Eyes Open

It took a while for Troy to convince his parents that he was OK, and that he was only going home to have a rest and think things through. However, Troy was lying. He wasn’t OK – in fact, he was anything but. He was grief-stricken, murderous, out for revenge. Seeing his innocent sister on that video footage, seeing how excited she was to meet the brother she never got a chance to ... it made Troy feel sick. How dare that tall stalker not only snatch his sister away from her family, but then have the nerve to appear and taunt the other child in the family, too?

Troy had had enough of asking questions. Now was the time to start getting answers, and he wasn’t going down without a fight. He wouldn’t take his pills tonight – he would stay awake every night until the tall man made another appearance, and then he would be expecting some answers from him. He didn’t know how he was going to do it yet, but he was going to try everything within his power.

He let himself into his house, still locking it behind him even though a strange part of him wanted the tall man to appear today. He wanted to know what had happened to his sister. He was still reeling over the fact that he actually had a sister. For all his life he had thought he had been his parent’s only child, but looking back, he was starting to see gaps in his previously normal childhood. The first was the fact that he had always seemed to subconsciously know that something had been missing. Now, he knew that it was of course his sister – he had always known that there was a gap in the family, and the more he looked back the more obvious he saw it was.

She would have gone missing at the beginning of January, if she had vanished two weeks before Troy had been born. Troy sat on the bottom step, concentrating hard on his earliest memories, and he could just about recall for as long as he could remember that his parents – his mother especially – had been very uptight around the New Year. He had always wondered why – the way his mother’s eyes would fill up at milestones like Christmas, Mother’s Day, birthdays. Troy could make an educated guess that his sister Rosie had been born in the middle of June – for that was when he remembered his mother getting most tearful, playing with her hair, generally looking lost, like she had forgotten something but couldn’t quite work out what it was.

Troy groaned loudly, feeling as though he had just received the news that someone close to him had passed away. He supposed that, in a way, it was like grief – he had a sister but he’s never met her, and there was a high possibility that she was either dead or would be permanently gone from his life. He felt robbed – he had always wanted a sibling and now he knew he had one who had been snatched away. Of course, this gave way to much anger, and Troy clenched his fists into his hair as he thought about the tall stalker who had been following him around so recently. What did he want? Was he mocking him? Did he know that Troy was going to find out about Rosie and did he want to see the reaction, or to constantly remind Troy of what he had lost? Or was it even more sinister – did he want to come after Troy as well, like his mother and father had mentioned?

"That would be just like the bastard," Troy muttered to himself, his angry tones meeting no ears. "I’m sure he’d really like that, wouldn’t he? Taking both of us. The bastard ... what the fuck does he even want with my sister?"

Saying it out loud – the words, "my sister" – made everything seem so much more real to Troy, and he suddenly felt very light-headed. Everything was moving so fast – he had gone from being terrified that he was insane or at least heading in that direction, to realizing that this creature really did exist and that his best friend had seen him too, to realizing that he was also tied in with his own family’s history and the root cause of a huge tragedy that had befallen them. Troy didn’t know what was worse – being insane or being faced with the real threat. It was all so unbelievable – he had gone from a normal guy with a slightly abnormal problem to being an average guy with some tall, faceless stalker after him. He didn’t know his motives or his origin or how he worked. How was he meant to defend himself?

In an evening similar to many ones he had had in the past, Troy found himself slumped on the couch, watching bad cop shows and even worse comedy re-runs until the clock showed it was well into the early morning. Troy hadn’t taken his meds, so he was still feeling awake. He started to feel a little apprehensive, however, wishing he had someone with him. He had admitted to himself earlier that he had no idea what this creature wanted, or how it worked. He couldn’t just go running in there without knowing what awaited him.

It was at that moment that his sister flashed back into his mind. He saw her, as clear as anything, on that video footage, bounding around, grinning, smiling, laughing, so excited about her baby brother. He saw her bright eyes, her beautiful curly hair, and heard her innocent voice as clear as though she were standing next to him. Troy felt tears spring to his eyes and he knuckled them firmly, determined not to show any weakness. He had to be strong. If he wanted to find any clues regarding his sister, he had to remain calm and focus on the future, whatever may lie in wait for him.

He was going over this thought again and again, trying to psych himself up for whatever lay ahead, when he heard a noise from directly above him. The room directly above him was his own bedroom, and, instinctively, he knew that someone was in the house with him.

Determination set in over his fear and, with his big sister in mind, Troy silently rose to his feet, making his way towards the kitchen. Once there, Troy paused again, looking around himself warily, beginning to feel the pangs of nervousness come upon him as he realized that there were no lights on in the house, aside from the flickering, blaring light from the television set. He thought he heard a familiar whisper of his name in his mind, but he pushed the fear back, swallowed it down, and crept into the dark, narrow hallway.

