Blink
BRADLEY CONVISSAR
Smashwords edition
This book is a work of fiction.
All characters, events and situations in this book
are purely fictional and any resemblance to real
people or events is purely coincidental.
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Copyright 2011 Bradley Convissar
Cover design by Bradley Convissar
The cover photo is a derivative of the photo “eyball” by Budzlife at Flickr, used under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License
http://www.flickr.com/photos/budslife/2853070450/
The background is “Dirty Grunge Background by happykanppy, 2011 used under license from Shutterstock.com”
In his twenty-five years of practicing dentistry, fifty-year-old Brian Mallory had never been freaked out at work. Anxious (while placing his first implant) sure, nervous (while trying to extract several root tips close to the maxillary sinus) definitely, and yes, even scared (while trying to cut out an impacted wisdom tooth, a procedure he had no business even attempting because of the difficulty and his own lack of experience), but he had never felt freaked out.
Until today.
And to think that the object of his current distress was something as simple, as innocuous, as a cheap piece of jewelry. A tongue ring, to be exact, the offensive bead resting comfortably within the mouth of the young female patient currently sitting in his chair.
“Time for a break, Amy,” Brian said as he applied gentle pressure to the small circular pedal under his foot, allowing the dental chair and its occupant to rotate into an upright position. “Take a rinse,” he added, then watched the young woman as she swished a cupful of water in her mouth before spitting it unceremoniously into the small bowl next to her. Brian’s eyes lingered on her profile- her high cheekbones, the graceful sweep of her of her nose, the corners of her expressive eyes- longer than what many would have considered to be professionally appropriate. But it wasn’t with the lecherous eye of a sixty year old man watching half-naked eighteen year old girls bounce around on MTV that he eyed the young woman. It was with a certain amount of pride. Though he was not the girl’s parent, or even a teacher, only her dentist, he had watched her grow from a nervous, shy child into an ambitious young adult over the past sixteen years.
Of course, he had watched many of his patients grow from toddlers into adults over the decades; that was part of owning a family practice. Hell, he had been doing this for so long that he was now seeing the children of patients who had been children themselves when their parents brought them in for their first check-up. All of the children he had watched mature over the years occupied a certain space in his heart, but Amy Gladwell… she demanded a small section all her own. After all, Brian believed that the girl may not even be alive today if it weren’t for his intervention.
Well, truth be told, she may not have died- probably wouldn’t have died- but her life could very well have wandered down a truly tragic path, one that surely would have altered her future for the worse if not for his involvement.
It was just after Amy had turned fourteen, and Brian was doing a routine exam after the hygienist completed her cleaning. Everything looked normal, and he almost missed the subtle pathology on the tongue side of her upper incisors. But as he swept the mirror along the arch, adjusting the overhead light for better illumination, he saw it: the faint pitting of the enamel that was the tell-tale sign of acid erosion, a phenomenon resulting either from sucking on lemons or another highly acidic food regularly or, more likely considering Amy’s gender and age, bulimia.
Brian had said nothing to Amy; she was a minor and it wasn’t his responsibility to approach her directly. But he mentioned his suspicions to her parents in the waiting room afterwards while she was in the bathroom, half expecting George and Elizabeth Gladwell to be angry with him for even suggesting that their precious daughter had something wrong with her. But instead, they shared a worried look between them, and Brian knew at that moment that the two suspected something but had been waiting for more evidence before confronting their daughter. And he had just handed them the proverbial smoking gun: a professional opinion. They thanked him for his observations and left with Amy.
When Elizabeth returned three months later for her exam and cleaning, she told Brian that Amy was seeing a psychologist for help with her bulimia. And when Amy returned three months after that for her own six month recall, she gave him a hug and thanked him for helping her. He asked her with what, and she smiled at him slyly.
“So your parents told you that I tattled on you?” he had asked.
“They didn’t rat you out. But I knew they suspected, and when they talked to me later that night, the timing seemed a little too coincidental. I knew you had said something to them.”
“I had to,” he had said.
“I know you did.” And she had hugged him again.
Amy, she was a very smart, very perceptive girl.
Seeing Amy always reminded him of one of the hidden joys of being a dentist. He had first seen her when she was three years old, over sixteen years ago, and had watched her grow from a toddler owning a spattering of tiny white teeth, to an awkward pre-teen with adult teeth erupting in the most distressing of places, to a shy teenager with a mouth full of braces she was ashamed of, to now, a beautiful, confident nineteen year old in her sophomore year of college. And who knew if she would have made it to this point without him.
