Eyes Open

Though he felt stupid for thinking it, Troy was relieved to not only wake up late the next morning, but also to find himself still in his bedroom, in his bed, and with no visible injuries. His last waking memories from the night before had not yet left his mind, and considering how deeply he slept these days, he was surprised to find the occurrences still so fresh in his memory.

Yawning, he sat up, looking around him warily. His nerves hadn’t settled yet, and he had no intention of opening the curtains. He had a horrible mental image of seeing the tall man directly outside the window, watching him at eye level once more. The very thought gave him the creeps, and he couldn’t understand why he was still so scared. Even in the days of his vicious and terrible night terrors, he had always felt a lot better once the sunlight started to creep into his room and he could hear the movement of other people outside.

He cautiously moved towards his bedroom door, pausing to listen before he slowly removed the chair from under the door handle. He wasn’t sure if his imagination was simply playing on his paranoia, but he was almost convinced that the chair had moved slightly. He felt the chair give way slightly as it moved from its position, jammed under the handle, and he placed it down behind him, reluctantly putting his hand on the handle. He pulled it down ever so slowly, and then, swallowing any fear that was threatening to bubble over, he yanked the door open, looking out into the hall wildly.

The hall was slightly darker than usual, due to the fact that the curtains were closed in all of the rooms, so no sunlight could trickle in like it usually did. However, the illusion of safety faded quickly as Troy glanced down to the floor.

Leaves scattered the hallway, as though someone had trampled them through the house. For a brief second, Troy relaxed at the thought that it had been so dark and he had been in such a panic last night that it could well have been him trampling the leaves all over the place, but his hope quickly dissipated as he realized that he hadn’t been into the spare room or the bathroom last night – the curtains were still shut from the last time, and yet leaves scattered those rooms too. Glancing behind him, Troy also realized that the only room upstairs that was foliage-free was his own room – the room he had spent most of his time in last night.

Troy looked at the curtains, watching for a hint that perhaps one of the windows was open. He knew he wouldn’t leave a window open in his current state of mind, but he was simply desperately trying to find a way to explain this. The only other explanation was the fact that someone had been silently stalking through his house last night, trying to get into his room. Surely, if it had been a burglar, there would have been some indication of a theft? Besides, Troy had checked and double-checked all of the windows and doors had been firmly closed and locked before he had gone to his bedroom.

Troy realized that this meant that the only explanation was that something which wasn’t entirely normal had gotten into his home that night, and of course, the only thing he could think of was the faceless man that was quickly becoming his worst nightmare.

Troy’s chest suddenly became incredibly tight, and he found himself starting to panic. He allowed himself to simply slump down to the floor where he stood, which happened to be just outside of his room. As he went to lean his head against the wall, hoping it would be cool and do something for his oncoming headache, he noticed something that was perhaps even more terrible than the leaves.

Handprints. Dozens of tiny handprints, likely belonging to a child, were smudged over the pale walls. Troy stared at them for ages, before he held his hand up against one, not quite touching it, to compare them. His hand was around three times the size of the little, grubby prints all over his walls.

Troy’s heart was thudding madly and he felt as though he were going to throw up, but he quickly came up with a plan. He stood up swiftly and went determinedly back into his room, rooting through all of the things in his closet until he found what he was looking for – a digital video recorder that his mother and father had got him for Christmas. Troy had many of them – he had been a film student at college – but this was the first one he found and he knew he needed to get all of this down quickly.

He turned it on, and fiddled with it as he moved back out into the hall. By the time he got there, it had loaded. The battery was low, but he wouldn’t need long to document this.

"This is what my house looks like this morning," he narrated, as he zoomed in on the many leaves scattered throughout the second floor. "This is the second floor. I didn’t even go into any of these rooms last night and none of the windows were left open. The doors were locked. I heard something – someone – trying to get into my room last night and came out to find this ... and these."

Troy knelt down to get a few close-up shots of the childish handprints.

"I’m not quite sure what to make of it," he whispered. He held his hand in front of the camera. "As you can see, my hands are much too large to even think about faking this. I live alone, I have no children, and no children have ever been in this house while I’ve been living here. None of my friends have children, either."

Troy sighed, before morbidly realizing that if anything were to happen to him, this camera would be his only testimony to the strange events that took place beforehand.

