The Seeker of Eyes
By A.K. McCarthy
In those days, the Seeker of Eyes was a common sight to the people of the valley. That was just how he wanted it, as you can tell by his name.
The people of the valley gave him that moniker, usually referring to him simply as The Seeker. He was what we today would call a shapesh
ifter. We would also call him a narcissist, as you can likely tell.
The Seeker lived alone in the forest, tucked among the spruce trees and drifting through the mountain fog. Nobody knew exactly what his true form was. He was always stealing the appearances of others. Humans, animals, some say he would even take the form of a particularly shapely and symmetrical sprout of skunk cabbage.
The Seeker was obsessed with beauty, almost as much as he was obsessed with the attention that came with beauty. He would take on the appearance of a beautiful villager or a particularly striking deer and gaze at his reflection in the valley’s calm glacial pools. Then, of course, he would parade through the village.
For years, the people of the valley could not tell the difference between The Seeker and their own. Sometimes a beautiful young man or woman would pace the village streets for hours, smiling at those who caught their eye. They would nod and grin and stick out their chests, reveling in the eyes watching them. They would bask in those gazes like the people of the valley soaked up the rare sunshine that peeked through the clouds.
Then they would disappear, and the next time they appeared, they would be stumbling out of the forest, covered in sap and needles and dirt, complaining about being dragged away from their home in the night. They would tell of how a sweet-smelling beast with yellow eyes had ripped them from their home and dragged them to a broad nest in the forest. They would describe the way the beast ran its coarse hands all over them, drawing blood and plucking out hairs before they lost consciousness for an entire day.
One of the town elders pieced it together after this happened a few times. An attractive villager was seeking attention for a whole day only to have been kidnapped for that whole time? The elder declared then that there was an entity in the forest who sought not blood or power, but attention. An entity that sought the eyes of everyone in the valley.
So The Seeker of Eyes got its name.
For a time, The Seeker was a relatively harmless resident of the valley. It was simply a wannabe peacock that liked to show its borrowed feathers from time to time. Or to the residents of the area, The Seeker was like a mountain that wanted to wear its beautiful cap of snow all year round. The Seeker became somewhat of a joke in the valley. If a villager looked you up and down and asked if you lived in a nest in the woods, that meant you were acting a little too full of yourself. Parents warned their children not to be like The Seeker, but to be humble instead.
Yes, the abductions were frightening, but many of the victims took it as a kind of perverted compliment. I’m so desirable that The Seeker wants to become me. In a twisted way, being dragged into the forest and mimicked for a day became a badge of honor. It became a measuring stick to demonstrate who the most beautiful people in the village were. People treasured the scrapes on their arms and legs where The Seeker had violated them.
But a relationship so vile and skin-deep is bound to turn ugly and abusive eventually.
On an unusually sunny day in the valley, The Seeker did something equally out of character. The Seeker took on the form of one of the village elders. The same one who had coined The Seeker of Eyes moniker. Perhaps The Seeker had heard the name and didn’t like it.
What was unusual about this abduction was that this elder could not, in any objective terms, be described as beautiful. His left eyelid drooped so much that he was stuck in a perpetual wink. His back was as hunched as the lowest mountains, the ones that the glacier had carved into humps.
So nobody suspected that the elder was not who he said he was when he beckoned a group of young villagers into the woods. Nobody joked about him living in a nest in the forest when he led them down to the river in the gorge. Nobody questioned his command to stand in the river and wait for fish. Nobody said a word when the elder limped his way back into the trees and told them not to move.
They didn’t speak until it was too late. They didn’t make a sound until the ground beneath them shook and the rocks began to tumble into the gorge. And even then, they didn’t speak. They screamed. They howled.
And then they were silent.
When the real village elder emerged from the forest with scratches on his arms, he found a community in mourning. Twelve of the finest young hunters were dead, pummeled to death by a landslide in the gorge.
The elder preached kindness and togetherness, but those words had vanished from the minds and tongues of the villagers. In their place were rage and revenge. They bellowed. They spat. They yelled to the mountains, almost daring them to rattle and unleash another torrent of boulders and earth.
And one woman listened.
The Seeker of Eyes was not the only wanderer in the forest in those days. The Crone did not have a creative name, nor did she want one. She was the inverse of The Seeker, like she was The Seeker’s warbly bizarro reflection in a glacial pool that was content to stay in the water while The Seeker strutted to the nearest gathering of people.
The Crone was helpful to the people of the valley. She is not like the witches you hear about in dark fairy tales, covered in warts and luring children to their deaths. Yes, The Crone practiced her form of magic, but she did not use it to spread misery.
She shared knowledge with the villagers. She shared advice about food, like which mushrooms to eat and which ones to avoid. She spoke to them about the moon and the stars and their meanings. Brave villagers such as the elders came to her with queries.
