Eyes Open

Struggling to remain calm, Troy took several deep breaths, looking around himself while trying to keep an eye on what was moving ahead of him. He couldn’t be sure if any of this was real, even though the ground beneath his feet seemed solid, and the cold biting at his skin felt real enough. The trees around him were dense and green, which confused Troy – it was winter, so how come the leaves were still on the trees? They looked like the type that would lose their leave in the fall, yet they looked as though they were in the middle of summer.

Troy frowned, still taking deep, slow breaths of the cold, crisp air. He shivered, wrapping his arms around himself as he continued to scan the trees close around him, looking for any sign of the tall man. On the ground, dead leaves and small bushes were thick, making the ground uneven. Troy had never been in such a dense forest before, and all of this was making him terrified that he was in an imaginary realm – like a night terror. For this reason, he was extra paranoid, and every slight noise made him jump. When a bird clattered out of a bush slightly to his left, Troy actually thought he was about to have a heart attack.

"Troy!"

The voice echoed around the trees, and Troy jumped once more, spinning around wildly, trying to find out where the voice was coming from. Instinctively he knew it was the same voice from his room – the same voice from the video of his big sister.

"Troy!"

The shout came again, giggly, playful, as though she were merely messing around with him. Troy located her shouting to be coming from directly in front of him, where he had seen the movement minutes earlier. He took several cautious steps closer, branches cracking and leaves crunching under his feet. He looked down at their vivid red colour.

Vivid red had been the colour of the leaves found scattered in his house.

Troy took a deep breath, looking into the darkness ahead of him.

"R-Rosie?" he asked, though his voice was barely a whisper.

"Come on, Troy!" came the playful voice, back to him. "Come and play!"

"Jesus," Troy muttered, his voice shaking, his shivers getting worse as the cold seeped through the thin hoodie he was wearing, chilling him to the bone. He took another cautious step forward, looking around himself warily the whole time, expecting the tall man to lunge at him at any second. His next step forward saw him break through the boundary caused by a slightly taller, stronger bush, and he found himself standing in a tiny clearing. He looked up above him, staring at the tiny shape of sky visible between the tall trees. What looked like an owl flitted across the gap. There was no moon. The sky was inky black, though Troy could have sworn it had been day when he first arrived in this strange place. He was starting to think that time and distance weren’t quite normal here.

He looked back down into the clearing, and felt his heart skip a beat as he saw the giggling girl in front of him. She looked like his sister, but older –around seven now. She smiled and skipped around in a tight circle, humming to herself, her curls bouncing around her shoulders. Troy stood completely still, watching her, wondering if she were even there at all.

"You finally came to play with me, Troy!" she grinned, stopping her skipping and bounding closer to him. She looked up at him curiously. "You got tall!"

She giggled again.

"Like the Tall Man!" she exclaimed, jumping backwards and starting to skip again. Troy couldn’t deny the fact that there was something seriously creepy, something unhinged, about the child.

"What the fuck is this?" Troy muttered to himself, taking a few stumbling steps backwards. He felt as though he were high, and on some sort of crazy trip. Of course, he knew that if this were the case, he would be one very lucky man indeed.

"What’s wrong, Troy?" the little girl asked brightly. "Do you not want to know your sister?"

Troy’s gaze instantly returned to the strange young child, and his attention immediately snapped to her. She giggled when she saw this, and this time it was her who took a few steps backwards.

"I think that’s a little mean, don’t you, Troy?" she asked lightly. "We’ve all be waiting to play with you for so long."

Troy stared at her for a long while, trying to work out what her intentions were. He didn’t believe that she was entirely his sister – the age didn’t add up, and Troy was pretty certain time travel was impossible. However, she certainly knew something – so what if she was a manifestation of his sister? He remembered Nate telling him something about the subconscious and how things sometimes portrayed themselves in a way that the brain would understand. Troy had seen Rosie as a child and would be freaked out a little if his saw his fully grown sister after only discovering that she ever existed – so perhaps that’s why he was seeing the child?

"Do you know something about her?" Troy asked, his voice cracking, his throat dry. "Do you know something about Rosie?"

The girl giggled once more, this time, it was more high-pitched and maniacal.

"Rosie, Rosie, where’d you go?" she asked, twirling around in a dangerous gracefulness on the spot. "You left no footprints in the snow!"

Troy stared at the little girl in disbelief as she continued to spin and twirl, his mind racing at one hundred miles per hour, desperately trying to make sense of something – anything.

"In your eyes, there was no light, when you said, 'The Tall Man visits at night'!"

"Where did you hear that?" Troy whispered, and the girl looked up at him and smiled.

"The Tall Man told me," she said, her eyes almost dreamy. "The Tall Man knows a lot, Troy."

She giggled lightly, taking several steps further backwards, the darkness beginning to swallow her up as she left the tiny pieces of moonlight finding their way down through the trees.

