The Creeps: A Samuel Johnson Tale

“It’s like the eyes follow you round the room,” said Dozy.

It was true. No matter where they stood, the gathered vampires kept a close watch on them.

“Unkebyem?” said Mumbles.

Dozy shrugged.

“I’ve no idea who’d buy one of those pictures and put it on his wall,” he said. “Except maybe your dad, to remind him of your mum.”

Mumbles kicked him in the shin again. The bulb above their head flickered one last time, then died.

“This isn’t doing us any good,” said Dozy. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I feel like we’ve been walking in this basement for hours. We must be under the sea by now.”

They trooped on, Dozy limping slightly from the repeated kicks to his shin, and Mumbles sulking in front of him.

“I like your mum,” said Dozy. “Seriously. You’re just lucky you got your looks from your dad.”

Mumbles turned to aim another boot in Dozy’s general direction, but he paused midkick.

“Erat?”

“Hear what?” said Dozy.

“Erat!”

Dozy listened. From the shadows behind came the sound of something landing on the floor. It didn’t sound like a big something, which was good. On the other hand, it was definitely a something, which was bad. The sound came again, and again, and again. Not a something, then, but lots of somethings.

Which was very bad.

“Rats?” said Dozy. They hadn’t seen any rats or mice yet, which he found odd. There were usually rodents in old basements.

Dozy listened harder.

“No,” he said. “That’s not the sound of claws. It’s more like soft fruit dropping on a floor. Maybe someone’s making jam.”

The two dwarfs faced the darkness. The sounds had stopped, but now there was movement in the gloom.

A small object rolled toward them and came to a halt a couple of inches from Dozy’s right foot. It looked up at him. It couldn’t do much else, since it was just an eyeball.

“Somebody will be missing that,” said Dozy.

Another eyeball rolled into view, and a third. Very soon, Mumbles and Dozy were looking down on a field of eyeballs. They were all slightly yellowed, and all very familiar, since the last time the dwarfs had seen them they had been lodged in the skulls of the vampiric pictures in the previous room.

I had to say it, thought Dozy. I had to say that the eyes seemed to follow you around the room. Mumbles had just the same reaction.

“Adzaeyfollroo!”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” said Dozy. “It’s not like I was hoping it would happen. All right, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to ignore them. After all, they’re eyeballs. What can they do, stare us to death? We’re going to turn around, continue our search, and pretend that they’re not there, agreed?”

Mumbles nodded. “Ooly.”

They each took a deep breath, spun on their heels, and started walking.

• • •

It turned out to be a lot harder than they had expected to ignore the eyeballs. Most of us, at some time or another, will have had the sensation that someone is staring at us. Our instinct is to find out who, and why, and make them stop doing it. If lots of people stare at us, we start wondering what might be wrong with us. Has our face turned a funny color? Do we have a bird on our head? Have we left something unzipped that shouldn’t be unzipped in public? Being stared at for any length of time is very unpleasant.

As Dozy was bringing up the rear he was more aware of the eyeballs than Mumbles. He felt hundreds of eyes boring into his back. He could hear them rolling along the dusty floor behind him. It was slowly driving him mad. Occasionally he would cast a glance over his shoulder and the eyeballs would stop moving. They would even stop staring at him for a while and suddenly find something interesting to look at on the ceiling or the walls. If they could, he was sure that they would have started whistling innocently, as if to say, “Don’t mind us, we’re not really following you, we just happen to be heading in the same direction.”

“Look—” Dozy began to say, then realized that (a) the eyeballs couldn’t do anything else and (b) what he actually wanted was for them to stop looking, so telling them to look wasn’t helpful.

“Listen—” he tried, but that wasn’t right either.

“Oh, just go away!” he said. “We don’t want any eyeballs. We have enough of our own. We only need two each. We’ve nowhere to put any more. We can’t keep you in our pockets. It would defeat the purpose.”

The eyeballs looked hurt, or as hurt as it was possible for disembodied eyeballs to look. The eyeballs peered at one another questioningly, then back at Dozy in a vaguely pleading manner.

“No, don’t try that with me,” said Dozy. “I mean it. You’ve had your fun, now go back to your pictures.”

He began walking again, but had taken only a few steps when he heard the wet rustling of eyeballs rolling, and felt them staring at his back again.

Dozy turned round in a fury.

“That’s it!” he said. “I’ve had it! For the last time, go back to your pictures!”

Just to be sure that they understood how angry he was, he stamped his foot hard on the floor. Something popped wetly under his heel, and there was the kind of squishing noise that only comes from standing on a round object that is mainly liquid and jelly held together by a thin membrane.

An eyeball, for example.

“Oops,” said Dozy.

He didn’t want to look down, but he didn’t have much choice. He lifted his foot and winced. He was no expert, but he was pretty certain that this particular eyeball’s days of staring at strangers had come to an end.

Mumbles came back to find out why Dozy had stopped walking, and told him not to worry: the bits of eyeball would clean off easily enough.

There was no way that the eyeballs could have heard him, thought Dozy. After all, they were just eyeballs. Even if they had, they probably couldn’t have understood him. Nevertheless, Mumbles’s words coincided with a burst of activity among the eyeballs. They began to vibrate. The red veins running across them expanded until the eyeballs were no longer big enough to contain them. They burst through the membrane of the eyes to form what to Dozy’s mind looked disturbingly like little legs. Each eyeball split beneath its retina to reveal a mouth filled with teeth. The two upper canines were longer than the rest, and needle sharp.

“Vampire eyeballs!” said Dozy. “Or eyeball vampires!”

Mumbles said nothing. He was too busy running away.

• • •

Meanwhile, in the Johnson house, Nurd and Wormwood were about to have problems of their own.

The window was now open, but so far the elf on the windowsill had not moved. Wormwood poked his head through the gap and peered down.

“Well, look at that,” he said.

“Look at what?” said Nurd.

He was still keeping a close eye on the elf. It was making him nervous.

“Elves,” said Wormwood. “Lots of ’em. It’s a pyramid of elves.”

Nurd climbed from his bunk and went to the window. He stuck his head out. Wormwood was right: there was a pyramid of elves under the window, each layer supporting the next until the topmost elf would be on the same level as the windowsill. But who would bother to build a pyramid of elves? Nurd twisted his head and tried to see if there was any sign of activity on the roof, but there was none.

“That’s quite unusual,” he said.

Wormwood poked the elf on the windowsill.

“You know what else is unusual?” he said.

“What?”