Eyes Open

"So the medication is working for you, then?"

Troy nodded as his best friend, Nathan Sutton, more often than not known as Nate, asked him the question.

"Yeah," Troy replied. "It’s been great. The first night I took it, I was out like a light. I didn’t wake up until five in the afternoon the next day. Then I was back asleep at eleven at night. It’s a gift from God, it really is."

"And you’ve been feeling normal?"

Troy hadn’t found the courage and acceptance in him to tell anyone aside from his doctor about the hallucinations yet, but he had told Nate enough for his friend to guess that things had been more than slightly serious.

"Yeah, totally," Troy said, managing a smile. "You know, I thought it would take ages to get back to normal, but when I woke up on the third day I felt completely fine."

"Sleep is a weird thing," Nate chuckled. "It used to confuse the Hell out of me when I was studying it at college. It was all about how you can go for days and days without sleep and be a wreck, but then finally sleep for a few hours and feel totally normal. We always used to debate that it was unclear what sleep was for."

"Restoration," Troy muttered, rolling his eyes. "I swear to God, Nate, I thought I was dying those last few days. It was horrible – really nasty. If you ever need someone to tell you what it’s like to be a zombie, then I’m your man."

Nate laughed properly this time.

"I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration, dude."

"It really wasn’t," Troy protested. "I felt dead. I was just staggering around the place with my arms out in front of me, muttering incoherently about brains or something."

"That’s just you on a normal day, man."

"Oh, very funny, Nate."

The two friends glared at one another in mock anger for a few seconds, before turning their attention back to the television. Nate was drinking a can of beer, but Troy had only just started driving again and was still on mildly strong medication, and so he was laying off of alcohol for the time being. He didn’t want to start messing up his medication when he was starting to get his sleeping back on track. He certainly didn’t want to see his tall, faceless stalker again, either.

Troy had been sleeping for five nights now, and there was no sign of the creature. He felt back to normal, and no longer felt that strange, foreboding atmosphere whenever he stood near a window or dared to leave the house. Troy was now fully convinced that it was just an incredibly vivid hallucination, but the thing that he was really curious over was why he had hallucinated such a random thing. Never before in his life had he ever seen anything like the tall man.

The tall man was something else – something incredibly strange. When Troy forced himself to recall these terrifying hallucinations, he could see the tall man as clear as anything else that happened to be in the room around him. The tall man had no face, just a white, featureless head. He wore a crisp black suit with a white shirt and a black tie. His limbs were long and out of proportion, looking more like tree branches than human limbs. Of course, there was the fact that he was also abnormally tall, and moved too quickly to abide by the laws of physics. When Troy really, properly considered what he had seen during these hallucinations, he imaged the tall man to be part human, part tree. It was a strange concept, and Troy couldn’t remember ever being exposed to something remotely similar to the tall man, even when he was a child. He didn’t recall it in fairy tales or bedtime stories, and he didn’t remember seeing any dreams or movies that could have hinted towards the tall man’s existence. He seemed to come directly from Troy’s imagination, and this thought fascinated him as much as it terrified him.

"Nate," Troy asked thoughtfully, and his friend turned his attention away from the TV. "Have you ever had a dream – like, not necessarily a bad one – but just a really random dream where you couldn’t explain where some of it came from?"

"How do you mean?" Nate asked curiously.

"Well, you know when you dream and you wake up and think it was really weird? You can usually bring it back to something you saw in the day – like a film, or something random on the street, or a comic, all mashed together to make the really weird scenario that you dreamt about. But, have you ever had a dream where you found that you couldn’t trace anything like that back through your time when you were awake?"

Nate blinked.

"That’s a pretty random question."

"Yeah, I know," Troy gave a thin smile. "It just popped into my head, you know?"

"Well, I can’t really say I have," Nate shrugged. "I mean, you know I’m interested in dreams and that sort of thing, so I usually jot them down when I remember them and then, when I have spare time and a clear head, I trace them back. Even when I have a nightmare about something really random and terrible, I can always work it out. Like the other day, this part ghost and part demon thing was chasing me around, and I woke up really freaked out. Then I realized it was a cross between horror movies I’ve watched recently and an episode of Buffy I accidentally saw when I was too young, which was years ago. For me, it’s all relevant. Why?"

