The Shape You Make: Iris
A short story from this world
These past few days I have been teasing something of The Shape You Make, a high concept horror with echoes of A Quiet Place, It Follows, Get Out, The Ring and maybe a few other influences. Now I present a fully self-contained story from this world.
WARNING: contains a scene with body horror and self-harm.
Iris had not seen her own face in three years. In her library, every surface that might have once held a reflection now offered only a dead, matte stillness. Cataracted plastic filmed the windows, admitting only a grey, featureless light. The steel countertops in the small kitchenette had been scoured with wire wool until they were nothing but a haze of scratches. Even the dark screen of the public-access terminal was covered with a thick, felt sheet when not in use. Her world was one of textures and sounds, and the most important sound was the soft, padded thud of a book landing in the collection hatch. It was the sound of a connection made without sight, of a service rendered in perfect, sightless safety. In a world that had gone quiet and learned to stare at its feet, it was the only conversation she ever had.
Her daily routine was an armour of silence. At eight a.m. she would unlock the staff door, her back to the empty street, and slide inside, locking it fast behind her. The air within was always cool and still, smelling of old paper, binding glue, and the faint, clean scent of the industrial-grade floor polish she used once a week. She powered up the system, the old computer humming to life like a sleeping animal. The online requests would be waiting. A Field Guide to British Fungi. The Collected Poems of Philip Larkin. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. That last one gave her a pang of something she refused to name. She imagined a parent, their head bowed, reading to a child who had never known a world of faces.
She moved through the stacks, a silent forest of paper and ink, her rubber-soled shoes making no sound on the linoleum. Her kingdom. She knew it by touch and memory; the rough, buckram texture of the history section, the smoother, glossier feel of the new acquisitions. She fetched the books, checked them out to the anonymous user IDs, and stacked them by the hatch. Each spine was a small, solid promise of order in a world gone sideways.
The hatch, a marvel of paranoid engineering, was a heavy slot in the wall, just wide enough for a hardback, lined with felt to muffle sound and painted a dead, non-reflective black. A user would place their library card in an external scanner, a green light would blink on her side, and Iris would slide their requested book through. They would take it, and she would hear their footsteps retreat. No words. No faces. That was the contract.
Today brought a request for an old ordnance survey map of the Peak District. Iris found it in the archives, a beautiful, fragile document smelling of dust and distance. She carried it to the hatch, her gloved fingers tracing the faint contour lines. She imagined hills and an open sky. She imagined looking up without fear.
The green light was on. She heard the faint shuffle of shoes on the pavement outside; a User was waiting. She pushed the rolled-up map into the slot. It was a tight fit. She pushed again, her fingers just poking through to the other side.
A cold hand shot from the silence and clamped around her wrist.
The grip was desperation itself. Clammy skin, fingers like cold bone. Iris froze, her heart trapped and frantic, beating a wild rhythm against her ribs. The rules, the years of routine, shattered in a single, forbidden touch. She tried to pull back, but the grip tightened, yanking her arm further through the slot, pulling her face hard against the dead metal. The smell of him filled her senses, stale sweat and something sour, like old milk.
“Please,” a voice rasped, a man’s voice, dry as dead leaves. His breath hitched in a sob. “Please, just a second. I just need a second.”
A scream built in her chest, hot and sharp, but her throat seized, strangling it to a choked gasp. He was twisting her arm, forcing her to crane her neck until her right eye was almost lined up with the opening. She saw a sliver of the outside world: grey pavement, a discarded takeaway wrapper, the scuffed toe of a boot.
Then he shifted. He brought his face to the hatch.
Iris saw his eye. It was bloodshot, the pupil a pinprick in a sea of yellowed white. It was wide with a terror so profound it felt like a tangible weight pressing in on her. Within the depths of that tiny, black pupil was a terrible, bottomless need. That eye poured its need directly into her, a drowning violation.
It lasted maybe two seconds. An eternity.
His grip slackened. He let out a long, shuddering sigh, a sound of obscene relief. “Thank you,” he whispered. The hand was gone. She heard his footsteps, clumsy at first, then breaking into a shambling run that faded into the city’s oppressive quiet.
