CreepsMcPasta Creepypasta Radio - "I Looked at the Solar Eclipse With My Bare Eyes. The Hole It Left Has Something in It." Creepypasta

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

CREEPYPASTA STORY►by Pieryl:   / pieryl  Creepypastas are the campfire tales of the internet. Horror stories spread through Reddit r/nosleep, forums and blogs, rather than word of mouth. Whether you believe these scary stories to be true or not is left to your own discretion and imagination. LISTEN TO CREEPYPASTAS ON THE GO-SPOTIFY► https://open.spotify.com/show/7l0iRPd...iTUNES► https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...SUGGESTED CREEPYPASTA PLAYLISTS-►"Good Places to Start"-    • "I wasn't careful enough on the deep web" ...  ►"Personal Favourites"-    • "I sold my soul for a used dishwasher, and...  ►"Written by me"-    • "I've been Blind my Whole Life" Creepypasta  ►"Long Stories"-    • Long Stories  FOLLOW ME ON-►Twitter:   / creeps_mcpasta  ►Instagram:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Twitch:   / creepsmcpasta  ►Facebook:   / creepsmcpasta  CREEPYPASTA MUSIC/ SFX- ►http://bit.ly/Audionic ♪►http://bit.ly/Myuusic ♪►http://bit.ly/incompt ♪►http://bit.ly/EpidemicM ♪This creepypasta is for entertainment purposes only

Every kitchen tells you who fitted it. You stand in the middle of the room and let your eye run along the tops of the wall units. And, if the line dips towards the corner, someone's hung them off the plaster instead of finding the stud. If the doors sit proudly at one end of the run, they've leveled them off the floor. The floors never level. The floor is a liar, and it lies differently in every house in Britain. Mrs. Hoyle's kitchen had been fitted in about 1994 by a man who did not care. I'd had the old units out in the morning.

Underneath, the wall was papered in something with pineapples on it. I told her Tuesday. It was Wednesday afternoon, already behind schedule. Bailey was on the floor doing the plints. 19 years old, all elbows, decent hands on him when he stops talking. He'd been at me since about eleven. So, what time are we knocking off? When it's done.

Yeah, but roughly when it's done, Bailey. He shuffled along his knees to the next section. He left his phone face up on the worktop I hadn't sealed yet, and he kept lighting itself up with things. It's just, it's ten past seven. What is? He stopped, sat back on his heels. and looked up at me like I'd asked him what a screwdriver was for.

The eclipse? I said something like, right, and carried on scribing the end panel. It had been on the front of the papers for a fortnight. It was on the side of the bus, the primary school up the road had sent letters home. The 12th of August, 26, first proper one since 1999.

Not total mind, not here. To get the whole thing, you had to be in Iceland or Greenland, or up the north of Spain, which is where the shadow actually crossed, and half the country had booked flights to Bilbao a year in advance. What we got in England was about nine-tenths of it, 92% where we were, enough that they were saying it'd go strange, not dark, and it was low. Everyone kept saying that on the telly, down in the west, 10 or 15 degrees off the horizon

going on for half seven in the evening. Sunset time. So, if you had a hedge or a bit of hill, you got nothing at all. You had to be somewhere with a clear run west. Mrs. Hoyle's kitchen faced west, straight down the garden, over the fence, nothing in the way for half a mile.

I didn't go looking for it. I was stood in the one room in that house where you couldn't miss it. Have you got glasses? Bailey said. No. I've got spares in the van. Mom bought a load off Amazon. She's got about nine pairs. She's giving them out at work. You're right.

They're the proper ones. They've got the... Bailey. He let it go. He went back to the plinths and I went back to my scribe. Mrs. Hoyle came home at half five, which was two hours earlier than she told me, and did the thing they all did. stood in the doorway with a mouth slightly open, looking at a kitchen that isn't a kitchen yet.

Oh, she said, it's not finished. Not yet, tonight. Only, you said Tuesday. I did say Tuesday, and then I found out what your last chap did with a waistpipe. I showed her. Don't argue with them. Show them. I got her down on her knees in her work clothes with a table.

torch and made a look at the elbow joint some cowboy had botched behind the sink base, held together with what I can only describe as ambition. She looked at it for a long time. Is that tape? She said. That's tape. On a water pipe? On a water pipe?

She made us tea. People are all right mostly. They're not annoyed at you. they're annoyed at their kitchen. If you can get them annoyed at the right man, usually a man who did the job 30 years ago, you get another day out of them, no bother. She took her tea into the front room and put the news on.

I could hear it through the wall while I worked. Somebody in a field in Yorkshire. Somebody had a peer. The word, unmissable, twice. About 20 to 7, the light started to go off. It didn't drain the way you think, where you don't notice until you're standing in dark. It went thin. The colour came out of it.

Mrs. Hall's units are sage green. She'd agonized over it, and the green just left. The doors went grey. My hands went grey. Everything still had the same brightness to it, roughly, but nothing had any colour in it at all. The shadows sharpened too. Normally the shadow of a window frame has a fuzz to it, an inch of not quite. That went.

Every edge came up hard as a cut. My own hand on the worktop threw a shadow with a border on it like a sticker. I was cutting a 45 and the last bit of agate tray for the door into the hall, and I could not make it read. I took my glasses off, cleaned them with my shirt, put them back on. Same. I checked the bulb in the worklight. The bulb was fine. I stood there with a chisel in my hand for a bit,

and I couldn't have told you why. Then Bailey said, Craig, from the back door, in a voice I hadn't heard him use. I went out into the garden. The street had gone quiet. No cars. You don't clock how much noise a road makes until it stops, then the silence had a shape to it.

