Larry's Lashes
A Short Horror Story
Larry Fraiser didn’t think anything of the itch in his eye before bed. It kept watering and he ended up rubbing it until it was raw, making him frustrated. He guessed he’d gotten an eyelash in it but after failing to see where it was in the mirror, he gave up and went to sleep.
When Larry woke up the next day it was darker than usual. He tried to open his eyes but he couldn’t and when he continued to try it was painful.
They were stuck closed somehow.
Larry called for help and his room mates Joe and Cam bumbled down the hall to see what the matter was.
“What the hell bro,” Joe said, “Your eyelashes are like, tied together.”
“What do you mean tied together?” Larry demanded with worry, “I have to go to work!”
“Interwoven I guess, it looks like they grew into each other overnight.”
“What?”
It was true. The beautifully long eyelashes around Larry’s eyes had grown enough to arrange themselves into an untanglable knot, sealing his sight off from the light.
“Has this ever happened before?” Cam asked, rubbing the baby blond curls on the back of his head.
“No, what the hell?” Larry gently felt his way around the problem area, “What the hell is this?”
He tried to pull his lashes apart but they clung vehemently to one another. It was sensitive to touch like a rash. He had to stop his painful investigation when it felt like he was pulling his lashes out at the root.
“I dunno,” Joe said, “I have to get ready for work though.”
“Yeah, me too,” Cam agreed as the two moved to leave, uncomfortable at the scene.
“Wait!” Larry pleaded, distraught at the lack of concern his friends were showing, “Can one of you help me? Take the day off and drive me to the doctor?”
“Sorry mate,” Joe answered unhelpfully, “I only have like, one vacation day left.”
“I can probably take a sick day,” Cam suggested with a sigh, “But you’re gonna owe me.”
“Yeah, fine” Larry accepted with relief. He had very little say in the matter.
When Cam and Larry arrived at the doctor’s office the unsettled tone in the assistant’s voice made Larry shudder with discomfort. He hadn’t realized how horrifying it must be to look at him with ghastly black hairs hanging off of his eye lids. It was only when the doctor arrived with a surgeon and explained the procedure that Larry began to feel a little reassured.
“Dr Sage here is going to just cut the eyelashes out of the way and you should be able to see perfectly fine,” Dr Ryans explained.
Larry lay back in the dim orange world view permitted by his eyelids and tried to stay still as the surgeon put a hand on his face and tilted his head to one side.
“There we go, don’t open until I say OK?” Dr Sage said as he snipped the lashes sealing Larry’s right eyelids.
On instinct, his newly freed eye popped open at the lack of restraint and some of the freshly cut lashes cascaded down into it. Larry sprung forward in distress.
“Agh!” Larry shouted as he squeezed his eye shut in pain, his body forming protective tears to fix the situation.
“I said not to open until I was done!” Dr Sage scolded as he sat back and waited for his patient to stop fidgeting, “I almost stabbed your eye out!”
“I know,” Larry mumbled as he wiped his free eye, “I’m sorry.”
“Lie back and let me get the other one.”
After the procedure Dr Ryans gave Larry’s eyes an exam and found nothing wrong. His vision was fine and the eyes seemed undamaged by the surprising growth. The only symptoms that remained were the sore redness that rimmed his eyelids where the lash roots had been pulled on.
They took some blood samples for testing as Dr Ryans was curious about Larry’s hormone levels but with no further problems, Larry was sent home and told to monitor his situation.
The next day Larry once again woke up to darkness.
At his concerned cry his roommates returned to discover that his eyelashes had been growing again.
Today however, Cam could not take the day off of work so Larry had to arrange for a taxi.
Joe hung around only long enough to get the car door closed and explain the situation to the shocked driver before Larry was once again whisked away to the doctor to figure out what was happening to him.
Fortunately for Larry, Dr Ryans was able to clear a space in his schedule for a follow up to look at the most bizarre case he’d ever seen.
After inspecting Larry’s sealed eyelids the doctor had a worrying realization.
“This is so strange,” he muttered, “It looks like the lashes are growing back into the skin.”