Iris collapsed back from the hatch, landing hard on the floor. She scrambled away, crab-walking until her back hit the shelves, sending a shiver through the books. She ripped the glove from her hand, scrubbing her wrist with her sleeve, again and again. She wasn’t trying to erase the touch. She was trying to erase the eye, that terrible, hungry thing, now burned onto the inside of her own.
She stayed there for an hour, huddled in the silent forest of books, shaking. Nothing happened. The pressure behind her eye was surely just a stress headache. She was fine. It was just a madman. The world was full of them now.
Then, as she stared at the blank wall opposite, something in the corner of her vision flickered.
She snapped her head around. Nothing. Just the hard shadow where the wall met the floor. She took a slow, deliberate breath, tasting dust and fear. Her eyes were playing tricks on her.
It was there again. A smudge. A small patch of air that seemed to ripple, like heat-haze off a summer road. It had appeared at the very edge of her view, a blind spot that had somehow begun to weigh on her. She tried to focus on it, but it was like trying to catch smoke. If she looked right at it, it was gone. If she looked away, it was back, hovering. A passenger.
She spent the rest of the day in a state of hyper-vigilance, her head twitching at every imagined movement. The smudge remained. By the time she locked up the library, the headache behind her right eye was a hot, sharp nail. She walked home with her gaze fixed on the pavement ten feet in front of her. Her body thrummed with a tension she had not felt in years.
Sleep, that night, was not a possibility. She lay in her bed, in her small, reflectionless flat, and stared into the darkness. Every time she closed her eyes, the afterimage of the smudge flared against the black. It was no longer a ripple; it was a darker patch of dark, a hole in the void. And every time she blinked, a mechanical, thoughtless action she had performed millions of times, she had the sickening, certain feeling that it was a little bit closer. A little more solid. The blink had become a betrayal. Each flutter of her lashes was a small surrender of territory in the dark.
She went to work the next day on a thin, brittle wire of adrenaline. The library’s quiet felt different now. It felt watchful. The smudge was more persistent. It followed her through the stacks, a loyal, silent shadow. She made mistakes. Dropped a book, its spine cracking on the linoleum with a sound like a gunshot. Misfiled a request, earning an insistent, rhythmic tapping at the hatch that went on for a full minute. Her hands shook. The passenger was distracting her.
That night, the paranoia began to curdle. She checked every corner of her flat, ran her hands over the felt-covered bathroom cabinet, ensured the thick curtains were sealed. She had missed a spot. The back of a teaspoon in the cutlery drawer gave her a distorted, warped glimpse of her own eye, wide and terrified. Behind it, just for a second, she saw a flicker of something tall and dark. She threw the spoon into the bin, her breath coming in ragged gasps.
By the third day, the insomnia had become a corrosive force. It was a physical grinding in her skull, a constant pressure that made her thoughts sticky and slow. And the smudge was no longer a smudge. It had a form. It was tall and thin, impossibly so, like a charcoal line drawn in the air. A rip in the world. It did not have features, but it had a posture. It stood with its weight on one leg, a slight tilt to its head. A casual stance that made her stomach clench with a memory she kept buried, a memory that tasted of cheap aftershave and fear. It was the way her uncle used to stand, just before he would ask her for a secret, his voice a confidential murmur that was worse than a shout.
The quiet dread of her life had been replaced by a screaming, internal panic. She had to know. She had to understand what that man, with his desperate, hungry eye, had put inside her head.
The journey back to the library was a lesson in the city’s new geometry. The silence was heavy, oppressive, broken only by the wind whistling down empty avenues. The cars parked along the road were skeletal things. Their windscreens were gone, leaving gaping mouths. The side windows were filled with rough sheets of plywood or dull, grey plastic. No reflections. Nowhere for a stray glance to catch.
