Chapter 1: What's Wrong With Your Eyes?

Chapter 1: What's Wrong With Your Eyes?

The Grand Macabre Theater was Julian’s personal cathedral of decay. He loved the way the gold leaf on the proscenium arch was flaking, revealing the dark plaster beneath like old bones. He admired the faint, persistent scent of dust and ancient velvet that clung to the air, a perfume of forgotten dramas. From his gilded cage of a box office, he surveyed the lobby, a lordling in his small, dimly lit kingdom.

Tonight, he was particularly pleased with his reflection in the thick security glass. Julian Thorne did not simply have a ‘look’; he had a carefully curated aesthetic. Long, straight black hair, as severe as a raven’s wing, framed a face of pale, angular lines. His suit was a three-piece charcoal black, tailored to his slender frame. He cultivated an image somewhere between a Victorian vampire and a forgotten poet, a walking piece of art amidst the mundane world of popcorn and soda sales. It was his armour.

The slow Tuesday night crowd was trickling out from the late showing of some indie darling film. A few couples drifted past, their conversations a dull murmur. Julian was idly polishing the brass ticket slot when a figure stepped up to his window, breaking the rhythm of the departing patrons.

The man was a silhouette against the lobby's weak lighting. He wore a black fedora, tilted low. One hand, starkly white in a single glove, rested on the counter. The other was jammed in his pocket, hiking his jacket up at an unnatural angle. An impersonator. Julian’s lip curled in faint, artistic disdain. The city was full of them, tourists and eccentrics playing dress-up. This one was clearly Michael Jackson. Pathetic.

“Can I help you?” Julian asked, his voice dripping with practiced ennui. He didn't look up from polishing the brass.

The figure leaned closer. A strange, sharp smell, like burnt sugar and ozone, pricked at Julian’s nostrils. A voice, not a singing voice, but a breathy, high-pitched whisper, slipped through the speaker grille.

“I’m not here for a show.”

Julian finally looked up, ready to dismiss the man, and his breath caught. The fedora’s brim cast the man’s face in absolute shadow, a void where features should be. But from that void, a smile bloomed. It was impossibly wide, a slash of brilliant, predatory white. It wasn't a human smile; it was the idea of a smile, stretched to a terrifying extreme.

The man tilted his head, a movement that was both unnaturally fluid and horribly jerky, like a film reel skipping a frame. His shadowed gaze seemed to bore right through Julian.

“I have a question for you,” the whispery voice continued. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Julian blinked. Of all the things he’d been asked in his life, this was the most absurd. His eyes? He was proud of his eyes. They were dark, deep-set, mysterious. They were a key part of the entire aesthetic.

“My eyes are fine,” Julian snapped, his composure pricked. “Are you buying a ticket or not?”

The impossibly wide smile seemed to stretch further. “No. Not yet.”

And then he was gone. He didn’t walk away. He was simply no longer there. One moment, the oppressive shadow and the sharp smell; the next, just the empty, echoing lobby. Julian stared at the space where the man had stood, his heart hammering against his ribs. He felt a cold draft, though the theater doors were closed.

“Freak,” he muttered, pushing the unease down. He turned back to the security glass, intending to smooth his hair, to reclaim his carefully constructed image. But the impersonator’s question echoed in his mind. What’s wrong with your eyes?

He leaned closer to his reflection. His dark eyes stared back. They looked… normal. Same shape, same colour. He turned his head from side to side. Nothing. It was just a lunatic trying to get a rise out of him. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling. He noticed, for the first time, that his left eye seemed a fraction wider than his right. Had it always been like that? He couldn’t remember. A knot of anxiety, cold and tight, began to form in his stomach.

A few minutes later, the side door to the box office swung open and Leo shambled in, reeking of cheap vape juice. He was Julian’s antithesis: stocky, clad in a tight-fitting staff polo, and possessing all the grace of a charging rhino.

“All clear out there, Nosferatu,” Leo grunted, tossing a ring of keys onto the counter. “Ready to lock this crypt up?”

“Did you see a man on your way in?” Julian asked, his voice tighter than he intended. “Michael Jackson impersonator. Fedora, one glove.”

Leo snorted a laugh. “In this part of town? Probably just a crackhead thinking it’s 1985. Did he try to sell you his moonwalk?”

“He was just… weird,” Julian said, deciding not to mention the question about his eyes. Leo would have a field day with that. “He just disappeared.”

“Yeah, they do that when you tell them you’re calling the cops.” Leo clapped him on the shoulder, a heavy, patronizing gesture. “Don’t let the spooks get to you, man. This place is old, not haunted.”

But the feeling of being watched didn’t leave Julian, not even as they went through the shutdown procedures. Every reflection seemed to hold a flicker of movement in its periphery. The polished glass of a movie poster, a puddle of spilled soda on the floor, the darkened screen of a concessions monitor—each one held the potential for a tilted fedora and a white, grinning mouth. He found himself avoiding his own reflection, a startling betrayal of his vanity.

Once Leo had lumbered off into the night, Julian was alone. The silence of the grand old theater pressed in on him. The encounter felt too sharp, too strange to be a simple run-in with a city eccentric. He needed to see it again. He needed proof that he wasn’t imagining things.

He made his way to the small, cramped manager’s office, the hub of the theater’s security system. The monitors displayed a dozen grey, lifeless angles of the empty building. Julian’s hands trembled slightly as he rewound the footage from the lobby camera, the timestamp in the corner scrolling backward.

He found it. 10:47 PM.

There, on the screen, was the figure. A smudge of black against the dim lobby. Julian leaned in, his nose almost touching the monitor. The impersonator stepped up to the box office window, the single white glove a beacon in the grainy footage. Julian watched his own on-screen self look up, their silent conversation playing out. He saw the figure lean in, saw the head tilt in that sickening, unnatural way.

Then, the moment the figure was supposed to walk away, it happened.

The image on the screen didn’t just move. It tore. For a split second, the impersonator’s form distorted into a blizzard of digital static. His limbs seemed to stretch to impossible lengths, his torso twisting like a wrung-out cloth. The fedora dissolved into a spray of black pixels. The terrifying white smile remained for a fraction of a second longer, hanging in the corrupted data like a ghost in the machine.

And then, the footage snapped back to normal. The space where the man had been was empty. The timestamp read 10:48 PM. There was no footage of him walking away, no sign of him ever leaving the frame. He had simply… glitched out of existence.

Julian stumbled back from the desk, a choked gasp escaping his lips. His blood ran cold. This wasn't a crackhead. This wasn't a prankster. This was something else entirely. Something that didn't obey the rules of reality, something that could step through the static between one moment and the next.

He stared at his own horrified face reflected on the dark monitor. And in the depths of the screen, for just an instant, he could have sworn one of his eyes looked just a little wider than the other.