Short Story — Frozen in a Scream
I walk a desolate roof. A murky haze envelops the sky. It’s a colour I cannot recognise. I know this roof, this path. I have walked this path a thousand times before and yet I don’t recognise it.
I see myself walking, bewildered. I see myself but how can I? How can I see myself from within? My vision is not my own. I exist outside my awareness, outside my understanding, outside my own body. I drift, not knowing where I am being pushed, pulled, or stretched.
The ground beneath me disappears. I seem to have lost all sense of up and down and front and back. There is no direction or magnitude to the drift. There is no fixed spot to hold, nor a ledge to hang onto. The haze dissolves into a demented darkness. The edges nonexistent, the layers uneven, the waves of liquified haze curtaining down in imperfect arcs.
A hand clasps from above pulling me into a vortex of confusion. I sleep a definitive sleep. I see myself in a definitive sleep. How can I? My body is not my own. My mind exists outside its own confines, my own body lying fast asleep, oblivious to the tribulations of its inhabitant.
I lie on my own body to see if I can squeeze in and wake. A figure lurks in the corner, no distinct shape or form. It drifts from one corner to another, uncaring of anyone else’s confusion. A light drifts from a corner, reluctantly pushing away a bit of the haze. It’s like a small pocket cloud, drifting, continuously blotting the darkness at its edges. I don’t know if I wake but I see the light drifting and evaporating into the walls.
In the half-light the corner figure reaches me. I do not recognise it. I should know who that is but I don’t. There is a smile whose intentions I cannot read. Eyes made of glass that reflects my own unknown fears. I see death, I see my lifeforce being weaned off. The hand reaches out to me once again. And this time, I clasp it, though it’s not me. My body is not my own.
My body wakes up, supported by the phantom’s hand. It looks at me like I am a stranger who intruded its precious sleep. There is resolve in those eyes which used to be mine. There is a smirk which is mine that comes out when I utter a word to end a conversation. An answer to a question un-phrased. A dark disquiet quelled before it reaches pandemonium.
I try to make the body remember that I am its inhabitant but it is out of my bounds. I am no longer there, and my body acts of its own volition, no longer an instrument of my neural faculties. I don’t know what I am anymore.
The walls begin to close on me. I don’t know what started this chain of events but my body and my phantom seem content with the goings-on, like everything is going according to a sinister plan beyond the realm of control. I try to find a way out and break through the darkness. All I get are fistfuls of dense air, the dankness of the surrounding inhibiting my breath.
I try to run as fast as I can, for I don’t own my legs anymore. But instead of me running, the world itself is going backwards, changing its position relative to mine like I only have my intention to run powering my movement. I reach a ridge, a small sliver of light seems shining through. I reach the light with my fingers but all I grasp is a fleck of dust.
Behind me, enters a reaper whose face I can’t discern. One by one, ghouls emerge in front of me, like they were hiding there all the time but needed the reaper’s assent to rise. These ghouls I know. Some of them are my own memories. Some of them are words unsaid. Some of them are souls I couldn’t bid goodbye to. And they’ve all come to claim their due. Come to claim what I could have given.
My urgency rises, my breath knots into my stomach, and I scratch and claw at the walls, hoping for a way out. A hand clasps onto my neck and I struggle to breathe. A squeal emerges from me and turns into a full bellow.
I remember now who I used to be. I remember now that the body and the memories were never mine. I remember the parched sensations that remained throughout my life. This is how it ends, and my final voice will not be one of wisdom, but a frozen scream of horror, my soul lost to time.
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This is an abstract story based on a sleep paralysis episode I had.