"It’s just that I had these ... dreams," Troy said slowly, choosing his words carefully. His best friend knew him well, and Troy knew that if he wasn’t careful to make this seem like a casual dream, Nate would know there was a deeper story to the whole situation. It wasn’t as though Troy didn’t trust Nate – he would trust Nate with his life, and the lives of his children, should he ever have any – but he just didn’t feel ready to admit he had hallucinated so vividly. It still made him feel slightly ashamed – as though his mind was unhinged, as though he were crazy, not in control. Troy couldn’t stand that. "I just dream about this strange looking man who I know hasn’t been influenced by any movies that I’ve seen."

"How do you know, though?" Nate asked, and he was perfectly calm, giving Troy the knowledge that even if he did think something was up, he wasn’t going to press the matter. Nate understood Troy well, and knew that when Troy wasn’t ready to talk, there was no use trying to get it out of him.

"Well, I’ve thought quite hard about it," Troy replied. "I wrote down a list of all the horror books and movies I’d been exposed to, and made a list of anything I’d seen that could be spliced together to make the end result that I dreamt about. Although some of it was simple – like what he was wearing – I couldn’t find an exact match."

"What was he wearing?"

"A suit," Troy shrugged. "I mean, I know where that comes from. Loads of people wear suits around here. But I just couldn’t think of why he looked so strange?"

"Strange? In what way?"

"He was abnormally tall."

"Well, tall people are allowed out in this day and age, Troy."

Troy managed a laugh.

"Yeah, but I mean he must have been nine, possibly ten feet tall."

"That’s quite tall."

"You’re telling me."

"Well, perhaps you saw it when you were really young?" Nate suggested. "You know, sometimes we see things when we’re younger that scare us and so we put them to the back of our minds – our subconscious – and forget about them. They can resurface when you’re older and you won’t know where they came from. Alternatively, consider this: when you were younger, you were smaller, so adults must have seemed a heck of a lot taller. How do you know this isn’t a strange manifestation of a person you saw when you were little? They would have been about three feet taller than you at certain times in your life. You’re six foot now, and so if you were still dreaming about someone three feet taller, that would make him nine feet tall."

There was a long pause as Troy took in what Nate had told him.

"I absolutely love that you did psychology at college, Nate," Troy eventually said. He felt a lot more relaxed now. Although Nate’s theory could seem longwinded or far-fetched to others, there was something that was sitting right in Troy’s head at his best friend’s words. They made sense, and they were logical. There was nothing to say that it wasn’t a possibility. Troy didn’t know if it was built from his desire to convince himself that what he had been witnessing certainly wasn’t real, or if a part of Nate’s explanation had really convinced him. Either way, he was glad that he had brought the subject up.

"It does come in handy," Nate grinned. "One thing it’s really good at is making you sound like you know what you’re on about."

"Well," Troy chuckled. "On that note, I should be heading off. I need to try and keep my sleeping patterns as regular as possible."

"All right, man. I’ll catch you later, yeah?"

"Sure thing, bro."

Troy let himself out and jogged to where his car was parked, half on the drive and half on the sidewalk, just behind Nate’s. It was an old car - Troy’s first, in fact – but it got him where he wanted to go, and Troy was fond of it. He patted the bonnet as he unlocked the car and got in, out of the cold air. This winter seemed to be colder than the other ones – Troy could usually stand the cold rather well, but at the moment he only had to be outside for a few seconds before he started shivering violently.

"Must be my old age," Troy joked to himself, as he started up his engine. His car seemed to retain the warmth well, so it only took him a short while to warm the car up nicely and pull out of the drive. He put the cool air on, aimed at the windshield, so he didn’t get fogged up, and switched on the headlights as he left the brightly lit street Nate lived on.

It was already quite late, and so Troy was able to put his foot down. This was how he liked the roads when he was driving – deserted, so he could push the speed limit a little and play his music nice and loud. At the moment, he was in the best mood he had been in for a while. He only hoped that it would last.