A skyful of eyes.

The day had not been off to a spectacular start.

Some gormless clown oozing out of a cheap chain-store suit and babbling into his phone had walked out in front of the car. Thankfully Able had managed to brake in time and save the fat idiot's life even if the tubby ingrate only gave him the finger as he walked past the front of the vehicle. The day did not get much better. The systems went down ten minutes before his lunch-hour and so he missed that and spent the afternoon trying to suppress the growls of his angry stomach. It was dark when they finally got the system back online and Able knew that they were lucky to have it back on at all. It had almost been a total disaster, yet he knew he'd still get railed on the next day for having it offline for so long.

The evening brought little relief; an hour stuck in traffic with the rain pouring down and impatient arses honking their horns every ten seconds. An accident on the road out of the city, a power cut along a narrow hillside road still slick with rain. All of this was normal, all of it was disappointing.

What came next was neither. Able happened to glance up at the now cloudless night sky to see a field of gigantic inhuman eyes speckle the night amidst the moon and stars. Some were larger than the orbiting satellite, others were so distant that they twinkled like the stars themselves but there were billions of them clearly visible all over the galaxy, so it seemed.

Able stopped the car, got out and looked up at this hideous and strange vista. He rubbed his own eyes and looked again. How he knew they were all eyes was uncertain. Some did look familiar, similar to reptiles or flies but others looked so alien that it was by mere association did he presume them to be eyes. They seemed to be looking everywhere across the universe and there seemed to be intent behind such inspection. Able got the feeling whatever they were, they were searching for something. This more than the feeling of terror was what made him get back into his car and drive, the dread thought that they might be searching for him. He had no reasonable basis for this assumption but considered that reason might not have all the answers given the sky had suddenly become populated with giant alien eyes.

It wasn't long before the shock of the new gave way to the constant unease of the norm. Able found himself just feeling creeped out by having all those eyes in the sky, once he got over the weirdness of it all. He wanted to know what others thought about it but was afraid to ask, just in case he had gone utterly insane and so he said nothing and told no one about the eyes, reckoning that if he turned on the news, they would mention it. He began to fear for his mental state when nothing was reported either on the radio during the journey home nor on T.V. when he finally got there.

He had noticed the occasional pedestrian gazing up at the sky with their eyes wide and mouths open and so wondered if perhaps it was something local, perhaps some chemical making people hallucinate, but there was no news of gas escapes or cordons or quarantines. From time to time he'd pull back the curtain and look up. They were still there, looking across the sky. Once he pulled the curtain back and got a good look at a guy in a flat two streets away, he was looking up. He spotted Able and just pointed up at the sky and shrugged. Able gave him a slow deliberate nod.

It was true. He wasn't mad, there really was a skyful of eyes. The knowledge of his sanity brought little comfort given that it meant there really was a skyful of eyes. What that meant, he had no idea. It took a few hours before the news seemed to be able to grasp the phenomenon and the first hasty reports were alarmist in the extreme. Once it was recognised as being a global and in fact galactic event the news became very cautious. The mystery was deepened when a report came in from NASA claiming that they eyes “were not there” according to all the machines they used to attempt to analyse the eyes.

By the following morning, everyone in the world had their own theory about the eyes and the internet almost crashed under the gravitational weight of the bullshit. Some hard scientists claimed it was more likely a psychological phenomenon, given their machines inability to locate any trace of the eyes. This seemed to give psychologists tacit approval to gild the lily of bullshit with even more outlandish nonsense. The fact remained that there were huge alien eyes in the sky, many of which could be easily seen in broad daylight. It took people days to shrug it off and get back to normal.

Except Able. On that first night he had, at about three in the morning, walked out into the communal area round the back of his close and stared up at one of the great alien eyes. It was about half the size of the full moon, a sphere of blue with two black stripe pupils inside an iris of gleaming sapphire. The thing was directly overhead looking off out past the edge of the galaxy into the void beyond, then it rolled and gazed at him, into him and through him. He felt it, a tangible tingle in his nerves, a tickle in his blood and brain, it could see him, all of him, everything he was and ever would be. Able collapsed onto his knees and wept. He looked up once more at the eye but it was looking elsewhere. He felt abandoned, exposed, violated.

Able picked himself up and went back into the house. It was there he realised something funny had happened to his ears. There was a tiny noise in both of them, almost imperceivable but definitely there. It was a low hissing sound like air escaping from a tyre but less organic, more like a machine version of such a noise. He yawned, stuck his fingers in his ears and wiggled them as if to dislodge something. Everything he tried failed and soon he gave up and tried to ignore the sound, to shove it into the background. He was almost successful with this, becoming aware of it with less and less regularity until it was at a level he could endure. Sadly it wasn't long before the noise got louder and changed pitch. Able once again tried to filter it out but the house was too quiet so he went outside.

That was a mistake. Outside the noise was deafeningly, painfully loud like some wailing insectile siren that drilled through the skull. It came from everywhere and somehow attracted the gaze of the eyes above towards him. He felt himself be scorned, judged, criticised, loathed and shamed deep in his being. He was torn apart by a contempt so monstrous his mind could only begin to comprehend the vast terrifying shape of it. The effect upon him was so great that he had to crawl, gasping and sobbing indoors. He felt as if he'd been drained of something undescribable but fundamental to his being.