“So how’s school going?” Brian asked Amy as she wiped her face with the yellow napkin around her neck. “I hear UCLA is beautiful.”
“Good,” she said. “Weather down in Southern California is much better than it is here. All sun, no snow.”
“Thinking about relocating once you finish school?” Brian asked as he began to lower her once again.
“Maybe,” she admitted as the chair began to creep down and back. “But as much as I like the warm weather, I do miss the seasons. Shorts at Thanksgiving seem so unnatural. And the people there… well, you know what they say about the Southern California scene. It’s all true.”
Brian hoped she stayed around, though he would never admit this aloud. Yet another creepy thing a dentist could mention to his patient. He simply thought it would be cool, one day, to treat Amy’s children.
“Pick a major yet?” he asked.
“Nah. I have another couple of months to think about it. Leaning towards going pre-med, but we’ll see. I’ll see how I feel after my anatomy class.”
“Good deal,” Brian said. He adjusted the light, slid his loupes (the special glasses he used for magnification) back over his eyes and leaned slightly over her again. “Okay, open wide.”
Brian didn’t usually do cleanings in his office (that was what God had created hygienists for), but a particularly nasty stomach bug had thinned both his and his hygienist’s schedules that day, as well as robbed him of his hygienist’s services (Shirley was home watching it come out both ends, Kathy at the front desk had cheerfully told him that morning). Instead of canceling what remained of the hygiene schedule and twiddling his thumbs during his own down time, he had integrated the two schedules into one. Just because he didn’t do cleanings regularly didn’t mean he didn’t know how to. Or wasn’t good at it.
He went around Amy’s mouth, pulling off little collections of plaque here and there and stripping small pieces of tarter from behind her bottom front teeth in silence, listening to the local news that was playing on a small television mounted on the wall.
And doing everything he could to not look at Amy’s tongue ring.
“You know,” he said, “the number one cause, after sports accidents, for broken teeth in your age group is tongue rings.” He didn’t know if this was actually true, but it sounded good. “You really should think about getting rid of yours before you break something.”
“Thanks for your concern, Dr. Brian,” she said (it was a rare patient who actually called him Dr. Mallory; it was always Brian or Dr. Brian), “but I think I’ll be keeping it. I’m careful not to bite on it. And I’ve grown quite attached to the little guy.”
A sudden peculiar coldness danced up Brian’s spine at this comment. What an odd thing to say it, he thought, the words echoing around in his head for a moment. But he quickly shrugged away both the bizarre comment and the unsettling sensation. Teenage girls were a strange breed of animal, prone to strange trends and behaviors. He had raised two girls and knew well the idiosyncrasies of the gender and age.
Ten minutes later, as Brian finished up with the cleaning, he said, “You know, you’re a big girl so I’m not going to lecture you, but you know you need floss at least once a day. I know you’ve never had a cavity or gum issue in your life, but it’s good to start doing it now so when you’re old like me and your body starts betraying you, it’s become habit. The latest research shows an increased risk of heart disease and stroke and some cancers in people who have gum disease.” In response, Amy gave him a thumbs-up. It was the same thumbs-up that she, like most of his teenage patients, gave every time the topic of flossing came up. It was their polite way of shutting him up. After all, teenagers and your adults didn’t have time for something as silly and sometimes painful as flossing considering their busy social lives.
Everything looked generally good in there: a little plaque, a little tartar, a little bleeding, a little stain, but that was all normal after six months, even in someone who brushed regularly. The only thing that bothered him at all wasn’t even anything dental related.
It was that damn tongue-ring.
Amy hadn’t possessed a tongue ring six months earlier. He would have remembered if she did. It must have been a recent acquisition. But it wasn’t the existence of a tongue ring itself that bothered Brian; he had seen his fair share of them over the past couple years as their popularity exploded in the young population, a generation that seemed determined to mutilate and disfigure themselves into oblivion as a way to express their individuality. (Brian always found it quite ironic that the patients with the most tattoos and piercings seemed to be the most fearful of needles). No, it wasn’t the presence of the ring that bothered him. It was the presence of this particular tongue ring.