“What!?” Larry exclaimed in concern.
“I don’t think it will be a problem for the surgeon but they seem to have grown more than when I saw you yesterday. Some of them are curling and the growth is driving them back into the epidermis.”
The new surgeon ceremoniously stepped forward and cut the lashes covering Larry’s eyes, allowing the light to once again reach his corneas. The neon blessing of the hospital lighting felt slightly brighter than the day before.
“What do you think is causing it?” Larry asked as he looked at his face using the selfie camera of his phone. He could see tiny angry red holes around his eyes where the lashes had apparently begun growing back into the skin and causing it to become inflamed and sensitive.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” admitted Dr Ryans, “But it looks very similar to an ingrown hair so I wouldn’t worry. It just looks like some of the eyelashes found holes in the skin membrane to grow into.”
“How do I stop it?” Larry asked, “What could be making them grow like this?”
There was a pause as the doctor contemplated his answer. Larry imagined an infinity of unpleasant futures in the silence.
“I would have to wait and see what the blood tests we did yesterday reveal,” Dr Ryans shrugged unhelpfully, “Until then I won’t know if you have some elevated hormones or if there’s something else going on.”
“When will that be?” Larry was despondent thinking about waking up tomorrow to the same dark world.
“Two days,” Dr Ryans replied.
With his sight restored, Larry was able to take the bus home but he dreaded falling asleep due to his apprehension that the eye lashes would grow back. He stayed up as late as he could and found that when the morning light broke through the window, as far as he could tell his eye lashes were the same length as they had been when he arrived home from the doctor’s.
Larry breathed a sigh of relief and decided it was safe to go to sleep, he’d missed two days of work and would have to be up in three hours for his shift.
When Larry’s alarm summoned him to the waking realm later that morning his eyes ached and he once again was unable to open them.
He was already so tired of this ordeal he simply turned onto his side and began to quietly cry to himself beneath the blankets.
When Joe came in and found his best friend silently sobbing under the covers he was moved enough to use his last vacation day to accompany Larry back to the doctor’s.
“I have never…” Dr Ryans trailed off while examining Larry’s face with his piercing blue eyes.
“Never what?” Larry encouraged, waiting in the blind darkness, terrified of what the answer might be.
“The lashes,” Dr Ryans finally said, “They grew into the skin again. In fact, they grew into the skin so much that they are poking out the other side.”
“What?” Larry felt panic rising in his throat and struggled to keep it out of his tone, “What does that mean?”
“As long as we can cut the lashes open it doesn’t really mean anything just yet,” Dr Ryans explained, “We should be able to pull what’s left over out of the skin. I just can’t wait to get a look at your blood work to see what’s going on. I have never heard of eyelashes growing like this, ever. I mean, the ingrown lashes are kinda similar to trichiasis but even then, the speed this is happening at is unreal. You said that you only slept for two hours?”
“Three” Larry said sadly, “This happened in three hours. They looked normal until I went to sleep.”
“That is so strange,” Dr Ryans stepped back to allow the surgeon to get access to the lashes and snip them free of Larry’s eyes, “I’ll do some research tonight until I can look at your blood work tomorrow.”
The next day was Saturday, so fortunately Larry had both of his friends available to accompany him to the doctor’s office, which was helpful due to the hysterics he awoke in.
Another morning without his eyes. Another morning of muted orange darkness, another sad couple of hours wondering what his future holds and if he would ever recover from this strange disease he’d never heard of before now.
According to his room mates, the lashes were even longer.
They had grown into the skin and back out to such a degree that the new protrusions were just as long as his regular set of eye lashes. Some of them even seemed to be curling back towards his face, threatening to reenter the skin a second time.
The only thing keeping Larry from becoming unimaginably depressed was the knowledge that Dr Ryans would have his blood work results and hopefully they held the key to this miserable mystery.
“Your blood work all came back negative,” Dr Ryans leaned in to examine the extent of the new eyelash growth, “Hormones are all normal, thyroid is normal, everything is normal. According to the results you are the perfect image of good health.”
