Shadow

Max’s consciousness clawed its way up through murky darkness. The sensation reminded him of the old lake behind his childhood home, the one parents warned their kids about. A boy had drowned there once. A kid whose name they all knew but never said out loud, Still, they dared each other to jump in. Stupid, reckless dares. And every time . . . every damn time . . . there was that half-second of panic when the water closed overhead, cold and heavy, and some deep, animal part of the brain waited for fingers.

Small fingers.

Impossibly strong.

Curling around an ankle and dragging them down.

That was how it felt now. Something unseen clutching at him, dragging him under.

But he fought . . . and slowly . . . he surfaced.

Pain pulsed through his chest, but not the sort of hurt he was familiar with. This went deeper, more foreign, like an unfamiliar percussion of pain marking time inside him.

Vague fragments of memory began to return. The surgeon’s grim look, the sterile brightness of the operating room, and a quiet, final nod of consent drifted back, and then he knew without doubt . . . his old, broken heart was gone.

His acceptance sharpened his thoughts, The haze lifting abruptly, pulling him back to the present.

His eyes were closed and he could sense the darkness on the other side of his lids.

Why was it dark?

Was it night?

He must be in a room, curtains drawn, lights switched off, as otherwise his eyelids would have been bleached crimson.

What time was it?

How long had he been here?

How long would he be waiting before somebody came to check on him?

And . . . most importantly . . . why couldn’t he open his eyes?

He felt the invasive presence of a breathing tube down his throat, every slow breath controlled by a machine beside him. His throat ached from the tube’s rigid press.

He tried to lift an arm to rub at his eyes, pull out the breathing tube, only to realise he couldn’t move, couldn’t even swallow. He wasn’t sure how long he could stand this discomfort . . . he could feel panic beginning to set in.

A kind of numbness radiated through his limbs, heavy and unresponsive. And at the same time, pain could still be felt, ever present. A slight tingling spread from IV lines hooked to his arms. Each beat of his second-hand heart reverberated strangely in his ribs, tethered to him by wires that he could feel trailing out of his chest and connecting to a temporary pacemaker, keeping him steady, keeping him . . . alive.

He didn’t deserve this second chance. If he was honest with himself he didn’t actually want to be alive, he’d lost so much . . . but he’d made a promise . . . his word.

He would see this through.

Then after that, well, he would worry about that when the time came.

He made another attempt to move, this time he tried his fingers, then his toes, but his entire body remained paralysed beneath an invisible weight.

A surge of anxiety rose up.

Panic began to twist inside him.

He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt like lead.

He couldn’t even scream.

Vaguely, he remembered the surgeon warning him about this . . . a phenomenon common after heart transplants, caused by high doses of painkillers and sedatives keeping his body still, easing the trauma.

He began to feel sorry for himself then immediately stopped . . . feeling stupid for doing so. He shouldn’t pity himself for temporary discomfort.

He had been given a second chance of life.

A chance that hadn’t come cheaply.

Max knew that money was not a concern in the minds of men who had obtained as much financial wealth as him. But even so . . . a concern about the cost of things still lingered.

Maybe, it had cost him . . . his soul.

His concern spontaneously evaporated, and was replaced with both surprise and relief to discover he could now see faint shapes, ghostly shadows of his room, the world in pools of grey. Momentarily perplexed, he wondered whether his eyes had finally opened, adjusting to the dark of the room.

But, his vision felt wrong.

Something was . . . off.

He couldn’t explain it.

Was this a dream?

A sudden bust of sound erupted from somewhere in the room. Clicking and popping that sliced through the silence. The rhythm tightened around him, like something was winding up, like metallic wire under strain . . . ready to snap. He sought an answer to where the sound was emanating from. He scanned the room in its swatches of grey. A suffocating, oppressive presence thickened the air. For reasons unknown he suddenly felt as though he wasn’t alone in the room, somebody, or some . . . thing, was not far away.

He became deftly aware of his helplessness.

Lying here vulnerable and unable to move.

Then . . . he saw movement.

