The Phantom Glasses Stealer of Old London Town

In the Park

I was in the local park one day in mid-September, enjoying a bit of Autumnal sunshine and warmth as I walked around rather aimlessly. I’d just enrolled for my second year at college and would be starting next week, and was feeling rather pleased with myself for getting this far in my Biology course. As I walked past a small wooded section I heard a cry: definitely female, definitely in some kind of undefined trouble. I went to find the source of the cries: in doing so I heard her cry “help!” a couple of times, and then, perhaps oddly, “I can’t see!” followed by a slightly stifled sob. At that, my steps faltered momentarily: I wondered what exactly I would find. But there was no way to find out other than by going to look, so I carried on with as much purpose as before.

I plunged into the wooded section, spurning the use of the pathway, which lent a rather more scratch-free way of going through it, then came upon another path, and the source of the cries: a girl about a couple of years younger than me, short and slim, wearing jeans and a clingy striped top: she looked quite appealing, it had to be said. She looked at me uncertainly, having hardly failed to notice my awkward and necessarily rapid progress through the bushes. I asked, ‘hello, can I help?’ She cried out, scarcely less stridently than before, ‘help me! Some man stole my glasses! I can’t see anything!’

She started to sob, so I went to her, tactfully proffered my arm and asked, ‘do you want help to get home or something?’ She nodded, eyes full of tears, and grabbed at my arm with a slightly clumsy and uncertain grasp, her uncorrected gaze inadequate to guide her fingers in such a task accurately. Absently I began trying to ascertain the exact nature and scale of her visual difficulties, but she looked up at me, straining to focus through eyes busy blinking away tears, and said, ’take me home, please.'

Now this was in many ways a pleasant thing for me, guiding some pretty young woman who had been mysteriously deprived of her glasses, and who was thus now dependent on me to help her avoid such dangers as tripping over tree roots, or missing the gate and blundering into the chain-link fence. I had the pleasure to guide her - Jenny, her name was - quite a distance, during which time she explained that she wore thick glasses, having done so for several years, and couldn’t see anything without them: the whole world being one big blur without them, according to her. A part of me was still wondering whether she was myopic or hyperopic as I led her home: I was guessing myope. She had me lead her up to her door; she opened her bag and fetched out her keys, then tried to identify the correct one for the job more by means of touch than sight.

I noticed that she didn’t look too closely at either the keyhole nor the key, which swung me more in favour of hyperope. As she opened the door and went in, I stood rather expectantly on the doorstep. I was looking forward to a nice surprise! Hopefully, well it had to be, she’d find a pair of spare glasses, then come and say “hello” again or “thanks”, or something else suitable for the situation. I heard uncertain footsteps going upstairs. There appeared to be no-one at home to help her find her spare glasses, and I heard a faint curse coming from upstairs as she rummaged for them, but presently I heard a gentle sigh of relief, and then footsteps, quicker and more confident than before, then a moment of movement behind the translucent glass panel of the front door.

Then she appeared again at the front door, this time wearing what were obviously a spare pair of glasses. They were big plastic drop-temple frames, mostly clear but with a flash of white and pink each side, but oh, the lenses, they were quite a different matter! My mind flashed as I took them in: Hyperope! Hyperope! Told you so! They were sooo strong, like two big polished gems sticking out into my gaze, catching light and throwing it back at me much brightened, and what her eyes looked like, well despite the size of the frames, each lens was more than full of inflated and expanded eye, blinking softly in unison. What sort of prescription did she need? At least plus 10, easily: that explained why she couldn’t see anything and needed my help to get home. She smiled gently, and said, ’thanks for helping me home…' She planted a little kiss on my cheek, and then gave a little cheeky wave and shut the door. But I didn’t care, my mind was full of what I’d just witnessed!

Dr Watson

A few days later I started college, and soon after there was another attack: a pair of thick glasses had been snatched from the face of some rather unspectacular girl early in the morning, and thanks to the Autumnal fog added to her own personal fog, she’d been unable to see who’d taken them. She had to be guided home, this time by a teacher who’d found her blundering around in distress. Anyway, it was now obvious that something was afoot, namely the theft of glasses from the faces of young women. All either had seen was a dark shape running away. It was time to do something: the Principal got the male prefects together, including me, and told us we were to be assigned as escorts to the various bespectacled girls around the college. Most of them, predictably, didn’t really enthuse about the idea, but of course, I was quite excited and interested, but quietly so in case someone noticed and thus realised that I actually liked bespectacled women.

