Shadow

Max Orpheous’ consciousness floats in murky darkness. The sensation conjures up an old memory; the old lake near his childhood home. Parents warned their children to stay away, a boy had drowned there. Everyone knew who it was, nobody ever said his name. And yet, the children would still go to the lake, and they would dare each other to jump in, and jump in they would.

There was always a fleeting moment when the water closed overhead, fully submerging and cutting off the senses to the world above the water, then a brief expectation of small hands reaching up from between the reeds and grabbing a kicking ankle. 

He has visited this memory often enough to recognise its boundaries. There will be no hands. There will be the cold, the dark, the unreasonable fear, and then he will wake. For a little longer he allows himself to float, relieved of the obligation to remember anything else. Eventually the darkness changes. It acquires depth and location. Something hurts, and the hurt belongs to him.

He is awake in a hospital bed. Pain establishes that much before anything else becomes clear: a deep, tightly contained ache across his chest, with sharper points embedded in it, as though several separate injuries have been persuaded to occupy the same space. He tries to move and discovers that he cannot. His hands will not close. His legs will not shift. Even his eyelids refuse him. Somewhere outside this sealed, unresponsive body it is the early hours of morning, and the room is almost dark, lit only by the monitors and a narrow strip of corridor light beneath the door. He has no access to any of it yet. There is only pain, darkness, and the effort of issuing commands that arrive nowhere.

Memories begin returning in the wrong order. Stainless steel. A face above him. The uncompromising white light of an operating theatre. Gloved hands moving with a purpose he had understood before the drugs took that understanding away. Then the central fact comes back, so enormous that for a moment the smaller details disappear beneath it. His heart has been removed. Another has taken its place. Somewhere inside his chest, beneath the dressings and the ache, a heart that once belonged to somebody else is keeping him alive. He has survived the operation. Whatever happens next, there is at least going to be a next.

Another memory rises immediately behind it, and he turns away before it can fully form. He knows what is there. That is the trouble: he knows exactly what is there, and how little resistance he will have once he permits himself to look. Faces, voices, the ordinary things he would have given away without thinking four months ago and would now surrender almost anything to recover. Every part of him wants to remember. Every part of him except the small, exhausted portion still capable of understanding what remembering will do. He has a task to complete and a promise to keep. Depression is not an efficient option. The phrase is ugly, inadequate, almost offensive, but its ugliness makes it useful. He can work with a problem expressed in those terms. He cannot work with the other terms.

For now he needs to remain functional. Afterwards he can let the memories come. Afterwards he can look at their faces for as long as he likes, even if looking destroys him. He holds to that arrangement with the stubbornness of a man who knows it is less a solution than a door wedged shut with his own weight.

A machine works beside him, drawing and releasing air. Psshh—kuff—psshh—kuff. The sound is close, repetitive, and sufficiently familiar to be dismissed before he has identified it. He directs his attention towards the more immediate difficulty. He is conscious. He can think. He can feel pain. Why can he not move?

Daphne had watched a documentary about sleep paralysis one evening while they were curled together on the sofa. He remembers that before he remembers anything the programme said. They had been trying to reserve those evenings for one another, although in practice Daphne generally watched television while Max watched Daphne. After years of marriage he still found her face more interesting than most things anybody could put on a screen. Sometimes she caught him and asked whether she had something on her nose. Sometimes she leaned against him without looking round, which was worse, because then he had to pretend he had been following the programme when she asked a question about it. Apparently he had absorbed more of this particular documentary than he realised.

Sleep paralysis occurs when waking awareness returns before the muscular inhibition associated with rapid-eye-movement sleep has ended. During REM sleep, neural mechanisms suppress most voluntary movement, preventing the sleeper from physically acting out dreams. If that inhibition persists into wakefulness, a person may remain unable to move or speak for seconds, sometimes minutes, despite being conscious of the room around them. Stress, disrupted sleep and exhaustion can make such episodes more likely. Max has an abundance of all three. As provisional explanations go, it is a reasonable one.

