Eyes Open

"Not this again!"

Running footsteps echoed through the house as Troy hurried down the stairs, his heart thumping madly, his eyes darting around himself anxiously. He ran from room to room, pulling the blinds and curtains closed, plunging the house into total darkness. Then, he stood completely still in the dark, quiet kitchen, trembling slightly, his eyes still darting around wildly. He swallowed heavily, feeling as though he were going to be sick.

There was no denying what he had seen this time. For the last three days since he had come home from Dr. Friscoe’s office he had thought he had been seeing it, but he had always managed to brush it off as something else. This time, however, there was no possible way he could brush off what he had seen.

Troy still felt weak at the thought. He had been lying on his bed. It was of no surprise to him that sleep wasn’t coming, but it had still been nice to lie somewhere warm and soft. He had kept the curtains open so he could watch the trees swaying in the wind, hoping it might finally lull him to sleep. It hasn’t really been working, but at least it had been more relaxing than lying on the couch, watching terrible re-runs of terrible sitcoms. It had been the exact moment that this thought had crossed his mind when he spotted movement outside his bedroom window. At first, he had put it down to a swaying tree branch, even though he felt his heart rate quicken and his mouth become dry. He had tried to ignore it, repeating to himself over and over that it was nothing to worry about.

"It’s just a tree, Troy. Just a tree."

However, it moved again, and Troy had to acknowledge the pale white sphere, the collar, the black tie, the black jacket. The creature slowly came into focus directly outside his bedroom window, staring in, seeming to just materialize out of the thin air. For a long while, Troy was still, unable to move because of the fear that gripped him. Eventually, he slowly moved his hand up to his nose, testing for a dream like he had done so many times lately. As far as he was aware, this was no dream.

It had been then that he had leapt up and, avoiding looking at the thing outside, grabbed the curtains and pulled them roughly closed. He ran madly around the second floor, doing the same in every room, before he had sprinted down the stairs to close the curtains down there.

Now he was still standing in the kitchen, his heart beating what he guessed was far too fast to be healthy, trying desperately to make sense of what he had just seen.

"It’s a hallucination, Troy," he muttered to himself, trying to persuade himself. "You haven’t slept in ages. It’s just a hallucination, OK?"

The little voice in the back of Troy’s head demanded to know why a hallucination could make him feel so endangered, but Troy pushed the thoughts away. He couldn’t start thinking that this was real. There were too many questions, and the one in the very forefront of Troy’s mind was the very one he spoke aloud into the silence of the kitchen.

"How could he be standing at eye-level when I was on the second floor?" he asked, his voice cracking slightly. The idea of a super-tall creature looming into his bedroom window while still having his feet on the ground was making Troy feel sick, it was scaring him so much. He couldn’t understand it, though. Usually Troy was pretty unaffected by these things. Even before these sighting had happened, he remembered thinking he had seen something and not feeling too threatened by it. He couldn’t understand why this was frightening him so much.

"Look, Troy," he told himself firmly. "For crying out loud. You’re twenty-three years old. These are just hallucinations, you got that? They’re all in your damn head. Think about it – out of all the things to hallucinate, is this really that bad? It’s a tall guy, in a suit, who happens to have no facial features. It could be so much worse. It could be things wrapped up in flesh straightjackets or rabid flesh-eating hellhounds or something. It’s a tall guy in a suit who just stands still. It’s not that scary."

Troy knew that he could repeat it to himself all night. It wouldn’t do him any good. The truth of the matter was that he was highly unnerved and possessed by a serious conviction that something terrible was happening. Not that something terrible was going to happen, but that it was already happening around him. Everything seemed so much more sinister. The ticking of a clock echoed through the quiet house, the wind howling outside sounded sinister, even the dripping of the kitchen tap made Troy jump slightly. His hands felt cold and clammy and his head was aching, and all he wanted to do was close his eyes and finally sleep. But he couldn’t – his eyes were constantly open, always searching, always darting around, frantically looking for something which he knew was there, just on the edge of his vision and his understanding.

A dark shadow passed across the curtains covering the kitchen window, and Troy almost let out a soft cry of fear and frustration. Instead, he stifled it, staying as still as he could, staring at the curtain, desperate to work out if it were merely a tree or a figment of his imagination. But how could he know what was his imagination and what wasn’t these days? He couldn’t even trust his own thoughts. He didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t while he was in this state.

The shadow flickered over the curtains again, and Troy darted from the kitchen into the dining room, which was even darker. Almost as soon as he entered the room, he saw the shadow pass across the dining room’s curtains, and, after a short pause, it appeared again, tracing a path across the blinds in the living room.

