Eyes Open

Troy stayed where he was for a long, long time, his back pressed against the wall, his legs splayed out in front of him, his chin resting upon his heaving chest as he struggled to catch his breath and make sense of what was going on. What had happened? How could he explain that?

The cynical part of him was starting to force him to realize that there was no explanation – that something was occurring that defied the boundaries of any knowledge he had ever picked up. As he sat there, he found himself beginning to feel more and more vulnerable. There was so much going on that he simply couldn’t explain, so how was he meant to defend himself against it?

Fear gripped him again, and he forced himself first onto his hands and knees, and then finally, shakily, onto his feet. His breath was now short and shallow, and his head was pounding in time with his furiously pumping heart. Waves of sickness continued to wash over him, and as the blood rushed to his head, his vision went darker, spots appearing before him. Pushing through the unknown illness, Troy stumbled towards his bedroom door and out into the dark hallway, feeling his damp shoes crunching on dry leaves as he made his way to the stairs. The whole house smelt like the forest had – slightly damp and musty, and Troy was uncertain of everything around him. Was he really here? How did he know that he was back in his house?

He stumbled down the stairs, nearly slipping twice, bouncing off of the wall to his left and nearly going over the banister to his right. He somehow managed to get to the bottom with no injuries, and immediately headed for his front door. He needed to get away. He needed someone – anyone – to reassure him.

The air was bitterly cold outside the house, but Troy barely even registered it. He stumbled and staggered down the road, knowing that he probably appeared drunk to anyone who happened to see him. In a way, he felt drunk – his head was spinning and his eyes couldn’t focus, and the ground seemed to be heaving under him. He felt as though he were going to be sick at any moment, and several times he had to swallow heavily to prevent himself from doing so. At the forefront of his mind was the terror that at any minute he could turn a corner and see the tall man coming towards him, ready to take him back to that dense forest, the forest he had never seen before in his life. He didn’t want to go back ... he couldn’t go back and hear that little girl taunting him, the giggling, the endless running through the strange landscape ... he needed something familiar, and that was where he was heading.

Troy only became aware of how late it must be when he found himself banging on Nate’s door for several minutes before he heard movement behind it. Usually it took Troy a while to walk to Nate’s house, and he was barely aware of the fact that he had arrived in barely any time at all. He heard a key fumbling around in a lock, and then the door was pulled open, and there stood Nate, in an old pair of joggers and a baggy, creased T-shirt, his eyes being forced open, his hair everywhere. Something about Troy’s appearance must have been rather shocking, however, as immediately Nate’s eyes widened and he appeared a lot more alert.

"What happened to you?" he asked, pulling his friend inside, shutting the door, and switching the hall light on to get a better look. Troy caught a partial reflection of himself in the mirror on the wall in the downstairs bathroom. His hair was messy and wild, small twigs littering it. Brown flakes of dead leaves were scattered over his clothes and his shoes and the bottoms of his jeans were muddy and slightly dusty. Troy looked at Nate, his eyes wide.

"He was in my room," he whispered, "The tall guy. He took me somewhere. I didn’t want to go but I had no choice, the room just dissolved and I was there and I don’t know what the fuck happened. What the fuck happened, Nate?"

"How am I supposed to know?" Nate demanded, but his voice was more gentle than it would have been in a different situation, and his brown eyes were full of genuine concern for his best friend. "Come through to the living room, you need to sit down. I can practically hear your heart thumping from here."

Troy, still stumbling unsteadily, followed Nate into the living room. Nate switched the small lamp beside the television set on as Troy gratefully collapsed into an armchair, allowing his tired and confused body to go limp for a few blissful minutes. Eventually, Nate spoke up again.

"So what exactly happened?" he questioned. "This tall guy showed up in your room and took you somewhere?"

"Yeah," Troy said softly, his heart still thumping but his breath finally caught. "He turned up in my room, and holy shit, Nate, he’s a freak of nature if I ever saw one. Close up, he must be near ten feet tall."

"Holy shit," Nate muttered, looking up towards the ceiling. "That’s like, as tall as this room."

"I know," Troy muttered. "He was the whole height of my room, too. And, close up, his limbs are ever freakier – they’re all straight. Like, there’s no curves, just jagged angles, like he’s made from a splintered rod someone’s forced into shape. His head isn’t just a white sphere, either. Close up it looks like he has pale skin stretched over his skull, but I don’t even know if he had one. I don’t even know if he’s human."

Troy’s breath was quickening again, and his voice was becoming unusually high-pitched. Nate watched him worry etched into everyone of his features.

"You need to calm down, man," he told his best friend. "You’re going to have a panic attack or something."

"I can’t calm down," Troy gasped. "He fucking ... the room all filled with fog, and I was in this forest ... there was this little girl who knew Rosie ... and he was there as well and he looked at me and I was back in my room and fuck I don’t know what the Hell happened –"

"Troy, calm down," Nate said firmly.

"How can I calm down?" Troy asked, his voice still unusually high and his words starting to run into each other.

