Eyes Open
Fourteen.
Troy made an unsuccessful attempt to scramble out of the way, but between the pain he was in from his injuries and the fact he had been so badly winded, he knew he didn’t really stand a chance. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Nate was trying to get to him, only to have to dodge out of the way every time he got even remotely close – the tendrils seemed to be able to stretch and act of their own accord.
The tendril that was currently after Troy found him easily, despite the amount of kicking at it Troy put in. It felt as though someone was wrapping a cold leather belt around his neck as the tall man lifted Troy into the air by his throat, tightening his grip until Troy couldn’t get a single breath of air into his screaming lungs. Instinctively, Troy’s hands went to his throat, and he desperately tried make his fingers force a gap between his skin and the thing which suspended him in mid-air. He tried kicking out at the creature again, but his lack of air was quickly making him weak and helpless, and black spots were starting to appear in his vision.
I’m going to die, Troy thought to himself. I’m going to die and it’s going to be because of this fucking creature.
As much as the thought angered as well as terrified him, Troy couldn’t muster up any strength at all to continue fighting. He heard Nate’s voice, somewhere far away, yelling in obvious fear as Troy allowed himself to go limp, his head slumping forward slightly, as darkness finally took over his vision, and everything went silent.
What followed was a strange sensation. Troy was aware, but at the same time, completely unaware. He knew something was happening, but he didn’t quite know what. He felt totally weightless, as though he were floating, drifting, but at the same time he knew he was still in possession of a body, for he could feel himself still being quite real, and quite solid.
Suddenly, Troy was aware that he wasn’t floating anymore. He was lying on his back on something uneven and rough, and he could feel the cold seeping through his clothes. It was soothing in his injured side and uncomfortable on his normal side, and he rolled over slightly, his eyes still closed, letting out a soft groan. For a long while, Troy lay there, listening for something – anything – to give him a clue as to where he was. He wanted to open his eyes to see, but he was terrified that in doing so, he would confirm what he feared the most – that he was dead.
His throat – both inside and out – stung furiously. He felt the tickly urge to cough but knew that it would be excruciatingly painful if he did so. Eventually, he couldn’t resist anymore, and had to cough. The pain made his throat scream in protest and his eyes water. He weakly lifted his hands up, still with his eyes closed, and wiped away the fluid that was trickling out from in between his closed eyelids. He could feel that they were more loosely closed now – they were starting to flicker and stayed open for longer, even though he didn’t particularly want them to. When they stayed open for a brief moment, Troy could make out grey, shadowy shapes, but nothing to give him any clue as to where he was aside from the fact that he was no longer on the street outside Nate’s house.
Troy moved his legs slightly after he lowered his arms, first of all to ensure that they were still there, and then to work out if they were still in working order. He could move them, although his left leg stung furiously, covered in road burn. His eyelids finally flickered open, and for a brief second, he thought his vision had been permanently damaged. Everything around him was hazy and a strange shade of white-grey. It was only when Troy weakly lifted an arm off of the ground and waved his hand through the air that he saw the colours disperse slightly, and swirl around in the path his arm had left through it. He realized that it was thick fog, and this realization alone was enough to shake the grogginess from his body and put the fear of God back into him.
He forced himself to his feet, swaying very unsteadily, and looked around himself wildly. He could barely see through the fog, but a couple of steps forward saw a huge tree loom out of the mist, and a couple more steps to the right saw the same thing happen. Crouching down closer to the ground, Troy recognized foliage and reddening leaves, and with an unpleasant dropping sensation in his stomach, realized that he must be back in that strange forest he had been in only hours before.