Somewhere over towards the school field there were people, a lot of them. They were making a low sort of sound together, the noise a crowd makes in a cathedral. Two doors down, a woman was standing on a garden table in her socks. Bailey was in the middle of the lawn with a cardboard glasses on and his head right back, saying, oh my God, over and over, quite quietly. to nobody. And I didn't look up. It's been so long since I made that decision

that it isn't a decision anymore. It's worn into me. Standing in Mrs. Hoyle's garden, I was not thinking about my brother at all. I was thinking about whether I could get the architrave done and still get the van unloaded before dark. So, I looked down instead. There was a tree in the garden next door.

a big scrubby thing overhanging the fence and the light coming through it fell onto the paving slabs Every gap between every leaf Had thrown a picture of the sun down onto the ground Hundreds of them Little curved slivers of light Thin has clippings Lay scattered all across the slabs

Up the fence panel And over the top of the coal bunker Wherever a leaf let the light through There it was again a sharp, perfect crescent, and every single one of them was pointing the same way. I stood over them, all those little identical cuts of light

lying on a garden path, and they were the shape of something happening behind my back that I had spent my entire adult life avoiding. I could feel it on the back of my neck, the heat going out of the day, out of the bricks, out of everything, at the wrong hour in the wrong month. I told myself I wasn't going to look.

I looked at it. Not for long. I want to say ten seconds, but the honest answer is, I don't know. I turned round. The chisel was still in my hand because I felt it there.

Between those two things, there's a gap and there's nothing in it. It didn't look dangerous. It was sat down low over the rooftops with all that atmosphere in the way, so it had gone red, a curved sliver up on its side with a black pressed into it. You could look, your eye let you. There was no water in it, none of that clench you get when you catch the sun by accident coming out of a tunnel. It didn't hurt at all.

"'Mate, where's he glasses?' Bailey asked in a slightly high voice, and I mumbled something like, "'I'm all right, and went back into the house. "'Finished the architrave, got the door casing done, got the beading on, loaded the van. "'Mrs. Hoyle came out and stood in a kitchen, and paid me half in cash there and then, which rarely happens. "'Twenty past eight. good day in the end. I dropped Bailey at his mums, and he talked the whole way, said the birds had gone quiet,

that there was a lad on his estate who'd watched it through a welding mask, and he wasn't sure that counted. Did you see it, though? he said at the curb with the door open. Did you actually see it? Bit of it. It was mad. Yeah. Then he was gone up the path,

and I drove home, and everything was completely and entirely normal. Brianie was on the step with a can of something in a workclothed still, and she got the good camping chairs out of the shed, which meant she wanted something. Did you see it? I was working. It came out flat. She looked at me over the top of the can. You were working?

Kitchen ran over. Craig, the entire car. country stopped. The entire country wasn't fit in a kitchen in Winsbury. She let it sit for a second longer than was comfortable. She does that, leaves a gap and sees what you put in it. Well, tough, she said, you're not missing tonight as well. Get changed. Because there was another half to it. Same night, the Perseids were at their peak. The reason everyone had gone on about it for a fortnight was that the moon was out of the way, which sounds like luck and isn't apparently. Briny explained it in the car, and I've had it explained twice since.

To get an eclipse, the moon has to be sat in front of the sun, so it's up in the daytime and it sets when the sun sets. The same thing that gave us the eclipse at seven gave us a completely black sky at midnight, no moon anywhere. So the Perseid's meteor shower, would be the most visible, a once in a lifetime cosmic coincidence they called it. She thought that was the most beautiful thing she'd ever heard. She said it was like it was arranged for us. We went out to the layby past the water tower, which is where you go around here if you want dark. Three other cars were already there, and a bloke with a telescope and a red torch,

extremely pleased to have an audience. I lay on the bonnet with my hands behind my head, and let her point things out. Don't look straight at them, she said. At what? Anything faint. You have to look next to it. She had her arm up, tracing.

Like, if there's a smudgy one and you look right at it, it goes. But if you look about that far off to the side of it, it comes back. It's a rotten cones thing. The middle of your eyes rubbish in the dark. My dad taught me that on the caravan. That's mad. Try it. So I did.

I picked a bit of nothing and looked slightly off to the left of it, and a star came up out of the black, like a name you've been trying to remember. Then I looked at it properly, and it went. See? Yeah. Everyone hates it. You get used to it. She got 11 meteors between 11 and half-12,

and counted them out loud. I got none. I said four. I don't know why I said four. If I'd said none, she'd have made it a thing, and I'd have to sit up and be looked at. Sometime after two, I noticed it. We'd been quiet a while, cold coming up through the bonnet,

that smell of a warm car cooling down. I was doing the thing she taught me, sliding my eye off to one side of a patch of sky, eye to see what came up out of it. And something didn't leave. Right in the middle of where I was looking. Not a star. It had no edges to it that I could find.

When I moved my eye, it moved with me, which is what an after image does. So I decided it was that. You get them. You look at a light and it stains. Everyone knows that. I looked at a red torch about half an hour before. I gave it ten minutes, blinked it, rubbed it, looked away and back. The sky round it was

perfect. I could see the smudge of the Milky Way, Brian his arm and the outline of the water tower against the stars, all fine. There was just a place in the middle of everything where the sky wasn't. Obviously, I said nothing. At about three, she said her back had gone and asked if I wanted chips, suggested a garage on the A-41 that does them till four. We got chips, and I ate them with a hole in the middle of my hands. I woke up at half-six and knew before I properly got my eyes open. I lay there looking at the ceiling,

and there was a patch of it that wasn't there. It wasn't black. I kept getting that wrong, kept telling people there's a black spot, because that's what you say. It wasn't black. This was the absence of the ceiling, a bean-shaped hole slightly left of centre,

and my brain kept trying to be helpful and paper over it with more ceiling, so the edges of it swam and healed and tore. Both eyes left worse. I got up. I could see the wardrobe, the door, the pile of clothes on the chair, the light coming round the curtain,

all of it. Perfectly normal room. I turned my head and everything I turned towards went away. I found Briney in the kitchen. I looked at her and her face wasn't there. Her shoulders were, her hair, her ear,

her hands around the mug, the pattern on her sleeve, all of that, sharp as anything. Right where her face should have been there was a smear of kitchen. You were right? I said I'd not slept. I got in the car, assuming I was the only idiot in the West Midlands.