The few people she saw walked with their heads bowed. Most kept their faces hidden by hoods or the brims of their hats. Others wore thick, black goggles with thin horizontal slits cut into them, reducing their vision to a narrow letterbox. They moved in slow, deliberate lines, giving each other a wide berth, a city of ghosts all terrified of seeing each other.
She saw an official patrol. Two men in tactical gear, their faces hidden behind dark visors. They moved with a rigid, unnatural caution. Then she saw the watchers. On the roof of a multi-storey car park, two figures lay prone, their sniper rifles pointing down at the street. Their posture was one of inhuman stillness. Iris had always assumed they were watching for eye contact, for the forbidden glance. But as she hurried past, a colder thought took root. They weren’t watching people. They were scanning for… discrepancies. For things that should not be there.
She made it to the library, her hands shaking so badly it took three tries to get the key in the lock. Inside, the familiar gloom felt menacing. The stacks of books seemed to lean in, their spines like teeth. The Shape was with her, of course. It stood by the returns desk, a tall, dark question mark in her periphery. She could feel its stillness. It was waiting.
She did not start with the books. She started with the whispers. On the library’s secure terminal, she tore the felt cover from the screen and dived into the dark corners of the web she had only ever read about. She started with simple search terms. ‘Peripheral vision static’. ‘Chronic insomnia eye strain’. Then, more honest queries. ‘Shadow person after eye contact’.
The results: a scattered archive of the damned. Message boards. Forums. Encrypted logs. All telling the same story. A glance. A flicker. The insomnia. The thing in the corner of your eye. Closer every time you blink. Closer.
She read a post from someone called SleeplessInSalford about his father, a postman who saw an ‘Empty Man’ and smashed every mirror in his house. She saw the warnings. And she saw the rumours about the only relief.
You have to show someone. You have to make them see. It gives you a bit of quiet.
He begged me. Said he couldn’t take it anymore. I looked. God, I was a fool. I looked.
It gives you a night’s sleep, wrote another user, u/Borrowed_Time. Maybe two. Then it’s back, and it remembers. And it’s hungrier.
Iris felt a wave of nausea. The man at the hatch. He had not been attacking her. He had been medicating. The thought of inflicting this on someone else, of hunting for a desperate face to pour her own horror into just to buy a few more sane hours, was monstrous. She slammed the browser shut. There had to be another way.
She went to the archives, to the locked digital files. Old government reports, academic studies from the early days of the Collapse. Most were useless, full of panicked theories about mass hysteria. Then she found it, buried in a mislabelled folder. A single file, heavily corrupted, its title barely legible: Memo Re: Project Chimera. Final Assessment.
It took her an hour to bypass the security and repair the file enough to read it. It was a redacted lab report, a nightmare in bureaucratic language.
…captured a residual perceptual echo at point of somatic expiration… Pattern AN-7… non-Euclidean data-object…
…transmission confirmed via direct or recorded retinal contact…
…Subject Zero displayed acute paranoia… terminal insomnia… destroyed all reflective surfaces… final expiration via prolonged grand mal seizure…
Iris stared at the screen, the words swimming in front of her tired eyes. It was real. A laboratory accident. A ghost they had caught in a machine and then let loose. And the ending. A seizure. A violent, thrashing end as the thing finally got inside and tore the mind apart.
She stumbled away from the desk, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The Shape was by the door now. Closer. It had shifted its stance slightly. It had its hands in its pockets. Just like her uncle. A cold, specific dread, colder than anything she had yet felt, washed over her. It wasn’t just a monster. It was her monster, wearing her pain.
There was no cure. There was no escape. The only way to slow it was to become a monster herself.
A desperate, insane piece of logic bloomed in her exhausted mind. A thought born of sleeplessness and terror. The report was clear. Retinal contact. It came in through the eyes. It advanced when the eyes were closed. The eyes were the door. The eyes were the battlefield. The windows to the soul.
If there are no windows, she thought, her mind suddenly, terribly clear, it cannot look in.
The maintenance closet. The tools. Her hand closed around a long, thin screwdriver. Hard metal. Her heart was calm. For the first time in days, the screaming panic had subsided, replaced by a cold, hard purpose.