Larry wailed in despair and buried his tender face in his hands. The lashes did nothing to stop the free release of tears and Larry put this ability to full use as he continued to cry all the way through the surgeon’s cuts.
Larry spent the rest of the day worrying about his eye lashes. He looked in the mirror every couple of minutes out of fear they might be making a resurgence. He couldn’t focus on anything to distract him from the waves of anxiety that continued to visit him throughout the day. Television didn’t help, watching videos online didn’t help, even arguing with people on reddit didn’t make Larry feel better. Every activity he normally could use to occupy his mind from the consistent boredom supplied by the world fell woefully short in his present circumstance.
The only thing he had was anxiety.
He moped around his apartment all day worrying he would lose his vision or remain alone for the rest of his life. Who would want to spend their life caring for a hideous blind man with a disgusting hairy growth dominating his face? He eventually fell asleep at four in the morning, a shivering, quivering mess of sadness and concern.
The next day Larry woke up to darkness once again. He tried to shout in frustration but felt a burning tug around his lips and found he could not open his mouth either.
Terror seized his heart as he blindly felt around his sealed lips for an answer to the questions he was asking internally. He stumbled out of bed and fell, hitting his head on something, maybe his desk. He made a muffled groan as he rubbed the aching spot on his noggin.
Joe, whose bedroom was next to Larry’s, heard the thump of his roommate tumbling out of bed and came to investigate. He gasped at the horrible sight he found.
Larry’s eyelashes had grown again.
They had grown into the skin around his eyes and back out, several times, creating a latticework of interwoven dark lines that stretched all the way down his cheeks to his mouth. The lashes had grown into the skin around his mouth, and had somehow discovered an exit in the middle of his upper lip, where they extended out into the air only to descend beneath the surface again in the middle of his bottom lip. They protruded from the skin at the base of his bottom lip, completely sewing his mouth closed.
Joe just stared aghast at his friend who was quietly fumbling around on the floor. Every time Larry tried to open his mouth, the tugging strands sealing it stung and the freshly ruptured skin would burn, tender and inflamed. It was like having hundreds of recently popped pimples running up and down his cheeks, swelling beneath his lips with angry disdain for his well-being. Sometimes panicked breaths would escape from his secured trap and would blow the tangle of lashes in front of them making the gangly knot shake unnaturally like a nest of spiders.
Cam heard the distressed bumps of Larry fumbling around blindly on the floor and came to find Joe frozen in horror in the doorway, his usually tanned face pale and twisted in fear.
“Oh my god!” Cam pushed passed the paralyzed statue of Joe and knelt down to give Larry a hand, “What the hell is happening to your face?”
At the acknowledgement of his predicament, Larry burst into tears and muffled sobs as he shook his head helplessly with no answer, his dark locks swinging freely despite the dark tangle that clung to his face remaining fixed like a sickening hairy mask.
“This is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” Dr Ryans leaned in to examine the new level of growth on Larry’s face, “I’ve been trying to find something similar to your condition and I can’t. There are no reported cases of anything like this happening as far as I can tell. I want to keep you here tonight under medical surveillance so that we can observe what’s going on when you’re asleep. Would that be all right?”
Larry gently nodded, the emotional price of his sadness left him drained and unwilling to protest. He just needed someone to take care of him and make his problem go away, he didn’t care what he had to do.
A new surgeon entered the room and cut the lashes binding Larry’s eyelids and mouth closed, finally allowing him to see and breathe freely. He wanted to rub his face, to clear the left over lashes from his visage, but the inflamed skin screamed at his touch causing him to just look in the mirror at his red, blotchy face. A new torrent of tears began to flow at his relief.
With his newly freed mouth Larry shouted in distressed frustration, unable to even soothingly massage the tender skin to alleviate some of his discomfort. The exhaustion of his ordeal overcame him and he fell back onto the bed in the doctor’s examination room.
“You want me to stay here?” Larry confirmed looking to Dr Ryans and then gazing around the small medical space.
