Fingers

Max surfaced from unconsciousness, caught in that space between dreaming and waking where the edges of the world didn’t quite fit together. He had been drifting in and out for the past twenty-four hours, his body cannibalising every ounce of energy it could scrape together for healing, forcing him offline so it could carry out repairs.

The room was cold. Quiet. The kind of silence that wasn’t real silence . . . nothing in a hospital ever was . . . but the kind stitched together by the soft, beep… beep… beep… of monitors and the whisper of oxygen flow. A fragile sound, like a brittle thread fraying with every pulse. Distant voices seeped through, muffled and indistinct, bleeding under the surface like water through rotted wood. The hum of unseen machines layered over everything like an endless, mechanical whisper.

The rigid press of the breathing tube was still lodged in his throat, foreign and invasive. He could feel the tug of the temporary pacemaker, its cables trailing from his chest, disappearing beneath tight bandages that felt more like restraints. Every muscle in his body ached . . . not in one place, not in any single wound, but as a whole. A deep, consuming exhaustion that weighed him down like wet sand.

He blinked . . . Once . . . Twice.

The room was dark. His vision unfolded in smudged shades of grey, blurred at the edges, the world bleeding into itself like ink spilled in water. It was wrong. The kind of wrong that had no name, just an instinctive, primordial certainty that something about it shouldn’t be.

He lifted an arm.

The movement was sluggish, his fingers curling into a weak fist. He rubbed his eyes. The moment his hand dragged across his chest, the sharp tug of IV lines and monitor leads bit into his skin. A sting at the back of his hand. A pull against his wrist. A reminder . . . he was bound here.

Still, his vision didn’t change.

Shades of grey . . . like last night.

Was he still dreaming?

Was this a dream?

Then the shadows began to move.

They seeped down from the ceiling like black water, unfurling across the walls in slow, pulsing waves. A shift, a slither, a creeping awareness that they weren’t just shadows any more. They were forming. Changing. Deciding.

And then came the sound . . .

A wet, organic snap and crack, like something forcing itself into a shape it was never meant to take. The slow, rhythmic clicking, like nails tapping against glass. Soft at first, then growing louder, spreading through the room until it was coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

His pulse lurched. The monitors picked up the change, beeping faster, reacting to the surge of adrenaline now burning through his body.

No . . . Please, no.

Not again.

Something else was in the room with him. He didn’t have to turn his head to know it. He felt it, felt the pressure of its presence settle against his skin, thick as humidity before a storm.

A cold wave rolled through him . . . not external, but internal. A separation. A loss of control. His body was no longer his. His limbs turned to stone, useless weights pressing into the mattress. His head lolled against the pillow, neck limp. His fingers, his arms . . . nothing moved. But he could see. Or at least, whatever version of seeing this was.

And then, it rose.

At the foot of his bed.

A jagged, wrong thing, unfolding like a puppet dragged to life by invisible strings. Its limbs were too long. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were exactly the right length, just moving in the wrong way, adjusting in tiny, jerking increments as if struggling to remember how a body should go together. The quiet clicking came again, a stuttering rhythm of joints popping, resetting.

It watched him.

He didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. The weight of its stare was thick, suffocating, pressing into him.

And then . . . a voice bubbled to the surface of his memory.

Daphne’s voice.

Soft. Distant. Slipping in through the cracks in his mind like a dream surfacing through the dark.

“Don’t be scared,” she whispered. “Especially when you see them. They’ll leave you alone… if they don’t know.”

The words were a lifeline, but one that made no sense.

If they don’t know what?

The mattress dipped, or that’s how it felt. A shift in pressure. Something settling at his feet, slow and deliberate. Moving. It dragged itself forward, its motions wrong. A marionette with tangled strings.

An old memory surfaced, half-buried but never fully gone.

Ghost stories and folklore he heard as a kid.