The relief was immediate. Able lay sprawled on the ground floor landing drenched in his own sweat and tears. He shivered and wept as the freezing morning air blew through the close like some icy phantom. It took all his physical and emotional strength to pull himself up the stairs to his flat. In a state of utter exhaustion he finally kicked the door shut with his left foot and lay on the carpet to recover. The noise in his ears grew in volume once more so he stuck his fingers in his ears, which helped considerably.

With silence in his head Able accepted he needed to do something. The eyes were some kind of threat, he could attest to that. Their gaze was awful and had vampiric qualities. As for the sound he could hear, they could hear it too and used it to locate him. He had to drown out the sound, go where they couldn't see him. He first thought of the underground, he could spend all day going round and round but he'd have to get there and that wasn't likely considering what had happened downstairs. He then remembered his flats had a disused basement which had been boarded up and off long ago. Able took one of his four iron out of his golf bag, then put his headphones on and went downstairs.

The music certainly helped drown out the noise and soon he was prising the cheap chipboard covering off the rotten doorframe beneath. The basement cellar stank of damp, dust and rotten wood but as he entered he noticed the sound had all but gone from his ears. He removed his headphones and listened. It was so quiet that it took a second for him to be aware of the silence over the normal biological noises one hears in within it. They couldn't get him here he realised and began to tidy the filthy place up.

He had to remove rotten floorboards and decades old paint cans, a bicycle frame and a ruined chest of drawers. After that came two old brown leather suitcases, both of which were empty and several dozen bricks. He popped his headphones back on as he dragged each of the items out into the back court. Once they were all collected he set them ablaze, a bit closer to the flats than he'd imagined. Luckily the building did not catch fire even if it was blackened up one wall with soot. He brushed the kilos of dust away, took some disinfectant to the whole place and brought one kitchen chair from his house and sat in it. The eyes certainly couldn't get him in this cellar. He remained satisfied with this for almost fifteen minutes until the impractical considerations of real life intruded. How would he eat? How would he earn in order to buy food to eat? He couldn't just starve to death in a small prison cell he'd made for himself. He had to move around the world and since he was sure that he was not the only person affected by the eyes in this way it stood to reason that the only way to avoid them was to create some kind of subterranean tunnel network which people could use.

He dashed back upstairs, pulled his laptop from the desk and ran back downstairs into his cellar. The noise was definitely quieter in the basement. He typed “The Noise and Eyes” into google, there were hundreds of thousands of entries. A cursory perusal confirmed his suspicions that he was not alone in the noise attacks, though they did seem relatively rare. After that he spent a long day and a lot of money online getting groceries delivered, and paying for digital copies of all the maps he could find of the town's sewage system imagining it to be a maze of massive tunnels like cities in the movies but finding only pipelines into the occasional narrow tunnel near sewage works.

He spent the evening swapping between thinking of how he could travel underground and peeking out the curtain. The eyes which had been stationary when they first turned up seemed to be roving, scouring the planet for victims to set their abysmal gaze upon. This made Able more determined than ever. If humanity was to survive, it would be underground. He jokingly referred to his future underground paradise as Subopolis.

Late in the evening he figured out that he could break through the basements of each of the long set of tenements which stretched down the road to the main street, where he could link with the shops and an old abandoned underground railway maintenance tunnel which belonged to a network of such that spread across the city. Relieved that he had a plan Able went back into the cellar and began smashing the wall with a pick-axe.

The neighbours were perturbed until he explained about the eyes and the noise. Some had heard of others who'd experienced such things, one expressed relief that he was not alone. Together they began to knock the wall into the next set of tenements. Before long they found themselves assisted by the other side who began tearing the bricks down on both sides. So it went from one block to the next and before long there were dozens of people engaged in burrowing underneath their homes. This made the job easier and it only took the better part of two days before they'd dug their way through the last stretch.

Getting through the shops provided the now large group with no real problems and soon Able found himself as the leader of this group. They followed his orders and cheered when they finally broke through to the maintenance tunnel. The place was well lit and they were not alone. They were greeted by the army.

Able and his group were led into a great underground bunker, a set of offices mainly but with ample living quarters at the back, as long as you didn't mind sleeping in row upon row of bunk-beds. They were told that the situation with the eyes was getting worse, that more people felt drained by their gaze and so plans had been taken to move the population underground, as a temporary measure.

After the first year, no one thought it would be a temporary measure any more. There were still those who could operate above ground but they were few and far between, for the rest of humanity it was dwell in the cramped tunnels and ruined under-cities until the boffins came up with a solution or slowly be driven to madness and death by exhaustion by the billions of horrible glaring eyes.

It took decades to build a proper civilisation underground, many millions died of disease and illness, many other were murdered or starved but eventually by the time Able was an old man, a sense of normalcy had returned to his life. The scientists, confounded by the weird alien eyes hidden in the sky above, had given up even trying to think of a solution and so most people accepted their new, rather bizarre fate.

One day Able was taking the sub-shuttle from the library to his home when he happened to notice something moving in the rockface of the tunnel wall far to his right. At first he could not make it out, then he could not believe it, then he gasped as he saw that it was far from alone. He felt his heart being crushed, death relieving him of this new fate. As he stumbled into darkness he cried a warning to those on the shuttle now staring at his collapse.

“Mouths, giant mouths in the walls.”