There must have been 30 people in that waiting room. Two lads about Bailey's age, a girl about 14 were the mom, and her mom was frightened. Everybody doing the same thing with their hands over one eye, then the other. Everybody with the same face on. sheepish, like we'd all been caught out at the same party. The lad next to me had done it through his phone screen. He'd been filming it, and he'd looked over the top of the phone for a second to see where to point it. One second, he said.

Kept saying one second, and looking at me to see if I'd tell him that one second was fine. It took four hours, drops that sting, and turn everything into a smear of headlights, a machine you put your chin on that photographs the inside of your eye. Dr. Faraday was about my age and the end of a long shift, and it clearly said all of it 40 times since tea time yesterday. Solar maculopathy, she said, which is a burn. You've cooked to the very centre of the retina. It's a photochemical injury, not a heat one, so there's no pain,

which is exactly why people do it. The good news is genuine. Most people get most of it back. Three months, six months. It'll shrink and it'll fade. And one morning, you'll notice, you're not noticing it. I said, most people? Most people, she said.

You'll keep something. A lot of people keep a small dead spot in the middle, and it stops mattering. I want you doing this grid every morning. And if it gets bigger, or the earth. other eye starts, you come straight back, don't sit on it. She gave me a card with a grid printed on it, a square of little boxes with a dot in the middle, and told me to look at the dot with one eye and see whether the line stayed straight. She went back through the pictures she'd taken, scrolling, then stopped.

How long did you look at it? Ten seconds, about. Hmm. She scrolled back the other way. And when did you do this before? I had every answer ready for standard questions, but not this. Sorry? There's older scarring, same eye.

It's healed. You've had a previous photic injury. She turned the screen slightly. Not really for me, more for herself. Have you done a lot of? welding without a mask or sunbeds. People don't think about sunbeds, or if you've ever stared at the sun as a kid. Kids dare each other to do it. No, I said, no to which. No, I've never done it. She typed it in. It took about as long to type as it took to say. That was the third lie.

It's the one that ended up in a file with my name on it, and it's the only one out of the three I'd take back. Brianne drove because I couldn't. She was good about it, better than I deserved, given she'd found out I'd looked at the eclipse about 11 hours after I'd told her I hadn't. She'd just put a hand on my leg at the lights. Then, on the island by the retail park, she said,

Why did you say you were working? Not in a sharp way, curious, and she left it open, kept her eyes on the road so I could have it easy if I wanted. I had it there, all of it, right up behind my teeth, and I could feel the shape it would come out in. The lights changed, she pulled off, and I watched a man loading flat pack into a courser

with a whole middle of him missing. By the time we were on the ring road, she put the radio on herself. That was the first one I let go past. I taped the grid to the fridge. I stood in the kitchen with one hand over my left eye and looked at the dot. The lines around it bowed away from me like something was pressing on the card from behind. That night I got up for the toilet at about two and didn't put the light on. Stood in the dark on the landing, the hole was still there.

I sat down on the top step. Everything else in that landing was down. dark, so there was nothing to lose, nothing to blank out, no ceiling for it to take away. It should have been gone, it should have been indistinguishable. I could still find it, slightly left off centre, wherever I turned, a different dark to the rest. It's hard to describe, and I've tried. The landing was dark with a light off. The hole was darker.

You can work with one eye You can't work with two eyes When they are both blank in the middle It took me about a day to find that out And I was not gracious about it I went out on the Friday Because there was a kitchen in Aldridge That had to be in by the weekend

A man who takes a day off Owe's an explanation And I hadn't got one I was prepared to give Bailey picked me up Because I'd not driven since Wednesday He'd gone quiet on the phone the night before when I told him where I'd been, and he was quiet all the way over. It finished me. Long run, eight base units down a straight wall, then a return.

You set out the first one dead right, and everything after that is just carrying on. The floor was off. It's always off, so you shim the first cabinet up until it's level, and you work off that. I leveled off the wrong thing. I got the spirit level on the top of the first unit, and I'd read it. The bubble was in the middle, and the middle was in the hole. So what I actually did was look at a bubble I couldn't see and tell myself it was where I expected it to be.

Then I built four meters of kitchen on top of that decision. I got to the end of the run at about four and put my hand flat on the last worktop. And the whole thing dropped away from me under my palm. Bailey was doing the appliance housing. I called him over and asked him to put a level in the first one and tell me what it said. He did. He was quiet for a second.

It's out. How far out? He put it back on, took it off, put it back on. How you do when you don't want the answer to be what it is. Craig, it's like proper out, there's a bubble in a bit. Four metres, bubble in a bit at the start, becomes a centimetre and a half of daylight under the worktop at the end. You can't scribe your way out of it.

You take the whole run off the wall, take the tops off, but the tops were already cut, and the tops were quartz. Nineteen years old, on his knees on a dust sheet, having to tell a man twice his that he'd got it wrong. He did it properly, or given that. He didn't soften it, and he didn't make a meal of it.

I said some things I'd rather not put down, not at him, near him, which is nearly as bad. He waited till I'd finished, then said, You can't see, can you? I can see.

Right, he said, Yeah. And he put him. packed up his own stuff into his own bag and did not slam the door. I sat on an upturned bucket in somebody's half-built kitchen for a long time. The quartz was £1,400. The insurance man on the phone wanted to know the nature of the error, and I said I'd missed her at a level, which is true, and he asked whether I'd had a medical event. I said no, which is also true, technically, because a burn isn't an event, is a thing

that happened to me on Wednesday and is currently getting better. That was the line I was holding. Currently getting better. Dr. Feriday had said most people get most of it back. Three months, six months. She said one morning you'll notice you're not noticing it. I had that off by heart. I said it to Briney, said it to myself in the van.

And I was doing the grid in the fridge every morning, one hand over an eye. like it was a treatment and not a measurement. The lines were bowing more, not less. I knew that. So, there I was. Friday night, $1,400 quid down. No van keys because I'd stopped trusting myself with them.