The next day the Principal got us together again in his office: we made a fine job of filling it, being as there were about 20 of us all told. He told us that we would be paired off immediately, so led us off into the main hall, where he’d assembled an identically sized group of the most heavily bespectacled female students at the college. He explained that we’d been assigned with regard to what subject we were studying: some of the students had been obliged to alter their lessons and teachers to accommodate this. He then read out the list of pairs: for some reason, I was near the bottom, and I watched as the prefects became matched up with GWGs one by one. There were some interesting specimens there, I readily admitted, ranging from fairly low prescriptions to much more interesting ones, both hyperopes and myopes, and that was just the glasses.

And finally he got to me: there was by now only a small huddle of girls left, and I would have been happy with any of them, I suppose, at least from an aesthetic point of view. A tallish, slim girl with long straight dark chestnut hair and thick myopic glasses glanced over at me and the boys: I caught her bright and clever gaze for a moment. Then my name was read out, and “Jane Watson”. I had little time in which to take in who it was: it was the tall, dark haired, intelligent-looking girl! She walked over to the Principal, where I joined her: she eyed me rather disinterestedly, then she shrugged gently, and said, ‘well, if it saves my glasses being taken, I don’t mind.’ I was, it has to be said, rather more interested in her. She was considerably more than pretty, in my view; her height and slimness interesting, her glasses adding a huge inducement for me to look at her. They were a kind of a curious off-rounded shape, slightly flattened at the top, almost suggesting a triangle but far curvier than that. And the lenses, oh… I watched her apparently tiny eyes blink behind them, viewing the others, then glancing back at me, and then at nothing in particular. Her tiny-seeming brown eyes blinked again softly, then stared at me: I was lost for both a moment and an eternity in the lovely magic of that gaze, something I could look upon forever and feel that it was nowhere near long enough. The way her lenses curved and pushed in her soft cheeks was pleasantly appealing, but the eyes had it for me. She blinked rather innocently at me, as if wondering why I was looking at her so intently. She smiled, and said, ‘are you doing Biology too? ‘Y-yes I am.’ Well, I was simply thanking my lucky stars that I’d a chance to meet that lovely gaze, too enraptured to do more than stutter inane responses. She started to tell me a little about herself, but I was too befuddled to take it in: she was talking about how she wanted to be a doctor when the Principal finished reading out names and pairing us up, and quieted down while he told us to keep our eyes open. This was especially intended for us boys, being as none of us wore glasses and thus had nothing to worry about from the “Phantom Glasses Stealer”, as he was now dubbed.

I spent several extremely pleasant lessons with the lovely and heavily bespectacled Jane Watson, at her insistence sitting beside her. She didn’t say whether she actually liked me, but at least she spoke to me and thanked me on several occasions for walking her from place to place around the campus, or to her dorm. It was always such a delight to see her in her thick glasses, as she pushed them up onto her nose and looked around furtively, looking for trouble as I walked with her. I spent many minutes inanely wondering and estimating her RX: my best guess was minus 12 judging by the amount of cut in and the amount of eye minification, and a proportionate amount of astigmatism.

One afternoon we were walking towards another biology class when she asked me ‘Puffin, what do you think about these headband things?’ Of course, I instantly knew what she was talking about: there’d been a few more “incidents” since we’d started escorting the girls around, for instance one boy had got bored with looking after his charge and left her to walk home alone, during which she’d been deprived of her glasses by the “Phantom”. She was about minus 8 which wasn’t good: what made it worse was that she didn’t have a spare pair on hand. The useless lad was summarily dismissed from the Principal’s scheme, and stripped of his prefecthood: rightly so in my opinion. Some girl with a RX of about minus 4 had her glasses pinched in the evening: it was dark at the time, thus she couldn’t see who did it, but she thought she’d seen someone wearing a cloak - as if that helped at all! And some young woman had been swimming when her glasses had been taken, leaving her groping and helpless for a while. As for the headbands, the Principal had found a shop that sold them, and pretty quickly they’d run out. The girls knew that us prefects could only escort a few girls, so the rest had wisely taken suitable precautions such as this. Jane shook her head, saying, ‘who would want to steal glasses? It’s crazy!’

