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. Slowly, he surfaced.

Pain pulsed through his chest, but not the sort of hurt he recognised. This went deeper, more foreign, like an unfamiliar percussion marking time inside him. Each beat felt counted. Measured. Borrowed.

Fragments of memory drifted back. The surgeon’s grim look. The sterile brightness of the operating theatre. The quiet, final nod of consent.

That was when he knew, without doubt.

His heart was gone.

The realisation sharpened his thoughts. The haze lifted abruptly, pulling him into the present.

His eyes were closed. 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. Otherwise his inner eyelids would have been bleached red.

What time was it?
How long had he been here?
How long before somebody came to check on him?
Why couldn’t he open his eyes?

He felt the invasive presence of a breathing tube lodged deep in his throat, every slow breath dictated by a machine beside him. His throat ached from the tube’s rigid press. Each inhale felt borrowed. Every exhale supervised.

He tried to lift an arm. Tried to rub his eyes. Tried to reach for the tube and tear it out.

Nothing answered.

He could feel everything. The pain. The pressure. The scrape of plastic in his throat. His body wasn’t numb. It was simply refusing to respond.

Panic stirred.

A faint tingling spread from the IV lines in his arms. Each beat of his second-hand heart reverberated strangely in his ribs, tethered by wires he could feel trailing from his chest to a temporary pacemaker. It kept him steady. It kept him alive.

He didn’t deserve this second chance. If he was honest, he hadn’t wanted to be alive. He’d lost too much.

But he’d made a promise.

His word.

He would see this through.

He tried again. Fingers. Toes. Anything.

Nothing.

The panic tightened.

He tried to scream.

Nothing.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recognised the feeling. They had warned him about it. High doses of sedatives. Painkillers. The body held still while the mind clawed its way back too early.

He began to feel sorry for himself, then stopped, embarrassed by the indulgence. This was temporary. This was nothing compared to what he’d already paid.

A second chance hadn’t come cheaply.

The thought surfaced uninvited. Maybe the cost hadn’t been financial at all.

Maybe it had cost him something else.

The concern evaporated as his attention snagged on something new.

Shapes.

Faint. Ghostly. Pools of grey forming the suggestion of walls, furniture, corners. His room emerged as if sketched in ash.

For a moment, he wondered if his eyes had finally opened.

But the vision felt wrong.

Off.

The room didn’t move when he tried to focus. The darkness didn’t behave like darkness. There was no effort involved, no adjustment, no strain. He could see without blinking, without shifting, without even breathing differently.

Was he dreaming?

A sudden burst of sound sliced through the silence. Clicking. Popping. Mechanical. The rhythm tightened, coiling around him like wire under tension, ready to snap.

He searched for the source, scanning the room in its swatches of grey.

The air thickened.

For no clear reason, a certainty settled in him. He was not alone.

Lying there. Exposed. Helpless.

Then he saw movement.

A shadow slid out from the corner of the room. Not cast. Emerging. It pooled across the walls and floor, spilling over hospital furniture with slow, deliberate patience. It moved like oil, fluid and purposeful. Sometimes it vanished as it passed through other shadows. Sometimes it deepened them.

Max watched, unable to look away.

The shadow slipped behind a piece of monitoring equipment and disappeared.

He waited.

The clicking stopped.

The silence that replaced it was so complete that even his heartbeat felt too loud.

Using whatever strange, bodiless perception he now possessed, Max scanned the room. He could see far more than he should have without moving his head. Without moving at all.

This had to be a hallucination.
A chemically induced dream.

Then the figure rose beside him.

It unfurled from the floor, stretching upward until it reached the height of his IV stand. Its form swayed gently, as though suspended in an unseen current.

Fear punched through the fog.

The shadow leaned closer.

Faceless.

Cold radiated from it, seeping into his skin, into his bones. He tried to draw a deeper breath, but pain coiled around his chest, sharp and absolute.

The figure hovered inches above his face, filling his entire field of vision.

The room dissolved. His world collapsed to this one presence pressing down on him.

Then the sound returned, faint at first, then multiplying. Clicking and popping reverberated inside his skull. Whispering voices threaded through the noise, one becoming many, layering over each other until the room filled with a chorus of muffled hissing.

Not shouting.
Screaming.
Distant. Agonised. Endless.

His thoughts fractured. He felt himself sinking into the bed, crushed beneath a vast, invisible weight. Consciousness began to slip.

Was he dying?
Was this Death itself, leaning close to claim what remained of him?

Light exploded across the room.

Max’s body convulsed. The invisible grip shattered.

Authority over his body returned. Pinpricks and tingling raced through his limbs as sensation reconnected to control.

His hands balled into fists. He blinked wildly as fluorescent lights blazed overhead. Colour flooded back into the world.

A nurse stood in the doorway, hand still on the light switch. Beneath her face shield and bouffant cap, concern was etched across her face.

“You’re awake?” she said softly, genuine surprise slipping through her calm. “That’s remarkable. You weren’t expected to be conscious this soon.”

She approached cautiously, then quickly, eyes flicking to the monitors at his bedside. His head remained immobilised by the breathing tube, but his eyes followed her as she leaned over the heart monitor, studying the fluctuating line.

She pressed a few buttons, checked his pulse and oxygen levels with practised efficiency.

Then she looked down.

Their eyes met.

“You’ve still got a breathing tube in, so don’t try to speak,” she continued. “Your surgery went very well, Mr Orpheus. You’re in the Cardio-Thoracic Intensive Care Unit. We’ll keep you here a few days to monitor everything.”

She spoke slowly, carefully, grounding him.

“It’s just after three in the morning. Try to rest. We’re watching you around the clock.”

As her reassurance settled, Max let out a shaky breath through the tube.

But even as she moved about his bedside, changing dressings and checking his patchwork torso, his gaze drifted to the far corner of the room.

The light didn’t quite reach it.

The shadows there seemed thicker. Heavier.

Waiting.