No Bailey, and nothing in the diary for Monday, because I'd rung around at six o'clock and cancelled the lot of it. Briny was on nights that week. The flat was mine until the morning. On my own, things got worse. The first time I put it down to the drops. I'd had the drops the day before.

I was looking at the telly, right where the telly was, and along the bottom edge of the hole on my left eye, there were four little pale marks, even spacing, slightly different lengths. I blinked and there were three. Then none. The second time was the following morning, on the grid, which is the worst possible place,

because you're already staring at a dot and a card trying to catch your own eye out. Four again at the rim, not moving across anything. They weren't in front of the fridge, they weren't in the room. They were at the edge of the missing bit, like something had come up underneath a floorboard and got its fingertips over the lip. I took my hand off my eye and had a cigarette out the window at half seven in the morning,

which I hadn't done since I was 24. No depth to them, nothing to judge them against. But they looked like fingers. Then I sat down and tried to work out what it was, and I did it quickly. All I could think about, It was the past. We drove down on the 9th of August 1999, two days early, because Dad had read that the

roads would be gridlocked. Apparently, there'd be 2 million people coming, and Cornwall would be full. It was in every paper for six months. Hardly anyone came. That gets left out. They'd brace the whole country for millions, and it just didn't happen. The roads were fine There were coppers stood about with nothing to do

Half the campsites had space All that fear For nothing I was 10 My brother Dean was 15 He got obsessed about a year out It started with a library book And then it was everything

He had the dates of every eclipse in the 21st century Written inside his wardrobe door and a magazine with a fold-out map of the shadow going up the channel. He'd worked out where you had to stand. He explained it to me in the back of the car on the way down, that you could take your glasses off during totality, and only during totality. You're supposed to take them off.

If you keep them on, you'll see nothing at all. He made me repeat it, off when it goes, on, before it comes back. He'd pick the spot as well He hadn't just come to see it He'd worked out where from He had it off the fold-out map A corner of the headland About a ten minute walk

Around from where the cars were Away from the crowd and the coach party And he'd been on at Dad about it Since Sedgemore's services They'd let him take me I've had 27 years to be angry about that And I have never been because I'd have led him too.

He was 15, and he'd read every book the library had on it. My parents could see how serious he was about it. No kid keeps that up for a year for a laugh. So, they let us go alone. Thought it would teach Dean responsibility. Mom said, be back for one. She specifically said, don't go near the edge. So there were 200 people in a field on the 11th.

11th of August, a Wednesday at 20 past 11 in the morning, and not one of them was within shouting distance of us. Cloudy. It had been cloudy all morning, and everyone was miserable about it. My mom kept saying, well, we'll feel it anyway. And then, about ten minutes before, it broke. Just a hole in the grey, right where it needed to be. and behind us back over the fields

200 people made a noise all at once I don't know how to tell you what the dark was like when it came It comes at you across the ground You see it coming and the temperature drops And every bird in cornwall shuts up at once There's a thing in the sky that is not the sun It's a hole with white coming out of its sides 200 people crying somewhere behind a hedge

and somebody's dog going mental. Two minutes and 23 seconds. Dean was going on at me about something in the middle of it. I remember him pulling my sleeve. I remember thinking, not now. And then he stopped. Mid-sentence, just cut off like a call on a bad line. His hand didn't feel like it slipped off my sleeve.

It just released. It was quiet and I got the rest of. of the eclipse in peace. It came back like somebody's thrown a switch, a light coming on, and I was stood on a headland, on my own. I came back to the cars by myself. I've never been able to get at what I'd said when I got there, only what everyone did after, looking in the field, the gate, the car.

Police came in the afternoon. They had those pre-positioned units all over Cornwall. for the crowds that never came, so we had more police than we knew what to do with, which you'd think would help. They had helicopters up by six, coast guard out on the water by half seven. They looked for a 15-year-old boy

who got fed up and wondered off. They never found anything. My dad died in 2011 and my mom in 2019. Neither of them ever knew a single thing more than they knew standing in that field. Of course I was seeing fingers. That's what I thought. And it was a relief.

It was actually a relief. Stress does things. Your brain's a machine for finding patterns. Give it a hole and no work and a dead brother's anniversary landing wrong. Of course my head would make things up. I nearly told Brianny got as far as saying her name. She looked up and waited. And I said, did she want to brew?

The right eye went on the Saturday. I'd had it in both, but the right had always been the good one. Smaller, softer at the edges, something I could work around. I woke up on the Saturday and it had grown in the night to match. Now there were two. I lay there doing what you do. Cover one, look, cover the other, look. and they weren't the same,

not the size of them. When I covered my right eye and looked at the wardrobe with the left, there was a hole with a certain sort of nothing in it. When I covered my left and looked at the same wardrobe with the right, there was a hole with a different sort of nothing in it. Two different absences, and I could not have told you how I could tell them apart. I sat on the edge of the bed a while with a hand.

over each eye in turn. Then I got up, went to the bathroom, and stopped in the doorway. Because there's a mirror in there, and I didn't want to. I couldn't tell you why, I just didn't want to. Briney got in from a night at about eight that morning, and I'd covered the mirrors by then. Bathroom, hall, the little one on the bedroom she uses for her eyes, towel and a carrier bag gaffer taped at the corners. She stood in the kitchen doorway with a coat still on.

You've covered the mirrors, Craig. I told her it was the dazzle. That was nearly true, because Light was doing things to me by then. But I could hear it when I was saying it. You can always hear it. Six months, she said, and I don't know one thing about you. I could have fixed it there, said my brother's name, told her about it.

the field and the fingers, and I know what she'd have done, because she's a better person than I am. She'd have sat down on the floor with me, and we'd have got somewhere. She left the gap, third one, and I stood in it with my mouth shut, same as I've done since 1999. After a while, she said she was going to bed. She slept till six, then went out another night at seven without either of us. saying anything else about it. So, I heard the flat to myself again, with two holes in my head.

