Dr. Sarah Voss noticed the pattern slowly, the way dangerous truths always arrive.
It began in 1976 with children who had mismatched eyes. Not all heterochromia—only the ones where one eye was gray. Not blue-gray. Not silver. Gray, like fog trapped behind glass.
They passed every standard vision test.
But they failed the ones no chart could measure.
They complained of movement where there was none. Corners that felt occupied. Figures that appeared only when they weren't being looked at directly. Most learned early not to talk about it. The ones who did were referred to psychiatry.
Dr. Voss did not believe in mass hallucination.
She began asking one additional question during routine eye exams.
"Can you draw what you see in this room?"
The drawings were consistent in a way that made her hands tremble. The rooms were accurate. The furniture precise. And somewhere—always just out of focus—there was something else.
Tall shapes.
Folded limbs.
Empty faces.
Never centered.
Never fully visible.
Almost as if they followed rules.
The first confirmed death occurred in 1977. A child stepped in front of a train while witnesses reported he appeared to be pushing something away. Others followed—falls, traffic incidents, unexplained violence.
Each case shared the same final recorded behavior:
Prolonged eye contact with something no one else could see.
Dr. Voss stopped publishing her findings. Stopped reporting cases. Stopped seeking approval.
She began tracking instead.
Over the next twenty-six years, she documented hundreds of subjects. Most died. Some disappeared. A small number survived by learning when not to look.
The gray eye, she theorized, did not malfunction—it overreached. It perceived light beyond the standard human spectrum, detecting fragments of a spatial layer embedded between moments. Not another world, but a gap within this one.
She named it the Between.
The Between was not empty.
And worse—it reacted.
Subjects who acknowledged what they perceived experienced escalation. Increased movement. Increased clarity. Increased proximity. The entities within the Between learned patterns. Learned faces. Learned fear.
Dr. Voss reached a conclusion that haunted her into old age:
Seeing was an invitation.
Before her death in 2002, she trained a small number of students in secret. Only one was given full access to her records, protocols, and red-flag cases.
Dr. Elaine Morrison.
Her final protocol was brief.
Never let them be alone.
Never let them stare too long.
Never let them name what they see.
One final note was written in red ink and underlined twice.
If a subject reports a woman in white, do not interfere.
She is not from the Between.
She is the reason some survive.
Dr. Sarah Voss died in her sleep in 2002.
Her work was buried.
Her files were sealed.
Her warnings were ignored.
They would have remained that way—
until a routine eye examination, years later, presented Dr. Morrison with a patient whose gray and hazel eyes matched a pattern she had been taught never to forget.