She sat on the floor, her back against the comforting solidity of a bookshelf. She did not allow herself to think. She only acted. She raised the screwdriver to her right eye, the one that had looked into the abyss. Her hand trembled violently, the metal tip wavering in front of her pupil. Sane terror screamed at her to stop. But the relentless, three-day creep of dread was a stronger voice, whispering that this was the only way.
She took a gasping breath and forced her hand steady. The tip of the screwdriver touched her eyelid, cold and alien. She pushed, the lid depressing, the metal scraping against the gentle curve of her eyeball beneath. She sobbed, a raw, animal sound. The Shape in her periphery leaned forward, curious.
That was all it took. With a surge of revulsion, she pushed harder.
The pain was a white-hot sun exploding behind her socket, an absolute, all-consuming agony that erased the world. There was a wet, yielding pop as the tip broke through. Her entire body convulsed. A hot gush of fluid, thick and viscous, poured down her cheek. Her vision on that side was gone, replaced by a swirling, chaotic nebula of red and black.
She fell onto her side, curled into a ball on the dusty floor, clutching her face, a high-pitched keen escaping her lips. The world was flat now, a one-eyed caricature of itself. The pain filled the room, a screaming presence that blotted out all thought.
But through the agony, she could still see. And in the corner of her remaining eye, the Shape was still there. It had not moved. It was still waiting. It had not been in her eye. It was in her sight.
A new wave of horror, colder and sharper than the pain, cut through her. She had only done half the job.
Getting back to a sitting position was the hardest thing she had ever done. Her body shook uncontrollably. Blood and tears streamed from the ruined socket, dripping from her chin onto her shirt. She fumbled for the screwdriver, her hand slipping on the wet metal. She raised it again, this time to the left eye, the good eye, the one that could still see the monster.
This was worse. So much worse. She knew what was coming. Her entire being rebelled, her muscles locking in protest. She had to use her other hand to force her trembling wrist forward. The world shrank to the point of the screwdriver, the last thing she would ever see.
She screamed as she drove it home.
Then came a blessed relief. Silence. Blackness. A pure, clean, absolute dark, unsullied by flickers or smudges. The pressure behind her eyes was gone. The Shape, the tall, thin thing that wore her uncle’s memory, had vanished. She was alone in the dark. She had won. She let out a long, ragged laugh of triumph and pain.
She sat for a long time, drifting in the quiet, peaceful void. The pain was a distant shore. The darkness was a blanket.
The silence did not last.
It began as a flicker of thought. A misplaced pixel in the canvas of her mind. A single dark thread in the black tapestry. She tried to ignore it, but it was there. She had no eyes to blink, but the rhythm of her own pulse, the beat of her own heart, seemed to fuel it. Each thud in her chest was a footstep.
With a dawning horror that was colder and deeper than any pain, she understood. The curse was not a broadcast received by the eyes; it was a file saved to the mind. The eyes were not the prison. They were the windows. She had not barred the monster from entering. She had just shattered the glass, trapping it inside.
Then the cold began. Not a chill on her skin, but a patch of deep, internal frost at the centre of the blackness. A place where all warmth was being devoured. And woven through the cold, a scent, faint at first, then unmistakable: the cloying, sweet smell of cheap aftershave.
With no external world to perceive, her consciousness had turned completely inward. The darkness behind her eyes was no longer an empty room. It was the entire universe. And the Shape was there. Not in her periphery anymore, not a vague smudge at the edge of things.
It was in the centre of her mind’s eye. Clearer than she had ever seen it before. Tall, thin, and impossibly close, its head tilted in that old, familiar way.
The darkness was absolute. And from the centre of it, she heard a confidential murmur, the kind that was always worse than a shout.
You certainly know how to get someone’s focus. That was dark, riveting and really suspenseful. ❤️
Wow 🤯 just *wow*. You build the suspense so well; the world and setting are so clear and everything layers over the story that came before to maximize the terror and her knowledge of what was happening. Such a great story! I look forward to reading more of this world, if you write more! So artfully done.