"Hey –" Troy began, as she began to walk backwards into the unknown.

She didn’t reply, but Troy could hear her gently humming the beat to the poem.

"You can’t do that! You can’t say all this shit and then just leave me here!" Troy shouted angrily. "Hey! What the Hell is going on?"

Suddenly, Troy was overcome with the urge to find something out, even if it was something irrelevant or useless –just to be able to put his hands up and say that he knew something, he knew an answer, would be worth it. He needed something, anything, to assure him that the world around him was real, and that the problems could be solved. Now, the more he tried to find answers to the questions that he had, the more he uncovered more unanswerable questions. It was a vicious circle, and at the moment, this girl was Troy’s only lifeline. He didn’t know any other way to get out of it.

Troy took several hasty steps towards the young girl, and she giggled again, that high-pitched giggle reserved for the creepy children in horror movies. Troy shivered as the sound echoed in his mind.

"You need to tell me what’s going on," he told her.

"Where’s the fun in that?" she exclaimed, before twirling on the spot and then taking off into a run that Troy hadn’t thought she was capable of.

"Shit!" he burst out, and he kicked his still trembling legs into motion as he sprinted after her.

It was a strange experience – Troy was average when it came to fitness, he could run for a fair distance without getting out of breath, but even after what must have been fifteen minutes of constant sprinting, he didn’t even feel remotely out of breathe. It was as though he were gliding effortlessly through the air in front of him, his toes grazing the ground briefly before he momentum kicked him forward another metre or so. Even though she was much smaller than him, the young girl was keeping quite a distance on Troy, and he pushed himself that little bit harder, determined to not let her out of his sight if he couldn’t simply catch up with her.

Scenery flickered past like it was on a bad tape that was on a quick fast-forward. Troy barely took any of it in – trees, bushes, wild animals flashed past him and he kept his head down slightly, his feet pounding the floor, the only sound in the forest being that of his thundering feet.

The little girl was making no sound as she ran, and Troy became even more determined to not lose her from his sight. She was completely silent as she ran – she seemed to move in what was more a gliding movement from where Troy was standing – and Troy knew that if he lost sight of her for even an instant, he would never find her again. She appeared when she wanted to be seen, Troy knew this much, and he also knew that if she didn’t want to be found, she would be invisible.

Troy lost count of how long they ran for. Occasionally, as stupid as it sounded, he would see a tree that he thought he had ran past before, and he wondered if she were simply leading him of a wild goose chase of sorts – a run to nowhere that would end in more unanswered questions. He forced himself to continue, making the most of the fact that he seemed immune to losing his energy, and even as he felt the sickness starting to return to him, he kept forcing one foot in front of the other, constantly moving, the desire to learn, to know what was happening to him, keeping him from collapsing to the ground in sickness and fear.

Convinced for certain that he had just passed the same tree for what had to be the fifth or sixth time now, Troy got another large, unwelcome shock as he rounded the corner and ran straight into a large clearing, absolutely huge compared to the tiny one he had met the young girl in. She was still in front of him, and she had slowed now, twirling around gracefully wants more, again humming the tune to the short poem Troy had written years ago but couldn’t remember. She twirled softly, her toes pivoting lightly on the dirt beneath her, her arms trailing calmly along in her wake. Troy watched her, almost transfixed, though something –instinct or something else entirely – was warning him not to step any closer.

So, he stayed at the edge of the huge expanse of clear ground. No trees at all grew on it, yet despite the access to light, the ground was sparse and muddy, only weeds daring to show their face, sprouting up between cracks in the dirt or beside rocks. Troy’s own feet left footprints in the soft dirt ear the edges of the clearing, yet the little girl appeared to have left no trace. Troy watched her continuing to dance and spin and hum, and then he realized why he was suddenly experiencing those familiar waves of nausea.

Across the clearing gliding a tall, menacing and unfortunately very familiar figure. The tall man also seemed to glide – Troy couldn’t really work out how he was moving – across the clearing and closer to the girl, who stopped her dancing and humming and instead turned and stared up into his face, or lack thereof. The tall man leant down slightly, studying her, and she reached her arms up to him, almost as though she were a small infant reaching for its parents. The tall man straightened, and the girl twirled briefly again before looking back up at him, and then, quite suddenly, both the child and the tall creature were staring straight at Troy.

Pain shot through Troy’s head and he couldn’t help crying out. He felt himself falling towards the floor, but before he hit it, he felt an unpleasant jerk somewhere within him and when he landed, it wasn’t upon the soft, slightly moist dirty of the forest clearing’s floor, but rather the warmer, more scratchy texture of his bedroom carpet.

Troy sat bolt upright, gasping for breath, suddenly exhausted. All around him were red leaves, and tiny, muddy footprints.