“Not in this room no, we have a bed at Crest Hospital down the road. That way we can hook you up to a couple of monitoring machines and keep an eye on what’s going on below the surface. There’s a new imaging device I want to use if that’s all right. It’s called an Electro-Imaging Machine, EIM, and it covers the whole body so we can even see what’s happening in your organs in case the symptoms stem from there.”
Larry felt a glimmer of hope, but within the overwhelming misery that had saturated his existence as of late, he was hesitant about trusting it.
The staff at Crest Hospital were very gentle with Larry, helping him to his room and providing him with dinner and entertainment. He was given a cream to help soothe his irritated skin and they promised him everything would be all right.
The room he would be staying in was more of a laboratory with empty white walls and a large glass window connecting it to another room. An assortment of odd looking machines were pushed up against the remaining three walls but once bedtime arrived, the nursing staff rolled several of them into position so they surrounded Larry’s bed like a gathering of judgmental visitors.
To no one’s surprise, once hooked up to an assortment of six different machines, Larry struggled to fall asleep and he was administered an anesthetic to help him drift off into the dark abyss of unconsciousness.
Dr Ryans stood in the neighboring room, peering through the connecting window on occasion and watching for any changes to the readings of the various machines he was using to track Larry’s status. He watched the monitor as Larry’s brainwave pattern descended from light sleep into deep sleep where the doctor assumed the problem might start, but to his surprise nothing happened.
Dr Ryans had hypothesized that when Larry entered the more restorative N3 stage of sleep referred to as deep sleep, it would be at this point when the growth would commence. This stage was commonly associated with tissue repair and physical restoration of the body. He continued to watch the monitor as it quietly beeped, and continued periodically peering into the neighboring chamber like a concerned parent watching a child play in the street.
It was only when Larry’s brainwaves began to ascend back up towards the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) stage of sleep that Dr Ryan started to see something bizarre. The machines did not notice anything new, but while peering through the window, Dr Ryans saw that the growth was beginning.
“Hey!” Ryans grabbed the broad shoulder of Nurse Connors who was watching the monitor with him, “Something’s happening!”
The two men rushed out to the hall where Dr Ryans continued into the patient’s room while Nurse Connors ran to the nursing station to assemble more help.
When the three nurses and extra doctor arrived at Larry’s room they stood in the doorway in horror.
Dr Ryans was standing next to the bed, his face a mixture of disgust and terror as he watched Larry’s lashes grow at an unbelievable rate. They menacingly crept as if they had a mind of their own, elongating like the searching tendrils of an invasive vine as they dove beneath the skin and erupted back out again.
Over and over they continued this slow and insidious action, like dark linear dolphins diving in and out of an ocean of skin until Larry’s eyes were sewn shut again. Dr Ryans was unable to move as he watched the creeping tendrils weave in and out of the skin until they approached the lips and those were sewn closed as well.
But the growth did not stop there.
To everyone’s amazement, once the eyelashes burst out of the skin below Larry’s bottom lip, the growth increased dramatically.
There was an explosion of black streams as the eyelashes double and tripled in length, weaving in and out of Larry’s skin in all directions, creating a tangled mess of fuzzy darkness wherever they went. Some grew straight up and then curled back on themselves creating rolls of dense eye lashes that cluttered the skin. Others spiraled hungrily, some heading back up his face towards the crown of his head, while others descended his neck and climbed towards his lower extremities.
The gathered medical experts watched aghast as the eyelashes grew into a massive tangled mess, quickly enveloping Larry’s entire form and causing the shape of his body to disappear within the large matted knot of black strands.
“Hey Chase!” Dr Ryans was jerked out of his stunned state by a nurse calling his name from the neighboring room, “Hey, come look at this!”
Chase Ryans strode from one room to the other to look at the monitor.
“It looks like the growth began when he started dreaming,” the nurse said, pointing to the graph on the screen.
“It’s his dreams?” Dr Ryans asked in disbelief glancing from the monitor to the large hairy knot that now lay on the table. Larry was no longer visible, having disappeared somewhere within its dark clutches. The outer shape looked almost like a black oval pod with fuzzy edges from all of the tiny protruding lash ends.
