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. 

This is nothing new. It's just a dream of a memory he has visited countless times before. He floats a moment longer in this memory, and then finally—he awakes.

Pain is present. Motor function is not.  He lies paralysed upon a hospital bed. It is the early hours of morning. Only the dim glow of a handful of monitors and a thin strip of light bleeding beneath the door prevent the room from being swallowed by complete darkness. Not that it matters right now, because he can't open his eyes.

Fragments of memory assemble themselves. The operating theatre. Sterile white light. Stainless steel instruments. Gloved hands. The surgeon's unreadable expression. And then he understands. His heart is gone, replaced by another. The operation has been a success. He has survived.

Another memory surfaces. He quickly pushes it away. He can't look at it, not even a glance. It will consume him. He has things that need to be done, and although every part of him wants to remember, he knows where that will lead. Depression is not an efficient option right now. There is a task that requires him to be functional. A promise he has to keep. Then he can allow himself to remember. Then he can see their faces again. Right now he has to remain emotionless. It is the only way he can focus and stay present.

Beside Max comes a sound. Sucking and pumping. Psshh—kuff—psshh—kuff. He dismisses it and returns his attention to the more immediate problem: why can't he move?

Max remembers an old documentary about sleep paralysis. Daphne had been watching it one evening while they were curled together on the sofa. It was time they tried to reserve for each other, although it generally consisted of Daphne watching television while Max watched her. Years of marriage had done remarkably little to diminish his fascination with his wife, and entire programmes had passed with Max barely looking at the screen. Apparently, he had absorbed more of this one than he'd realised.

The documentary examined sleep paralysis, a neurological phenomenon in which the mind regains consciousness before the body does. For a few seconds, sometimes minutes, voluntary movement simply ceases. The condition appears most frequently during periods of extreme stress, anxiety or exhaustion. Given everything that has happened, Max can't think of a more suitable diagnosis.

The documentary had also explored how sleep paralysis was understood before there was a medical explanation for it. For most of human history, people experiencing the condition had reached much the same conclusion: something had entered the room.

The names changed from place to place. Scandinavia and much of Europe had the Mara. The Romans had the Incubus and Succubus. Anglo-Saxon folklore had the Old Hag, while across the Middle East there was Al-Jathoom. West Africa had Ogun Oru, and along the East African coast there was Jinamizi. Korea had Gawi Nulim. Bangladesh had the Boba. Japan had Kanashibari, and Brazil had the Pisadeira.

None of those cultures shared languages or beliefs. Many developed thousands of miles apart. Yet they all described the same encounters with unsettling precision. The sleeper awakes unable to move. A presence waits in the darkness. It approaches the bed, climbs onto the chest, steals the breath from its victim and silences every attempt to scream.

The thought of screaming brings his awareness to his throat. It feels restricted, as though something is lodged inside it. He needs to swallow, but can't. Then the noise beside him suddenly makes perfect sense. A ventilator. That would mean the discomfort in his throat is a breathing tube.

The intrusion triggers an immediate reflex. His throat wants to tighten. A violent urge to cough, retch and expel the obstruction forces its way upward, but he is immobile, forced to endure the sensation of wanting to gag without the ability to do so. Max doesn't panic. Years of astronaut training have reduced panic to a liability. Panic creates mistakes. Mistakes kill people long before space ever does.

Max had never intended to become an astronaut. He had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at twenty-two before remaining there for another six years, first as a researcher and later as a lecturer in theoretical physics. His age had initially created the occasional awkward situation. Some of the graduate students attending his lectures were older than he was, and visiting academics had been known to mistake him for a student and ask when the professor would be arriving. The confusion rarely survived the lecture.

By the time he left MIT, his work had already attracted attention beyond academia. Papers bearing his name had accumulated thousands of citations, and several of his revisions to established mathematical models had begun appearing in the work of other physicists. His accomplishments at such a young age drew occasional comparisons with Isaac Newton, who had produced much of his most important early work while still in his twenties.

Awards followed, then patents, although Max considered the latter more useful. An award could occupy a shelf. A patent could finance a laboratory.

By his early thirties, he had become one of ARCHON's youngest lead systems architects, earning a reputation for an unusual habit. Max did not simply solve equations. He rewrote them. Some of those revisions became the mathematical foundation for technologies that reshaped energy generation, communications and deep-space exploration. The machines themselves could be fabricated by hundreds of skilled engineers and assembled from thousands of detailed drawings. Their installation manuals filled entire shelves. Commissioning was another matter.

