The Sensory Thief Part 8
Then, the 'ah-ha' moment struck him like an arrow to the chest. It wasn't just meat the creature needed; it was the sight itself, the literal, electrical essence of his own prophetic hunger. To give the baby thing the future, he had to surrender his own. The Thief sat on a low, wooden stool, his movements were perfection in their deliberate, clinical precision. He picked up the hand cranked drill, drew a deep breath, filled his lungs to maximum capacity, and exhaled a shaky sigh. He pressed the tip against his own temple. The cold metal was a huge contrast to his feverish skin. The bit felt like ice, and it made his stomach squirm. He turned the crank slowly; the sound a sick music vibrated through his jaw, with a percussion of bone meeting steel. He didn't scream; he gritted his teeth, watched a thin spiral bone shard fall onto his shoulder, and felt the hot blinding pain, pierce through the veil of his consciousness. He continued to drive the bit deeper inch by inch and felt the resistance of his skull finally give way with a sickening, wet pop. He set the drill down. His breath came in shallow gasps as he reached for a thin, silver spoon. With a hand that shouldn't have been that steady, he inserted the tool into the fresh hole in his temple. He probed past the bone into the soft mysteries of his own frontal lobe. He felt his vision strobed with flickered memories of past victims that seemed to haunt his mind. He ignored them as the spoon scooped out a small, grey-pink mass of his own humanity. It was a small but important part of his genius, the seed that would soon blossom inside of his creation. He pulled it out; a wet string of neural tissue trailed from his head like a silken web. He stood swaying on feet that felt like they belonged to a ghost and leaned over the creature to continue the operation. He peeled back the stitched eye and began to graft his own brain matter into the optic nerve; the grey slush fused with the milky orb in an impossible biological coronation. As the last piece of his own mind was buried into the creature’s skull, the eyes flared alive with light, and the Thief felt a brilliant bright silence settle over his own mind. The price of a soul that can see what hasn't even bled yet.
The air in the nursery was thick with the smell of iron scented fluid; it was a locked tomb where the cost of vision was being paid with gray matter. The Thief swayed, the silver spoon trembled in his hand that felt miles away from his body, his vision a fractured mess, electrified into a kaleidoscope of static and crimson. Each time he blinked, the world tilted a little more until his balance lurched and threatened to send him crashing into the ice crate, but his will was like unbreakable bone. He leaned over the crib; his own temple leaked a slow steady trickle of clear fluid that splashed onto the baby creature’s heaving chest. With a grunt that was more of a rattle than a human sound, the Thief’s delicate work of fusing his own frontal lobe tissue to the creature’s optic nerve almost made him sick. He felt the rise of vomit trying to crawl up his throat, but he managed to swallow it down in large gulps.
The room began to turn grey, then a blinding white brain misfire turned the hole in his head into a vacuum of direct conduit to the void. He almost passed out, his knees buckled, his forehead nearly slammed into the creature’s pulsating mass, but he caught himself on the edge of the crib, his fingernails clawed into the wood until they split. He couldn’t see the nerves anymore, only the memory of where they should have been visible in his fractured mind. His fingers moved with clinical precision, weaving the silk through his own warm brain-flesh and the cold, milky orb of the baby creature’s eye.
Stitch number one, the world nearly spun out of control. Stitch number two, silent rings drowned out the creature's breath.
“One the more knot.” The Thief whispered to himself. Then an unexpected optic nerve electrical flare snapped a jolt of cherry lightening through the Thief’s remaining consciousness. He saw it for half a heartbeat and screamed out in pain from the intense flash. The creature’s eye dilated, the pupil shifted from milky white to a deep violet that reflected its creators’ own orbitals.
The surgery is over and in the eyes of the Thief it was a resounding success. The baby thing was no longer just meat; it was now a powerful tool that belonged to a future God. It was a living map of the future, fueled by the genius of its creator's.
The Thief tried to stand to admire the masterpiece he had created from his own mind, but blood loss and fatigue claimed him. The heat in his chest turned cold, his vision snuffed out like a candle’s flame, and gravity pulled him down like a lover. His body collided with the floor with a heavy, hollow thud, his head rested near the feet of the creature’s crib, and darkness claimed what was left of his soul. He had given everything to the creature in that moment, but was it worth it. The Thief’s unresponsive expression said it all. ‘You bet your ass it was worth it.’
As he sank into deep unconsciousness, the baby thing blinked its new eye and tried to focus on the distant ceiling, but visions of the future bled into its sight and scared it into unanswered wails of terror. Its cries echoed throughout the house, bled through the floorboards, and into the underwater ears of the victim downstairs. To him the cries were nothing more than muffled bleats from an unknown origin, but down deep he knew he wasn’t the only one being tortured.
To be continued.....
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