It got out that evening. I got into a way of sitting by then, armchair angled at the window, because if you sit at 45 degrees to a bright thing, you can use the edges of your eye for most of it, and it's nearly like seeing, sat there like an old man. And the fingers came up over the... the rim of the left one. Four again at the bottom edge. So, I thought stress again, tried to calm down and waited for them to pack it in. They didn't. They got longer. They came up out of the missing bit, knuckles first, then the backs of them, and then the whole hand was clear to the base

of the thumb. It turned and got its palm down flat on the rim, on the actual edge of the hole, and pressed. I watched something take its weight on a place that is not physical, lever itself up, and put a wrist through into my living room. The wrist, then the forearm to about halfway. I did not move. I sat in the chair with my hands gripping my knees. It was pale. raw, like the bit of a tree under the bark. There was no blood in it, and there never had been. You could tell that at a glance, no flush at the knuckle where the bone comes near the surface,

just an even white grey the whole way, and a shine to it that wasn't wet. And it was clean. I could not get past that then, and I cannot get past it now. I'm a joiner, my hands are a record, There's a scar across the back of my right one from a Stanley blade in 2007. The nail on the middle finger has grown wrong ever since a Joyce landed on it. There's always glue in the creases.

Every set of hands I've worked next to is the same. Hands are a list of everything you've done. This one had done nothing. No marks on the palm. It had the creases. It had a thumb joint and a bit of the left. blue skin over the knuckle like anyone's. It just had no history. Nothing had ever happened to it. It stayed maybe 15 seconds. Then it made a fist. That's when I got out of the chair. I was in the

kitchen before I knew I stood up. I stood there for about an hour with the extractor fan on because I wanted a noise. It happened twice more before dark. Over. the top of the sink in the hall when I put the big light on, and I found standing in my hall at nine at night that I could get rid of it. If I looked straight at where it was, hard and deliberate, it went every time. It's not a trick, it's how the injury works. The hole is the middle of my sight, and it travels with me, so anything in it is in the exact place I can never look. and the second I turn my head to put my eyes on it. I've taken the hole with me, and it's somewhere else.

It doesn't move. The world moves behind it. I did that many times, four seconds of empty hall, and then it was back at the rim of whatever I was looking into. I don't know what I thought I was proving. At about 11, I went to take the towel off the bathroom mirror. I put the big light on and pulled the towel off And for a second

It was fine It was what it had been for three days Shoulders the top of my ears My hair all there All completely normal And a smear were my faces Then it settled And the hole was no longer in the room

It was in me I could see its edges and through it behind where the back of my own head should have been I could see the far wall of the bathroom the tiles the edge of the shower screen the light switch cord swinging very slightly which meant I could see something four feet behind my own skull through the front of my face

and it was moving I have absolutely no idea why I didn't run the fingers came over the bottom edge of my jaw inside the rim gripping the lip of my own face from underneath, the same as they'd gripped the rim of the hole in the chair. It came out wrong, forearm, then elbow. There was more arm than would fit, but it kept coming. None of it made the hole any bigger or the arm any thinner. I stood there and watched it happen. My brain kept trying to give me a number for how long the arm was, and it couldn't.

and I felt nothing. There was nothing in the middle of my face for anything to press on. The place it was coming through had no nerves in it because the place it was coming through was not there. So a thing, the length of a man, came out of my head and I had less sensation of it than you get from a hair on your collar. The elbow cleared, the upper arm came, and when it had enough of itself out in the room,

It reached across and put its hand down on the top of my shoulder, then settled the weight on. Fingers over my collarbone, the last two curled around the front of my shirt, in the fabric, tucked in, comfortable. I looked down at my actual shoulder. Nothing. Blue check, top button gone, a bit of dust on it, my own shoulder with nothing on it whatsoever. and I could see it as long as I'd liked, because the side is the only place I can still see. I looked up. It had moved along, same hand, but it had shifted an inch toward my neck. I hoped it would slink off when I looked away, the way it had before. It hadn't. It had moved instead. I got out. I got the door shut and sat on the landing floor.

with my back against it in the dark. I did not give it up. I got the door shut and sat on the landing floor with my back against it in the dark. I am not the sort of man who wants a thing like this to be true. But medical conditions, don't put a hand on your shoulder and move it while you're looking away. So I did what you do when all logic's gone. I said his name out loud on the landing. I said, Dean, is that you? Nothing at all happened. There was no change in the room. Nothing answered.

She got in from a night at 10 to 8 and went straight up. She was asleep by the time the taxi came, and I didn't wake her to say where I was going. The taxi came at 20 past 8, and I sat in the back with my head turned to the window like a dog, because a moving shower. is the best thing when the middle's gone, and part of me hoped that whatever it was couldn't keep up with the movement. Sunday the 16th, four days. Dr. Feriday told me to come straight back if the other I started, or if it got bigger, and both had. Going back is the one instruction I followed. I hadn't slept. The waiting room was nothing like Thursday. Four one of them asleep.

The great national outbreak of stupidity had already started clearing up. Most of them will get better, exactly like she said they would, and go back to work and tell it as a funny story. I got called at ten past nine. Dr. Feriday was patient with me. Right, she said, how are we? I told her about the level and the worktops. I did not tell her about what I saw in the hall or the bathroom.

I had that argument with myself in the taxi. She did the letters and the wall better than I expected. He learned to read around it. Then the grid, and I had to say the lines were bowed, and she wrote. Then drops, the weight, and the machine you put your chin on. She was quiet through the scan, a working one. Okay. It looks the same as Thursday

And before he'd take that badly It's meant too Three days is nothing I wouldn't expect to see the first bit of change For a fortnight And I wouldn't read anything into it either way before then She traced something on the screen With the pen without touching the glass

The scan isn't the thing to go on this early What I'd go on is that most people get most of it back Three months, six months You'll likely be fine by Christmas. You'll keep a small central defect, probably, but it shrinks and you compensate. I asked her, and I'd rehearse this in the taxi about 11 times, whether a thing like this could make you see things that aren't there. She wasn't remotely thrown. Yes, very commonly, take vision away from a bit of cortex, and the cortex doesn't sit quietly. It generally, it generally

It generates, patterns, colours, sometimes faces. It's called Charles Bonnet Syndrome. It's benign, and it's underreported, because people are frightened will think they've lost the plot. She looked up. Are you getting anything? A bit of flickering, I said, around the edges. Tell me if it changes. I will.