I replied to her original question, replying with fake nonchalance, ‘ummm, yeah, you could try the headbands. It might save your glasses being taken when no-one else is around.’ ‘That’s what I thought, but I also thought they’d look goofy.’ ‘No, I’m sure they’ll look OK, and everyone else is wearing them.’ ‘Yeah, I suppose so, and I wear glasses anyway, so they’ll hardly make me look more goofy.’ I fought desperately to stop myself from blurting out, ‘No! You don’t look goofy in glasses! You look lovely!’ I only just succeeded. Oh, if only I could have said all that I felt, but in the current uncertain atmosphere I felt it best to keep quiet about being an OO: I dared not even mention the existence of GWG-loving young men such as myself.

Elementary

That all changed abruptly, because it had to. One evening I was looking up on the “Glasses for Auction or Sale” section on “Eyescene”, and saw to my astonishment a very familiar pair of glasses: they were minus 4, modern and in a feminine style - that wasn’t so incredible, what was that they were the very glasses that I’d heard Jane talking about a few days ago! I sat wondering how they’d wound up here: it had to be that the seller was the Phantom, or else perhaps whoever it might have been was connected to him in some way. A couple of nights later another very familiar pair of female-orientated glasses turned up, this time around minus 8 each eye. I sat there in wonderment and bemusement, almost as dazed as if I’d spent a few hours staring into Jane’s tiny-seeming gaze. It appeared to be obvious: this seller, going by the name of “Super-OO”, had to know something about this fishy business! The problem was how to catch him at it. As everyone female and bespectacled was now on their guard, there’d been a notable drop-off in cases. But we couldn’t do this for the rest of our lives. I thought about it long and hard, wishing that I didn’t have to do it, but in the end realising I had no option: I would have to try persuading Jane to be bait in order to catch him. In order to do that, I would have to do what was for me a difficult thing: reveal the existence of OO’s and GWG-lovers such as myself, and show her Eyescene. There appeared to be no other means to get Jane to play along.

The next day I found Jane waiting expectantly at the door of her dorm, her hair oddly flattened against her head. It took me a moment or two to realise why: she was wearing a dark headband, hard to spot other than by means of its effect on her hairstyle. She smiled at me as I strode up to her with a confidence that I didn’t feel at all. She smiled at me, then sensing that my awkwardness seemed even more acute than normal, she asked, ‘what’s up?’ ‘Oh, nothing.’ ‘Doesn’t look quite like nothing to me,’ she remarked with a kindly, slightly maternal note to her voice. I replied, ’no, really, it’s nothing.’ I awkwardly gestured that we should start walking, then in answer to her expectant looks and attitude, I had to begin. The problem was, where to begin? It was rather like explaining the joys of smoking to an avowed non-smoker, or of some highly intoxicating drink to someone who had completely eschewed alcohol before being legally able to partake of such liquor, or perhaps akin to explaining “twinkly stars” to the blind-from-birth. But I had to begin, otherwise there would be no end to the “Phantom”. Thus I began.

‘Jane, you know that you said that your glasses make you look goofy?’ She nodded slightly, in vague anticipation of what she imagined I might say. I continued, ’there are some people that I know who, if they saw you, would think otherwise: they would say you looked lovely, beautiful, that your glasses make you look even lovelier and more attractive than otherwise.’ Her walking pace slowed almost to a hesitant stop, and she stiffened, then turned to look at me, her face lined with curiosity and surprise. After a heartbeat and drawing breath, she asked, ‘who… where are these people?’ ‘On the internet.’ She shivered involuntarily, and then, in a flat, probing voice, asked, ‘do these people include you, then?’ ‘Yes.’

There was an awkward silence broken only by the sound of our footsteps as we walked slowly on. She turned her head away from me, looking into the distance. She then gave a hollow laugh, and said, ’to think that all this time, I hated wearing glasses, only wearing them because I needed to see and couldn’t wear contacts. And now you tell me now that I needn’t have worried at all, that some men WANT girls to wear glasses before they’ll get interested? OK… talk about turning things upside down! It’s very strange that my view of the world could be so easily shattered!' I was beginning to feel a touch of relief: at least she didn’t think me a prize nutcase, for which I was extremely grateful. Then she asked, as she had to, ‘why are you telling me this? I doubt you would tell anyone, they might think you’re crazy…’ I had to tell her, otherwise this whole business would have no end. I replied, ‘Jane, the people I know of on the internet use pseudonyms… there is one called “Super-OO” who tries to sell glasses on the net.’ That left her curious to say the least, so I told her: she was disbelieving, so I told her all that I could tell her about being an OO, that I loved the way bespectacled women looked, the way their thick glasses pushed in their faces and shrank their eyes, the coke bottles, the shiny plano fronts, and for hyperopes, the fascinating way their eyes were inflated and enlightened… she blinked at me, then gave a small shrug, as if she were used to people being weird and odder than me. Of course, she was shocked. But what I’d said about glasses and those who wore them intrigued her, and actually seemed to please her.