Only Max truly understood the mathematical framework that made some of his systems function. The hardware was merely the physical expression of equations that existed almost entirely inside his own head. Other engineers could manufacture every component to specification and assemble the finished machine perfectly, yet still fail to make it operate as intended. Tiny adjustments made during commissioning, insignificant on a technical drawing, could alter the behaviour of the entire system. That final stage inevitably became Max's responsibility. Wherever one of his more advanced systems was deployed, sooner or later Max had to follow it.

Space presented the obvious problem. Sending a civilian physicist into orbit whenever one of his systems required commissioning was neither practical nor particularly sensible, so Max trained as an astronaut out of necessity, not ambition. What had begun as a solution to an engineering problem gradually became another part of his career. He reinvested heavily in his laboratory, expanded its capabilities, filed further patents and accepted additional missions on his own terms. Each generation of his technology reached farther than the one before it, and eventually the machines went places where their inventor could no longer remain safely on the ground.

Argos was supposed to be the last. Max had already spent too much of his life away from his wife and son. The mission would take him away from Earth for more than four months, but he had accepted that absence because he believed it would be the final one. One last deployment. One last contribution to the programme. Then Hermes could inherit the procedures, simulations and thousands of pages of documentation required to keep his machines running. He would return home and stay there. Instead, Max had returned from Argos to a world he barely recognised.

He has been back on Earth for only two days, perhaps three; he isn't sure how long the operation took. In that short time almost everything he believed before leaving has been overturned. ARCHON has lied to him. People he trusted have kept secrets from him. Four months ago he had boarded Argos believing the greatest sacrifice would be another season away from his family. Now he may never see them again. The thought pushes against the barrier he has erected around those memories, but he forces it back. He should never have gone on that mission, but regret is another indulgence he cannot afford. Not yet. There is still something he can do. He needs to get back to his lab. There is a QEC module there. He can communicate with the shuttle. He can talk to Hermes. 

Max concentrates, straining his senses and willing his mind to re-establish contact with his body. Hopefully persistence will jump-start his motor functions. There is still no physical response. Then something changes. His vision starts to return. He assumes his eyes must have opened.

At first it is indistinct. Gradations of grey. Shapes without edges. Then walls. Furniture. Equipment. The room assembles itself piece by piece, as though drawn in charcoal on a canvas made of smoke. Everything wavers with a kind of shimmering heat-haze. Max can see the hospital machinery at his bedside from his periphery: the ventilator, a heart monitor, an IV stand and something that has a pacemaker look about it. Wires and tubes snake everywhere, disappearing beneath the tightly wound bandages covering his chest.

Movement from the far corner of the room draws Max's attention. Nothing is there, just a deeper black than the darkness surrounding it. He is certain he saw movement. He continues to stare. Slowly, the feeling grows that something is staring back.

A new sound fills the room. Clicking. Popping. It seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, a metallic rhythm tightening until it vibrates like wire stretched to breaking point. A shape detaches itself from the corner. It crawls down the wall and over the leather visitor's chair before slipping beyond the edge of Max's vision. He tries again to move, to lift his head enough to follow it, but nothing happens. Then the clicking stops.

The psshh—kuff of the ventilator suddenly sounds too loud. Max can feel the borrowed beats of his second-hand heart thumping beneath his bandages as he searches what little of the room his eyes can reach. Nothing moves. Whatever he saw is gone. Perhaps there had never been anything there to begin with. He has just undergone major surgery and his bloodstream must contain enough anaesthetic, analgesics and sedatives to make a hallucination entirely unremarkable. Add sleep paralysis to the equation and shadows crawling across walls hardly constitute compelling evidence of anything. There will be an explanation. There is always an explanation.

Something moves between his feet. A head rises into view at the foot of the bed and Max stares at it. It does not move. It is little more than a silhouette against the backdrop of his room, without features or detail, only the rounded suggestion of a head where moments before there had been nothing. From this angle, it could still be something ordinary. A piece of medical equipment. The back of a chair. Some harmless object distorted by exhausted eyes and an anaesthetised brain. He concentrates on its outline, searching for the mistake his vision has made.

