I Am Falling

I am falling.

The air whistles past my ears like tinnitus, but I don’t try to block it out. The thought never crosses my mind.

I am falling.

Despite the speed at which I am plummeting to the ground, the windows rush past slowly and I can see my reflection in them. I see my own haggard face, dark eyes sunk into my skull from lack of sleep, unkempt stubble with patches of grey.

When did I start getting old?

My clothes, thick with dirt, grime, and blood. My blood. It seeps into the fabric of my shirt, ruining the pristine cream colour, from the bullet wound in my stomach. The force of the shot had knocked me over the edge.

I am falling. And I know why.

My desk was on the tenth floor, far below the roof, which sat on the ceiling of floor 48. The roof where I would be shot.

I kept my desk as tidy as possible. I had always been a bit of a clean freak and made sure that everything had a home where it could be returned to once finished with. A plant grew by my side, small, potted but real. More than I could say about the cheap plastic knock-offs that many of my colleagues had. They felt that a real plant was too much work to take care of, that it would wither and die, causing them undue distress and guilt. I watered my plant every day. That was enough. That was all that was required. The rest of my desk was clear aside from my computer and a small shelf of papers. I was content with it. It made me happy.

My colleagues hated me. They believed I looked down on them.

“Jeff,” Darren called from across the room. My boss. And the man who would end my life.

He was walking my way, drawing the eyes of everyone else towards me. They blazed with hope that today was the day I was going to be dismissed, though that wouldn’t make any sense. I worked harder than any of them.

The only one who didn’t look up was Loren, but she never followed the crowd. Her head stayed down, focused on her work. I think she hated them all just as much as I did. I never talked to her; her desk was messy, papers strewn all over it and nearly buried the photograph of her Shih Tzu, Hayley. I only knew the dogs name because it was engraved into the frame.

Darren slammed a file down on my desk and glared expectantly into my eyes. “What is the meaning of this?” He demanded. I felt this was all very unprofessional, but stating as such was not likely to make things better. I looked down at the file.

It was bound with string, as if it had been pulled from some espionage movie. I had not seen it before, yet my signature was clearly scribbled on the front under the REMOVED BY heading.

“I asked you a question, Jeff. What is the meaning of this?” Darren agitatedly repeated.

“I don’t recognise this file,” I reply. My voice is flat, as it always was. I knew it annoyed people, but I couldn’t help it.

“Don’t bullshit me. How did you even gain access to this archive? You don’t have clearance.”

He was right, I did not have clearance. This file was from the B3 archive. I was only cleared to access B1. “I don’t know how my signature got onto that file. But I promise you, I did not take it.” A dozen eyes watch me gleefully. They wanted me gone and I could never understand why.

“I wish I could believe you, but this is just the latest in a long line of issues. Go home until we have figured this out, I am officially putting you on suspension.”

The room exploded in silent smirks, triumph for all who hated me. Even Loren looked up and eyed me with disguised emotions.

Darren swept the file up, causing a gust of wind that ruffled the papers on my desk. His elbow caught the edge of my plant pot causing it to wobble and fall to the floor before I could move to save it. The ceramic shattered and dirt spread over the carpeted floor.

“Clean up your mess before you leave.” Darren shouted over his shoulder. As if he was not the cause of all this destruction.

My colleagues watched me passionately as I scrambled on my hands and knees to recover the plant and sweep up the soil.

I wanted to scream out, to break down and cry, to curse them all out and exit the building in a blaze of glory that they would never forget. But I didn’t, I walked out quietly, head bowed, in silence.

Pippa waved to me as I walked past her reception desk. She was the only person in the building I liked, so I feigned a smile and waved back, not bothering to stop and talk. I just wanted to get home and wrap myself up in a blanket. Maybe ask my wife if she would be willing to prepare my favourite meal for me. Her own recipe of lasagna. The thought did fill me with a little spark of joy.