A shadow in the corner of the room, cautiously slid out of the darkness, gingerly pooling across the walls, hospital furniture and floor . . . creeping steadily, but slowly, toward him. Max struggled to identify the exact shape of the shadow or what was casting it. It seemed to swim with a fluidity like spilt oil across the surfaces, in swatches of grey, occasionally disappearing into other shadows.

Max waited patiently, the moving shadow had seemed to have disappeared into another shadow, cast by a piece of hospital monitoring equipment.

He waited, watching from the corner of his vision.

The clicking sound in his grey-shaded hospital recovery room stopped abruptly, replaced by a silence so absolute that even his heartbeat seemed too loud. Using whatever method of sight he had seemed to have acquired, Max scanned the room. He was amazed at how much of the room he could see without moving his paralysed head. This had to be some form of medically induced dream or hallucination caused by the medication.

Then, the figure rose beside him, unfurling from the floor until it reached the height of his IV stand, its form swaying as though caught in an unseen current. What was this? Max’s rational mind shattered, fear cutting through the post-surgery fog as he lay there, paralysed.

The shadow leaned closer.

Faceless.

Cold radiating from its form, chilling his skin, seeping into his bones. He tried to draw in a deeper breath, but pain coiled around his chest, an insistent reminder of his limitations.

The figure pressed nearer, hovering inches above his face, filling his field of vision.

He felt the room around him dissolve, his whole world narrowing to this dark, cold presence pressing down on him.

Then he heard it, faint at first, but clear . . . the popping and clicking, reverberating in his skull, followed by an erratic whispering voice threading through the silence like white noise, cappella’d by another voice, then another, until the room was filled with a chorus of muffled hissing voices. The cacophony of unintelligible voices, layered with anguish, far off, distant shouting; no, not shouting . . . screaming!

It overwhelmed Max’s mind. He couldn’t concentrate, form rational thought. He could feel himself sinking into the bed, as though a great weight was pressing into him, he was drifting away from consciousness.

Was he dying?

Was this shadow learning over him, Death, the Reaper himself . . . ready to take his soul?

Light suddenly flooded the room, burning through the darkness like a flamethrower.

Max’s body convulsed, breaking free from the invisible grip, gasping as his lungs dragged in air that felt painfully sharp against his raw insides. Blinking rapidly, he saw fluorescent lights glaring down on him. The room swam into focus, no longer just shades of grey but real colour. He felt sensation return to his limbs in pinpricks and tingling waves. He could feel the control over his limbs returning.

A nurse was standing in the doorway, her hand still on the light switch, under a face shield and bouffant cap . . . a look of concern on her face. She approached slowly at first, noting the beads of sweat dotting his brow. Then, she walked briskly over to his bedside, her gaze immediately flicking to the monitors stationed beside him.

Max’s head lay motionless, the breathing tube restricting its movement, but his eyes followed her as she leaned over his heart monitor, scanning the fluctuating line of his heartbeat.

She pressed a few buttons on the machine, checking his pulse and oxygen levels with a precision that was both clinical and gentle.

Then she glanced down, and their eyes met briefly . . . her surprise evident in the slight widening of her gaze.

“You’re awake?” she said softly, her voice reassuring but edged with genuine surprise. “That’s remarkable. You weren’t expected to be conscious this soon.”

She adjusted the flow of one of his IV drips, giving him a gentle smile.

“You’ve still got a breathing tube in, so don’t try to speak,” she continued gently.

“Your surgery went very well, Mr Orpheus. Right now, you’re in the Cardio-Thoracic Intensive Care Unit, and you’ll be here a few days so we can keep a close eye on everything.” She spoke slowly, choosing her words with care, as if giving him time to process.

“Everything looks stable for now, but you’ve been through a lot. Try and rest, it’s still the early hours, not long gone three of the morning. We’ll be monitoring your vitals around the clock.”

As her words settled over him, he let out a slow, shaky breath through the tube, the weight of her reassurance grounding him slightly. But even as she moved, changing his dressings, carrying out her routine inspection of his patchwork torso, his gaze shifted instinctively to the dark corner of the room. The overhead light barely reached the corners the his room, its beam too narrow, casting deep shadows that seemed just a touch too dense. Something about the way they clung, heavy and waiting, sent a shiver down his spine.

Had it just been a dream?

A nightmare?