The documentary had examined the older explanations too. Long before there were sleep laboratories or electrical recordings of brain activity, people woke in their beds unable to move and understood the experience according to the knowledge available to them. The names differed. In Scandinavia and much of Europe there was the Mara. Roman traditions supplied the incubus and succubus. Anglo-Saxon folklore had the Old Hag; across the Middle East, Al-Jathoom. There were accounts of Ogun Oru in West Africa and Jinamizi along the East African coast, Gawi Nulim in Korea, the Boba in Bangladesh, Kanashibari in Japan and the Pisadeira in Brazil. The traditions were not identical, and their histories were more complicated than a television programme could accommodate. Nevertheless, across languages, religions and considerable geographical distances, certain details recurred with disturbing consistency.

The sleeper wakes and cannot move. Something is in the room. It comes closer, settles upon the chest and makes breathing difficult. Attempts to call for help produce no sound. The experience has an immediate physical explanation, yet to the person trapped inside it the conviction of another presence can be as persuasive as any object seen in daylight.

Max remembers finding that interesting. Daphne had found it horrible. She had drawn her feet beneath the blanket, and he had resisted the temptation to point out that a blanket was unlikely to represent a significant obstacle to an incubus. He is grateful now that he resisted. The recollection of her bare feet disappearing beneath the fabric is already more than he can safely allow himself.

The thought of calling out directs his attention to his throat. Something occupies it. He has been aware of the discomfort without examining it, but now he feels the intrusion distinctly: a persistent pressure, too far down to be relieved by moving his tongue. He needs to swallow. Nothing happens. Beside him the machine completes another cycle, and the sound resolves into its proper meaning. A ventilator. The obstruction in his throat is a breathing tube.

Recognition does nothing to make the sensation tolerable. His throat wants to close around the foreign object. The urge to cough becomes an urge to retch, fierce and immediate, while his body remains incapable of obeying either. He endures the impulse without the muscular act that would ordinarily discharge it, caught in the prolonged anticipation of gagging. Panic offers itself with remarkable speed. Max declines it, although declining is work. Years of astronaut training have taught him to treat panic as a physiological event requiring management, rather than a source of useful information. It narrows attention, accelerates bad decisions and encourages a person to confuse action with progress. In space, people generally make their fatal mistakes before the environment finishes killing them.

He had never intended to become an astronaut. At twenty-two he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then stayed for another six years, initially as a researcher and later as a lecturer in theoretical physics. His age occasionally caused difficulties of an administrative rather than intellectual kind. Some of the graduate students in his lectures were older than he was. Visiting academics sometimes mistook him for a student and asked when the professor would arrive. Max usually told them shortly, which was true enough. The confusion seldom survived the lecture.

By the time he left MIT, his work had acquired a readership well beyond the institutions in which it originated. Papers bearing his name accumulated thousands of citations. Revisions he had made to established mathematical models began appearing in other physicists’ work, first as proposed alternatives and then, increasingly, as the framework from which new investigations proceeded. His early accomplishments attracted occasional comparisons with Newton, who had produced much of his foundational work while still in his twenties. Max found those comparisons flattering in the way that being mistaken for someone substantially more accomplished was flattering. They also made him uncomfortable. Newton had enjoyed the considerable professional advantage of not being alive to read the comparison.

Awards followed, and then patents. Max preferred the patents. An award occupied a shelf and occasionally required him to attend a dinner. A patent could pay for equipment, employ somebody capable of using it and keep a laboratory operating through another year of questions whose answers were not yet commercially attractive.

By his early thirties he had become one of ARCHON’s youngest lead systems architects. His reputation rested partly on an approach that colleagues admired when it worked and found exasperating while it was happening. Max did not always accept the equations defining an engineering problem as fixed. He examined the assumptions beneath them, reconstructed the model and, where necessary, rewrote the mathematical description of the system itself. Several of those revisions became the foundations of technologies that changed energy generation, communications and deep-space exploration. Once a design was established, hundreds of skilled engineers could manufacture its components. Thousands of drawings specified materials, tolerances, connections and assembly procedures. Installation manuals occupied entire shelves. Commissioning remained a different matter.