"You can calm down by catching your breath and thinking about this logically," Nate said, raising his voice slightly to be heard over Troy, who was now muttering rapidly to himself. "Listen, OK, so we both may have seen this guy, but there’s nothing to say that your fear didn’t cause a hallucination of you going to that forest, OK?"

"There were leaves," Troy muttered, rocking back and forth slightly. "There were red leaves all over the forest floor, and there were red leaves in my house when I was running through it. And look at me, Nate? Does my appearance look like that of a guy who’s been tucked up in bed all night?"

Nate looked at his friend again, once more taking in the small details, like the tiny flakes of leaves in his hair and the mid scuffs up his jeans.

"Are you sure that you didn’t get that on the way here?" Nate asked, but his determination seemed to have faltered slightly.

"I know I was there, Nate," Troy said softly, though his eyes didn’t stop darting around and his shaking didn’t stop. "I know I was there," he said again, even softer this time, and he curled himself up even smaller into the chair.

"Even if you were," Nate said, gently now. "Panicking won’t help you. I know it’s freaky – Hell, even I’m freaked out and it didn’t even happen to me. But you have to try and stay calm at least. Perhaps this is what he wants? Perhaps he wants you to freak out? You can’t let him get to you, man. You need to keep calm and beat this thing, whatever it might be."

"I don’t know," Troy said quietly. "I don’t get him at all, Nate. No matter how hard I try – anything I try to explain just doesn’t make sense. I can’t understand him at all. I don’t even know if I should call him, 'him', or 'it', or what. I just don’t know where I stand and that terrifies me so much. I’ve never had something I couldn’t understand – or something that I could at least pretend to understand."

"So it’s vital that you keep a clear head, then," Nate said firmly. "You need to work this out, and panicking won’t help."

There was a slight pause that went on for just a little too long, and Nate watched his friend, suddenly instinctively knowing that his attention was somewhere else. Troy’s eyes were too unfocused to be looking at something in the room, and Nate noticed that the seemed to be staring past him, out of the window behind him. He turned to follow Troy’s gaze, but found it hard to see anything at all – the glare from the lamp was making it hard to see into the darkness outside.

Movement grabbed Nate’s attention back to Troy. He had jumped up quite suddenly, with energy that Nate didn’t know he had at the moment.

"Troy, what’re you –" Nate began, but Troy’s furious shout cut him off unexpectedly.

"That bastard!" he yelled, running down the short hall to the next room, the kitchen, and starting to fumble through all the drawers. Nate appeared shortly after he did so, standing in the doorway looking shocked and very much confused.

"What’s going on, Troy?" he asked.

Troy barely heard him. He had found what he had been looking for and was now darting back towards the door.

"What the Hell are you doing with that?" Nate suddenly shouted, jumping out of the way as Troy shot past, holding in his right hand a large, sharp cutting knife. "Troy! Troy!"

Troy didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down as he ran to the front door, pulling it open with his free hand, and sprinted out into the cold night air.

"You fucking dick!" he screamed, not caring how many people he woke up.

The tall man barely moved as Troy approached him. He seemed to be watching him with an air of amusement now, but Troy was too angry to wonder why, or to feel the fear and sickness that usually accompanied getting too close to the creature.

"What the fuck do you want?" Troy screamed up at him, but the blank face remained just that, and still the man didn’t move.

Troy felt the anger pulsing through him, and although all he managed to do was merely twitch his arm as the thought to lash out with the knife crossed his mind, the tall man seemed to know what he was planning. Troy heard Nate shout out just as something wrapped itself tightly around his waist, hurling him up into the air and a fair distance down the street. Troy landed heavily, skidding across the road which tore at his jeans and his flesh, leaving severe road rash all down one side of his body. Feeling blood oozing into his T-shirt and his jeans as stinging spread throughout his entire body, Troy was still thinking clearly enough to be wondering just how the events of the last few seconds had actually happened.

He forced himself into a sitting position, scanning for the tall man, and that was when he spotted what the cause of his violent flight down the street had been. The tall man was gliding towards him, looking the same as he had always done, except there was one big difference. This time, long, black tendrils came from his back, lashing around like whips, and Troy suddenly realized that this hidden weapon of the tall man’s was going to be a serious danger to him if he didn’t move soon.

Yet Troy found himself temporarily transfixed in horror, as he watched the dark, cruel tentacles snaking through the air. Some – one of the ones that had thrown him, Troy guessed – were thicker than others, and so noticeable that Troy could see there were two of the thicker ones on either side. He didn’t know how many of the thinner ones they were, but he knew enough to work out that it would be like getting lashed with a whip if one hit him.

The tall man was a slight distance away, but quite suddenly he was mere feet away from Troy, who was still in a very vulnerable position on the ground. He scrambled out of the way as one of the thicker tendrils smashed into the ground next to him, and he couldn’t help but let out a slight yelp as he saw the mark it left on the road’s surface. It didn’t take a lot of intelligence to work out that it that amount of force had come into contact with an arm or a leg, Troy wouldn’t be in possession of it anymore.

As he scrambled away, he felt something knock him to the floor with brute force, winding him. He rolled onto his back to see a long, snake-like tendril heading straight towards him, and he knew there was no time to get out of its way.