The woman with the gun had no eyes.
Melanie knew it had to be an illusion of some sort-she told the police later that she thought it must be some kind of high-tech contact lens, some sort of really advanced plasma screen or something , but at the time she simply stared at the black-and-white blur that filled the stranger's eye sockets in utter, bewildered horror. It was somehow much more unnerving than even the gun; Melanie had worked as a bank teller for over five years now, she had gone through robbery drills, but nobody had ever taught her what to do when a woman walked up to her with nothing but endless pits of static where her eyes should be.
It didn't seem to stop her from seeing; she walked up to Melanie's window and pulled out the gun with a calm, confident smile on her face. "If you could, please?" she said, putting a bag on the counter and opening it up. "Just whatever you happen to have handy, the money's not really the important part. He doesn't even need it, honestly, but everything needs to start somewhere. Right, Melanie?"
Melanie murmured something affirmative-it was part of the training, keep calm and agree with everything they say-but her mind wasn't really focused on the other woman's words. It wasn't even focused on what it should have been, which was the standard checklist of procedures in the event of robbery by threat; Melanie knew she was supposed to be hitting the silent alarm, slipping the dye pack into the bills she was already beginning to empty into the bag, memorizing the robber's appearance for later, and a host of other things. But those eyes.
They looked like holes. Not even holes leading into the woman's head, just holes in... in everything. Like when Melanie stared at them, she could see all the way outside of the universe and there was nothing outside existence but an endless void of fizzing, silent static. It was more horrifying than Melanie could have imagined, and far more horrifying than she could describe to the police afterward; all she could really say was, 'She was a Caucasian redhead, about five foot six, wearing a black leather jacket over a white blouse with red pants and black boots, and her eyes were... static.' She couldn't make them understand.
Whatever it was, it didn't look like it was painful. The woman's smile seemed natural and unforced, and she waited for Melanie to finish emptying out her drawer like she was simply passing the time waiting for her bus to get here. "Please don't be nervous," she said, her voice mellifluous and devoid of any regional accent. She sounded like a local television news anchor reassuring the public about the bad weather expected to roll in overnight. "I know you're going to be, no matter what I say, but it really is going to be alright."
If anything, that only unnerved Melanie more. Bank robbers were supposed to intimidate tellers with the threat of violence, not reassure them. Melanie struggled to respond, but the woman had already taken her best material. "Of course, ma'am," she murmured weakly, emptying the last of the cash into the bag. "You're absolutely right." Her voice sounded thin and terrified in her own ears, like a bad impersonation of herself. She wondered suddenly what would happen if she simply passed out and fell behind the counter. Would the woman shoot her? As soon as the thought popped into Melanie's head, it began to feel like a horrifying inevitability.
Melanie's vision began graying out around the edges, and at first it felt like the static had somehow escaped from the woman's bizarre, impossible eyes and was closing in on Melanie from all directions. It seemed almost like a relief to realize that she was about to faint instead. She slid the bag across to the robber and leaned heavily on the counter, focusing every last bit of her willpower on keeping her knees from buckling.
"Thank you, Melanie," the woman said, seemingly oblivious to the terror she had created. "Again, please don't be frightened. It's all part of the process, I promise." And with that, she turned and walked away. Melanie forced herself to watch the robber leave the building and go around the corner out of sight before she sat down hard and put her head between her legs. After that, she couldn't make herself move for a little while.
She recovered a bit by the time the police arrived, at least enough to take her statement and try not to sound too absurd when she got to the bits that sounded crazy even to her. Luckily, the manager was able to corroborate most of her story, but it sounded like nobody but Melanie had caught a glimpse of those strange, inhuman eyes. She wondered briefly if she'd imagined it, or hallucinated it, but... no. The memory was too vivid to be fake.
The detective told her that they'd found the bag sitting next to a trashcan about half a block away, money still inside, and credited Melanie's calm under pressure for remembering the dye pack. Melanie thanked them automatically, but she had a strange, numb certainty under it all that they would have found the money anyway. 'The money's not the important part.' 'He doesn't even need it.' And most disturbingly, 'Everything needs to start somewhere. Right, Melanie?'