She was in the living room when I walked through the front door. Wiring up a new stereo system I had bought her for Christmas. I honestly believed I was her second love; music was her passion and her life revolved around her efforts to listen to as many different genres, in the best quality, as was possible.

The stereo had definitely bought me a few more years before the inevitable divorce. Though I wouldn’t survive a few more years, I didn’t know that yet.

“Babe?” I called to her back. She turned slowly and blinded me with her ridiculously bright headtorch.

“What are you doing home so early?” She asked through the screws held between her lips. Her eyes were curious, not yet understanding the level of shit I had just been thrown into.

I sighed, “They suspended me. Apparently, my signature got onto a file I shouldn’t have access to, and they need to investigate it.”

The screws were dropped and the headtorch turned off. It only took her a second to cross the room and embrace me in her arms. When she spoke, her voice was muffled by my chest, “You’ll get through this, Jeff. We’ve been through worse right.” It wasn’t a question. She was still a little unsteady on the prosthetic leg, and the months after the crash had been some of the most strenuous of my life, I could never imagine what the recovery had been like for her.

“Kate, they hate me there, they will use this as an excuse to get rid of me. I know it.”

Pulling away slightly, Kate stared up at me with the caring eyes that I had fallen in love with. Her arms, still around my waist, still supported me. “Then let’s start looking for something else. So that if they sack you there’s something else to fall back on, and if they don’t, you can move somewhere that will actually appreciate you.”

I could not fault her logic. It could be a good idea to move jobs and start afresh, away from the judging eyes. “Can we start tomorrow. I just want to lie down and process this all.” I said. I felt like I had been crushed under the brogue heel of Darren, though I had no way of conveying this hurt to Kate. She knew, even as my face remained motionless, she always knew how I was feeling inside.

“Of course. Go on, get yourself out of those clothes, I’ll finish this off, then we’ll chill for the rest of the day. Sound good?”

“Yeah, sounds good.”

Kate smiled and turned on her heel to get back to her project. Only I would be able to see the slight limp when she walked. I missed the way she used to walk.

We curled up in bed. A thin layer of sweat coated my skin, making me feel the chill of the room. Kate’s breasts were warm against my side. The stump just below her left knee rested on my leg as she snuggled into me.

She snored gently and the sound began lulling me into my own slumber. The TV played on, long forgotten and turned down to barely a whisper. I could almost forget the events at work and call today ‘a good day’. I could almost be ready for another day of hard work in the morning.

But there wasn’t going to be any work tomorrow. I might not be at work again for a while. That thought was what delayed my sleep, and though I did fall asleep eventually, I am certain I was still awake when the shadows at the foot of our bed began to move.

I had been still for some time, unwilling to move and risk waking Kate. Maybe they thought I was sleeping and it was safe to approach. I wanted to jump up, prove them wrong, show them I was conscious and fully able to protect myself and my wife.

But I could not. I was frozen in place. The shadows approached. With no resistance, my body, naked and defenceless. There were two of them. Shaped like men, without any discernible features. Without eyes or mouths, it seemed impossible to know, but I could tell they were smiling. Revelling in my discomfort.

My heart beat heavily in my ears. I wanted Kate to wake up, to hear the mass of muscle spasming in my chest and spring into action to save us. But she did not stir.

I was alone in the terror of the night with the shadows bearing down upon me.

A void shape that existed in perverse disruption to all the laws of the universe, though somehow still recognisable as a hand, reached towards my face. I knew that when it touched me, it would feel cold and unnatural.

I wanted to run. I could feel my body shake as it attempted to flee but only stalled in place. Tears ran down my cheeks, and in that moment, I realised; they knew I was awake. They wanted to see my fear. They took pleasure in it.

I was right. Its fingers were freezing, like the vacuum of space, as they ran across the skin of my cheek.

They channelled their way through sweat and tears to the centre of my forehead. There the pressure began. It felt like it was burrowing through my skull into the mass of grey matter beneath.

