Eyes Open

It had been three days since Troy last saw the tall man outside his back door. Since then, towels from the bathroom had been hung up over the glass and the curtain was permanently pulled over the front door. All of the windows remained firmly locked and covered, and Troy hadn’t seen daylight for the entire time. He didn’t dare – he knew what was lurking on the other side of those curtains, and at the moment, they were all that were separating him from insanity. They shut out whatever lurked outside, whatever was stalking him, and for a few blissful seconds, perhaps he could convince himself that there was no danger outside – that it was simply normal out there, and he wasn’t trying to defend himself from the unknown with a few meters of fabric.

It was day time now, though from the dim light inside the house it looked to be early evening. However, outside of the house, the sun was high in the sky and life was going on as normal. Troy, hidden inside his home, was unaware of this, though he supposed to himself that outside of his home people were getting on with their everyday lives. Of course, none of them had some strange, faceless entity following them around, which Troy guessed would come in handy if you wanted to live a normal life. His life had been anything but normal lately, and it was getting less normal every day.

This was what had brought Troy to the position he was in now. He was kneeling before his television, fiddling with his camera, hoping and praying that he would find answers in the footage he had shot over the last couple of nights. He had been woken from his sleep for the first time since he had started taking his sleeping pills both the last night, and the night before that. He slept so well when he took those pills that he hadn’t even considered it was possible to be woken while under their influence, but he had found himself wide awake for what at first seemed like no reason.

The first night, he had lay there, wide awake, for nearly an hour, growing more and more annoyed at the fact he wasn’t getting some much needed sleep. He wasn’t sure what had woken him – until he had heard it. At first, it was faint, but it gradually grew louder. It sounded like someone was running up and down his stairs rapidly, and from what Troy could hear, it sounded as though there were several people, most likely children. This, coupled with all of the handprints that were still on his walls, had terrified him greatly, and he had lay awake for the rest of the night, only finally falling asleep as the sun began to rise.

The next morning had shown up no clues – the only handprints that were there had been there when Troy had gone to bed the night before, and no leaves scattered the house. The logical voice in his mind was telling him it was a dream, but the logical part of him was getting quieter and quieter lately. Troy knew to think that all this could be explained would just be stupid now – he had finally come to terms with the fact that something unnatural was happening. This thought did nothing to settle him, however, and when he went to bed that night, he was dreading being woke up again, to lie in the darkness listening to the unknown.

Of course, it happened again, but this time Troy didn’t just hear footsteps. It started out like the night before, and Troy lay frozen in fear as he heard the patter and thudding of feet running up and down his stairs, and then the whispering started. It sounded like a group of at least five children, all whispering excitedly and giggling. Troy had sat up slightly, his eyes wide, trying to penetrate the darkness around him. The voices stopped whispering, and from the slight movement in the hallway, he could work out that whatever it was happened to be standing right outside his bedroom door.

When he heard what happened next, it was all he could do to stop himself from crying out.

“Tro-oy,” a playful female voice giggled. “Troy!”

Troy remained completely still, feeling sick to the core, listening as the little girl – who sounded no older than four years old – seemed to start singing his name, in an almost taunting fashion. The whispering and the calling of his name went on until the sun rose again, but Troy was past sleep. He remained in his room until the early afternoon, when he finally devised a plan that would hopefully start helping him get to the bottom of what was going on.

This was what brought him to where he was now. Before he had gone to bed the night before, he had set up three cameras – one in the living room, pointing at such an angle that it could see most of the room it was in, plus the dining room and part of the kitchen. The other two went in the hall outside his bedroom, and in his bedroom respectively.

Troy was going to look through the footage now, and hope that there were some answers.

Skipping through at a slightly faster pace, Troy slowed at about the time he knew the whispering and giggling had woken him up. There was nothing visual, but Troy could still hear the voices. He could show the tape to someone and not have to worry about the fact he was going insane if someone heard the voices too. He tried not to think about what would happen if the other person didn’t hear the voices, but he would have to cross that bridge when he came to it.

To his disappointment, the camera positioned in the hallway outside his room had much the same footage, although if Troy looked incredibly closely, he thought he saw a few more sets of handprints appear by themselves. He couldn’t be one hundred per cent sure, though, and so it was with a sense of resignation that he plugged in the last camera. This was the one from his room, and he wasn’t expecting much.

He flicked through the footage quite quickly, until he began to notice something strange in the footage. Every so often, the picture would jump and tear slightly, as though it were being played off of a DVD that had a scratch on it. Troy pressed a button on the camera and slowed the camera down to normal speed.

There he was – fast asleep this time. Troy guessed it was before the noises woke him up. He moved slightly, but aside from that, he seemed to be out for the count. Troy counted the picture tearing and jumping several times before he thought he saw something unusual on the screen. As he watched, something incredibly familiar seemed to simply melt into the picture.

A tall man, wearing a suit, with unusually long arms and legs and no face.

