A Hallowe’en Tale
He knew the instant he opened his eyes that something was terribly wrong.
The light in the room was dim, and he was propped up in some sort of hospital bed. The pillows were high behind him, the rails were raised on the sides, and a beeping machine on a tall pole was stationed to his right. A tube snaked from the machine to his right arm, and seemed to be attached there. When he tried to lift his arm to confirm this, he discovered that his hands and arms were immobilized. There were no visible restraints, but his arms would not move no matter how he tried.
Then he tried moving his legs. He stared at the elongated shapes beneath the blanket, but his efforts to shift his legs were as fruitless as before. He could not discern any straps or restraining devices beneath the covers, but the fact was that he was being held motionless. He again attempted to jerk his arms, then his legs, but his limbs remained as still as the mountains on the moon.
He could hear a television somewhere nearby, and the door to his left was partially open, bright light laying in a stripe across the floor tiles. The sound of two women talking and laughing entered the room. He thought to call out, but his thinking was roiled, like a mud puddle stirred with a stick. Who to call? What to say? Whose voices were those?
While pondering his situation, he looked around the room. Shapes of unknown things squatted in the murky half-light. He tried staring at them in turn to bring them into focus, but they remained gauzy and distant. How did I get here? He peered into the corners and shadows of the darkened room.
And then, while staring at what he thought to be a dresser, he saw movement.
Was it at the foot of the bed? Or farther away? He blinked twice, hard, and tried to sharpen his focus, but this didn’t help. He continued looking at the shape he thought to be a dresser, and there, down near the floor, he saw it move again.
It was oval in shape and light-colored. It looked to be a face. It was looking back at him. And as he watched, it moved towards him.
As the shape drew near, he thought, Yes, it is a face. He felt as cold as metal, and he knew the chilled sensation was a sign of danger. Again he tried to lift his arms, to kick his legs over the side of the bed, but he could not move. He could not move at all. He drew a breath and tried to cry out, but only a thin trickle of a whistling whisper came forth. No one would be able to hear him in here, not with that racket outside the room.
The shape was closer now. It was a grinning face, malevolent with wide, staring eyes, and it moved through the gloom silent and steady, just a few feet above the floor. He thought he could hear it breathing, a wet, rasping sound. The voices outside the room seemed to be louder now, and he drew in another breath to try and cry out, but before he could, a loud voice just outside the door called out.
“Did he come in here?”
The face was at his left hand now, sliding along the edge of the blanket, and he felt scalded and frozen at the same time as the adrenaline poured into him, his face contorted with the futile effort of trying to move, trying to cry out. And now a fine-boned white hand reached out from the darkness beside the mask and touched the back of his hand. He felt his heart gallop against his ribs and he took one more breath –
The overhead light snapped on and a familiar woman stepped into the room, followed by two older women in pajama-like uniforms. They were all smiling, and they were looking at him. And at something beside him. He tried to cry out again, and it seemed that molten ice poured all over his body from above. His breath caught in his throat.
A small boy in a skull mask stood next to the bed. He was holding a plastic pumpkin up, trying to set it onto the blanket. The boy pushed the mask up onto his hair and smiled up at him, but his smile fell away as the man in the bed began making choking sounds. He turned to the women, who were staring in horror. His mother raced to the bed and knelt there, shouting something to the nurses behind her, who were already in frantic motion.
The man heard the small boy say, “What’s wrong with Granddaddy? Is he having another stroke?” but he never heard the answer. A high whine drowned out all sound, and the scalding freeze on his skin suddenly changed to deep warmth, and the need to close his eyes eclipsed all other sensation. He fell away from them, away from the noise in the room, and he dropped down into a sleep unlike any he had known.
~ S. K. Orr