateful toward strangers, many taking to their beds in saturnine fits of melancholia, refusing to rise and take up their work, until this sudden indolence became visible on the streets, with shops closed, offices empty, the streets cleared of pedestrians and vehicles, and our little city felt shuttered and squalid, its enormous life squelched by some unknown malign force.
Only a short time passed before people began to blame the man, because from house to house it came to be realized that only those who had seen him were among the afflicted, and the man came to be seen as a kind of disease, a plague that struck with uncanny means and now lay upon the city like a curse, a punishment for crimes unknown and sins uncommitted, so the quest began for some kind of expiation, with everyone asking what the man wanted, whether he would, once he had it, go away and leave us alone, and whether the afflicted would then be healed.
The religious among us decided that the answer lay in the ancient tradition of propitiatory sacrifice, so they began to engineer offerings, first birds and then dogs, sheep, and cattle, but needless to say, these attempts at appeasement were ineffective, so the strange plague continued on its way, inexorable and expanding.
The less spiritually inclined simply went about their business, convinced that they could do nothing and life had to go on, so they went to work, noting the absence of their stricken colleagues, then went home and were back at work the next day, living as best they could, not despairing but simply acknowledging that this was what was happening and nothing could be done about it, and labor is, after all, a welcome distraction from the horrors of the world, which is perhaps why we labor in the first place, and so long as they had not seen the man themselves, they decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that they were in no danger, though they made quite sure they were home before dark, and never visited those tenebrous places from which the man could emerge.
As for our political leaders, at first they did as they always do and pretended that nothing was happening, blaming it all on mass hysteria or self-hypnosis, but as the economic and social consequences of the man’s appearance became clear, they decided on a proactive approach, and sent out their agents in search of the man, trawling through the shadow spaces of the city, shining their industrial flashlights into secret places in hopes of denying the man his natural element of darkness, and sometimes the night itself seemed to dissipate before the lights toted by these squadrons of hunters, but their efforts proved, in the end, to be for naught, as no trace of the man was ever found.
All involved agree that the thing reached its climax with the shining of the sea at the turning of the third new moon, a night on which the stars seemed to shine brighter than ever, the lights of the metropolis impotent to drown them out, and as the waters of the wine-dark sea dashed themselves against the rocks, they seemed aflame with a light of the most uncanny color, not the silvery illumination of the stars, but the unspeakable crimson of the man’s eyes, so that the tide itself was as blood, blood cresting up and foaming, waves of blood awash upon the sands, casting the city, normally so virgin white, in a sanguinary hue until, with the rising of the sun, it was gone, the pale and deep blues of the old ocean returned, and once again all was as it should be.
From that day to this, the man has never been seen again, the dark places of the city left unoccupied and unmolested, the afflicted returning to themselves, rising from their beds and going back to their quotidian lives as hard workers and loving parents and spouses, with some even seeming to be improved by the experience, becoming more sympathetic and compassionate as a result of their ordeal, so that the coming and going of the man is considered by some to have been a necessary ordeal, forcing us to become something more and perhaps better than we were before, though I believe a gentler and less onerous test would have accomplished the same at a much lower price in suffering and anguish.
Yet, though we never speak of it, a certain pall still hangs over our little city, as many of us feel that, somehow, we know that the man comes and goes, and while, for now, he may have moved on to other, greater cities, and perhaps even to villages and small towns, who knows but someday, on the night of the new moon, he may, for reasons known only to himself, return to us, and haunt the dark places from which, at times, we still recoil, wondering if we might glimpse the burning eyes and, against our will, be born again.