Troy felt the sick rising in his throat as he watched the tall man stand in his room. The only movement that the tall man made was to slowly creep closer to the sleeping Troy, and then, he simply stood there. Troy, eventually finding the strength to flick through the tape, worked out that the tall man stood there for an hour and a half before vanishing only seconds before Troy was jerked awake by the voices outside his room. He watched himself sit up and look around, and he felt sick at the fact that the whole time he hadn’t known how vulnerable he had just been.

"What the fuck?" Troy whispered to himself, his heart thumping far too quickly to be healthy. "There is no way – no way – this can be happening!"

He was decided – he had to tell someone. This was serious. Whatever this thing was could get into his house, and it could do whatever it wanted. Standing up, Troy stumbled out into the hall, trying not to think about what creeped around at night, and picked up the phone with a trembling hand. He hadn’t used it since it had started screeching at him when the tall man appeared, and he prayed it wouldn’t do it again as he dialled Nate’s number.

"Nate," he said, knowing he sounded desperate, as he heard his friend pick up the phone.

"Oh, hey Troy. What’s up?"

"Nate, I need you to come over straight away," Troy blurted out. There was a slight pause and then his friend spoke up again, this time sounding concerned.

"Are you all right, Troy? What’s going on?"

"I can’t really explain it," Troy said quickly. "I need to show you something. Can you please come round? I don’t know what to do."

"Sure, I’ll be right over," Nate said, and Troy could hear him fumbling for his car keys. "Hang tight, I’ll be there in ten minutes."

It was an anxious wait for Troy. He paced around the lower floor of the house endlessly, his eyes swivelling from side to side as though expecting to see the tall man appear at any minute. Troy couldn’t feel safe anymore – now he knew that the creature could simply invade him home like that – materialise whenever he wanted to – he couldn’t relax. The highest form of security had been broken now, and Troy didn’t know where he could be safe. He had always thought that once he locked the door of his home, he would be all right. Now, last night's footage had torn that safety blanket from his grasp.

The doorbell clanged loudly though the house at that moment, and Troy jumped, startled out of his thoughts. Had it been ten minutes already? He felt as though he had spent only seconds dwelling upon his predicament.

"Jesus, man," Nate muttered, when Troy pulled the door open and beckoned his friend inside.

"What?" he asked in reply, startled by how weak his voice suddenly sounded. It was as though something inside him had panicked and fled, leaving only a shell where determination used to be.

"You just look ..." Nate faltered for a moment, before finishing his sentence a lot quieter than he had been previously speaking. "Different."

"I do?" Troy asked, but he wasn’t really paying attention, and if Nate replied, he didn’t hear. Eventually, Nate’s voice got through to him again.

"So what’s wrong? What do you need me to see?"

"This is going to sound mad," Troy said, as the two friends collapsed into seats in the living room. He noticed Nate eyeing the video cameras and wires down beside the TV curiously. "That’s why I didn’t tell you. Not until I had proof something was going on."

"Like what?" Nate asked.

"Well, at first I thought I was just hallucinating. Lack of sleep, you know? But things have gotten so much weirder, and I keep seeing the same hallucination. I won’t tell you what he looks like yet – but I think I got it on camera."

"How can you get a hallucination on camera?" Nate asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Exactly," Troy muttered, moving over to the TV. He found where the footage of interest started on the camera itself before he put the picture on the TV screen. Troy didn’t want Nate to know anything about the man he was seeing. If Nate really did see the tall man on the footage, he would be able to describe his appearance to Troy. That way, Troy could be certain someone else could see it too.

"Is this your room?" Nate asked, as the footage began. "Dude, what’s going on? Have you gone mental?"

"That’s what I’m hoping to find out myself," Troy mumbled. He tapped the screen. "Watch here. You’ll see in a minute."

The room was totally silent as the tall man materialised out of thin air, and stood over the sleeping Troy, silently observing him. Troy eventually fast forwarded until the video camera’s time stamp showed that an hour and a half had passed, and then he hit play again, whereupon the tall man vanished as quickly and as inexplicably as he had appeared.

The room remained silent, and Troy barely dared to ask Nate if he had seen the figure. If he hadn’t ... well, Troy dreaded to think. He guessed he would have to entertain the possibility that he was severely mentally ill.

Eventually, he couldn’t stand the tension anymore, and he turned to face his best friend. He wasn’t prepared for the look he saw plastered across Nate’s face.

"Nate?" Troy asked, but there was no visible reaction from the other man. "Nate? Hey, man, what’s going on? Did you see him?"

"Him," Nate eventually whispered, and he turned to stare at Troy in horror. "Jesus, man ... why ... what ... oh fuck."

"What?" Troy demanded. "Nate, tell me. Do you know what’s going on? What’s happening to me?"

"You’d better get comfortable," Nate muttered, running a hand through his dark blond hair. "This could be a potentially long story."