The pain was like nothing I had ever felt before. The dark fingers seemed to expand into my mind, tearing away at my essence. My only solace was that I lost consciousness quickly and fell into a dark slumber.

I woke to find Kate had moved to her side of the bed. Assuming she had simply got too warm I slipped out to the bathroom and checked my face in the mirror, searching for any evidence of my haunting encounter the night before. There was none. No hole, no wound, not even a bruise. I honestly began to think that it may have been a horrifically vivid nightmare. There was no lingering pain to say that the shadowy men had ever been real.

Kate appeared at the door behind me, she was rested on a crutch that she used when she couldn’t be bothered with the leg, it still ached sometimes.

“Where did you go?” She asked me.

“I just got up. What time is it?”

“It’s half seven. But I meant last night. I woke up and you’d gone off somewhere.”

I frowned at her through the mirror. I had been in bed with her all night. Hadn’t I?

“Hmm, I had wondered whether you had gone for a walk or something, you know to clear your head after yesterday’s fiasco.”

Had I been sleepwalking? I had never sleepwalked before. In the mirror I stared at the point in the middle of my forehead. Where that… thing… had touched me.

Kate hopped over and put an arm around me her head nestled its way onto my chest. “I’m here, if you need to talk. Please, Jeff, don’t bottle it up.”

I remembered how she had been after the accident. The constant ‘I’m fine’ and pent-up anger she carried with her like a dark cloud. We had learned then how such things could strain a marriage and promised to be open with one another. But how could I open up about what happened last night? What would I say?

“I’m fine,” I said while holding her tight, to both comfort us, and to stop her from seeing my eyes. I didn’t want her to see the lie.

I never slept well again. Every morning, I woke up to hear from Kate that I had once again left the house while she slept. Every morning, she asked me if I knew where I had been, every morning, I did not.

On the fourth night, we agreed that Kate would stay up and follow me. We both knew it could be dangerous to wake a sleepwalker, and we knew that I returned home every night, so she only had to find out where I’d gone.

Why didn’t we get help? Call a doctor or something. I wish we had, knowing where the night would lead.

I kissed Kate goodnight, she was still dressed and would wait at the bottom of the stairs for me, and I went to bed. It was strange lying under the covers alone. The bed felt unnaturally cold and I felt an absence without her by my side. I was restless as a result and struggled to fall asleep. Maybe there was a nagging part of my mind telling me that this was not a good idea.

I awoke, not in my bed, but, in a field. Alone. I recognised it as part of the farmland that ran along the south edge of the neighbourhood. I must have walked nearly a mile to get here.

I was suddenly aware that my hands were wet, and I looked down through the gloom of night. My pyjamas, usually a pure, clean white were stained dark. A part of my brain which had not yet fully processed the situation complained that they would need throwing out, that they had been ruined beyond recovery.

I could see patches of white skin showing through the same dark staining that covered my forearms and hands. The smell perforated my nose, and I knew that it was blood.

“Kate?” I cried, remembering that she was going to follow me. I was alone in the field. Where was she?

“Kate!” I cried again and began to run back home.

“Kate!” I screamed before tripping over something in the dark. My face hit the ploughed soil, thankfully missing any rocks that had been turned up.

Fumbling around in the darkness, I searched for whatever it was I had tripped over. My fingers brushed against metal and I grasped it. At one end there was a strange bowel made of plastic, at the other… A shoe.

I held Kate’s leg tight. It was also wet with blood and dirt was sticking to it. I wanted to scrub it clean.

I wanted to know where my wife was.

Scrambling to my feet, I ran for home, hoping and praying that I would find her there. That this wasn’t her blood.

Throwing the front door open I screamed her name into the house.

“In here,” a man replied from our front room. The voice was familiar, but did not belong in my home, I could not place it.