The physical machine embodied the mathematics, but the drawings did not capture every relationship governing its behaviour. In some of Max’s more advanced systems, small adjustments during commissioning altered interactions across the whole apparatus. An engineer could fabricate each component correctly, assemble the machine precisely and still produce something that failed to operate as intended. Max could identify which apparently insignificant parameter required adjustment because he understood the framework behind the observed behaviour. Much of that understanding remained inside his head, not through deliberate secrecy but because formal documentation lagged behind a system of reasoning he continued to revise. Wherever the more difficult machines went, their inventor eventually had to follow.

Orbit made that dependence expensive. Sending a civilian physicist into space whenever a piece of equipment required commissioning was an unsatisfactory operating model, particularly when the physicist was also indispensable elsewhere. Max trained as an astronaut because the engineering had left him little sensible alternative. What began as a remedy for a logistical problem gradually became another career. He put money back into his laboratory, expanded its capabilities, filed further patents and accepted additional missions on terms he could negotiate. Each generation of equipment reached farther than the last. Eventually his machines were travelling to places where he could no longer supervise them from the safety of Earth.

Argos was supposed to have been the final mission. He had already spent too much of his life away from Daphne and their son, and four more months had seemed a substantial enough sacrifice even when he believed there would be a home to return to afterwards. One last deployment, one last contribution to the programme. Then Hermes could inherit the procedures, the simulations and the thousands of pages of documentation needed to keep the systems running. Max would come back and stay back. He had imagined the decision acquiring permanence through repetition: saying it to Daphne, saying it to himself, saying it whenever somebody at ARCHON began a sentence with After Argos. Instead he returned to a world in which even the things he had considered certain required examination.

He has been on Earth for two days. Perhaps three. He does not know how long the operation lasted or how much time passed before it, and that uncertainty irritates him more than it should. In the little time he can account for, ARCHON has lied to him. People he trusted have withheld things he had a right to know. Four months ago he boarded Argos believing the worst consequence would be another season away from his family. Now he may never see them again. The thought presses against the barrier he has built, and for a moment he feels how flimsy that barrier is. He should never have gone. It is a true statement and an entirely useless one. He forces it aside.

There is still something he can do. His laboratory contains a QEC module. If he can reach it, he can communicate with the shuttle. He can speak to Hermes. He holds those facts in sequence, repeating them without embellishment, because they lead somewhere and the other thoughts do not.

He concentrates on his body, attempting to recover it one small movement at a time. A finger would be enough. A twitch in his foot. Anything to demonstrate that intention can still produce a physical result. He waits, tries again, changes nothing except the intensity of the effort. There is no response. Then his vision begins to return, and he assumes his eyes must have opened, although he has felt no movement in his eyelids.

At first he sees only differences in the darkness. Grey areas gather around darker ones; boundaries emerge and fail, then emerge again. The room assembles itself gradually, like a charcoal drawing being worked into the surface of smoke. Walls, furniture, machinery. Everything wavers with a shimmer resembling heat rising from a road, although the room feels cold. At the edge of his vision he can make out the ventilator, a heart monitor, an IV stand and another device whose casing and connections suggest something to do with pacing. Wires and tubes descend towards him, disappearing beneath the dressings bound around his chest.

Movement in the far corner catches his attention. When he looks, there is nothing he can identify, only a patch of blackness deeper than the surrounding dark. He is certain something moved. He keeps watching, expecting his eyes to resolve the shape of a chair or a cabinet and end the matter. Instead he begins to feel that the attention is mutual.

A clicking sound starts somewhere in the room. Small, separate reports, with a dry popping beneath them. He cannot locate the source. The sound seems close and distant at once, scattered through the space around his bed, then drawing into a metallic rhythm that tightens until he imagines a wire under increasing strain. In the corner the darkness changes shape. Something detaches from it and moves down the wall. It passes over the leather visitor’s chair without disturbing it, flowing across the back and arm before slipping beyond the limit of his vision. He tries to lift his head. The effort is considerable; the result is nothing. The clicking stops.