Then the shape of a hand appears between his feet. Long black fingers spread wide against the white sheet beneath them, their outline suddenly unmistakable. Every explanation Max has assembled falls apart. A spring beneath the mattress gives a sharp ping and Max feels the foot of the bed sink. Another hand appears beside it, and for a moment neither moves. Then the head rises, narrow shoulders emerging beneath it as impossibly long arms draw taut between them and the hands planted on the mattress. The proportions are wrong. The arms are too long, the shoulders too narrow. There is still no face, no eyes or mouth, only the shape of a head suspended above a body struggling to pull itself into view.

On the wall it had moved effortlessly. Here, every motion appears to meet resistance. One arm pushes slowly forward as though forcing itself through something thick and invisible. It strains for several seconds, barely advancing, then suddenly tears free and snaps ahead with startling speed before becoming trapped again. Another spring pings as the mattress dips. The other arm follows, straining against whatever holds it back before wrenching itself free in another violent release. It reminds Max of a fly caught in a web, tearing itself from one adhesive strand only to become trapped against the next. Yet it continues, dragging more of itself onto the bed.

The cold arrives with it, spreading somewhere deeper than Max's numbed skin as the creature crawls over his legs and the mattress compresses beneath its weight. Whatever this thing is, existing here is difficult for it, but whatever it wants, it wants badly enough to endure the struggle.

The creature reaches his chest and the mattress sinks beneath them both. Something inside Max begins to give way. His connection to his body fails and he feels himself sinking, slowly at first. He half expects to pass through the mattress and emerge beneath the steel-framed hospital bed, but it never happens. He is sinking somewhere else.

The ventilator recedes, its mechanical rhythm growing faint. The pressure of the breathing tube fades from his throat. Even the heart beating beneath his bandages seems to belong to somebody else. Then he hears screaming. It is not coming from the corridor or another room. More voices join it. Dozens become hundreds, cries layered upon cries until individual voices are impossible to separate. Some are shrill and desperate. Others are lower, exhausted sounds dragged from throats barely capable of producing them, each breath seeming to scrape its way into existence before collapsing into another cry. The farther Max sinks, the louder they become, yet the creature itself remains perfectly silent.

Max concentrates on his fading heartbeat, now barely perceptible. He waits for the next beat, but nothing comes. For one terrible moment he cannot tell whether the heart has stopped or whether he has simply sunk too far away to feel it. Is this Death? Has the Reaper finally come to collect whatever remains of his soul?

And then a great illuminance detonates across the room. The black shape evaporates, swallowed by the light. The smoke canvas melts away, replaced by a flood of natural colours. Heavy blue blackout curtains cover the window, printed along the bottom with a procession of little white sailboats. On a trolley beside the bed sits a plastic jug of orange squash and a laminated hospital menu illustrated with a smiling teddy bear holding a knife and fork. Above him, several pieces of yellowing tape remain stuck to the ceiling. One still holds a few stubborn strands of silver tinsel, overlooked when somebody took the Christmas decorations down.

The bed springs ping back into shape. Control returns in a rush of sensation. Pins and needles race through Max's limbs as neural pathways reconnect. His hands clench and unclench. Then his throat spasms around the breathing tube. He gags violently, his body convulsing as it finally attempts to expel the obstruction.

A nurse stands in the doorway, her hand still on the light switch. Concern shows plainly beneath her face shield. “You’re awake?” she says, genuine surprise slipping through her calm. “That’s remarkable. You weren’t expected to be conscious this soon.”

She approaches quickly, her eyes flicking to the monitors. Max's head remains immobilised by the breathing tube and saliva runs from the corner of his mouth. His glassy eyes track her movements as she leans over the heart monitor and studies the fluctuating line. She presses buttons, checks his pulse, checks his oxygen saturation. Efficient. Practised.

Max lifts a shaky hand towards his mouth. His arms are heavy, his strength depleted. The nurse catches his hand and gently lowers it back to his side. Their eyes meet.

“Easy, Mr Orpheus. 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.”

Max exhales shakily through the tube. He feels a cold tingling travel up his arm. His throat begins to relax, becoming numb to the tube.

As the nurse works around him, adjusting dressings and examining the surgical lattice across his torso, his attention drifts back towards the far corner of the room. A white-haired man stands there, motionless, wearing a doctor's coat with a leather satchel at his side. Max hadn’t noticed him enter. The man is watching him. 

And then sleep takes Max away.