Open Your Eyes

In an old hospital room, a man sat on the dirt-covered floor, curled up against the wall and shivering, with his head buried into his knees and his arms covering his ears. He tried to force his mind to be back home, to be anywhere but in that room. But the still air surrounding him brought him back to the dull hospital room. A single lamp hung from the ceiling, swaying back and forth, its shadows dancing before the man's eyelids. He concentrated on the buzzing of the electricity, the only sound in the room besides his loud and heavy breathes. Everything else in the world around him was quiet. His fingernails dug into his skin as his mind tried to tell him to open his eyes, to block out every memory and every familiar emotion and just face his reality with a tough heart. But he couldn’t open them. In the back of his mind, he knew what had to happen if he opened them. In the back of his mind, he's lived through the whole process before.

He felt the thumps of his heartbeats as he forced his eyes open. Slowly, he removed his head from his knees, feeling the burn his fingernails left on his skin. And slowly, he started to look around him at the long unused room. Walls that used to be white were now grey and smeared with all shades of red and yellow. The floor was no better, tainted with long dried blood. Everything looked creepier in the dim light, the stained bed sheets, the boarded window, the beaten cabinet next to him, its broken glass shattered in shards by his feet. Evidence of all the foul doings that took place in that room for years. Images started playing out in the man's head. Memories. Faces of people that were in that same hospital room many years ago, before the man escaped his duties, when he broke free. Or so he thought, because there he was again, in that same old room.

A strange sound passed his lips when he tried to stand up. A groan. Or a growl. He wasn’t sure, he was only aware of the burning in his throat. And the sound coming from the other side of the room.

"You're up."

The man froze. A minute. It was all he needed to find his courage to turn around. He took a deep breath, in and out, in and out, then slowly turned on his feet to face the bed. A boy laid there on the bed. A boy no more than ten. The man felt a familiar tightness in his chest, and he thought, now it was obvious what he was put there to do. More memories swam in the man's mind, clearer now than they were before.

"Open your eyes." The man's father ordered. He stood, a boy of ten back then, in front of a glass cabinet filled with all kinds of strange things. The boy could only recognise a knife, so clean that the light reflected on its blade and hurt his eyes. On his father's mark, A man dressed in all white reached in and grabbed the knife. "Watch. If you don’t, bad things will happen to all of us."

So he watched.

The man snapped back into reality. He felt the breath being knocked out of him. His heart took up a faster rate. His body turned stiff and his eyes were stuck to the boy on the bed. He looked so small, so pure. Just like the boy from his memory.

The boy spoke again. His voice just as innocent as he looked. "They told me you were just sick. But I know you're afraid. It’s okay, I'm afraid, too."

The boy wasn’t supposed to be awake. And the man hadn't expected to let his mind take him under, deep into the darkness of his memories.