The ventilator becomes offensively loud. Psshh—kuff. He can feel the heart beneath his dressings, its unfamiliar beats arriving with enough force to make him aware of the damaged tissue around it. He searches the portion of the room available to him. Nothing moves. Whatever he saw has gone, assuming there was anything to see. Major surgery, residual anaesthesia, analgesics, sedation, disturbed sleep: he has more than enough material for an explanation. Visual distortions require no extraordinary cause under these circumstances. A sensed presence during sleep paralysis is well documented. He knows this. Knowing it ought to help.

Something rises between his feet.

It remains still at the foot of the bed, a rounded shape against the dim room. Max stares, trying to establish where it ends and the background begins. There are no features. No details by which to recognise a face, if it is a face. From this angle he could be misreading almost anything: the back of a chair, a piece of equipment, an object whose outline his brain has completed incorrectly. He examines the shape with the deliberate attention he would give an anomalous instrument reading. Somewhere there will be a discrepancy that explains the impression.

A hand appears on the sheet between his feet. Long black fingers spread against the white fabric, distinct enough for him to count them, and a spring beneath the mattress gives a sharp metallic ping. The foot of the bed sinks. He feels the change through his heels.

A second hand settles beside the first. For several seconds nothing else happens. Then the head rises, bringing narrow shoulders into view. The arms extend between those shoulders and the hands planted on the mattress, and their length makes the shape difficult to understand. Max keeps trying to fit what he sees into human proportions, correcting for perspective, for the strange quality of his vision, for the position of the bed. None of the corrections work. The shoulders are too narrow. The arms are too long. The head has no visible eyes or mouth, only an outline above a body hauling itself upwards.

On the wall it moved easily. Here its movements appear obstructed. One arm begins to advance, pressing slowly through something Max cannot see. It strains for several seconds with scarcely any progress, then releases abruptly and snaps forward. The hand lands farther up the bed. Another spring pings. The other arm follows, labouring against the same invisible resistance before breaking free with a speed that makes Max flinch somewhere inside his motionless body. The movement reminds him of a fly pulling loose from a web, escaping one adhesive strand only to catch against another. Each advance frees the creature briefly. Each leaves it struggling again.

Cold accompanies it onto the mattress. Max feels it in places the postoperative numbness ought to have made inaccessible, a deep chill advancing through his legs as the thing crawls over them. The bed compresses beneath its weight. He watches the next hand reach and strain, and understands something he would prefer not to understand: being here is difficult for it. Whatever it wants from him has made the difficulty acceptable.

It reaches his chest. The mattress sinks beneath them both, and something in Max begins to yield. At first he thinks the creature is pushing him into the bed. Then his awareness of his body loosens, and the sensation becomes one of sinking away from it. He half expects to pass through the mattress and find himself beneath the steel frame, looking up at the underside of the bed. There is no underside. There is no floor approaching. He is going somewhere the room has no space to contain.

The ventilator grows faint. Its rhythm continues, but at a distance that increases without any movement of the machine. The tube in his throat loses its urgency, then its pressure, then almost all sensation. His chest recedes from him. The beating heart seems to belong to somebody else in a more complete sense than it did before, as though he has become a visitor permitted to observe its work and is now being shown out.

He hears screaming. At first he tries to place it in the corridor, then in another room, because hospitals contain suffering and suffering sometimes makes itself heard. More voices join the first. Dozens, then hundreds, layered so densely that he can no longer follow any one of them. Some are high and desperate. Others are low, worn sounds produced with what seems to be the last available strength. He can hear the effort of breathing between the cries, air dragged through throats that barely have enough left to use it. The farther he sinks, the louder they become. The thing above him makes no sound at all.