Foiled!

It wasn’t long before I was showing her the Eyescene site on my computer, and all the associated paraphernalia thus associated with it. She had to say she didn’t pretend to understand all of it, but she realised I was onto something. Then she asked me, ‘how do you intend to track down this “Super-OO” that you’re after?’ ‘Errr… I was hoping you might help me.’ ‘Yeah, OK, I don’t mind. What do you want me to do?’ She blinked at me from behind her thick, glinting glasses as I told her my little plan, such as it was: basically I’d get her to walk around somewhere a bit secluded, without her headband on, and I’d stay out of sight. Then hopefully the “Phantom” would appear, and I’d try and grab him. It seemed simple enough.

She looked neither pleased nor convinced. ‘you want me to lose my glasses too? I’m not sure about that!’ ‘But… we can put a stop to this nutcase once and for all. You won’t have to wear a headband again.’ She sat in silent thought for a moment, and then asked slyly, ‘promise me you’ll stay close and jump on him when he comes, before I lose my glasses.’ ‘I promise!’

So, the next night we went out to the park in the college grounds. It was dark and cold, so both I and Jane wore coats: I have to say she looked very fetching and attractive in the dark, with her glasses reflecting moonlight back at me. She walked up and down a particularly dark and lonely wooded lane, with me hanging around expectantly for a while, then we got tired of it and gave up. She came back indoors with me, her glasses steamed up, thus she had to take them off and squintingly wipe them. For a moment she looked at me with her scrunched up gaze, and asked, ’this is what I look like without glasses - do you like it?' I shrugged, then belatedly thought that she probably couldn’t see my reaction very well anyway.

The next night came, and again we went out in hope. For a while we said and heard nothing. All day it had been a little misty, but as time went on it got foggier and foggier, until the visibility declined to about ten feet or so. I could see Jane fairly well, but she couldn’t see me. I heard her mutter miserably to herself ‘Puffin, I hope you’re out there still, and not sat indoors thinking how crazy I am to be doing this!’ I whispered back to her. ‘don’t worry, I’m still here.’ There was no reply.

Then I heard running footsteps: initially I thought that perhaps Jane had become scared and was running back to the dorms, but an instant later I saw that she was still there, wandering about up and down the lane. The footsteps got nearer and louder, and then abruptly stopped. Then, nearly a minute later, a figure clad in dark clothes and a swirling cape jumped from nowhere at Jane. She screamed, and fought to protect her glasses. For some reason, as she called my name, I numbly thought how short the “Phantom” was: a tiny bit shorter than Jane. Ignoring that, I ran to help.

The Phantom had pushed her against a tree, clawing at her face; Jane was screaming and struggling to hold him off her. Then I came charging along, piled into the Phantom, and pushed him away from his intended quarry. He staggered, recovered and started to run away. I left Jane and pounded after him, and rugby-tackled him. From his lips came a girlish scream! I was almost shocked into letting go: but I couldn’t. I pushed the Phantom down, pulled him around onto his back and tore away the cloak from his face: to reveal an oddly but quite definitely pretty female face. It was true; the Phantom Glasses Snatcher was a woman! She wasn’t keen on being caught, but I had a tight hold of her wrists, and thus she couldn’t do more than squirm and curse me. Jane caught up with me, and together we took the culprit in.

Of course, we were admonished for our foolhardy actions, but were also congratulated on bringing the Phantom’s reign of terror, such as it was, to a timely end. We got rewards for our trouble too: but the greatest reward of all? Being with the bespectacled Jane Watson, meeting her gaze, looking into her eyes, thinking about her. It’s so wonderful when she says to me softly, her eyes blinking from deep behind those thick lenses, ’tell me again how I look in glasses…'

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