The Man of Smoke - Part 2 (Wiggling Toes and Niggling Woes)

Time passed, and while he was unconscious, and when he was eventually wilfully asleep, he had strange dreams that often had recurring themes. The first dream he could remember distinctly was that of the accident, and that helped him to remember where he was and why he was there.

The dreams made him fear the man that had called out to him greatly, it was a fear he hadn’t felt since he was a child and he watched the film adaptation of Stephen King’s IT and suddenly became terrified of clowns, drains, spiders, and plugs. He would refuse to go out in the rain or take baths, and would burst into tears at the sight of both spiders and clowns. To this day a chill would still run up his spine when he saw a clown, and any spider the size of a thumb nail or bigger would make his blood run cold. This was what he felt now. Almost nothing could compare to the pure terror that can plague a young child with irrational fears.

David felt the sickeningly familiar fear creep over him almost every night and day now. It was probably part of the trauma from the accident and the recovery process. He still hadn’t been able to leave his bed so all he could do for most of the day and night was dwell on what had happened and how his life had been ruined.

He became wracked with depression and anger. His blind rage and utter misery went unnoticed by the doctors and nurses as he never spoke. He was sure the morphine and drugs were enhancing the dark feelings he dwelled in, and he constantly felt a numb detachment from his old life, his body, and the world around him.

When he slept, his dreams were dark, and when he would wake he would be drenched in cold sweat, as if he had went sleepwalking and decided to go for a swim. Fearfully, his eyes would watch the dark corners and other beds in his ward, looking for the man who did this to him. However it was rarely a man that chased him in his petrifying nightmares anymore.

In his dreams his assailant changed forms constantly. At times it was a looming shadow that seemed to be made entirely a thick, black, viscous substance which was almost like crude oil. It powered towards him through the darkness and moved into the shape of a car, speeding towards with the headlights glowering red like hot coals. Sometimes he saw a huge terrible monster that he couldn’t even begin to describe with words or with a drawing. It had a horrible dripping maw and claws the size of butcher knives on the end of each of its innumerable fingers.

It was also made of the oil like substance, and it would bubble and melt as it tore down the dark street towards him, and he would always wake up just before it reached him. It would always make him jolt awake as if he had been electrocuted.

Then there were the other dreams, these were perhaps more terrifying. Everyone has those moments in life where they, to use a cliché, see their life flash before their eyes. Most people will have had at least one near death experience. David wasn’t blessed with the luck of the Irish and had a fair few more than average. Randomly, his dreams would be of these experiences, but with minor differences.

The first time he had ever had a close shave with death was when he was a young boy, probably only about 5 years old. His family had gone on a trip to the local swimming pool. David accidentally wandered into the deep end when his parents weren’t really paying attention to him.

Suddenly, he had found the tiles below him falling away into nothing and his head had gone underwater, and in his panic he had inhaled and began to cough and splutter. He couldn’t swim at all, and he of course couldn’t shout for help because of his coughing and retching. Every time he went under he would try to touch the bottom and bounce himself back up, as if he were on a trampoline. His head would break the surface and he would try to shout out through his coughing and spluttering and would inevitably end up just swallowing even more water. Before it was too late, his father noticed what was happening and rushed to save him, and he escaped relatively unscathed physically, but with the lasting scars of childhood fear.

In his nightmares, he was in a massive abandoned swimming pool, which was filled with stagnant water. The building was abandoned and decaying, with smashed windows and graffiti daubed over the walls. A strange black substance then began to spread from the ancient and useless pool drains and filters. It sat on top of the water like thick black oil, but it moved as if it had a mind of its own.

David would panic and try to escape, but the oil came at him from all sides, dying the stagnant water a pitch black colour. When it reached him it would form into the monster with the burning red eyes, or it would shape itself into a shadow that wore a bone whine mask. The mask was covered in strange markings that he could never remember when he woke up, and sometimes it had thin slits for eyes and a mouth, even though the eye sockets appeared empty.

The mouth seemed to hold no features, almost as if the whole in the mask was the creature’s mouth. Sometimes he saw the driver of the car in the mask, sometimes it was the man who seemed to have met him before. The creature would wrap its hand around his neck and hold him under the water until David felt like he was close to death, then he would wake.

There were other dreams where the creature pushed him out of the tall and withered old tree that he fell from and broke him arm. Sometimes he saw it force feeding him the bleach that he accidentally drank as a baby. Sometimes he saw it hold him down as the two muggers who stole his wallet and phone a few years ago took turns punching and kicking him in the stomach and head. None of these experiences were particularly pleasant to experience.

It brought the fact to David’s attention that he seemed to be very unlucky, and that he should probably pad his apartment with sponge or cushions when he eventually returned home, but then he would probably have a seizure and suffocate on a mouthful of pillowcase. He had these same dreams over and over again but the actors within them always changed. It was like a stage show where the stars got sick and a wealth of understudies had to cover for them.

4 weeks had passed since the accident. He was now back on solid food, though he wouldn’t really have called the slop the hospital served him ‘food’. It was probably better than what he would eat at home, as he had become a bit of a bachelor lately and only ate instant noodles, microwave meals and fast food. Luckily for him he had always been very tall and skinny so he didn’t really put on any weight from eating absolute crap.

This trend has continued despite the accident, even though he felt extremely lazy and lethargic from basically spending several weeks not leaving his bed. At the start of the third week they began to wheel him back and forward in a wheelchair from room to room to perform tests on him.

He was still heavily bandaged and had casts on both his legs, along with his right arm. He also had a rather unsightly neck brace, and some of the nurses were so pretty that he wished he didn’t look like some sort of plaster coated robot. He was beginning to recover some semblance of sex drive as well. This was extremely frustrating given his situation, lack of mobility, and the fact that most of his right arm was in a cast. It was the hand he used for everything.

The tests yielded some results that were improving David’s mood greatly; he was feeling slightly hopeful about his recovery as opposed to feeling pessimistic. David could wiggle his toes easily, and despite the damage to his legs and so his spine, the doctors had told him that through ‘extensive physiotherapy’ he would eventually be able to walk completely normally.

There was one problem though. Despite not being on any strong painkillers and anaesthetics anymore, his hallucinations seemed to be continuing. Well he at least hoped he was hallucinating. The man who called out to him in the street and caused all this mess seemed to regularly dander around the ward. He would give the nurses lecherous glances and make obscene gestures around them, but of course they couldn’t see it.

He would also approach the other patients and casually read their charts, but no one else seemed to notice this either. David never mentioned it to any of the nurses when he saw him, because he thought they would dismiss it as hallucinations because of the drugs, or they’d take him in for more tests, and he was sick of tests. So he kept silent.

When the man appeared, David could have sworn that the temperature in the room would drop. It felt as if he was cold and numb all over, as if he had just woken up in a bath filled with ice after someone had drugged him and stole his kidneys. He could have sworn that a few of the other patients in the ward stiffened or shivered when the man appeared, but he must have been imagining it. He only saw the man once or twice in the ward and he dreamed about him so much that it was hard to tell the two apart, so he pushed it to the back of his mind and just tried to ignore it was happening.