Laid on the sofa, seemingly unharmed was Kate. Her eyes were wide and unfocused, but they blinked. Her breath was heavy and sporadic. Panic and fear firmly holding her within its grasp.

Standing over her was Darren, a coat roughly thrown over his nightclothes and shoes unlaced on his feet. Why had he not yet tied his laces? He was looking at me with rage, fear, and disbelief. Taking in the sight I must have been.

“I don’t… I… Is she okay?” I stammered, still clutching Kate’s blood-stained leg. I could hear it dripping onto the floor.

“Are you… You?” Darren asked cautiously.

“Yes, of course it’s me. Tell me what happened. Is she hurt?”

“No, she’s not hurt. I got out of the house in time to stop you.”

“Stop me?”

Darren’s eyes were haunted, not really seeing the room he was in. The events of the night obviously replaying through his mind over and over again.

“Darren,” I tried to bring him back to now, “what happened? What did I do?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“He doesn’t.” Kate sat up, her cheeks were crusted with dried tears. “It wasn’t Jeff.”

I rushed to her side, dropping the leg, and tried to take her hand in mine, but she pulled away, eyes fixed on the blood that covered me. I let my hands fall to my sides. “Kate, please tell me what happened.” I begged her.

“I followed you—”

“Kate, please rest.” Darren interrupted, “I can tell him.”

“You didn’t see all of it, Darren!” She snapped back before returning her gaze to me. “I followed you; you had this look like you were in a trance like they say sleepwalkers normally have. You left the house and just ran off. I followed you, though you were moving so fast, I could barely keep up, you were already at Darren’s house when I did catch you.” She paused, the wide-eyed look of existential terror returned. “You were standing with this… this thing. It looked like a man, but it was—”

“Made of shadows,” I breathed.

Her eyes darted back to me. She had been crying, but there were no tears left to fall. Instead her eyes were red, puffy and dry.

“How did you know?” She asked. “Do you remember what happened?”

“No, I saw them in our bedroom the first night I sleepwalked. I hoped it had been a nightmare.”

“Them?” Darren asked.

“There were two of them.”

“There was only one standing with you.” Kate continued, “You seemed to be talking but I didn’t make any of it out. You turned and pointed at Darren’s house. I think I screamed because then you both looked at me. The shadow. It didn’t have eyes, but I could feel its stare, like it was piercing through me.” She hugged herself and shivered.

Darren pulled a throw from the sofa and wrapped it around her shoulders. He threw me a look that told me that he knew I would have done so too, but the blood on my hands forbade me from touching anything.

“Your eyes, Jeff. I saw your eyes. They were black. As black as a cloudless night sky. You didn’t even look like yourself. The way you stood, the way you smiled, full of cruelty. It wasn’t you.”

“This was when I came out of the house. I heard Kate scream. I saw you with that thing. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”

“I tripped,” Kate continued, looking down at her prosthetic leg, “fell over while you came over to me. Then you spoke, and it wasn’t your voice. You said that you weren’t going to hurt me, but that you needed to borrow my leg. You then… It then… pulled it off me, literally ripped my leg from the fastening, grinning the whole time. I begged you to wake up and come back to me. You… It just pushed me away.”

Kate now wrapped her arms around me. My heart warmed as her trust in me returned. After everything these… demons… had taken from me, she was all I had left.

“I watched you go. Just quietly walking away. That… shadow man faded away. Like I said, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself. I followed you. While Ella helped Kate inside. I just wanted to know where you were going…” He trailed off, eyes pulled down to the ground.

I watched on in silence. Unsure how to get him to continue the story. Afraid of what he would say. “Whose blood is this, Darren?” I finally asked.

“Hayley’s. You went to Loren’s house. With the leg. You beat the dog.”

Hayley, Loren’s Shih Tzu, the one whose photo sat on her desk, buried beneath papers.

“Why?” The word escaped me in a breath of despair. I knew there was no answer in this room. Only my tormentors knew.

