Harvester of Eyes: the tale of terror

First pass over airport


Kaylisha recalls meeting the man sleepin in the seat beside her: Randall Waymon Jarrell, a poetry student and keeper of company over his head.
Her confidence in him led her to believe him; there was a way to ditch the mobsters and forget them. He took a terrible beating and was even shot trying to keep them from taking her away, when they wanted her father’s secret information.
He played the card held closest to the vest, and it ended her terror at the hands of the hired goons. Waymon thought, “well, I’ve apparently saved the day.”
But he set loose the Harvester of Eyes.
She recalls:

*What happened.
*They fled.

Man with them here in this medical plane, Buddy, was a racist who fondly recalled Waymon from boyhood and gave them shelter deep in the woods.

Their stay with him ended when they got on their feet. After a couple of months, they started to feel free of the Harvester.

Then came the call about Ladell Morse three days before.

The same thing that happened to the thugs who’d chased Kaylisha across half the city, had happened to his eyes.

Kaylisha recalls: What the thing said to her
What she heard it did


Second pass over airport
She recalls the Harvester, digging through garbage to find eyes for his pouch of leather
Waymon awakens, recites some Yeats:


We sat grown quiet at the name of love;
We saw the last embers of daylight die,
And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.


I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;
That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

Then, they realize they’re being turned away after this second approach to land! Pilot's getting no one at the tower. What's going on?


Kaylisha looks at the man on the stretcher, who introduced himself as a bigot not three months before. Living in the woods, eventually got Kay and Buddy got along, and she started to forget the Harvester of Eyes.


" If it gets the bigot, well, he’s got it coming," she’d thought the first night she stayed there. Now, with him clinging to life, she hopes they land soon.

But now they’re thrown together in life or death and she realizes: it was all for her. The conjuring, the sacrificing...how many more need die that she might live? She thinks back to something she heard on the news five days before...six?
The eyes taken in the mass graves by the Mexican border told her he was back.
She recalls the ceremony that brought the Harvester at their darkest moment.


Her blood and Waymon’s mixed on the paper Waymon and she burned. "Harvey" makes crude, insane jokes and literally gets drunken on its enhanced awareness, as it adds stolen eyes to its mind and goes psychic joyriding. It did its grizzly work of attracting the eyes, literally, on outstretched vessels and nerves before snapping bloodily, pulled invisibly to its tiny bsby hands that stretched out of the top of his otherwise human head.


Waymon now reveals to Kaylisha why she'd been spared during the Harvester's first manifestation: for a moment, she too had been possessed by the Harvester of Eyes that first night. Waymon thought the spell he used would banish the creature, and indeed, after an image of great fire, only Kaylisha had remained, and for almost three months they'd not seen anything. As of late, however, the Harvester is brazenly doing things that create public terror. His attack on Buddy, who was left for them to find, ties them to his path with little doubt.


Waymon had been racking his brain for a new banishment spell ever since they realized the Harvester was running wild, only three days before. They had not slept since!

They were checking on the people where they’d stayed, against her wishes, but Waymon explains there’s just no running now. They stop the Harvester of Eyes from running rampant, or he will be the only wise man in a kingdom of the blind.


Why is the plane being turned away? No one in tower answering? Her stomach drops. Harvester laughs, his eyes now visibly around her. The fusilage begins to rip off the top!

(tHEN SOMETHING UNEXPECTED WILL HAPPEN.)

They hear news about the horrible concert Harvester threw? I think we’ll let the police mention it at the end, but there’s no real body available to arrest, so the police come away unsatisfied. Damn lucky for the recent host for the Harvester of Eyes if he is not connected to this. I don’t know if he will be so fortunate.

As for these three, I’m just about there. I have really three humans, the host (inactive, mentally?) and the Harvester, those five, as my cast. Really, it's one woman versus one mysterious monster, with a couple of guys trying to help and some poor pilot meanwhile concentrating on getting their Medivac plane safely down.

So, with Kaylisha, the Harvester, then Buddy and Waymon, with three peripheral characters (a detective, another victim named Ladell Morse, the pilot) plus the faceless Mafioso who perish in the flashback to the first night. I think a lot of BOC lyrics will find their way into the telling of this one.


But now, I just hope I have you looking out for the story. “Blinding the Kingdom” I think is its name, with Kaylisha, Waymon, the bigot Buddy, and the Harvester of Eyes.

Just some thoughts. I have seen the ending evolve into something strange but believable in context.

I admit, I couldn’t get to sleep after writing this. Lue

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