Had it only been hours? Troy couldn’t tell – and besides, the forest had changed so much for only a few hours. It looked totally different now. All of the leaves had fallen from the trees, although there didn’t seem to be any more fallen leaves on the ground as there had been previously. The trees were undeniably bare, though, their jagged, naked branches jutting out at cruel angles, reminding Troy unpleasantly and unwillingly of the tall man’s long limbs and lashing tendrils. The mist was thicker, swirling around everything on the forest floor, creeping towards Troy with outstretched fingers, the cold touching all of his exposed skin, making him tremble worse than ever before. What had changed the most, however, was the atmosphere. Troy didn’t remember the forest feeling this foreboding before. The first time he had been here, granted, he had been scared and apprehensive, but this was unlike anything he had ever felt before. The terror within him was stronger than he had ever felt before, and he wanted to just turn and run, but where? He didn’t know. He could only stand and shake, his throat throbbing, his body stinging, everything aching.
Troy’s breath was clouding in front of his face as it had been doing so often lately, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to keep warm. He could feel bruises forming on his back from being slammed to the floor, and his throat was still stinging. He noticed red on his left arm and looked down to see that his T-shirt sleeve was torn and bloody, and his entire arm was red raw with road rash. He winced as he saw it, and as was typical of injuries, now he had seen it, it hurt more. The left-hand side of his jeans had suffered the same abuse – the material was frayed in some parts and had holes in it in others, and blood was seeping from these injuries, too.
Before he had a chance to return to the all-important matter of working out whether he was dead or not, Troy spotted movement up ahead of him, and instinct told him that it was the same little girl from earlier who was watching him silently from the spindly branches of the bushes.
"You better have a seriously good explanation," Troy muttered, and she stepped quietly out from behind the bush. She too looked different – her face was gaunt and pale, her skin pasty. Her clothes were dirty and hung off of her emaciated frame, and she shivered lightly as she watched him. Despite the obvious differences, she was certainly the same girl from the last time Troy had been here – he wouldn’t ever forget the look in those eyes. He wasn’t sure what was more unnerving –when she was laughing or when she wasn’t. She was deathly quiet now, simply watching, not unlike the tall man himself. Troy began to feel increasingly endangered, and he took a few steps away from her. She merely matched the difference with a few steps forward. Troy stopped, staring at her, and then she gave that creepy smile and looked into his face.
"Watch what I can do!" she said softly, and, as Troy watched, her flesh, slowly at first and then picking up speed, began to decay. It wrinkled and turned a strange white-grey colour, almost matching the mist around it, before it seemed to dry out and shrivel closer to the bone, turning blacker and blacker and then into gloop, dripping off first her arms, then melting down her face to expose her skull, and finally tumbling away from her legs. Troy continued to watch in horror as the rotting flesh pooled around her skinless feet, soaking into the ground, and as it did so, her bones started to crack and crumble, finally shattering and falling into a pile on the floor where the flesh had recently been, turning quickly into powder and disappearing.
Before Troy even had a chance to react to the horrific scene he had just witnessed, the floor around him seemed to pitch and heave again, and he closed his eyes, instinctively knowing that, when he opened them, he would be somewhere entirely different. He only opened his eyes when he felt the floor steady beneath his feet, and when he felt the worst of the nausea leave him. He cracked his eyes open warily, half-glancing around before his eyes snapped fully open as he realized where he was and what he was seeing.
Troy was in the same clearing as earlier, but this time it was horrifically different. The trees, bare and jagged like all of the others in the forest at the moment, were covered with morbid decorations, and as Troy moved closer, he realized that they were bodies.
Bodies were hanging from all of the trees, and not all of them were in one piece. The one closest to Troy was completely disembowelled, the removed organs in a slimy, glistening heap beneath its limp legs. Another one nearby was limbless, though Troy couldn’t locate the missing limbs, and more than half were headless. Again, Troy couldn’t work out where the missing body parts were – until he looked upwards, attempting to look away from the carnage around him, and saw the tops of the trees littered with heads, arms and legs.