Climbing up the stairs was a challenge – it was pitch black and Troy knew that some of the stairs creaked. He made slight noises on his way up, yet he somehow knew the creature – if it was indeed the creature – would not flee. His curtains were open in his room, letting in the strange orange glow from the nearby streetlamp, and the door was pulled partially closed. Troy pressed his eye against the gap, swivelling it round as much as he could, but everything looked innocent enough. That was until Troy noticed the ground seemed to be covered in a layer of thin, almost invisible mist.

Troy took a deep breath, and cracked the door open. The room was empty, though the strange mist swirled around his feet, moving slightly as he appeared to wade through it. He stopped for a second, and then, all of a sudden, he simply knew that something was behind him. Swallowing whatever fear had returned to the surface and summoning up what little courage was left, Troy slowly turned around to face whatever it was.

The creature seemed even taller this close up. Troy was mere feet away from him, and as he slowly moved his eyes up towards the creature’s head, fear unlike anything he had ever felt before gripped him tightly around the chest. He tried to take a step back, but faltered, realizing that he couldn’t move for the terror that grasped him. The thing reached out a long, skeletal arm and nearly touched Troy’s shoulder, before seeming to hover there, its head to one side, considering him. Troy got the feeling it wasn’t used to people voluntarily coming so close to him.

For a long while, they simply stared at one another, Troy in horror, and the creature with a somewhat innocent curiosity. Troy guessed that the creature was closer to ten feet tall, from where he was standing, and this close up he could make out details that he had never noticed before. The way that there seemed to be no curves in his limbs – all the joints were straight or jagged, the suit falling over them in the same way. The creature didn’t appear to be breathing at all, rather he was standing totally still, watching the human in front of him in the same way a child would watch an animal at the zoo. Even though he still had no visible features at this distance, Troy saw that his head was more shaped than it looked when he hadn’t been so close. It looked almost as though the white, featureless skin was pulled tightly over a skull, for Troy could make out a slight jaw line and hollow sockets where eyes should be. As Troy looked into this empty sockets, the fear he was feeling became so much more pronounced, and he suddenly felt nauseous, dizzy, like he had been overcome by a severe bout of sunstroke.

The thing reached out for him again, and this time, Troy moved. He ducked out of its grasp and pressed himself against the wall, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and staying focused on the danger in front of him. The tall man calmly turned to face Troy again, still considering him as though he were nothing more than a simple plaything.

Troy swallowed heavily and managed to speak.

"What do you want?" he croaked. "Why are you here?"

The tall man did not reply – Troy wasn’t even sure if he could – but just continued to stare at him, standing completely still, though there was an air about him that told Troy to stay on his toes. He felt the creature could pounce at any moment, and he didn’t want to even think about the strength that those bony, slender fingers might hold.

"You took her," Troy said, his voice growing stronger as he thought of his sister. "You took my sister. Where is she? And what do you want with me?"

The creature’s silence had suddenly become more annoying than foreboding, and Troy took a slight half step towards it.

"Have you not had enough of tormenting my family?" he shouted at the thing, screaming the words right up at it, feeling the anger finally coming out into bravery. "You need to leave, you hear me? You need to leave us the fuck alone, and you need to tell me where my sister is!"

The creature remained silent, although it cocked its head to the side more, as though wondering why this human would dare raise his voice at it. Troy stared back, fighting the sickness that threatened to overpower him, fighting the urge to run far away, as fast as he could, fighting the pounding headache that threatened to obscure all of his thoughts –

And then he felt the room changing. The floor became uneven and the room was quickly filling up with the same fog from the other night – thick, blinding, impenetrable – Troy could feel its icy grasp wrapping around his exposed skin – his eyes stung, his skin prickled and the heat retracted from his extremities. His hands and feet quickly became numb and he began to shiver violently as his room melted away into the fog, and the floor seemed to completely disappear below him even though he didn’t fall, and he could hear voices inside his head – screaming, yelling, crying, sobbing – and it was all becoming unbearable – he was going to be sick, or he was going to die, or –

Troy’s feet found solid ground, and he opened his eyes, though he did not realize he had even closed them in the first place. His breathing was erratic and his heart was pounding too fast to be healthy. He was covered in cold sweat, trembling violently, not knowing if it was fear or cold, for it had to be cold – his breath was clouding in front of him – and as he came back to his senses, Troy realized he wasn’t in his room anymore.

He was in the middle of a dense, dark forest, and up ahead of him, something was moving.