Dr Ryans hurried back to Larry’s side and started calling his name.
“Larry! Larry Fraiser wake up! Can you hear me?”
There was no response except for the quiet sound of lashes rubbing against each other. Dr Ryans felt his heart rate quicken as panic began to foment within him.
“Larry Fraiser!” Ryans shouted again, “Larry, wake up!”
He wanted to shake his patient but he didn’t know where to grab and the thought of touching the lashes made him grimace.
There was a muffled sound, like a low groaning that started to quietly escape the rustling lashes. It began to rise until it was a faint heartbreaking wail.
“Chase, he’s awake!”
Dr Ryans rushed back into the monitoring room to look at the readings from the EEG only to watch the panic spread throughout Larry’s mind as he woke up and realized the gravity of his situation. The colors flashed on screen as the area of the brain associated with fear activated again and again.
Larry’s heart rate began to climb as the patient was overcome with terror upon waking up with his whole body tightly secured within the strangling mess of his own eyelashes. He couldn’t open his eyes, he couldn’t open his mouth. There was nothing to inform Larry of what was happening to him, and as his amygdala continued to light up with fear, Dr Chase Ryans felt his own heartbeat double again.
From within the hairy mass, muffled screams could now be heard escaping which were loud and shrill enough to reach the neighboring room. There was a frightening moment pierced only by the distorted repetitive cries from within the tangle of lashes.
No one moved, no one knew what to do until suddenly, the screaming ceased.
For a second the silence reigned despite the monitoring machines continuing their emergency beeps, a discordant mechanical symphony escaping the connecting room.
Then, suddenly the loud frenetic beeping from the EKG began to slow. Larry’s heart rate was finally falling, but it was dropping more dramatically than expected. Chase spun to look at the screen only for another beeping to start sounding off.
“What’s going on?” Nurse Connors asked, entering the room at the cacophony of electrical notifications.
“I don’t know!” Dr Ryans shouted over the din of another machine being set off.
“His vitals are dropping,” the nurse reading the screen shouted, “Like, all of them!”
“Quick, start cutting that stuff off of him!” Dr Ryans ordered.
The available medical staff rushed to Larry’s side and began to use scissors and scalpels to slash at the strangle of eyelashes. Every time they cut one strand, more would grow to reclaim the lost territory.
Snipping swiftly at the surface meant piles of severed lashes began to clump on the floor. Dr Ryans watched as Larry’s heart rate descended dangerously low, while yet another machine started wailing behind him.
He turned to look at the readings on the EIM screen and his face drained of color.
“Get that stuff of him now!”
“It’s growing too fast!” Connors called from Larry’s bedside, “What’s happening?”
Dr Ryans ran in and began desperately tearing at the eyelashes surrounding his patient with his bare hands. Disgust be damned, lives were at stake.
“His organs are failing!”
His initial concern for Larry’s immediate well-being at having his lashes ripped from his skin was overcome by his fear that the patient’s life would be lost if they were not aggressive enough in their response.
The team of four began to maniacally hack at the ever-growing mass of eyelashes that were shielding Larry from the outside world. One of the nurses, an older woman named Margie, ran out into the hall and hollered for help before she returned to her work. Three more medical personnel rushed into the room in a flurry of scrubs and began fervently cutting at the knot with scalpels and scissors.
“Chase,” the nurse in the connecting room called, “You’re gonna want to see this!”
Dr Ryans sprinted into the neighboring room.
“What?”
“Look at this,” the nurse said pointing to the EIM screen, “There’s no reading for his liver! It’s like it just disappeared!”
“There’s no liver?”
The EIM monitor displayed a cross-section of Larry’s whole body with each of his organs depicted within the image.
The liver was not there.
Dr Ryans watched in amazement as the heart image on the monitor began to fade in color until it too was a vacant dark space. The EKG machine behind him abruptly flatlined, the slowing rhythm of Larry’s heart rate becoming a long high whine as the machine failed to detect a pulse.
“What the hell is going on?” Dr Ryans spun back from the EKG to look through the window.
