A sense of dread grew in me so carefully and naturally that it took several moments to realized the source was the figure before me. I tried to pin the anxiety to a single characteristic: the posture, straight-backed, but bent at the waist as if on the verge of sprinting; the proportions, legs and neck a fraction too long for the torso. But nothing about the figure was actually outside the range of human variation, and no sooner did I believe I had found the single distinguishing trait than it slipped back into normalcy, into humanness. There grew in me an atavistic fear, a fear I had heard described but never taken seriously, something that was not a conscious thought, nor even an emotion, but a fact of the environment. As the silhouette stepped out of shadow and into solidity, it turned its long neck and on the uncanny visage I viewed the only feature which no one may confuse for human: the eyes.

Those eyes belong to the class of phenomena which have no adequate medium of communication outside of personal perception, but I have found the attempt to catalogue them therapeutic. I will begin with the mundane first impression of orbs ink-black from center to edge, slightly too big and slightly too close in shape to a perfect circle. One fortunate enough to have only had a passing glance might note no distinction between pupil, sclera, iris; in fact, there is an almost visible pupil of jagged shape, tracing a letter M or W across each eye, of a marginally different shade of black or perhaps of the same shade, but with a note of lilac or turquoise in the light it reflects, or gathering in a haze on the surface of that membrane.

Yet the affecting color, or the pupil of a cuttlefish, are not what loom over my memory of that encounter. I witnessed on those organs a deep texture. The texture was nothing like the moist and glossy surface of a human's eye, or the slimy eye of a fish, or even the unnervingly dry eye noted in certain reptiles. Gazing into those spheres of stone revealed strange angles; the angles conspired to arrange themselves into slowly shifting geometries. As I watched that kaleidoscope of unnatural shapes disintegrate into a diaphanous, coiling black fog, I felt at first morbid curiosity, then growing familiarity, and finally a profound comfort in that shifting vista. Self-loathing bloomed in me at the experience of finding such calm and relief in something so alien and repulsive.