Then she went back through the images. That was all it was. She had Thursday's pictures up and the ones from that morning. She was flicking between them, comparing the two photographs, and she said, mostly to herself, That's a nice clean shape, actually. Sorry, you get a burn shape. She sat back a bit and turned the screen properly this time.

The eye is a lens, it's focused the thing onto the back of itself, so what you end up with is a picture of whatever you were looking at printed on the retina. She tapped a desk near the screen. With a partial eclipse, you very often get a crescent. Little curved scar, because that's what was in the sky. I've had four of those this month.

They're rather lovely, in an awful sort of way. I looked at it. My eyes were dilated and my central vision gone. So I was looking at the photograph on a certain way. screen with the sides of my eyes. I saw it properly. It was a ring, a complete one, a pale circle with a dark center to it, closed all the way round, even in thickness, and the middle wasn't scarred at all.

The middle of it was untouched retina, sitting there fine with a burnt ring drawn around it. That's not a crescent. I said. No, it's very round, isn't it? She leaned in and looked at it closer. You do get variation. The shapes affected by all sorts of things.

Eye movement, how many times you looked. If somebody looks four or five times over a minute, you can get overlapping lesions that merge and look like anything at all. I looked once. You said ten seconds, roughly, and people are always. wrong about that?" She smiled. No offense. Everybody's wrong about it. Ten seconds means anything from four to a minute and a half. She scrolled on. That was it. Twenty seconds of her being mildly interested in a shape and then she went to the next picture. Clinically,

it doesn't matter at all. The shape of a burn changes nothing about the treatment or the prognosis. To her, it was just a curiosity. Whatever was happening to me wasn't medical. But here's the thing neither of us said. At 92% there's still a curve of the sun left. It's a big curve. Nothing in the sky over England on the 12th of August made a ring. Now, the other thing, she said, and pulled up something else.

I asked you whether you had a previous injury, and you said no. I did. I want to show you why I asked. Two images of the same eye side by side. This is your fresh legion, and this is old. Right next to it, just off centre. See how it's pigmented at the edges there, that clumping? That's a burn that's healed a very long time ago.

decades. It's tiny and it's never given you a day's bother. I bet you've had it since you were a child. I looked at the old one. It was a ring as well, fainter, a little pale circle with a clean retina inside it and pigment freckled around the outside sat there quietly. 27 years old, about a millimeter from the new one, and the two of them were concentric. Not touching, one inside the other, like the rings on a stump. Kids stare at the sun, she said. It's one of those things. You'll not remember it.

I said, I had my eyes shut. She looked up. Sorry? It was ten. There was a thing in the sky over the field with white coming out the sides of it. Everyone in Cornwall screaming. I had my eyes shut for the first bit. I don't know how long.

I opened them and saw the rest of it. I never told anybody I'd shut them. You can't burn a shut eye. Nothing, I said. Sunbeds. Probably sunbeds. She wrote it down. Outside, I sat on the wall by the drop-off,

with my eyes streaming from the drops. Everything had blown out smear. Two burns in the same eye a millimeter apart, 27 years between them, both the shape of the totally covered sun. Neither of them the shape of anything that was in the sky when I got them, because on the 11th of August 1999, my eyes were shut for everything except totality. There is no reasonable thing to do with that. What I did was decide that something had been printed on me in the world. that field and whatever was coming up out of the hole had come in with it and had been

sat in me since I was 10 waiting for somebody to make the hole big enough which meant the answer was in that field everything after follows from there not the recent eclipse that only opened the door Cornwall was where I did this to myself I got the phone out held it about four inches off to the left and started working out how to get to the lizard when you can't drive. The field to solar farm now. I found that in about 90 seconds. Planning application in 2014, 40 acres, and there's a local paper piece with a photograph of a counsellor stood at a gate. I know that gate. I looked at that photo for a long time with my head at an angle. The panels going off behind him in rows and rows down the slope, all the way to where the ground stops,

and the sea after that. It took two calls. The metasaur as a festool is the single most expensive thing I have ever bought. A lad from Canuck met me at the garage at half-11 and gave me $480 quid in twenties. Then the track saw, the rail and the router. He rang his mate while he stood there and his mate came out for the rest. I told myself it was temporary. I'll get them back.

They hold their value. You can always buy tools. I stood in an empty garage on a Sunday afternoon with 1100 quid in my jacket and my whole tray going up the M6 in the back of someone else's transit. I sold 20 years of work to get to a field. The train from New Street to Penzance is the wrong side of six hours on a Sunday and you change twice. I got the 20 past two.

The train comes along the seawall at Dourlish, and everyone on it looks out the window. I looked at the window with the side of my eye and got a strip of it. Top of the water, the wall going by, the whole middle of the view punched out. I had a hand on the glass for a while. Not mine.

It sat on the outside of the window for about a minute, palm flat, going along with us. Nothing to hold on to. I'd stopped getting up about it by then. There is nowhere to go on a train. There's no bus down the lizard on a Sunday evening. I found out stood outside Penzance Station with a bag and a stick I bought in the garden centre.

So I got a taxi, 45 quid down. The driver was a woman about 60, and when the headlights got to the gate, she said, There's no houses up here, love. Is someone meeting you? And I said yes. She sat a minute with the engine going.

Then she turned it round in the gateway, and I listened to her, go back down the lane. I'd been expecting a field. What's there is an industrial installation. Palisade fence with a wire on top of it, gate with a keypad, A sign about voltages, a sign about CCTV. And behind the fence, the panels, rows of them going down the slope on frames, all tilted the same.