Whispers around a campfire. Sleep paralysis myths. Stories about creatures that sat on your chest in the night, pressing the breath from your lungs, stealing something vital from you before you woke.

The Old Hag. The Shadowman. The Mare. Different names. Same horror.

He considered this, then a second voice rose from memory . . . Magnus’ voice.

A younger voice, inquisitive, questioning.

“What if things are really there all the time… but we can’t see them?”

“What if we can only see them when we’re scared?”

The weight on his chest increased. The creature had moved. It was right there, just below his line of sight. If he could only lift his head, just a little, he could see what it was doing.

Then, the sensation shifted. Something worse.

A deep, rolling nausea, like his stomach had just dropped straight out of his body. His mind spun, his focus fracturing.

He was sinking.

Dark liquid surged around him, swallowing him, pulling him under.

The lake. The old lake by his childhood house. Where the boy had drowned.

The freezing water closed around him, squeezing his chest, numbing his limbs.

The feeling of nausea increased, his head was spinning along with his thoughts. He was having trouble concentrating, getting purchase of rational thought.

His head went under, water closed in over him. The shock of it made his lungs seize, his body screaming for breath. The ceiling of the hospital room fractured into dancing ripples upon the surface of the water.

He was sinking.

Something grabbed his ankle.

Small fingers.

He knew what they belonged to. The boy. The one the parents had whispered about. The one that had drowned.

It pulled him down.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Magnus’s voice surfaced again, an echo carried through the dark.

“The kind that makes all the hairs on your arms stand up.”

Max continued to sink. He needed to focus, stop his mind from spinning. The blackness around him engulfed him, an endless abyss of black.

If this was a dream, and he was aware of it, surely he could control it. But something else was here, something that didn’t belong, something trying to wrestle that control away. He could feel it in the way the shadows curled at the edges of his vision, pressing at the boundaries of reason, trying to force his mind from rational thought into chaos, into fear.

Again, Magnus’s voice drifted up from memory.

“…When we’re scared.”

Scared.

Was he scared?

Max’s fall into the darkness began to slow. The sensation of sinking fading.

No, he wasn’t scared.

He was . . . angry!

Mad that after everything he had lost in the physical world, someone . . . no, some . . . thing thought it could take his mind, too. Steer him like a mule, bit in his mouth, reins pulled tight.

No, he wasn’t scared. He was enraged.

And he was taking back control.

He felt his slow descent abruptly stop. His limbs felt weightless, floating, waiting. Even with the oppressive blackness surrounding him, he knew what way was up.

The small, cold hand wrapped around his ankle began to loosen, fingers slipping away. A retreat.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Max thought.

He reached down and grabbed the small boney hand tight. Anger fueling his irrational actions.

He had lost so much.

He wanted someone to blame.

You will do…

The hand spasmed, tried to recoil, shocked . . . this had never happened before. Max shot upward, his speed accelerating. He wasn’t sinking any more; he was rising.

He was in control.

Something thrashed beneath him, scratching, biting, clawing at his hand, desperate to break free. It was powerless. The darkness around him grew thin, paling into lighter shades. Above, the surface of the water shimmered, rippling with faint light.

The sound of rapid popping and clicking erupted from below, growing in intensity. The small hand twisted, still trying to rip itself free, but Max held fast. He wasn’t strong in the real world . . . not any more. His body was broken, stitched together, fragile.

But here . . . here, he was God!

“Don’t ever try to fuck with my mind,” he thought.

The surface shattered.

Max burst out of the darkness, out of the water, out of the dream . . . and into the waking world.

His hospital bed lurched beneath him as he shot upright. Cables and wires snapped taut, yanking free. Machines tipped over. Alarms screamed. He felt the warm trickle of blood running down his wrist, his arm, but he didn’t care.

He wanted someone to blame . . . Someone to . . . pay!

He was amazed to see his arm out in front of him, he had it, just like he had gripped the small hand, he was now holding onto . . . a shadow?