Troy felt his stomach churn and, as the smell of rotting flesh hit him, he finally gave up trying to swallow the sickness down. However, being violently sick didn’t stop his stomach from turning over itself and his head from spinning. He wanted to get out of that clearing, but any way out would mean him having to run past a mutilated corpse. He continued to stare in horror, for that was all he could do, and his mind rushed with thoughts. How had this been done? Why? Who were these people? Were they people who had gone missing like his sister? Oh, Christ ... his sister wasn’t one of them, was she? Where did they all come from? Surely they had to be from different areas – hundred of bodies were here and if hundreds of people went missing the authorities would surely be involved. So, if they were all from different areas, how did they get here? How were the limbs and heads put so far up the trees? What was the point in mutilating them like that? And, foremost in Troy’s mind – why had he been brought here to see them?
A terrible thought struck him then. He had clearly angered the tall man – what if Troy was one of these headless bodies, and it was merely his ghost that was watching this scene? What if the decaying girl had been hinting to him what had happened? What if he were already dead?
"Troy!"
Troy spun around as someone vaguely familiar called his name. They sounded as though they were calling from a great distance, and he span around on the spot for a while, trying to work out in what direction the voice had come from.
"Hey!" he shouted, hoping – praying – that he would get a response. For a while there was nothing, and then Troy heard his name being called again, closer this time.
"Troy!"
"What the –" Troy muttered, and then the floor began twisting under his feet again, and just before his vision closed in around him, Troy thought he saw one of the corpses still in possession of its head turn and stare at him.
"Troy! Jesus Christ, Troy, wake up!"
Troy was being shaken quite desperately. He realized this before anything else as his senses returned. He recognized Nate’s voice, somewhere above him, and the cold was still biting at him even though something warm had been wrapped tightly around him.
"Troy! Come on, man, please don’t be dead! Please don’t be dead!"
Nate opened one of Troy’s eyes, bringing Troy fully back to his senses, and he reached up a bloody left arm and tried to swat him away. Almost as soon as he acknowledged his surroundings, Troy began to shiver violently. He heard Nate muttered various "thank you"s in relief, and then suddenly his friend was scooping him right off the ground.
"It’s all right, man," Nate told him softly, as he began to carry his friend back towards the house. "He’s gone now. We’ll get you inside. It’s going to be fine."
Troy couldn’t believe him. All that was playing over and over in his head was what he had seen in that clearing. Try as he might, he couldn’t forget it.
The tendril that was currently after Troy found him easily, despite the amount of kicking at it Troy put in. It felt as though someone was wrapping a cold leather belt around his neck as the tall man lifted Troy into the air by his throat, tightening his grip until Troy couldn’t get a single breath of air into his screaming lungs. Instinctively, Troy’s hands went to his throat, and he desperately tried make his fingers force a gap between his skin and the thing which suspended him in mid-air. He tried kicking out at the creature again, but his lack of air was quickly making him weak and helpless, and black spots were starting to appear in his vision.
I’m going to die, Troy thought to himself. I’m going to die and it’s going to be because of this fucking creature.
As much as the thought angered as well as terrified him, Troy couldn’t muster up any strength at all to continue fighting. He heard Nate’s voice, somewhere far away, yelling in obvious fear as Troy allowed himself to go limp, his head slumping forward slightly, as darkness finally took over his vision, and everything went silent.
What followed was a strange sensation. Troy was aware, but at the same time, completely unaware. He knew something was happening, but he didn’t quite know what. He felt totally weightless, as though he were floating, drifting, but at the same time he knew he was still in possession of a body, for he could feel himself still being quite real, and quite solid.
Suddenly, Troy was aware that he wasn’t floating anymore. He was lying on his back on something uneven and rough, and he could feel the cold seeping through his clothes. It was soothing in his injured side and uncomfortable on his normal side, and he rolled over slightly, his eyes still closed, letting out a soft groan. For a long while, Troy lay there, listening for something – anything – to give him a clue as to where he was. He wanted to open his eyes to see, but he was terrified that in doing so, he would confirm what he feared the most – that he was dead.