The words echoed strangely in her head the whole time she was riding home (one of the detectives was kind enough to give her a ride, and Melanie had filed 'getting back to her car' under 'Shit I Will Deal With Later'), the whole evening as she tried to push the entire incident out of her head with 'Friends' re-runs and weed, and even in bed until she took a couple of sleeping pills to silence the maddening memories and dull her wits into somnolescence. Melanie knew it was all just adrenaline backwash, the panic and terror that she didn't let herself feel while she was being held at gunpoint suddenly crashing in on her, but she couldn't seem to silence that voice.
Melanie was glad they gave her a few days off; going back in to work tomorrow would have been flat-out impossible with this hanging over her head. She needed time to rest, to recover, to let the memories scab over and flake off. She needed to forget it all, the creepy woman and her creepy eyes... all of it. Just forget, she told herself drowsily as she finally nodded off. It's over. Just forget it.
But when Melanie woke up the next morning, she could see static in her eyes.
*****
It wasn't much, not at first. When Melanie stumbled into the bathroom to splash cold water onto her face and chase away the cobwebs from her brain, the woman staring back at her in the mirror had only a few tiny dots of white flickering against the darkness of her pupils here and there. Melanie could almost almost almost convince herself that it was her imagination, that she had spent so much of yesterday morbidly dwelling on the woman with static in her stare that she was seeing it everywhere she looked.
But then she stared at herself in the mirror a little while longer. And she could see the static in her eyes.
Once she trained herself to notice what she was looking for, Melanie could actually see out through the parts of her eye obscured by static. She watched her own eyes for what felt like hours, grabbing the hand mirror from her dresser and taking it into the living room where the light was better and staring at her own reflection until she could see the difference between the world as she normally viewed it and the world as seen through the bursts of visual noise.
It didn't obscure her vision, surprisingly enough. Instead, it seemed to... simplify it. It was as if a veil dropped down over the tiny fragments of the world she watched through the haze of static, turning them into an outline of themselves that only seemed to let a little bit of understanding pass. Clothing became washed out and colorless, walls and furniture turned into shadows that merely suggested solidity... her hands and arms remained clear and vivid, in some ways even moreso than through the parts of her eyes that still saw normally, but most of the things around her simply dropped into a sort of visual irrelevance.
This was real. This was absolutely fucking real. Melanie sprinted to her computer, looking up the closest doctor with trembling fingers, rehearsing her explanation in her head until it no longer sounded insane. 'This woman, she had some kind of static in her eyes, and now I'm-' 'This woman, she had an eye condition, I think it might be contagious-' 'Can you look at my eyes? I keep seeing something weird-' 'I'm scared that some kind of eldritch horror has escaped out of the woman who held me at gunpoint and burrowed into my brain, and now it's burning a hole into my head from outside the universe so it can use me to see through. That's medical, right?'
Melanie decided not to go with that one. Instead, she put on a pair of sunglasses and pulled her long dark hair back into a ponytail, and went out to the bus stop. She called the police while she was waiting, but it turned out that unlike the movies, they didn't really welcome the help of a spunky civilian with no formal training but plenty of common sense and bright ideas. She got as far as, "Were there any fingerprints on the bag?" (no), "Did the surveillance cameras show anything?" (they confirmed your story, ma'am), and "Did you notice anything funny about her eyes on the video?" (click)
Melanie decided not to call back.
When the bus arrived, she took a seat as far away from anyone else as she could-she didn't understand what was going on, but she felt weirdly like it would be irresponsible to make eye contact with anyone even through her sunglasses. Whatever was happening to Melanie, it started when she looked at the woman at the bank; it only stood to reason that looking at someone else might carry a risk of... contamination? Infection? She had a sudden mental image of the hospital filling up with creepy, static-eyed people as the doctor she visited turned into a vector of transmission for every single person they examined, spreading the (virus? Bacteria? Fungus? Eldritch horror?) throughout the city. They hadn't gone more than a mile before Melanie got out and caught another bus going back the way she came.