The thing scrambled to get away. It flipped and twisted in his grip, contorting unnaturally, its body a frenzied, writhing blur. The clicking sound exploded inside Max’s head, a percussion of noise so fast it almost became a growl.

Max tightened his grip. His hand sank into the thing’s shifting form, disappearing into blackness.

Then, with his free hand, he ripped the breathing tube from his throat.

Pain should have followed. A sharp, tearing agony. But he felt nothing. Nothing except the burning, feral rage still pumping through him.

He yanked the shadow closer, his voice a raw snarl.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

The thing froze . . . Confused.

Its form flickering like a dying signal. Max could see it clearly now . . . or almost clearly. His vision kept dipping in and out, shifting between reality and something else, shades of grey . . . the world where the shadows lived. The creature would disappear for a flicker of a second, and the room would snap back into full colour, overturned monitors, the wreckage of his bedside equipment. Then the gray tones would return, and the creature would be there again.

It stopped fighting.

The thing steadied itself, its shifting, disfigured head tilting toward Max’s own. The clicking had changed . . . a new rhythm now, fast, percussive, like an old engine struggling to turn over.

Max narrowed his eyes. “What… what are you?”

The creature turned. Not toward him, but toward the fallen hospital equipment.

One of the monitors began to flicker.

White noise sputtered from another machine.

The monitor’s screen went blank.

Static crackled. The purring sound of the creature buzzed through another monitor’s speaker, then another.

Max turned just as another monitor screen began to flicker. The heart readout stretched, distorting, twisting, fading into static.

Another machine powered down . . . the pump that had been attached to his breathing tube.

The thing wasn’t touching anything. Even as it had earlier scrambled to escape his grip, it hadn’t even wrinkled his bed sheets.

And yet…

Max felt the realisation crawl up his spine. The creature may not have been able to physically affect the world . . . but maybe it didn’t need to . . . Maybe it had influence over something else?

His head whipped toward the last piece of hospital machinery which was still functioning . . . his temporary pacemaker.

The green LED status light flickered.

Green . . .

Then red.

Max spasmed. Agony ripped through him, fire surging down every nerve. His hand snapped open.

The shadow vanished.

He fell backward. His back arched against the bed as his body seised, every muscle in him tensing at once.

What an idiot.

It was over.

He had fought through all of this, and for what? He was going to die here. So much for a second chance.

I’m not ready

He thought about his new heart.

Beat, damn you.

He concentrated on it.

Beat.

His pulse. His breath. His body.

Beeeat…

He forced the black fog edging his vision back.

The alarm tone on the pacemaker shifted. A new monitor flickered back on. The machine’s alarm wailed.

He almost had it.

Almost . . .

He could feel something . . . control.

But something was draining him. Pulling the energy straight out of his body. He was running on empty.

The door burst open.

A mob of doctors and nurses rushed in, light flooding the room, burning his vision. Frantic hands . . . grabbing, stabilizing, reattaching wires, IVs.

But Max’s focus wasn’t on them. It was fixed on the dark corner of the room.

The one area where the light didn’t quite reach.

He knew it was there. Watching him. Assessing him.

Trying to figure him out.

A whisper . . . Daphne’s voice. Close. Too close.

“They know,” she said.

Max groaned, his throat raw and scraped, his voice barely audible. “What do they know?”

No reply.

He swallowed, tried again, his voice hoarse, demanding. “What do they know?”

A doctor patted his arm, voice smooth and clinical. “Everything is going to be okay, Mr. Orpheus. I’m just going to give you something to calm you down. Help you rest.”

Max’s pulse spiked.

“No,” he croaked. “Daphne…”

The drugs hit his bloodstream like cold fire, a tingling rushing through his veins. His body slipped away from him, again.

Darkness closed in.

And then, just before he lost himself to it, he felt it . . . a breath against his ear.

A whisper.

Daphne’s voice, “They know… you can see them.”