The Crone had heard the rockslide. She felt the earth tremble beneath her. She came to the village, eschewing her hermit-like ways for a day.
As the bloodied elder preached forgiveness in the sunshine, The Crone plotted her revenge in the shadows of the spruce trees. Then she stepped into the sun and told the villagers her plan.
Much like he was not the only one in the great forest, The Seeker was not the only one who could change his appearance. The Crone spent the next few weeks operating in her own way, extracting beauty from the most stunning members of the village. She also concocted a foul-smelling potion that she had to keep in her dwelling in the woods so it wouldn’t upset the villagers. She drank of that potion every day. Nobody knew what the elixir did, but villagers noticed that while The Crone’s face and figure became startlingly beautiful, she wore long robes and covered up as much of her skin as she could.
They did not ask for an explanation. The acidic tide of revenge still churned in their stomachs. They were happy that The Crone was doing anything at all.
After weeks of this, of The Crone consuming equal parts beautiful and foul, The Crone began sleeping in the village. She walked the streets and even gazed wistfully into the forest with her new, symmetrical, young, unwrinkled face, hoping to attract The Seeker’s attention.
And attract it she did. Not even a week had passed before The Seeker slipped into The Crone’s new dwelling in the village and dragged her into the forest. The Crone pretended to struggle and cry for help as The Seeker took her to his nest. All the while, she kept her robes wrapped around her body.
After a small eternity, they arrived at The Seeker’s wide nest in the forest. It was a landscape of tree limbs and trunks of smaller trees, stripped of their bark and rubbed soft by the elements and by years of The Seeker smoothing them out on his own. The Crone was surprised to find how comfortable the accommodations were.
The Seeker was not there to provide comfort, though. He was there to become this beautiful villager and parade in her skin for a day. He tore The Crone’s robes off and began to scrape at her bare skin. In the dark of the night, he couldn’t see the hair on her skin. He could smell the putrid smell coming from her veins as he scratched at her, but he didn’t care. Foul odors drifted through the forest like aimless spirits. He had learned to live alongside them.
It wasn’t until his body began to take the true form of what was inside The Crone that he stopped.
Instead of smoothing into the supple skin of a young woman, his body broke into a million pinpricks of pain. Coarse hair sprouted like a new forest was being birthed all over his skin. Instead of a symmetrical nose and plump lips, The Seeker’s face collapsed. It flattened so quickly that he thought his whole skull might be caving in.
The Seeker howled and yipped in an animalistic voice that was foreign to him. It echoed through the valley, bouncing off the mountains and replying to itself over and over. It wove a tapestry of agony that floated between the tops of the spruce trees and the low clouds that twisted through the valley.
When the transformation was complete, The Crone stood above The Seeker, who lay in his nest like a helpless fetus in a womb.
“You will never take another form again,” The Crone said. “This is you now. Get a good look in the glacial pools. You will be alone with your ugliness for eternity.”
The Crone leaned closer to the beast, her words as sharp as thorns.
“Nobody will ever see you again,” she said. “Not for long. They will catch glimpses of you. You will move at the edge of their vision or in the shadows of the pines. You can move up and down this ocean’s coast as much as you want, you can scream and howl and present yourself to people all you want, but they will never catch more than a glimpse of you.”
These are the words that hurt The Seeker the most. He knew that ugliness could be as attractive to the eye as beauty, but to not be able to draw any attention was a curse worse than being hideous. He moaned and shrieked, like he was experiencing his transition all over again.
The Crone walked back to the village. She shed the long, black hair that sprouted from her skin, and then she shed her youthful beauty. By the time she arrived in the village at sunrise, she looked like herself again.
The Seeker’s cries echoed through the valley for a full week before they went quiet. And then the people of the valley never saw him again. That was exactly The Crone’s curse. The people of the valley weren’t sure whether The Seeker was still living unseen in the valley or if he had moved on.
In the generations since then, similar nests have appeared all over what is now the Pacific Northwest. Similar yips and howls have echoed through various types of pine and fir and spruce trees. But hardly anyone has been able to catch more than a peek at the creature that creates those nests and those sounds. In the time since the invention of the camera, all we have are a handful of shaky, blurry images of this supposed creature.
The descendants of the people of the valley know that the creature is all too real. They know that he is desperate to be seen, but cursed to be invisible. They know that The Seeker of Eyes goes by a new name now, one that is focused on a different body part as far away from the eyes as a body part can be. He might hate his new name as much as he hated the way the village elder branded him as The Seeker of Eyes, but he’s powerless to do anything about it now.
He wanders the mossy forests and the foggy valleys with a name and a body he didn’t choose, cursed to do so in anonymity for eternity.