Troy was surrounded, and he was also terrified. He was caught up in the whole experience, knowing it was too real to simply be inside his head. Then his mind was working wildly, and he found himself questioning everything. If this was a hallucination yet it was so realistic, what was there to prove that the whole of his life had been a similar lie? He was driving himself mad with the thoughts, and he sprinted out of the dining room, through the kitchen and to the hall, where he grabbed up his telephone and settled halfway up the stairs, next to the bend in them. There were no windows here, and he could relax, if only slightly.

The time it took for the night staff at the medical centre to answer the phone seemed like an age in Troy’s state. His chest felt tighter by the second, and he was scared he was going to have a full-blown panic attack.

"I really need to speak to Dr. Friscoe," Troy blurted out, as soon as someone finally picked up.

"Is it an emergency?" the voice on the other end of the phone asked.

"You’re damn right it is," Troy fired back, his eyes darted madly around the darkness, expecting to see the faceless creature walking up the stairs towards him.

"And what’s the problem?"

The bored tone to the receptionist’s voice was annoying Troy. It made him feel like he didn’t have a serious problem and he was pretty sure that, in actual fact, this problem was probably the most serious that he was going to get.

"It’s –" Troy broke off, before forcing himself to say the very word he wasn’t sure was correct when used to describe what was going on. "It’s my hallucinations. I have insomnia. They – they’ve got dangerous. I was told I had to get in touch if they got dangerous."

Troy knew that there were a few white lies going in there, but he was beyond caring at the moment. He needed medication, he needed sleep – before it killed him.

"It has to be incredibly severe for us to call Dr. Friscoe in," the receptionist said calmly. "Are you sure it can’t wait until morning?"

"It’ll damn well have to," Troy found himself blurting out. "I’m not going out there – that’s where he is!"

Between his fear that it wasn’t a hallucination, and the undeniable vividness of the creature if it was a hallucination, Troy certainly didn’t want to leave the partial safety of his house.

"So it’s not exactly an emergency if it can wait until the morning?" the receptionist asked, in the monotonous voice that was so annoying Troy now.

"I’m sorry," Troy said, in an over the top, sweet voice. "You seemed to have missed the part where I told you I’m hallucinating and am too afraid to leave the house because of what’s out there. Now, I know it’s a hallucination and all of that, but my hallucinations are rather vivid and so if I go out there and stab my next door neighbour because I think he’s going to kill me, will that be acceptable?"

There was a long pause. Troy knew that the woman on the other side of the phone line was affronted, but at this point in time – and with a faceless nine foot tall creature waiting for him outside – he didn’t really care. He just wanted to get some medication, get some sleep, and stop acting like a crazy person. He didn’t think that was too much to ask, although at this precise moment in time he was having a hard time believing the statement.

"If you want to see him, you’ll have to come down," the woman eventually replied, sounding as though she were having to bite her tongue to stop her from snapping at Troy. "If you’re really that bothered about it, I can send someone over to escort you over here."

Something in Troy told him that was a little too far. Sure, he knew he felt like a crazy person, and to some extent he was acting like a crazy person. But the last thing that he wanted was to be treated like a crazy person. After all, it wasn’t as though he were schizophrenic or something serious like that. He was simply sleep deprived. He had to keep telling himself this, or he knew he would really freak out.

"I’ll just take my chances," he muttered, and then he hung the phone up.

It was still another five minutes before Troy could bring himself to move from the safety of the windowless stair case and back down the half-flight of stairs to the hallway. There, he could see the dark rectangles made by the glass in the front door, and the exact same in the back door. He knew that if this man was keeping an eye out for him anywhere, it would be here, where he could see straight through the house. The thought made Troy feel incredibly vulnerable as he stood there, the phone loosely in his hand, feeling himself shaking slightly.

"It’s just a hallucination," he muttered. "If you don’t want it to be there, it won’t be. It’s all in your head. The more you look for it, the more you’ll see it. It’s not there."

He placed the phone back onto its holder. The beep signalling the fact it was now charging sounded far too loud in the silence of the house. Troy’s whole body was on edge as he moved slowly towards the front door. He was silent as he moved, feeling as though he were dragging himself through thick tar. Even the air was hard to move through, as though some unseen force was trying to stop him from reaching his destination. The thought made Troy feel even more unnerved, if this were actually possible. He had always been told to trust his gut instinct, and his gut instinct was right now screaming at him to ring back and just accept a lift.

Troy placed a shaking hand upon the door handle, and took a deep, steadying breath.

"It’s not really there," he told himself again. "You just think it is. Now calm down, and get out there. It’ll be over soon."

He pulled down the door handle and opened it, stepping out into the icy cold night. His breath instantly clouded in front of him and the floor felt slightly slippery underneath his feet. He locked the door, fumbling nervously with the key as he did so, and then turned to face the dark street. It was empty for now, but something told Troy it wasn’t going to stay that way for long.

He steadied himself, and then headed out into the night.