He’s making tea when he first sees it. An early morning, his mother still asleep and the haze of just past sunrise settling over the world as he pulls the kettle with him to the sink to fill it up. His mind about just as foggy as the air outside, wiping sleep from his eyes before setting his gaze through the window above the sink; and he has to do a double take at the shape that’s standing under a tree behind the fence line.
He turns off the tap.
He can’t make out much of the details from where he’s standing, but that hardly matters in the face of its impossibility. A black shape with almost undefined edges and a shape that could have been human but… wrong, somehow. Fundamentally wrong. Like staring into a shadowed void that made his eyes water when he tried to look closer, a lack of tangibility looking like cracking static or a bug in the very nature of reality, a glitch personified and absolutely covered, head to monstrous toe, in glowing, never once blinking, bright green eyes. Fingering, with impossible clawed fingers and predatory intent, through decaying box of old books and magazines and things from the attic he’d left there with still every intention to throw out.
And then the thing's head turns, snaps its hundreds of eyes all at once to focus on him as he ducks down behind the counter. Eyes wide, unstable as he lowers himself on the floor, back pressed up against the cupboard under the sink and brings a shaking hand to press against his mouth. The heavy weight of a thousand eyes all focused on him in that moment, as his mouth goes bone dry with a thing that stands what feels like right behind him. Just waiting, and watching him, and seeding his dread and just waiting for that one movement, that once excuse to crash through that window and end him before he can even let out a scream.
It takes hours of nothing happening for him to work up the nerve to move again. To pull himself up over the counter enough to peek and see the spot by the tree empty. It doesn’t bring him the relief he thought it would, not with the still constant impression of that thing still watching him, now unseen when before he at least could have had the knowledge of where it was.
It's gone now, he can't see it and oh god that just makes it so, so much worse.
The space under the tree is empty, the yard itself is as lonely as he's come to expect but he can still feel those eyes. And he stands, staring through the kitchen window, trying very hard to find it again with frantic eyes swept over the yard, picking through and focusing on every dark corner and hiding place. Expecting, with some awful dread for it to be very, very close all at once from where it’s hiding, to smash through the window or to appear right behind him, even as the feeling of hundreds and thousands of eyes all focused at once still persists, has him pinned down where he's stood. Waiting for him to make a move, for him to do… something. Something he's not sure of, and that fact alone makes him very afraid. That one wrong movement, one wrong action and it's all over. And he can't see it but oh god, he can feel that it can see him.
And in that moment, all he could think beyond the fear as he backed away from the window slowly, shaking under the feeling of that relentless gaze trained on him and waiting to strike, was that when it did inevitably come, (as by now he was sure it would even as it bided its time) all he could do was just hope it would be quick and painless.
The relentless choking dread whispered a very, very different story.
After a few more hours of thumbing through books and not daring to step back into the kitchen or anywhere near a window, the feeling faded. Slowly, no discernable moment where it all cut off, maybe just enough to not notice him so much… He worked up the nerve enough to move, to push through the door and past that threshold enough to step outside and search for a minute or two, to make sure before he gripped his shoulder bag tighter and started his trek to work.
Never stopping once, tense as all hell, jumping at shadows and trying very hard to resist that urge to look over his shoulder, or to entertain that constant fear and feeling of eyes, watching from just out of sight.
The box of books was gone. At the square of empty pressed grass all he could do was swallow it down, and squeeze the straps of his bag again, and keep walking.