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Ren closed the box.
The muffled voices continued from inside it for a few seconds and then subsided to a manageable murmur. He set it on the shelf and turned back to the operating room.
Tara was sitting up on the table, her color still several shades below normal, both hands pressed flat against the surface to keep herself upright.
"Have you gained anything?" Ren asked.
"I haven't checked yet."
Then something happened in her eyes.
The irises split. Visibly, continuously: one pupil becoming two, two becoming three, three becoming four, the irises subdividing in concentric rings until each eye held a dense cluster of pupils stacked within itself, the whole arrangement resembling something that belonged in a microscope slide rather than a human face.
Polycoria, Ren thought. Except polycoria was a medical anomaly with a maximum of four or five instances. This was something else. This was a bloom.
The multiplication stopped.
Tara turned to look at him.
"AGHHHHHHHH."
She fell off the operating table.
She hit the floor and scrambled backward on her hands until her back was against the wall, legs pushing against the tiles, putting as much distance between herself and Ren as the room would allow.
"Don't come closer! Don't come closer! WHAT IS THAT BEHIND YOU?"
Ren tilted his head. "What do you see?"
Tara's multiple pupils were all directed past him, at a point somewhere just over his left shoulder. Her face had gone completely still, the stillness of someone whose brain had stopped negotiating with what their eyes were sending it.
Behind Ren stood a figure.
It was impossibly tall, its full height lost in the upper darkness of the room. The body was draped in black cloth that extended outward in jagged layers like wings that had stopped being wings, shredded at the edges into fraying points, heavy and still. From the darkness around its form, multiple limbs extended: clawed, articulated, each one ending in curved fingers that had more joints than they should. A massive sword hung in its grip, the blade thick and irregular, worn into a shape that had never been smooth. Around what should have been its neck, five white masks clustered in a loose arrangement, each one perfectly blank, expressionless, the surface of each catching what little light there was and returning nothing. A pale halo of dim light ringed them from above, faint and cold.
None of the masks had eyes. None of them moved. They simply occupied the space where a face should be, arranged in a stack that communicated nothing except that there were five of them and they were looking.
"Oh," Ren said. "So you can see that. As expected of the Eye of Nyarlathotep."
"WHAT IS IT?"
"Can you deactivate the skill?"
"I'll try."
Tara's eyes returned to normal. One pupil each. She sat against the wall and breathed.
"I can," she said. "I can turn it off."
"Check your skill."
She opened her status. Ren quietly requested a parallel analysis from the system.
Eye of the Walking Chaos Rank: Demigod Type: Active — can be toggled on and off
Grants the user the ability to perceive that which must never be perceived: to see what should not be seen, and to hear what should not be heard.
"What the fuck," Tara said.
"What the fuck," Ren said, at the same time.
They looked at each other.
Tara's face had collapsed. Whatever had been holding her together through the procedure was simply gone.
"Doctor," she said. "Is this a curse? Is the being that gave me this trying to kill me?"
She was crying, tears running clean down her face.
"Even just seeing that thing standing behind you was enough to traumatize me," she said. "What happens when I accidentally activate it again? What else is out there? What else am I going to see?"
Ren was quiet for a moment.
"I can't say what you'll see," he said. "But I can tell you that the ability itself carries no malice. I would have detected it during the procedure. This isn't a curse."
"Then what is it."
He thought about how to say it.
"You know in Chinese New Year when an elderly relative gives a child money and the child doesn't know what to do with it?" He sat down on the edge of the operating table. "It's something like that. A very powerful entity that does not fully understand human limitations encountered you and decided to give you something, genuinely believing you would like it. The way a small child might give someone a piece of uranium because it's shiny and they thought you'd enjoy it." He paused. "The intention was not to harm you. The scale was just wrong."
Tara laughed through the crying. It came out wet and slightly broken.
"So it's a bad joke," she said.
"More or less."
She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "You said you had a secret to show me."
"I do. But I want to ask first whether you're ready for it, because it involves using the skill."
Tara looked at him with considerable suspicion.
"Before anything else," she said, "what is that thing standing behind you? The one with the masks and the sword. What is it."
"I'm not completely certain," Ren said. "But based on what I now know, my best guess is." He said the name.
The name came out of his mouth as three syllables, but what Tara heard was not three syllables. What Tara heard was a sound that her brain translated into three syllables after the fact, because the actual sound occupied a frequency that human hearing was not designed for and the brain was filling in the gap.
Blood ran from her left ear. Then her right. Then from the corner of her left eye.
"STOP. STOP. STOP."
"Ah. Sorry." He reached for the surgical kit. "I thought the integration might have given you some tolerance."
Tara pressed her sleeve to her ear. "It did not."
"Fair enough."
She sat for a moment. The blood stopped. She looked at the wall and then at him and then at the wall again.
"Doctor," she said. "I don't think I'm ready to know the secret yet."
"That's fine."
"I want to go home now."
"Of course. Come back if anything changes. If you feel anything unusual, any pressure behind the eyes, any sounds that don't have a source, contact me immediately." He took out his phone and sent her his number. "And make sure you take time. The integration will settle over the next few days."
"Okay." Tara slid off the wall and found her feet. She picked up her hat from the chair where she'd left it. Then she stopped.
"Thank you, Doctor," she said. "I mean it. This is the first morning in four months that I can get dressed without it taking thirty minutes."
"You're welcome."
She walked to the door. She had her hand on the frame when he spoke.
"One more thing."
She turned.
"Don't look up at the sky."
Tara looked at him for a long moment.
Then she walked out.
In the clinic, Ren sat on the edge of the empty operating table with the closed box of heads on the shelf and the figure still standing behind him, its five blank masks quiet and present in the room, and thought about the eye in the sky and what it meant that a C-rank hunter and an astronaut could now see both.
Well, he thought. I have some things to think about.