The EEG that was transmitting Larry’s brainwaves began a disturbing blipping sound and when Chase checked it, he observed the brain activity readings were diminishing to nothing.
The team of six were ferociously attacking the growing ball of eyelashes. The room was now covered in them, resembling an uncared for hair salon with thin eyelash fibers raining down like black snow, littering the floor in dark hairy piles.
Dr Ryans spun back to the EIM machine and his desperation was jacked up one hundred fold as he watched the outline of Larry’s body dissolve into nothing. The EIM monitor was not empty, it simply depicted exactly what the doctors and nurses could see: a large dark oval almost like a fuzzy cocoon.
He ran from the monitoring room straight to supply closet and grabbed the largest scalpel he could find. He sprinted back to Larry’s side and stabbed the scalpel directly into the throng of eyelashes surrounding his patient.
“Get him out of there!” Dr Ryans yelled as he thrust his arm up with all of his might and sliced a huge gash in the eyelashes. The severed tendrils quivered and reached for one another again but Ryans repeated the process before they could, over and over with the other staff following suit until they were making good work against the shuddering mass of darkness.
Finally, Ryans reached deep enough into the writhing knot that he believed he would make contact with Larry’s body.
No contact came.
Upon pulling his arm out there was a hiss of pressure being released and the room was filled with a foul odor, like rotting vegetation and bile. Everyone reeled backward in unison at the stench with Margie leaning into the corner and vomiting on the floor.
The smell was horrendous and invaded the nose like a thick smog of repugnant scum. It was a mixture of puke, rotten eggs and spoiled vegetables, all combining into a monstrous flavor that sat on the back of the tongue, choking all who breathed the horrid scent. It clogged the air passages of those present like an insidious smoke and caused an eruption of coughing from everyone as many staggered away from the stench. Chase could taste it and it made his eyes water.
He stepped toward the table to find that the eyelashes had stopped sliding over one another like snakes and stayed frozen in place like the inanimate objects he had once believed them to be. The dark color was rapidly fading from them, bleaching the fuzzy cocoon with the pallid shade of dead hair as the strands began to dry and fray before his eyes.
He took a clump of the knot in his hand and the brittle eyelashes snapped easily at his touch, crumbling into dust on the floor. There was a soft crackling sound as the strands began to wither and diminish on their own, with a large split appearing down the middle of the oval tangle.
Suddenly the eyelash shell broke open and fell in half, spilling a disgusting smelling soup of half-digested human remains all over the table and floor. Another nurse puked and several people stumbled out into the hallway to escape the foul stench that had clouded the room.
Dr Ryan’s eyes watered as he tried to breathe, holding his shirt up to his nose despite the little it did to block the smell. He took a cautious step toward the table, carefully avoiding the slowly growing pool of mustard colored liquid that was spreading across the lash-ridden floor, hoping to examine what had happened to his unfortunate subject.
The eyelash cocoon was now a crumbling mass of white fraying fibers. The human inside of them was no more, having apparently dissolved into the liquid with only fragments of bones or floating organic material to even suggest that once a person had been there.
Dr Chase Ryans fled from the room in disgust and horror, leaving the withering mass of Larry’s lashes to crumble into the revolting mixture of organic sludge which was all that remained of the once human patient.
Author’s note: Hey there! Seb here! I just wanted to thank you for choosing to spend your time reading my work. It means the world to little old me, head swirling with horror stories, to know that out of the darkness of our experiences we can form real human connections and investigate subjects that are exciting and scary. I’m so grateful that you chose to come on this journey with me and I hope it has prompted some fun questions for you to enjoy thinking about in the future. Your support means a lot and I am honored that you put your belief in me to entertain you.
Thank you.
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© 2025 Sebastian Arends | Sincerely Seb. All Rights Reserved.
Unauthorized use, reproduction, or distribution of any part of this story or accompanying image is prohibited without permission from the author. No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this publication for purposes of training AI technologies.
A great read!
Each time I stumble across your horror, I'm inspired to get back into the driver's seat myself and start writing again, and your exceptional knack for visceral (and oftentimes revolting, I might add) description never fails to impress me!