Most of the rings he had seen up to now- actually, all of the rings he had seen up until now- were either a small silver stud or a colorful acrylic ball. But Amy’s… it was about the size of a marble, considerably larger than any he had ever laid his eyes on, and nestled in a significant depression towards the front of her tongue. The design was much more ornate than anything he had ever seen before. The orb was a deep crimson in color, streaked throughout with a network of fine silver and black threads, and bisected down the middle with a long black slit that looked similar to a snake’s pupil. It looked like an eye plucked from the face of a demon, adding a certain ugliness to an otherwise beautiful mouth. Despite its outlandish design, though, it didn’t look cheap or cartoonish; in fact, the amount of detail incorporated into the eye made it look damn real. And damn unnerving.
And if the design of the eye wasn’t creepy enough, the fact that it seemed to watch Brian as he worked made him feel uneasy.
Now Dr. Brian Mallory considered himself a very sane, very grounded man, not given over easily to fantasy or conspiracy. He knew there was a very rational reason for why that eye seemed to follow him. It could have been a simple trick of the light and how it reflected off the crimson orb. It could have been purely coincidence, Amy moving and resting her tongue in such a way that the pupil of the eye always seemed to linger on him. Hell, the eye itself could have been an independent sphere within a thin plastic shell, always rolling around as the tongue moved. There were half a dozen logical explanations.
But none of them felt right to Brian.
He stepped on the pedal, once again raising Amy to a sitting position.
“Am I done?” she asked.
“Almost,” Brian said. “Just want to look at your x-rays once more, then take a final look inside your mouth.”
“You know you won’t find anything,” Amy said, smiling that wonderful, infectious smile.
“Probably. But I want to be thorough. There’s a first time for everything.” He examined the x-rays on the computer screen for thirty seconds or so, found nothing suspicious hiding in the black, white and gray images, then reclined the chair a final time.
With his patient once again supine, Brian asked Amy to open her mouth. He went around the upper arch first, utilizing his mirror and explorer to examine the teeth. He lingered a little longer on the backs of her front teeth (the degree of enamel pitting was the same as it had been for the past five years, meaning she hadn’t slipped back into that disgusting, dangerous habit of vomiting up most, if not all, of her food), then moved to the bottom arch, where he likewise examined each surface of every tooth. Satisfied that she still remained cavity-free, he was about to lift her up for the final time when his gaze fell once again on that tongue ring.
That eye was looking at him. He swore it was. Amy’s tongue was perfectly flat, perfectly still, yet that slitted, reptilian pupil seemed to be staring directly at him when it should have been pointed straight up, at the roof of her mouth.
Brian didn’t know where the sudden idea came from. He knew on some primal, instinctive level that what he was about to do was in fact a very bad idea. But he found himself doing it anyway, as if his hands were ignoring his brain’s urgent prodding to cease this foolish activity. Silently, he flipped the mouth mirror over in his right hand, stabilized Amy’s jaw with his left, positioned the butt-end of the mirror over the tongue ring, and gently tapped.
He expected to hear the light ting of metal hitting metal. Or the more hollow sound of metal striking plastic. What he expected, though- what any rational man would have expected- was not what happened.
A moment before the mirror struck home, the tongue ring blinked.
It blinked.
Brian’s mirror didn’t strike the eyeball, but instead a black shield, an eyelid, that had unfurled from underneath to close over and protect it.
Horrified, Brian’s fingers went limp and the mirror slid from his latex-clad grip, bouncing off the corner of Amy’s lip, bouncing off her shoulder, and clattering noisily to the floor. Normally, he would have attempted to save the fallen instrument before it fell to the ground, but every muscle in his body was momentarily paralyzed as he stared, completely and absolutely revolted, at the tongue ring.
Slowly, the ebony eyelid opened and receded back to where it had come from, into that depression which cradled the eye. That slitted pupil rotated towards him and the disembodied eye seemed to glare imperiously, as if to say who are you to strike me?
Foot shaking, it took Brian several moments to successfully put enough pressure on the foot pedal to activate it. The chair raised Amy to a sitting position.
“Am I done,” she asked, turning to look at Brian.
He simply nodded, his lips trembling slightly but refusing to make any cogent sounds.
Amy reached up and began to remove the bib around her neck. She handed the alligator clips and damp bib to Brian, who accepted it with slightly shaking hands, then stood up. “Thank you,” she said.
Brian finally found his voice. “Welcome,” he mumbled.
Amy turned and began to leave the room, but Brian managed to find his absent voice before she disappeared.
“I think you’re tongue ring blinked at me,” he said stupidly, realizing how foolish he sounded as the words escaped his mouth.
