The Eyes of God

Friday the 13th horror

“Sister, you have sinned. Submit yourself to the eyes of God for judgement.”

Sister Margaret, third of her line to join the faith, withered skin the thin leather of an autumn leaf still uncrunched in the winter of her years, trembled inside her pristine robes. Prostrated on a circular stone plinth, she breathed out shakily, and it did nothing to quell the squirming anxiety in her guts. In the vast, infinite room, only she was illuminated. A voice spoke from the darkness. It came from all around her, from the ceiling, and from the floor. It was directionless and absolute. She very nearly uttered a prayer for protection, tasted the forethought of the words on her tongue, only to realize she was due to meet a messenger of the very God who would receive it.

“Stand Sister, and receive your penance.”

Bones creaking, her body responded. With shaking arms wrapped closely around each other, she stood, and stared out into the darkness. Everything inside screamed to pound on the floor and demand release, to beg the clergy underneath the floor to withdraw her from this fate. It would do nothing, so neither did she.

The eyes of God are in every place, keeping watch on the evil and the good.*

A shuffling in the darkness of the room. The rustle of robes or skin or dried leather. She gripped her arms and lost feeling in her hands. Blackness materialized from blackness, made discrete first in her imagination, and then more clearly as it inched forward to the edge of the light. A hunched, spindly, cloaked thing. Twice her height easily, sleeves stretching to the floor.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.**

One Seeing. One Knowing. One Love.

The thing unfurled in one fluid motion. It rose, and the robes sloughed from its shoulders. Sister Margaret froze in terror. There was a suggestion of human form. A starting thought when this thing was molded. Like a prayer whispered underwater, it went mostly unheard. Its arms hung past its knees. It had no mouth. It had no ears. It had no nose. It had no genitals. It had only eyes. Eyes, everywhere. The slits of them covered its body. There was no symmetry, no consistency of form, or shape, or size.

…my eye and God's eye are one eye…

Its eyes opened, all at once. Every one of them different. She collapsed onto her knees, and prayed incessantly. Chaotically.

OneseeingOneknowingOnelove.

Synchronously, they rolled in their separate sockets to focus on her, to see her. To hold her and understand her. To absorb her. As images flooded her mind, she heard someone screaming in the distance and wondered absently if they were okay. It was her.

She saw herself from the outside, feeding the children food meant for the priests. War orphans, mangy and thin, haunted the doorstep of the church, begging for scraps. She did it for weeks, secretly. The fathers complained over their meager portions, and she reminded them that gluttony was sinful, that their robes fit too tightly, that fasting can bring you closer to God. This worked for some time, until it didn’t. She was found, and the priests craved her suffering in retribution.

The vision dissolved, and became something new. The children she fed grew older. They became thieves, stealing from the wealthy and good. They joined the military, and in their short lives inflicted terrible destruction. They became addicts, and faded into nothing. They became street corner preachers, blasphemers. She was dimly aware of her weeping as she watched. Sobs lurched from her. Here was proof of her sin, multiplying into the future. God had always meant for the children to die, and she had saved them.

“Your penance is observed in understanding, Sister. You have seen your sin, and now will never see again. Your eyes have become God’s eyes. You shall see the sin of all who come after you.”

She saw herself from the outside. From its perspective. Crumpled on the stone floor now, she seized, and blood ran from her empty sockets. It blinked her eyes, newly added to its patchwork body, and the world turned momentarily to darkness. The eyes of God closed then, and for a time she saw nothing.

The plinth retracted into the ground and disappeared. Some time later, it rose again into the sanctum. A man stood now in the halo of light, his arms and legs bound to a small metal circle set in the stone.

“Brother, you have sinned. Submit yourself to the hands of God for judgement.”

He fell to his knees.

“Please, I beg forgiveness. I just needed to feed my family. They’re starving, everyone’s starving. Please, I’m a carpenter, without my hands I’m nothing. Mercy, please, I beg you.”

“Your hands are not your hands, they do not belong to you. They are God’s hands. Stand brother, and receive your penance.”

From the darkness, a narrow, writhing thing appeared. A thing of hands and fingers. It moved with the insect slither of a centipede, thousands of digits scuttling against the floor in succession to carry it forward. There was no face, no defining features other than a long trunk, the palest of skin, and an incalculable number of hands. Each of them unique in color and size. It rose up above the man, a towering monstrosity with fingers grasping at the air blindly, and finally he screamed.

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I wrote this for the Eye See You event. I hardly ever write horror, but the idea came to me as soon as I read the rules for the event, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Religious horror has always been such a good pairing to me.

There are two quotes that I didn’t want to attribute in the text of the story. These were taken from Proverbs 15:3*, and a quote from Meister Eckhart**.

Cover image “On the horizon, the Angel of Certitude, and in the somber heaven a questioning eye” taken from Odilon Redon’s À Edgar Poe (1882) (public domain).