"It sounds like some bad horror movie, I know," he muttered, glancing at the hand prints again. There was something distinctly disturbing about them. "But you see, things have been really weird lately. At first I thought it was hallucinations brought on by my severe insomnia, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve been sleeping really well for nearly a week, and all of a sudden this recurring hallucination appears. It’s ... it sounds stupid, it really does. But I see this tall, really slender man. He wears a black business suit and from what I can see, he has no face. Like I said, he’s really tall – nine or ten feet, I reckon. Sometimes he seems taller, even at a distance. I don’t know if that’s just an illusion brought on by something near him, or if he can alter his height or something. I’m not really sure. Anyway, I thought I’d seen the last of him when I started my medication and began sleeping properly. But I saw him when I was driving home last night – he was shrouded in fog, staring at me from under a streetlight. I freaked and drove home and locked the place down, but before I fell asleep I thought I could hear all these weird noises, and then it looked as though someone tried to open my bedroom door. They couldn’t, of course, I had a chair pressed up under the handle. But when got up ..."

Troy quickly panned the camera around again, taking into account that the only room that was free of leaves was his room, and the handprints on the walls.

"There was all of this," he finished, quietly. "Anyway. That’s all for now. For all I know this is a damn hallucination too. At least if I show anyone else the footage, I’ll know I’m not insane. Perhaps I should try and get my tall friend on camera?"

Sighing, Troy shut the camera off, and turned around to face the mess again. Something in him was telling him to stay away from it all, and the last thing he wanted to do was clear up the freaky leavings of some entity that had been stalking around his house. He went downstairs instead, hoping to find something to take his mind off of things.

He had a message on his answering machine, and for a brief moment considered ignoring it. However, it was probably his mom, and as he hadn’t been in touch in a while, he assumed she would be worrying. He pressed "play" and listened to see if he was right.

He was – it was his mother’s voice which filled the hallway.

"Will you please give me a call, Troy?" she asked him, and Troy rolled his eyes in a fond way. "You can’t tell me that you’re off to see the doctor and then not tell me how it went. Hopefully you’re sleeping now, but when you get up please call. Your father wants to know how it went, too. All right, talk to you soon. Oh, wait – what did you do to your answering machine? It nearly deafened me. Anyway, I love you, take care."

Frowning slightly, Troy wondered what his mother was on about. His answering machine message was the normal, "Hi, this is Troy DeLage. Sorry I can’t come to the phone at this time, please leave a message after the tone. Thanks!"

He picked up the phone and pressed a few buttons to get the message to record. Sure enough, it started as he remembered it, and then he jumped a mile as the message cut to violent distortion. The tone of the message went up far too high for anyone’s voice to reach and broke off into a screeching sound, making Troy think of an incredibly annoyed cat. Then, the screeching died down and instead changed to a loud and consistent buzzing, before it gave a strange grinding sound and cut out. Then, there was the beeping sound, as normal as it always had been.

Troy frowned, wondering what could have caused the phone to do such a random thing. He pressed a few more buttons, re-recording the message with what he knew would come across as a slightly confused tone, and then played it back. It played normally.

Shrugging, Troy quickly dialled his mom’s number and put the phone to his ear. He wasn’t too freaked out by the whole thing – the phone was old, after all, and was known to glitch out occasionally. One time it had decided to call several different numbers when he hadn’t even been in the house. He had come home from a night out to several annoyed family members asking why he had been calling at such a ridiculous hour.

"Hi, Mom," Troy said, as he mother picked up.

"Finally, Troy!" his mother exclaimed. "Where have you been? It’s been days."

"Oh, you know," Troy shrugged, going through to the kitchen and supporting the phone next to his ear using his shoulder and titling his head. "I’ve been sleeping, mostly, if I’m honest. Catching up on everything I lost, you know? And last night I was hanging out with Nate, so that’s probably why I missed your call."

"So, how is this sleep coming along?" Mrs. DeLage asked her son. "I guess it’s going well?"

"Yeah, I’ve been getting a good few hours in. I’m really sorry about what happened with the answering machine. I guess the phone glitched again."

"It gave me an awful fright," Troy’s mother replied. "I thought it was you playing a joke or something."

"Nah, that was pretty messed up," Troy replied. "I don’t know what caused –"

Troy suddenly dropped the phone as the shrill screeching sounded right in his ear, sending pain shooting through his head. He swore viciously, clutching his ear as it continued to ring, and span around away from the phone, grimacing.

He froze as he saw what was standing outside the front door. The faceless man stood right up against the glass – the only glass in the house that didn’t yet have a cover – and gave Troy that familiar feeling of being watched. Beside him, the phone continued to screech wildly. Troy could do nothing but stare in disbelief.