His throat – both inside and out – stung furiously. He felt the tickly urge to cough but knew that it would be excruciatingly painful if he did so. Eventually, he couldn’t resist anymore, and had to cough. The pain made his throat scream in protest and his eyes water. He weakly lifted his hands up, still with his eyes closed, and wiped away the fluid that was trickling out from in between his closed eyelids. He could feel that they were more loosely closed now – they were starting to flicker and stayed open for longer, even though he didn’t particularly want them to. When they stayed open for a brief moment, Troy could make out grey, shadowy shapes, but nothing to give him any clue as to where he was aside from the fact that he was no longer on the street outside Nate’s house.
Troy moved his legs slightly after he lowered his arms, first of all to ensure that they were still there, and then to work out if they were still in working order. He could move them, although his left leg stung furiously, covered in road burn. His eyelids finally flickered open, and for a brief second, he thought his vision had been permanently damaged. Everything around him was hazy and a strange shade of white-grey. It was only when Troy weakly lifted an arm off of the ground and waved his hand through the air that he saw the colours disperse slightly, and swirl around in the path his arm had left through it. He realized that it was thick fog, and this realization alone was enough to shake the grogginess from his body and put the fear of God back into him.
He forced himself to his feet, swaying very unsteadily, and looked around himself wildly. He could barely see through the fog, but a couple of steps forward saw a huge tree loom out of the mist, and a couple more steps to the right saw the same thing happen. Crouching down closer to the ground, Troy recognized foliage and reddening leaves, and with an unpleasant dropping sensation in his stomach, realized that he must be back in that strange forest he had been in only hours before.
Had it only been hours? Troy couldn’t tell – and besides, the forest had changed so much for only a few hours. It looked totally different now. All of the leaves had fallen from the trees, although there didn’t seem to be any more fallen leaves on the ground as there had been previously. The trees were undeniably bare, though, their jagged, naked branches jutting out at cruel angles, reminding Troy unpleasantly and unwillingly of the tall man’s long limbs and lashing tendrils. The mist was thicker, swirling around everything on the forest floor, creeping towards Troy with outstretched fingers, the cold touching all of his exposed skin, making him tremble worse than ever before. What had changed the most, however, was the atmosphere. Troy didn’t remember the forest feeling this foreboding before. The first time he had been here, granted, he had been scared and apprehensive, but this was unlike anything he had ever felt before. The terror within him was stronger than he had ever felt before, and he wanted to just turn and run, but where? He didn’t know. He could only stand and shake, his throat throbbing, his body stinging, everything aching.
Troy’s breath was clouding in front of his face as it had been doing so often lately, and he wrapped his arms around his chest, trying to keep warm. He could feel bruises forming on his back from being slammed to the floor, and his throat was still stinging. He noticed red on his left arm and looked down to see that his T-shirt sleeve was torn and bloody, and his entire arm was red raw with road rash. He winced as he saw it, and as was typical of injuries, now he had seen it, it hurt more. The left-hand side of his jeans had suffered the same abuse – the material was frayed in some parts and had holes in it in others, and blood was seeping from these injuries, too.
Before he had a chance to return to the all-important matter of working out whether he was dead or not, Troy spotted movement up ahead of him, and instinct told him that it was the same little girl from earlier who was watching him silently from the spindly branches of the bushes.
"You better have a seriously good explanation," Troy muttered, and she stepped quietly out from behind the bush. She too looked different – her face was gaunt and pale, her skin pasty. Her clothes were dirty and hung off of her emaciated frame, and she shivered lightly as she watched him. Despite the obvious differences, she was certainly the same girl from the last time Troy had been here – he wouldn’t ever forget the look in those eyes. He wasn’t sure what was more unnerving –when she was laughing or when she wasn’t. She was deathly quiet now, simply watching, not unlike the tall man himself. Troy began to feel increasingly endangered, and he took a few steps away from her. She merely matched the difference with a few steps forward. Troy stopped, staring at her, and then she gave that creepy smile and looked into his face.
