This was my first creepypasta. You can also find it up on the Monolith forums.
Back in 1970, comic book fans sometimes came upon an ad for x-ray specs. I don’t know if anyone ordered them or not, but I know one thing for sure; no one got the real thing.
No, that was my unhappy pleasure.
One autumn Sunday afternoon, the 8th grader that I was in 1955 entered a novelty shop and exited with a hideous pair of black glasses that looked to be made of some kind of cheapass plastic. They’d cost me all of a penny and the box they came in claimed that they were the world’s only pair of x-ray vision glasses.
Now, at the time, I thought this was a fine joke.
First of all, how the blue hell did the world’s only anything come into the possession of a novelty store in good ol’ Shitkicker, Nebraska?
Secondly, the price. The box they came in cost more to make than the piece of shit inside.
So, I ‘knew’ it was faker than a stripper’s titty, but bought them because I had a dollar’s worth of allowance burning a hole in my pocket. Besides, my friends at school would get a kick out of them and, at that age, what else matters?
Sure enough, come Monday morning, my dorky friends and I were clowning around outside of Wheeler’s General Store, when I brought out my coke-bottle novelty-shop wonder, took them out of the package and put them on.
The general consensus was that I looked like a fucking retard. This, we all agreed, was funny as hell.
Yeah, I know, we were in middle school. Everyone is an idiot in middle school.
Anyway.
I proceeded to fuck around, first acting as though I were really mentally retarded, drooling as girls I knew from school walked by, lunging as they veered away in disgust, enjoying the shrieks of revulsion I got in reply.
After a while, even our easily occupied minds required something a little better for stimulation. In order to maintain my status in the limelight, I upped the ante, made like the specs really worked. I pretended to recoil from the homely girls that passed, leering at the girls, some of whom were older than me and in high school, who I deemed pretty enough.
It took me about a minute to figure out that I wasn’t just imagining the ladies in their underwear.
My friends caught on to the fact that something was wrong when a large girl in the class ahead of us walked by and I failed to do the proper thing and flail like an idiot. The girl in question had tits like I had never seen before and will most likely never see again. They were real, no doubt about that.
My friends jeered as my head turned to watch her pass.
“Hey Michael, you wanna go out to the dairy and check out the heifers?” one of them, Bobby, asked.
I turned around, ready to throw out some witty reply, and recoiled from what I saw.
Bobby was no looker himself, you see. I’ve never cared for the sight of other men naked, anyway.
This was all it took to get everyone laughing again, except Bobby, whose face turned to a frown as I stumbled back from him. When you’re in 8th grade, a joke is funny only so long as it’s happening to someone else.
I whipped my specs off, muttered, “Damn,” and his scowl deepened.
“Asshole,” muttered Bobby.
The laughter hadn’t yet subsided when Old Man Wheeler came out and shooed us away from his shop. He threatened, as always, to call the police on us for loitering. As always, the threat was empty, at least as far as we were concerned. We never really stuck around long enough to find out.
This is how it began.
Over the next few months I would use my newfound treasure to do everything from looking through girls’ clothes, to watching the late movies through the bathroom wall when my parents sent me to bed. The late-night movie sessions lasted long enough for me to see The War of the Worlds before I saw something I’d have just as well not seen. I gave up my x-ray specs for a week or two after that.
See, over the couch I’d glimpsed my mother’s head and shoulders. As usual, I could see through her clothes, but I couldn’t see anything important, so I hadn’t minded.
But, for a split second, I felt like I could see through her head, at least through the back of her skull, to the brain inside. It didn’t look like the brains I’d seen in my biology textbook, all clean and pink, like a ball of macabre yarn. It looked like clotty red and pink meat, which is what it was, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight.
I gagged, tossed my specs against the bathroom wall.
It should have been a clue when the damn things didn’t break.
I hurried back to bed, the specs now safely tucked under one arm, hoping that my parents hadn’t heard me. I jammed the specs under my bed and threw the covers over myself, willing myself to forget the pulsing redness inside my mother’s skull.
It took me about a week to dismiss my better instincts. I told myself that it was just a trick of the light, that I had been tired and that I had allowed the movie, a horror flick, to go to my head. Just because my specs could see through cloth didn’t mean they could see through the dense bone of a person’s head.
I took the specs back up and for a while all was right with my world. I looked at pretty girls naked and even cheated on a test once, science. The teacher didn’t even notice that I was wearing plastic glasses in class, that’s how little attention he paid to us.
Anyway, when a red haze started to filter in every once in a while, around the people I was watching, I just dismissed it. I figured, hell, if blood and gore is cool in horror books, why not in real life? It’d make biology a sight easier to learn, no pun intended.
So, I kept at it, even when the pretty girls started being not so pretty any more and when breasts took on the look of globes of white fat, which is what breasts really are. I became fascinated with the roiling innards of the people I saw every day and I suppose that if I’d made it that far, I might have made a decent doctor.
I don’t remember when I started seeing through things, even when I took the specs off. I guess I was just so used to seeing the insides of people, of seeing their chewed food roll down their constricting throats at lunch time, their farts swelling inside them during math class, that I didn’t notice how my natural vision had changed. I was in class when it came to me, while I was struggling to see my English textbook, rather than through it. I reached up to remove my specs, wondering why I had put them on in the first place. I felt nothing but my own skin under my fingers and I let out an unholy shriek, scaring poor old Mrs. Potter out of her wits. The class stared at me like I’d grown an extra leg and I might as well have. I clutched my face and the teacher summoned the wits to escort me down to the principal’s office, where I sat, in dire shock, until my mother came to pick me up.
I was sent to bed straight away when I got home, my mother believing that I had a migraine and needed bed rest. I heard her phone the doctor from the other room, speaking about her son’s ‘collapse’ at school. Embarrassing as this was, I was too concerned with the fact that I could currently see through my eyelids, a fact I had never noticed while lying in my dark room at night. The room seemed quite bright, owing to the fact that I could also see through my window shade and the bedroom ceiling.
It only got worse from there. You may not realize it, but there are things in the universe that were never meant to be seen by human eyes, at least not while we’re still alive; twisty, sinuous things, like rays of vibrating energy with great gaping eyes and mouths that form the black holes of the universe, dancing around the stars and planets. Imagine walking each day suspended over the deepest pits in hell and all they contain. Boiling piss and blood is tame by comparison to the things I’ve seen since that fateful autumn day. These are only the things I can describe-there are things out there that human language can’t adequately explain.
Even now, after I put out my own eyes with a ballpoint pen, I can still see them. I almost hope I bleed out before my parents get home from dinner. Yet, I can’t help wondering-if my soul leaves my body, will I have to confront those monsters that roam our universe? Will I ever stop seeing? For this reason, I’m almost scared to let myself die. Is there something beyond even this which I will be forced to see?