Kate tightened her grip on me but her eyes avoided mine.

“Jeff,” Darren regained my attention, “we should go into the office tomorrow, get the whole situation with that file out of the way. When we beat this, you need a job.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, that file could have been their way of isolating you from everyone. Getting you here where they can control you without as many people noticing.”

“So what now? An exorcist?” I couldn’t hide the sarcasm in my voice.

“I don’t know. But we will figure this out.”

“Figure this out?” I jumped to my feet, throwing Kate back. “I killed a dog! Attacked my wife! Have no control over my body or actions! Any you just say, ‘we’ll figure this out’.”

Darren’s face twitched, too quickly for me to discern anything from, but in hindsight, it was definitely a smile.

“Trust me.” He said before leaving.

Kate and I remained in silence. Her leg left abandoned on the floor, staining the carpet with blood. My brain itched to start cleaning it up, but it felt wrong, like I would be destroying the evidence of a crime. In fact, I was sure that’s what it would be. A crime, committed by something beyond understanding, using my body. The evidence would lead to me. No one would believe us if we tried to explain what actually happened.

I look at the leg again.

“Shall I clean it up so you can use it again?” I asked tentatively.

Kate doesn’t respond but her eyes lock upon the gory mess on our floor. Her hold on me tightens, so I do not move. My head falls back and I drift into a sleep that seemed to have been waiting for me since that first awful night.

Kate was gone when I woke. Her leg too. Though before panic could take hold, I heard her off time footsteps coming down the stairs.

“Kate?” I called out.

Her footsteps quickened and she burst round the corner to see me. Her eyes were damp from the tears already forming.

“Did I…” I began, the fear seeping into my monotone voice.

“No. You didn’t move at all.” Kate rushed to my side and took my hands; the roles reversed since the night before. “Maybe… Maybe it’s gone. Maybe, were finally free of it.”

The office was quiet. No one looked up at me when I walked in. Even Pippa at the front desk had kept her head lowered towards the papers she was sifting through. Loren’s desk was bare. Recently cleared, dust hadn’t settled on it yet. A small memorial to her dog, Hayley, was pinned to the cork noticeboard. I tried to keep my eyes away from it.

My desk was as I had left it several long days ago. My plant, unwatered, was now a dry brown husk. Looking at it made me feel a new level of helplessness, and, with a small push of my hand, I sent it and its pot tumbling into the bin.

Darren came out to greet me, and I felt numerous eyes watching us. He said nothing but shook my hand and smiled. Gesturing to the lift he turned without even looking at the room. And I followed him in. Without question or concern.

When the doors closed, his body blocked the buttons, and I simply assumed we would head down to the basement to finally put an end to the issue of my forged signature.

“How did you sleep last night?” Darren asked through his back.

“Good actually, no more sleepwalking. I think it might be gone.”

“That is good to hear.” I heard a harsh metallic click, then he turned and a gun was in his hand.

I had never seen a real gun before and I thought it looked heavier than the ones in the movies. Black metal shone ominously both on the gun and his eyes.

I saw your eyes. They were black. As black as a cloudless night sky. Kate had said about my own eyes. I saw how accurate she had been now I was looking into Darren’s.

The lift dinged, almost comedically considering the tense situation, and the doors opened to the roof access.

That is where my tale began. A bullet to the chest and a 48 storey drop.

I look at you, the woman who met with me after I hit the pavement, you seem kind. Death should be kind.

You reassure me that there was nothing else I could have done, that my wife would be safe, and Darren would not be blamed for my death. Whether I believe you, or not, I do not say.

I consider begging. One more day. Just to say goodbye. To prepare my Kate for a life without me. To hold her one more time, and apologise for the pain I have caused her. Yet, I already know you do not care. Or, if you do, still have no intention to grant me my wish.

I take your offered hand, and everything goes black. Not like the Shadow Men, but warm and final. Tidy and without chaos.