The whole hillside gone black and geometric. It's a hard thing to look at. It's not ugly. There's just nothing for your eye to catch on anywhere. The field I'd had in my head for 27 years is a green thing with people sat on it. and it isn't there. The wall's still there. The wall along the top boundary is the same wall, granite,

with the same bit falling in at the corner where a kid could get over. A couple hundred yards down past the far end of the panels, the ground stops, and there's the sea, 400 feet below. The Coast Guard searched that in 1999. Boats, helicopters, the lot, from half seven that evening. I looked down at the water sideways.

They were looking for a boy who disappeared into thin air. There was a bloke on sight. I hadn't reckoned on that at all. Sixties van, high-vis. A technician contracted out at that hour on a Sunday because the inverter had thrown a fault. That's why the gate was open. He found me stood at the fence in the dark

and did exactly what you'd do. You're all right there. I said I was looking at the view. You're stood in front of a fence. Fair enough. He wasn't aggressive about it. He'd been on his own with a fault since six. Seemed he wanted a chat as much as he wanted rid of me.

Then I asked him the question. I'd come 400 miles to ask. Were you here in 99? He was. Not on this field. He was up at Culdros then, but he'd stood on the cliff at Bass Point with his wife and about 200 other people,

and he talked about it for a solid ten minutes. The birds went, the temperature, a man near him wept. And then he said his wife reckoned she'd heard a kid shouting from round a headland somewhere in the dark, and they'd put it down to somebody getting carried away. I had my hand flat on the side of a warm van

and I did not move it He asked why I wanted to know And I said my family came down for it He said lovely What did Then he asked with the door open And the interior light on Whether I wanted a lift back down to Helston

He asked me twice I told him I was being picked up He locked the gate and drove off, gave a friendly beep on the lane. Sunrise was about 10 past 6 and if I went back to Helston I'd never get out here again by then.

The bosses don't run that early. Once I'd chosen to stay, I couldn't get off the hill either because I can't travel in the dark. That's not a figure of speech. A lane with high hedges at 11 at night is a black tube with a black floor. Seven hours

on a granite wall with my back to a fence. The arm came out before midnight, and it stayed. It didn't do anything, not one thing it hadn't done before. It came up over the rim and got itself out of the elbow. And then, it just stayed, and it did not go when I turned my head, because there was nothing to turn my head towards. A field in the dark is the same in every direction.

The trick doesn't work when there's nothing to swap it for. So we sat there. It sat with me until four in the morning. And I want to set out what I was doing. I thought... It was Dean. That's what four days with no sleep and a burn in your head does. Something got into me the day my brother stopped existing

and it had been there since. The only thing that ever let any of it out was a freshly burnt hole in the middle of my sight. But the hole was too small. That was the reasoning. A hand and a wrist were as much of him as would fit. If I made it bigger, he could come the rest of the way and then, after 27 years, it would be finished.

I was going to let my brother. brother out. I know he was irreversible, but it felt like a small price to pay for what I owed him. The sun came up out the bay at 11 minutes past six. You can look at her sunrise. Everybody has. There's a minute or two at the start where it's thick and red, sitting in all that low air. It doesn't hurt. It's the same trap that got me stood in a garden at Wensbury with a chisel in my and I walked into it again on purpose with 400 miles of preparation. I could see it, actually see it. A red thing sat on the water, big and bright enough to fill more than the hole.

First thing I'd properly seen since Wednesday. Then it got up out the haze and stopped being red. And that's when it started. Your eyes fight you. I hadn't reckoned on that. I hoped it would come on more gradually from the red. The lid comes down without asking, and the water pours out of you. Your head turns itself away.

I had to put my hands on my own face to stop it, one on the brow and one of the jaw, holding my own head still. There's only your body doing everything you can think of to make you stop, and none of it hurts, so you can override all of it if you decide to. I don't know how long. Longer than Wednesday. Much longer.

At some point the whole field went white. Grass and sky gone to the same nothing. I was making a noise and the last thing I saw with any clarity was my own hand in front of me and I could see the glue in the creases. Then it stopped being white. and started being something else.

I went down on my knees between two rows, put my head down, and waited. It came back in stages, and every stage was worse than the one before. A period of nothing at all, which I was fine with, because I knew it was temporary.

Then colors at the outsides, then shapes at the outsides. Then the middle arrived, and the middle was the size of, a dinner plate held at arm's length. I got up and the hole came with me. It was there in the rim like the lip of a well. Both hands came over it, more arm than there had ever been, and the arms came up, hand over hand, on a rim that isn't anywhere, than the shoulders further than it had ever come before. And then the whole of it hauled itself up, out of

the middle of my sight, and stood in front of me in a field, in full daylight. I'm not going to describe it. I'll give you two things, and that's all. The first is that the hands were the smallest part of it. They were the ends. The thing that had been coming into my bathroom since Friday, putting itself on my shoulder like a dad at a funeral, was the last inch of something that had been stood on this headland in 1999 with its arms down a hole in a 10-year-old boy's eye.

The second is that I had seen it before. The 11th of August 1999 in the same field. Dean took me round the headland, as I said. Ten minutes walk, bracken up to my chest, the noise of the crowd getting smaller behind us until it wasn't there. Then the ground opened out and the sea was. went away, flat to the edge of everything. Don't go near the edge, Mom said.

He kept me back off it. He was being responsible, kept his hand on my shoulder the whole way across the last bit of open ground, and put me down on a rock about 30 feet from where it stops. He had the glasses in his coat pocket and a quick save bag with a fold-out map. He'd been checking his watch since half ten. And then it started. started to come across the water.

The birds went, the temperature dropped, and the colour drained out of the gorse and the bracken and out my brother's face. Every shadow on that headland went hard and sharp as a cut. And then they went long. When the light drops out of the sky at 20 past 11 in the morning, the shadows don't disappear.