Amy stopped, one foot in the hallway, one still in his room. She turned slowly and smiled at Brian, a smile he no longer found charming but instead slightly unsettling. “Yeah, it does that sometimes.”
Brian responded by sitting there with what he imagined was a dumb look on his face.
Amy laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
“You think this fad has legs?” Brian asked, hoping against hope it wouldn’t. It was just too creepy, even if the ring itself was quite harmless, just a bizarre little toy. And that’s all it was, wasn’t it? A motorized tongue ring? What else could it be? At that moment, Brian wouldn’t even consider the alternatives.
“No, not a fad,” she said. “More like an invasion.”
“Excuse me? Invasion? You mean like the British Invasion during the sixties.”
She laughed lightly again. She seemed to have the giggles. But it was a condescending laughter, not the innocent laughter of delight. “No, silly,” she said, offering another chuckle, an airy sound that somehow possessed both amused and sinister qualities. “But don’t worry. Once your people have been subjugated, you and others in your profession will be like kings. After all, cleanliness is next to Godliness, and who better to keep the new masters clean and healthy within their homes than you?”
Brian didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
In response to the silence, Amy spread her lips slightly, allowing her tongue to roll out of her mouth to a length that would have put Gene Simmons to shame. The slippery organ then split into three separate pieces of meat, each strip undulating gently like an obscene tentacle, tasting or smelling or just feeling the air within the office.
And then they were gone, back into Amy’s mouth, and nothing about the girl appeared odd anymore except for the once sweet smile that now seemed ominous instead of innocent. “I’ll tell mom and dad you said hi,” Amy said. “And I’ll be seeing you again.”
“Six months,” Brian said quietly.
“Six months,” she said. “Maybe sooner. And don’t worry, I’ll start flossing. And I mean it this time. The new masters demand it.” With those ominous words hanging in the air, Amy turned and left the room, her skirt swirly gently about her hips as she went.
Once she was gone from view, Brian felt all of the tenseness drain out of him, and he allowed himself to slump back in his chair. With Amy gone he was finally able to think, but the bizarre thoughts which invaded and swirled around his mind made him feel like he was going insane. He just didn’t know what to think. What to do.
He could go to the police, tell them what he saw, and watch as they laughed him out of the station.
He could build a bomb shelter in his basement to hide in.
He could talk to a psychologist and find out if he was losing his mind.
He could fashion a hat out of tin foil and paint some signs declaring the end of the world was near.
He could go after Amy and demand some answers.
Brian shook his head, as if this violent action would somehow scour these crazy ideas from his mind. It must have worked to some degree because when he finally stopped, he felt a little dizzy, but also a little saner.
In the end, he did the only thing a sensible, rational man could do: he decided to focus on his next patient. The best thing for a troubled mind, after all, was occupying it with work.
Brian typed up his notes on the computer (leaving out all mention of the eyeball, of course) as his assistant, Marsha, cleaned up and prepared the room for the next patient. Once Marsha was gone, he glanced at the schedule to see who was next of the docket: Jessica Holmes. College junior, if he remembered correctly. It wasn’t abnormal to see a string of college students at the end of December and beginning of January; he called them his Summer-Winter crew, as they came in for the biannual check-ups when they returned home for summer and winter breaks. Brian tried to remember where Jessica went to school, but he couldn’t locate that piece of info within his memory, so he returned to the computer and opened up her chart. He had created a special section within every patient’s record to store personal information so that he knew what to talk to the patients about (How old is the baby now? How was graduation? How is your knee after the surgery?)
He accessed this section in Jessica’s chart and quickly scanned his notes.
His heart seemed to miss a beat and he felt that familiar icy tingle do the tango up and down his spine again.
She went to the University of Southern California.
He wondered how far UCLA was from USC.
He wondered if, just maybe, he would be seeing another one of those tongue rings again real soon.
And at that moment, his stomach suddenly queasy, Brian wished he had also called out sick from work that day.
I hope you enjoyed Blink. If so, please consider purchasing one of my other works wherever you purchased this one, including:
Pandora’s Children: The Complete Nightmares Book 1
Pandora’s Children: The Complete Nightmares Book 2
(new versions of both available end of October)
Dogs of War: A Ghost Story
King of the Merge (available soon)
Last Dance of a Black Widow (another free short, available soon)
And, as always, follow me at the following places:
www.pandoraschildren.com
www.darkestdayspublishing.com
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Twitter: @bconvisdmd