"Watch what I can do!" she said softly, and, as Troy watched, her flesh, slowly at first and then picking up speed, began to decay. It wrinkled and turned a strange white-grey colour, almost matching the mist around it, before it seemed to dry out and shrivel closer to the bone, turning blacker and blacker and then into gloop, dripping off first her arms, then melting down her face to expose her skull, and finally tumbling away from her legs. Troy continued to watch in horror as the rotting flesh pooled around her skinless feet, soaking into the ground, and as it did so, her bones started to crack and crumble, finally shattering and falling into a pile on the floor where the flesh had recently been, turning quickly into powder and disappearing.
Before Troy even had a chance to react to the horrific scene he had just witnessed, the floor around him seemed to pitch and heave again, and he closed his eyes, instinctively knowing that, when he opened them, he would be somewhere entirely different. He only opened his eyes when he felt the floor steady beneath his feet, and when he felt the worst of the nausea leave him. He cracked his eyes open warily, half-glancing around before his eyes snapped fully open as he realized where he was and what he was seeing.
Troy was in the same clearing as earlier, but this time it was horrifically different. The trees, bare and jagged like all of the others in the forest at the moment, were covered with morbid decorations, and as Troy moved closer, he realized that they were bodies.
Bodies were hanging from all of the trees, and not all of them were in one piece. The one closest to Troy was completely disembowelled, the removed organs in a slimy, glistening heap beneath its limp legs. Another one nearby was limbless, though Troy couldn’t locate the missing limbs, and more than half were headless. Again, Troy couldn’t work out where the missing body parts were – until he looked upwards, attempting to look away from the carnage around him, and saw the tops of the trees littered with heads, arms and legs.
Troy felt his stomach churn and, as the smell of rotting flesh hit him, he finally gave up trying to swallow the sickness down. However, being violently sick didn’t stop his stomach from turning over itself and his head from spinning. He wanted to get out of that clearing, but any way out would mean him having to run past a mutilated corpse. He continued to stare in horror, for that was all he could do, and his mind rushed with thoughts. How had this been done? Why? Who were these people? Were they people who had gone missing like his sister? Oh, Christ ... his sister wasn’t one of them, was she? Where did they all come from? Surely they had to be from different areas – hundred of bodies were here and if hundreds of people went missing the authorities would surely be involved. So, if they were all from different areas, how did they get here? How were the limbs and heads put so far up the trees? What was the point in mutilating them like that? And, foremost in Troy’s mind – why had he been brought here to see them?
A terrible thought struck him then. He had clearly angered the tall man – what if Troy was one of these headless bodies, and it was merely his ghost that was watching this scene? What if the decaying girl had been hinting to him what had happened? What if he were already dead?
"Troy!"
Troy spun around as someone vaguely familiar called his name. They sounded as though they were calling from a great distance, and he span around on the spot for a while, trying to work out in what direction the voice had come from.
"Hey!" he shouted, hoping – praying – that he would get a response. For a while there was nothing, and then Troy heard his name being called again, closer this time.
"Troy!"
"What the –" Troy muttered, and then the floor began twisting under his feet again, and just before his vision closed in around him, Troy thought he saw one of the corpses still in possession of its head turn and stare at him.
"Troy! Jesus Christ, Troy, wake up!"
Troy was being shaken quite desperately. He realized this before anything else as his senses returned. He recognized Nate’s voice, somewhere above him, and the cold was still biting at him even though something warm had been wrapped tightly around him.
"Troy! Come on, man, please don’t be dead! Please don’t be dead!"
Nate opened one of Troy’s eyes, bringing Troy fully back to his senses, and he reached up a bloody left arm and tried to swat him away. Almost as soon as he acknowledged his surroundings, Troy began to shiver violently. He heard Nate muttered various "thank you"s in relief, and then suddenly his friend was scooping him right off the ground.
"It’s all right, man," Nate told him softly, as he began to carry his friend back towards the house. "He’s gone now. We’ll get you inside. It’s going to be fine."
Troy couldn’t believe him. All that was playing over and over in his head was what he had seen in that clearing. Try as he might, he couldn’t forget it.