This is your semi-regular reminder that for all that he very much leans into being 'just a guy', John Gaius is a horribly unsettling and disturbing eldritch entity who has not been entirely human for 10,000 years:
As the world went up I remade us both. I hid me in you... I hid you in me. And when we were together... I became God..
We're repeatedly told how uncanny Alecto was. And how terribly ordinary-looking John is...but how deeply, deeply upsetting his eyes are to behold. They're repeatedly described as "monstrous" (on one occasion, directly before John jokes "I'm not a monster"), as well as "terrible", "like dead planets", "primordial", "chthonic", "inconceivable", and "deeply fucked up".
There are multiple descriptions of how his down to earth persona suddenly falls away and he can be seen as something infinitely more awful:
- "terrible divinity clung to his skin"
- "It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow"
- "He was no longer human. He was immortal again"
- "He was always somehow more alive than everyone else around him, and yet dislocated from what you considered living. A man-shaped eclipse."
- "The Emperor of the Nine Houses - the Resurrection - the First Reborn - sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light."
There's one moment in particular where Harrow perceives him as something vastly beyond human:
his great immortal age - of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell holding a heart.
(Though of course Harrow herself is far from metaphysically straightforward - in the River, Gideon says "You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire...you were a hunger without a stomach...")
When John describes Resurrection Beasts to Harrow - although we do not yet know that this is a confession of murder and of a sort of cannibalism by a part man, part planet - he is "lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue."
Even when he's not obviously being an eldritch thing, his very normal crown of foetal bones moves on its own, and the white rings in his eyes are described as flickering. Even blithely sitting in a Cohort Admiralty meeting munching peanuts, John is in constant, unsettling motion.
As if that doesn't already sound unpleasant enough, it seems rather like there is something physically discomforting about making eye contact with John. Looking on those white rings is likened to "dying" and "a migraine", and described as "scalding".
It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes... You had never become used to it.
Making eye contact with John doesn't just cause physical pain. It also seems to open you up to some degree of suggestion or compulsion. Here's Gideon's description of making eye contact with John:
God looked at me...and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline...
Those white-ringed eyes closed, and your heart almost relaxed in your chest.
Which seems to place two incidents that otherwise might be explained as Harrow's difficulty refusing the man she has been raised to worship as god in a different light:
It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white.
He looked at you as though he were glad to see you... some nameless softening in his face and those white-tinged, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God
I don't think we're nearly frightened enough of John... Or of the prospect of John and Alecto - the man who became god and the god who became man - reunited (even if at odds) in ATN...