They stretch. All of them at once, in the same direction. Something came out of one. I've had 27 years to find a word for how, and I haven't got one. It didn't climb out. The shadow was a shape on the ground,

and then there was more of the shape than there was ground. It came off the flat, the way ink comes off a nib, getting bigger, except it wasn't coming towards us. It was just becoming there. It made no sound. 200 people were screaming behind a hedge 400 yards away,

and I could hear every one of them, and the thing, 30 feet in front of me, arrived in total silence, and I shut my eyes. I've told everybody for 27 years that I shut them because the dark came fast and I was frightened. But really, I shut them because there was something on the headland with us.

Thus. Dean pulled my sleeve. He said my name. He said it twice. And then he said, run. He pulled hard enough to move me. I remember my shoulder going and my feet not. I had thought about that particular half second more than I have thought about anything else in my life. Because that is the moment. But I was ten years old, frightened to death, trying to make the world disappear. My eyes screwed shut, not moving, because moving means opening your eyes, and opening your eyes means seeing it again. So, I shrugged him off. He ran, he was 15, and he had a far better survival instinct than I did. It was the sensible thing, the right thing. And it stopped. It was quiet, and I got the rest of the eclipse.

in peace. I open my eyes into totality with nothing on the headland but me. So I stood in a soul of arm with the same thing 30 feet in front of me in broad daylight. I had been wrong about all of it. I'd spent 27 years thinking about what I'd do if it ever happened again, fighting it, getting around it, making it give him back. but none of that happened. I was 10 years old again, and I could not move.

It came across. I couldn't watch it come. That's the joke of the whole week, because it was the hole. It was the exact place my eyes can't go. I had a dinner plate of nothing in the middle of everything. Every time my eyes tried to grab it, the hole came with me, and it took it away. So what I got was the edges, its shadow moving along the scenery in the low glow of the sun, and the pressure on the air that I could feel on my arms.

It stopped somewhere close. I know how close because the light changed that the edges of my vision, and then it put a hand on my shoulder. I felt that one. This time, it was weight in it, fingers over my collarbone, the last two curled in front of my shirt, cold like the inside of a wall. And I stood there. The next part I can't get at.

I have no idea how long it was. The technician from before says he got to me about half nine, so I lost somewhere about three hours. My legs went at some point, and I would not let them fold. There was a wet patch down my leg, and I only found out about it in the ambulance. I did not move. I stayed still for as long as I could. It cost me my eyes to be able to do it.

The only reason I could stand there and not look at the thing that took my brother was that I burned out the part of me that looks, 400 yards from where I burnt it the first time, on purpose, because I thought I was letting him out. Then, the hand wasn't there. The technician came out to do the string washing and saw me sat in the middle of his employer's asset. He came down the slope shouting and got to about 15 feet away and stopped. I hadn't known my face was bleeding.

I had my hands on it hard enough for so long that I opened the skin over my own eyebrow with my thumbnail. I never felt it and I still don't remember it. He got me up the hill and sat me in his van with a door open and rang for an arm for an arm. ambulance, and while we were waiting, he asked me twice what I'd been doing down there. I didn't answer either time. Then he stopped asking and just sat with me. He didn't have to do that. I hope he never finds out what he was sat next to.

The police came to the hospital at Truro at about one, trespass and a welfare thing. A sergeant with a very kind manner asked me careful questions. questions in a particular order, and somewhere in the middle of it, I gave him my name, and Deans, and the Year. I heard him stop writing. He didn't ask me anything else about it then, he said he'd be about. The consultant looked at the back of my eyes for a long time before he said anything. He was younger than me.

He asked how long I'd looked, and I told him the truth, which is that? I don't know. Then he told me what I'd done in the plainest language I've ever heard in a hospital. He said, This doesn't come back. The sergeant was still here.

He came and sat down about an hour ago with a file open on his knee. He looked it up while I was in with a consultant. He had the year, the place, and Dean's name on his lap in somebody else's handwriting from 1999. He said, is there anything you want to add to this?

And there it was. I had it all lined up. The headland, three shrugs, him saying run. I said, no. There's a sentence in that file that I put there when I was 10 years old. My mother and father read it, and both of them died with it in their heads. It says he wandered off.

If I change it now to something no living person can check, all I've done is take away the only version of my brother anybody else has got and put mine in its place. The truth has a thing in it that came out of a hole in my face. He said to tell him if anything comes back to me and left the rest of it hanging. Then he left a card I can't read on the table. I haven't rung Bryny.

She'll have got in from a night this morning and found the flat empty. The mirror is still covered. She'll have messaged and I can't read it. Bailey doesn't know either. The technician knows more about me than either of them and he is a man I met last night next to a fence. My jacket's in the cupboard by the bed with money still in it. On Sunday I told myself this was temporary and I believed it.

You can't hang a door by feel. The hole is still there. It's in the middle of everything I look at. I stood still for hours and at some point it let go on my shoulder. That's the only thing I know about it. My only guess is the same as before. I didn't move. Being a coward saved me twice.

I've been lying here trying to work out. what a joiner does when he can't see a bubble in a level. Not much is the answer. You can labour for somebody, but that's apprentice level work at most. There's a bloke I know who went to estimating after his back went, and he's all right, but I'd still need to be able to see. I'll have to be something else. I don't know what yet, and I'm not going to work it out in one night.

What I keep coming back to instead is what's left, which isn't much, and most of it is a woman who kept leaving me gaps. The bloke opposite told me this afternoon there's a lunar eclipse in a week on Friday, the 28th, 96% of the moon in the earth's shadow. You don't need specialist glasses, you look straight at it for as long as your neck holds out

and it will not do a single thing to you. So, I'm going to ring her tomorrow. I'm going to tell her about the headland. I've sat here and decided that if she can hear that and stay, she'll not get another gap out of me. If that works out, I'll tell her there's something on the 28th she'd like. She'll come. That's the worst thing about her.

and I'll not see it, not the middle of it. I'll get the edges, the trees, the shape of her stood next to me with her head back. She'll have to tell me what's happening in the part I can't have. That'll do. That's more than I had on Wednesday.