He concentrates on his heartbeat. It is still there, just perceptible, and for several moments he makes the faint rhythm the whole object of his attention. He waits for a beat, feels it, waits again. Then the next one fails to arrive. He waits longer. He cannot tell whether the heart has stopped or whether he has fallen too far from it to notice. The question that comes to him is embarrassingly old and terribly sincere. Is this Death? Has the Reaper come at last to collect whatever remains of his soul? He has spent his life acquiring better questions than these. None of them is available now.

Light breaks across the room with the force of an explosion. The black shape vanishes into it. The wavering grey surfaces dissolve, and colour returns so suddenly that Max finds the ordinary details almost incomprehensible. Heavy blue blackout curtains cover the window, with a procession of little white sailboats printed along the bottom. A plastic jug of orange squash stands on the trolley beside his bed. Next to it lies a laminated hospital menu bearing a smiling teddy bear equipped with a knife and fork. Above him, yellowing strips of tape remain stuck to the ceiling. One holds a few persistent strands of silver tinsel, missed when somebody took down the Christmas decorations. The sailboats, the bear, the tinsel: objects chosen or overlooked by people who have gone about their work in this room without knowing what could occupy its darkness.

The bed springs ping back into place. Sensation rushes through him, bringing pins and needles to his arms and legs. His hands close, open, close again. He scarcely has time to recognise the movement before his throat contracts around the breathing tube. The gagging impulse finally becomes action. His body convulses, and pain tears across his chest as muscles attempt to expel something held deliberately inside him.

A nurse stands in the doorway with her hand still on the light switch. Concern is plainly visible beneath her face shield, followed by surprise she does not quite manage to conceal. “You’re awake?” she says, already moving towards him. “That’s remarkable. You weren’t expected to be conscious this soon.” Her eyes go to the monitors while he tries to draw enough meaning from her words to make her understand that waking is not the part that matters.

His head remains constrained by the tube and its fittings. Saliva runs from the corner of his mouth. He follows her with wet, strained eyes as she studies the heart monitor, presses buttons and checks him with quick, practised movements. She takes his pulse, checks the oxygen saturation and looks back at the changing line on the screen. There is comfort in her efficiency, but it is a comfort he cannot quite reach. She is attending to the body he has just returned to. He has no means of telling her where he has been.

He raises a hand towards his mouth. The arm feels impossibly heavy, depleted of all useful strength, but it moves. That fact almost makes him weep. Before his fingers reach the tube, the nurse catches his hand and lowers it gently to the bed. She holds it there until his eyes meet hers. “Easy, Mr Orpheous. Don’t fight the tube. I know it’s uncomfortable. I’ve adjusted your IV. You’ll be back to sleep soon. Your surgery went very well. You’re in the Cardio-Thoracic Intensive Care Unit. We’ll keep you here for a few days so we can monitor everything.”

Back to sleep. He wants to object, but the breath leaving him passes through the tube without becoming words. A cold sensation travels up his arm from the IV, followed by a tingling that seems to spread beyond the vein carrying it. His throat begins to relax. The obstruction remains, yet his body grows less interested in rejecting it. Already the room is becoming easier to accept. The nurse is here. The light is on. His hands move when he asks them to. These should be sufficient facts upon which to rebuild the world.

She works around him, checking dressings and examining the surgical lattice across his torso. Max watches until the effort of following her becomes too much. His attention drifts towards the far corner, drawn there by a concern the medication has softened without removing. A white-haired man stands beside the visitor’s chair. He wears a doctor’s coat, and a leather satchel hangs at his side. Max has not seen him enter. The man makes no move towards the bed and offers no word to the nurse. He simply watches Max, motionless in the place from which the darkness first began to move.

Max tries to keep his eyes on him. He tries to lift his hand again, to secure the nurse’s attention before the room slips beyond his grasp. His fingers stir against the sheet, but she is looking at the dressings, and the movement is too slight to bring her round. The man remains in the corner. Then the light, the nurse and the watching face recede together, and sleep takes Max away.